The Misenchanted Sword (Legends of Ethshar, volume 1) by Lawrence Watt-Evans

[james_davis_nicoll]

A common-place soldier's life is complicated by a magic sword's deadly flaw.

The Misenchanted Sword (Legends of Ethshar, volume 1) by Lawrence Watt-Evans 

Comments

[patrick_morris_miller]

There are good Darrell K. Sweet covers and that is not one of them. (Only today did I finally realize that Valder-as-portrayed isn't a hunchback; that's his bedroll. The wizard does still seem to be differently affected by gravity, as well as needing a lot more calcium in his diet but it's far too late now.)

[jbwoodford]

Even his worst covers show some evidence that he actually read enough of a book to depict a scene, but for me his most annoying flaw is his tendency to put people into ridiculously complex and entirely inappropriate clothing.

[patrick_morris_miller]

The dress in the SF covers of his I have at hand seem practical. His fantasies do tend to be Ren Faire by way of Rob Liefeld.

[bunsen_h]

I'd be inclined to attribute the wizard's problem to a vitamin D deficiency -- rickets.

[patrick_morris_miller]

My brain was looking for rickets and couldn't find it. Either way, more milk in childhood would have been a good idea.

[damien_neil]

The bodies are not good if you look at them closely, but it stands out on a shelf. I’m pretty sure the cover was part of what led me to pick it up off the department store bookshelves long ago. (Also, the title is attention-grabbing.)

[(Anonymous)]

"Only today did I finally realize that Valder-as-portrayed isn't a hunchback; that's his bedroll."

No, to me it doesn't look like a bedroll, but like he has very puffy capped sleeves aka balloon sleeves. ...and is hunchbacked. ☺️

-Awesome Aud

[patrick_morris_miller]

You can see the strap down his spine holding it in place.

[james_davis_nicoll]

I asked an art historian and she supports the sleeve hypothesis.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, because it's either that or his bedroll is the same colour as his ..um.. skirt, for some reason.
😊

-Awesome Aud

[patrick_morris_miller]

Quartermaster division procures all their textiles from the same vendor?

[(Anonymous)]

Or the artist was working with a limited colour pallette. 😉

-Awesome Aud

[bolindbergh]

Re fantasy resurrections, The Reign of the Brown Magician by the same author has the title character almost succeed. (He restores the life, but the soul is gone.)

[petrea_mitchell]

Thank you for reviewing this. I really liked this book and now I have some ideas how to look for similar books that I haven't read yet.

[austin_dern]

A thing I enjoyed in the Ethshar novels I read is how the magic is treated as a manufacture; like, the soldiers impressed into the battles get mass-produced spells that let them temporarily endure without food or water, which imagine any quartermaster would give several warehouses full of food and water to have.

[chrysostom]

I liked how there were several different, completely incompatible, magic systems at play. Not sure if that got touched on much in this volume.

[patrick_morris_miller]

If you like that, you'll love Lyndon Hardy's Master of the Five Magics et seq.

[bunsen_h]

Well, if that's the only criterion for liking a book. I felt that the ancient wizards' plan in MotFM was... how to put this? ... fractally baroque. It didn't encourage multiple people to attempt to acquire the necessary skills; it was a long chain of extremely unlikely chances, and any break would doom the plan's one shot.

At least it did not, like its sequel, involve a Rubik's Cube as its core plot device.

[(Anonymous)]

While very different - almost exclusively set in the present recent British capital - Ben Aaronovitch's "Rivers OF London" series has different schools of magic appearing, although we see most about Isaac Newton's forms and wisdoms which police constable Peter Grant is studying. There's French magic, Chinese magic (calligraphic), a British female tradition separate from Newton's, amongst others, and various magical creatures including London's several river spirits. Human magic destroys electronics, river magic doesn't but your river is going to need a top standard waterproof cellphone case. Reading between the lines, the "Isaac" magic police force has had a severe case of tunnel vision, and very little professionalism although none of them are left since the Second World War except for Inspector Thomas Nightingale, anyway.

Robert Carnegie

[petrea_mitchell]

IIRC, book 2 is where that started being touched on.

[movingfinger]

Just looking at the image of this cover sent me back to a Paperback Booksmith in a long-gone mall, noisy and crowded, staring at the back wall's rows of F/SF, deciding what book to buy this week with babysitting money. Gosh.

The Sweet style is so evocative of that kind of book and era, it would be fun to use it on works completely counter to it. One could get away with it once, for one series.

Also, I thought the wyvern shield mark had fallen out of use before this.

[patrick_morris_miller]

Just looking at the image of this cover sent me back to a Paperback Booksmith in a long-gone mall, noisy and crowded, staring at the back wall's rows of F/SF, deciding what book to buy this week with babysitting money. Gosh.

So true (modulo store and income stream).

Also, I thought the wyvern shield mark had fallen out of use before this.

A quick shelf biopsy shows a wyvern shield on Hambly's The Silicon Mage, ©1988.

[solarbird]

Oh wow, this is a flashback. I should re-read this, it's been ages.

[scott_sanford]

By the way, thank you for the link to LWE's Ethshar FAQ page; this will give me some entertaining reading.

[bolindbergh]

archive.org has some downloadable Usenet collections covering the relevant era, so I went digging.

I can't find any single post matching the description on the Wikipedia talk page. Ethshar was mentioned in two popular threads shortly before the start of the serialisation experiment: "So You Win A Billion Dollars" (November-December 2004; about funding works that publishers are unwilling to take a chance on) and "Books you wish they wrote more in the series" (March 2005). I think we can safely ignore the thread "Reviving Ethshar" (December 2003; started by Tim Bruening).