Tor Double #19: Fritz Leiber’s Ill Met in Lankhmar and Charles de Lint’s The Fair in Emain Macha
Cover for The Fair at Emain Macha by Mel Grant
This volume of the Tor Double series offers something it hasn’t offered before. Although several of the novellas previously published in the series have played with the tropes of fantasy novels, such as Jack Vance’s The Last Castle or Joanna Russ’s Souls, all of the stories published to this point have been science fiction. With Volume 19, the series offers two novellas which are unabashedly fantasy, Fritz Leiber’s Ill Met in Lankhmar and Charles de Lint’s The Fair in Emain Macha. Not only are both fantasy stories, but both of them are parts of series exploring the characters who feature in them.
Fritz Leiber introduced the world to Lankhmar and his characters of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser in August of 1939 in the story “Two Sought Adventure,” which appeared in Unknown. By 1969, he had published an additional eighteen stories about the adventurers, including one story which told of the Grey Mouser’s life before he met Fafhrd.
Ill Met in Lankhmar was originally published in F&SF in April, 1970. It won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. Ill Met in Lankhmar is the second of four Leiber stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series. A prequel to all of the previously published Lankhmar stories with the exception of “The Unholy Grail,” this novella tells how his two characters meet for the first time. …