History, True or Feigned: 2026

Wednesday, February 25, 2026

Review: Swords Against the Shadowland by Robin Wayne Bailey

All views in this blog are my own and represent the views of no other person, organization, or institution.

A version of this article appeared in Knights of the Dinner Table #149 (March, 2009).

America’s most influential fantasy author, Fritz Leiber, passed away in 1992. His greatest creations, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, were comfortably retired following his last work concerning Nehwon, The Knight and Knave of Swords and it seemed their tales had all been told. But Leiber had, apparently, designated a literary heir, Robin Wayne Bailey, to write further about the swashbuckling duo.

There is a natural caution amongst fans when a new writer begins to tell tales of such legendary characters and the sorry history of Conan following his creator’s death is ample evidence of how poorly it can turn out. Leiber’s creation had begun as a collaborative effort between himself and Otto Fischer and both were active in war gaming and the early days of Dungeons and Dragons. Despite Leiber’s distinctive style, then, a fan could hope for the best. And Robin Wayne Bailey was an excellent choice for literary heir as a veteran fantasy author with tales in the Thieves’ World anthologies that were extremely reminiscent of Leiber’s own work. Moreover, like Leiber, Bailey is very active in the fan community, approachable, and extremely likeable personally.

Bailey did not rush to put out a new story after Leiber passed away, the first new Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser tale; Swords against the Shadowland, was not published until 1998. Set in the period following “Ill Met in Lankhmar”, during which Fafhrd and the Mouser avoided that city and were plagued by memories of their lost loves, Vlana and Ivrian. The novel follows the vengeance of the wizard Malygris, and the unintended consequences of his vengeance. It falls to our two heroes, manipulated by Mouser’s wizardly patron Sheelba, to set things right.

Malygris might be named after the eponymous wizard from "The Death of Malygris" by Clark Ashton Smith, or perhaps it is intended to be the same wizard, I'm not certain. I rather hope there is an intended connection.

This is not a Fritz Leiber book, nor even a pastiche of Leiber’s style. Bailey wisely avoids that trap and instead writes a book in his own style, utilizing the characters and locations of Lankhmar. For Leiber fans there might be some disconnect here; like the heroes of all of the early 20th century fantasy greats (i.e. Howard, Lovecraft, & Tolkien) Lieber’s heroes are more than a little detached from themselves. Fafhrd and Mouser love deeply, but discuss those loves with the same ironic abstraction that they discuss broad philosophies and metaphysics. Bailey’s heroes are heirs of our own, far more confessional age. They admit and discuss their brotherly love for each other with far less reticence than Lieber would have allowed, and their understanding of, and connections to, their own psyches are deeper.

This is not a criticism, however. The story is a swashbuckling tale of Lankhmar in the finest tradition, told by a man who has carefully studied Lankhmar. Bailey’s experience writing for the Thieves’ World shared universe concept clearly aided him here. Lankhmar is not only one of the oldest fantasy worlds, it is one of the oldest role-playing settings, and there are many who feel they know the fabled city nearly as well as they know their own hometowns. They will feel right at home in Bailey’s Lankhmar, perhaps even more than Lieber’s, as Bailey adds a level of detail that Lieber avoided in the pre-RPG age.

For gamers, Bailey’s work has several interesting concepts and ideas that gamemaster’s can steal. Malygris’ method of vengeance and its unintended consequences make the entire plot perfect for lifting as an adventure premise, one easily adapted to most AD&D-style fantasy settings. The novel explores Lankhmar thoroughly, and those running campaigns in any fantasy city will find many ideas and concepts in it that can be easily lifted for use in places like Waterdeep or the city of Greyhawk. Fafhrd and the Mouser are always excellent examples for players to emulate, and in the current era of role-playing, they are perhaps even more relevant.

Though this was the first of a planned trilogy, subsequent works never materialized. I don't know why, I greatly enjoyed the novel but I can see purists rejecting even the idea of a successor to Leiber, perhaps sales were low. Or perhaps the format was an issue. The duo's tales were primarily sword & sorcery short stories, often first published in magazines and then later collected in the famous "Swords against..." series. Leiber himself only wrote one true novel of the pair (and several novellas). Bailey was a veteran of the short story format, but perhaps he had a hard time creating full novel stories for the pair that fit into their established timeline.

If that was the case, it is a shame that an anthology wasn't produced instead. I believe a Lankhmar festschrift celebrating Leiber would have been well received by fans. Not a collection of unconnected tales like After the King: Stories In Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien (1992) edited by Martin H. Greenberg, but rather a collection of tales set in Lankhmar or elsewhere on Nehwon by a variety of fantasy authors. Leiber himself established that Nehwon had connections to other worlds, so they could even bring characters from their own worlds. Bailey would be the perfect editor for such a volume.

Fritz Leiber has passed and his copious output as a writer leaves us much to enjoy. And we have this novel, showing that the world itself can still entertain. It has been over fifteen years since I first read this book, I think it is time to read it again. And certaunly, Bailey’s concluding words provide a fitting end to this review, encapsulating a fan’s longing for eldritch Lankhmar and her roguish heroes:

Our Knight and Knave of Swords—sleep

Your work is done, the tale is told,

And lives are saved a hundred-fold.

If only all man’s plagues could be

Such a neatly ended fantasy.

Saturday, February 7, 2026

The Fallibility of memory, or why we are unreliable narrators of our own stories

All historians deal with memory. It is unavoidable, all historical evidence is filtered, one way or another, through memory. As a public historian working on modern military topics, memory in the form of witness statements, memoirs, personal accounts, or oral history interviews permeates the sources.

We understand how fallible it is, and I recently had an excellent, albeit personal, example of memory's fallibility impressed on me. It's about something with very low stakes, which makes it an excellent test case for memory.

A D&D Basic Set advertisement
from 1981.

I try to maintain a chronology of my life, a year by year account of when important, pivotal, or formative events occurred. My wife thinks it is a sign of my ego, I think it is interesting and useful for various reasons. In maintaining this chronology I have recently had to reevaluate the date of a formative event from my childhood.

One Christmas, after I had already been reading a borrowed copy of the Player's Handbook for months, my parents gave me the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set and the Dungeons & Dragons Expert Set for Christmas. I created my first character and I Dungeon Mastered my first game that day, with my father and my sister playing. My father played the only D&D game of his life that day as a fighter named Sir Grumpsalot. 🤣

The memories are still clear, and they are beloved. It is when I try to assign a year to that event that things started to fall apart. I was in middle school that this happened, so either 7th (1980-81) or 8th grade (1981-82).

Long ago, before I sat down and systemically did my personal chronology, I got it in my head that I started playing D&D in 1979. I know now that is false, probably wishful thinking combined with the 1978 copyright date of the Player's Handbook. See, we all have a subconscious urge to edit our memories, in this case to give myself more credit as an 'old school' D&D player.

Decades later, when I sat down to do the chronology I realized what I had done. At the time, I was convinced that I had started playing D&D in the fall of my 7th grade year. Counting back from my 1986 high school graduation, that was fall 1980. So, I confidently put that in my chronology. I even felt good about "correcting" my record.

Recently, however, I have had to check the publication dates of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set and the Dungeons & Dragons Expert Set. I had the Moldvay version of the former, the Cook adaption of the latter. And in both cases they were first available not in 1980, but in 1981.

I had retained a basic memory of my middle school years, I knew I broke my leg in 8th grade and was holme for a decent while. I knew played D&D in the cafeteria in 8th grade, DMing my friends. But other aspects had rearranged themselves in my mind. Unimportant, but formative events for me.

So, the Christmas gift that I was certain was given to me on the Christmas of 1980 was actually given on the Christmas of 1981. I started playing Dungeons & Dragons, one of the formative moments in my life, in the fall of 1981.

This isn't incredibly important, of course, but as a historian it provides me with an excellent example of the fallibility of memory. When I interview subjects about past event, I will always keep this in mind, how easy it is for the time and date of occurrences to get muddled in our minds, so that we become firmly convinced of falsehoods. Not lying, but neither is it factual.

Anyway, I found this interesting. And as a historian, publicly recounting that I was mistaken about dates I have often given in the past feels like the right thing to do, even if no one else cares.

If anyone else has examples of how they discovered their own past memories were inaccurate, I'd love to hear them.

Monday, February 2, 2026

Thoughts on The Acolyte

I finally finished The Acolyte series last night.

As always with Star Wars, there is a lot of criticism of the show (mostly about it being "woke" or the supposed lesbian themes) which is just utter and complete nonsense.

The acting and the special effects were fine, good even. Some of the actors put in excellent performances. All of the characters deserved to be in Star Wars.

Still, the show is bad, a failure. It was the writing. The show lacked clarity in its message and its plot. There is space for a show about the period 100 years before the Clone Wars, highlighting the problems in the Old Republic that led to the separatists, and the problems in the Jedi Order that allowed the Sith to return.

To do that, you need to have more clarity about what the Jedi believe, and why parts of that belief are wrong or dangerous. The inherent tension in Star Wars is that it is essentially clearly a bi-polar morality - the Light side of the Force versus the Dark side of the force. A Manichean universe. But that leaves little room for grey.

Most people misunderstand "grey" in morality, IMO. They see grey as eliminating black and white. But Grey cannot exist without black and white, it is a mixture of the two but black and white still exist, and grey exists in shades, but even those shades tend towards black, or white. The yin-yang symbol is itself misleading, the drop of the opposite color in each is still distinct and separate. In reality, there should be grey in there.

For Star Wars, this becomes an issue as the story expands beyond the original trilogy. Those are excellent films, but they are set in a time of moral clarity - Light and Dark. The Jedi are the wise ones who understand and define the difference between Light and Dark. But when you start out to create prequels, to explain how the Light lost so badly that the Jedi were nearly extinct, that the Old Republic, a representational democracy transformed into an authoritarian empire, then you have an issue. Because Light and Dark so so easy to see in the original trilogy, how do you make them HARD to perceive, even for the "wise" Jedi, in the prequels?

The easy answer is you don't. You go the "Satan" route, with some outside force that transforms and overwhelms the "Light", corrupts it despite many of the Light understanding what is occurring. Individual failings are the culprit here. The Light and the Dark remain distinct from each other. It is to Lucas' credit that he didn't go this route. (though I don't want to denigrate that route, Tolkien follows it and it works brilliantly in his legendarium because he has exceptional moral clarty and message clarity throughout his work).

Lucas, being a post-World War II American, believes inherently in complexity and "grey." He decided that the prequels are not merely the success of the Sith, but the failure of the Jedi. He decided the heroes of his mythos had to have feet of clay.

And yet... there remained the struggle between the Light and the Dark. And the Prequels biggest failure (after starting the story with Anakin as an 8 year old) was that they never quite found the way to show the grey. Thee Sith are clearly about domination, power, greed and the Jedi are the good guys defending against that.

So The Acolyte has a problem. Now, some Star Wars has started to understand the issue. Dave Filoni in the Clone Wars cartoon, with Father, Daughter, Son, Force, Light, Dark balance storyline hinted at it. And Lucas' prophecy that Anakin would bring "balance" to the force hints at it. The problem is that the Jedi and the Sith both equate emotions with Evil. This is the Jedi failing, they see no good in emotions, merely unbalance, and so they strive to destroy attachment, taking children from parents early to avoid creating bonds. The Sith use emotion to gain power, but the use of that power is always for selfish reason.

Star Wars has never made clear that the Jedi are benevolent not because they seek power from balance, but because they use that power for greatest good for the greatest number of people, they are unselfish. The Sith are malevolent not because they seek power from emotion, or imbalance, but because they use that power for selfish ends, to impose their will upon others.

The Acolyte has the right tools for the job, it shows a Force cult of witches who clearly have no trouble with attachment, with emotion. They use both sides of the Force, but they are not malevolent, they appear to merely wish to be left alone on the planet Brendok.

The wheels fall off because the show never properly shows us what the witches want, what the Jedi want, or what the Sith want. Much of this is to preserve mystery, they who is shaped as a murder-mystery. But because we never get a full understanding of motivations the whole thing remains muddled. There are hints that the writer understand what they need to do - for example, Mother Aniseyais says "This Isn't About Good Or Bad. This Is About Power, And Who Is Allowed To Use It." - but overall the motivations remain muddled.

An equal failure of the writing is that so much of the conflict depends upon bad decisions and misunderstandings. And those poor decisions are out of character for Jedi, or even Sith. The initial conflict between the Witches and the Jedi could be solved by honest conversation, yet neither side engages in that despite clearly being led by individuals who would clearly chose such talk first.

Later, the four Jedi hide the truth for weak reasons, and it was obvious such a lie would fester. And then at the end, the Stranger and Osha leave Mae behind for the Jedi, with the Stranger wiping her memory (huh?). Again, why? Why not take her with them? All they did was leave information for the jedi behind that way. Poor writing.

The Acolyte was a good idea, but the writing never rose to the occasion. It is interesting to compare it to Andor. The writing on that show is superlative, it is probably the best Star Wars media product, period. It covers complexity well, but it does benefit from moral clarity - the Empire is clearly malevolent. What it shows is not why some rebel, but why some serve such a clearly evil organization. And, of course, Andor is just as "woke" as The Acolyte. More so, in fact, with a very clear same sex relationship whereas The Acolyte only hints at them,

I don't regret watching The Acolyte, it wasn't a bad show at all. I would like to see more of the surviving characters, a new season would be good. But I do hope that with Dave Filoni in charge we see more clarity in Star Wars writing across the board. His record on that is mixed, however.

What I would really like to see is a Clone Wars-style cartoon set during the Galactic Civil War, starting with the aftermath of the Battle of Yavin. With Han, Luke, Leia, and Chewbacca as main characters, just like we see Anakin and Obi-wan in Clone Wars. Drawing on all the old extended universe material for inspiration (Jaxxon! Zeltrons!) and showing new fan favorites like Ashoka (how does she escape that Between Worlds place?) and Rex interacting with the OT characters. And Wedge. We need Rogue Squadron back. 😀

All views in this blog are my own and represent the views of no other person, organization, or institution.

Thursday, January 1, 2026

What I read in 2025

On New Years, 2019 a friend of mine posted a list of the books they had read in 2018. I thought it was a great idea so I've been posting such a list myself ever since, first on Facebook, now on my blog. I find it a very useful exercise in self-reflection - though I am sure it is really just another example of my narcissism. 😏

This isn't everything I read. I don't include the articles and books I read for work. I only include such works when I read them cover to cover, rather then piecemeal while doing research.

I count books just to get a sense of where my mind was that year. This past year I worked hard to read new books rather then rereading the books I loved. This was, probably a mistake. In a catastrophically bad year for our nation, I could have used more comfort reading. I had a hard time finding books I truly loved this year, chasing the feeling of new discovery kept me from enjoying the familiar.

This meant I missed some books that I usually read each year, most notably Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Also, a lot less Tolkien or Tolkien related works then I usually read. Almost no Dungeons & Dragons related works as well.

I focused on two classic writers this year, Mark Twain and HG Wells, or portions of their writing. Wells had no surprises really, but Twain was a bit disappointing. I also looked again at Swiss Family Robinson and remain frustrated because I have not been able to find the version I read as a kid (most people don't realize how varied versions are due to the chaos of 19th century international copyright chaos.)

I did discover three new authors whose work I admire: Garth Nix, KJ Parker, and Giles Kristian. I will read more of their works if I can find them. And one author I utterly despise: TJ Hoisington. His work is reprehensible.

I'm not going to make predictions for next year's reads. Right now, I've been exploring the Matter of Britain, and some Christmas carryover. I would guess I am likely to reread some works however, just because I don't see myself avoiding rereads since I need to embrace comfort reads again.