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Chicks in Chainmail #2
Did You Say Chicks?!
A brief word from the characters: We seem to have a failure to communicate here. Hey, it's okay with us that Chicks in Chainmail was so popular, and reached Number 3 on the Locus bestseller list, and everybody wanted more, please. But people, you need to take us sword-swinging amazons a little more seriously. After all, you think it's a picnic wearing a cold brass brassiere (let alone finding the right size)? You think it's a piece of cake keeping those chainmail accessories from rusting when it rains? You think it's a walk in the park besieging a city when you've got PMS? Think again, you wimpy noncombatants!
Sure, you're entitled to a laugh to two. Hey, we like a good joke as much as the next amazon. But hard experience has taught us that swordswomen don't get no respect. So, while you're chuckling, show some respect. You can start by buying this book. You were going to buy the book, weren't you? Pardon us a moment...have to wash the blood stains off these swords before they set...
4 • No Pain, No Gain • [Ladies' Aid & Armor Society • 2] • (1998) • short story by Elizabeth Moon
24 • Slue-Foot Sue and the Witch in the Woods • (1998) • short story by Laura Frankos
32 • A Young Swordswoman's Garden Primer • (1998) • short story by Sarah Zettel
48 • The Old Fire • (1998) • short story by Jody Lynn Nye
65 • Like No Business I Know • (1998) • novelette by Mark Bourne
92 • A Bone to Pick • [Vassilisa • 1] • (1998) • short story by Keith R. A. DeCandido and Marina Frants
109 • The Attack of the Avenging Virgins (as told by one of the Valiant Vanquished) • (1998) • short story by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
129 • Oh, Sweet Goodnight! • (1998) • short story by Christina Briley and Lawrence Watt-Evans [as by Walter Vance Awsten and Christina Briley]
145 • A Bitch in Time • [Lineman • 1] • (1998) • short story by Doranna Durgin
162 • Don't You Want to Be Beautiful? • (1998) • short story by Laura Anne Gilman
171 • A Night with the Girls • [Sun Wolf and Starhawk] • (1998) • novelette by Barbara Hambly
196 • A Quiet Knight's Reading • (1998) • short story by Steven Piziks
204 • Armor Propre • [Terion & Feric • 2] • (1998) • short story by Janet Stirling and S. M. Stirling [as by Jan Stirling and S. M. Stirling]
222 • A Big Hand for the Little Lady • (1998) • short story by Esther M. Friesner
237 • Blade Runner • [Hallah Iron-Thighs] • (1998) • short story by K. D. Wentworth
253 • Keeping Up Appearances • (1998) • short story by Lawrence Watt-Evans
268 • La Différence • (1998) • short story by Harry Turtledove
279 • Tales from the Slushpile • [Riva Konneva] • (1998) • novelette by Margaret Ball
302 • Epilogue: Yes, We Did Say Chicks! • (1998) • short fiction by Adam-Troy Castro
309 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published February 1, 1998
1 person is currently reading
519 people want to read
About the author
Esther M. Friesner
264 books707 followersEsther M. Friesner was educated at Vassar College, where she completed B.A's in both Spanish and Drama. She went to on to Yale University; within five years she was awarded an M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish. She taught Spanish at Yale for a number of years before going on to become a full-time author of fantasy and science fiction. She has published twenty-seven novels so far; her most recent titles include Temping Fate from Penguin-Puffin and Nobody's Princess from Random House.
Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in Asimov's, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Aboriginal SF, Pulphouse Magazine, Amazing, and Fantasy Book, as well as in numerous anthologies. Her story, "Love's Eldritch Ichor," was featured in the 1990 World Fantasy Convention book.
Her first stint as an anthology editor was Alien Pregnant By Elvis, a collection of truly gonzo original tabloid SF for DAW books. Wisely, she undertook this project with the able collaboration of Martin H. Greenberg. Not having learned their lesson, they have also co-edited the Chicks In Chainmail Amazon comedy anthology series for Baen Books, as well as Blood Muse, an anthology of vampire stories for Donald I Fine, Inc.
"Ask Auntie Esther" was her regular etiquette and advice column to the SFlorn in Pulphouse Magazine. Being paid for telling other people how to run their lives sounds like a pretty good deal to her.
Ms. Friesner won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story of 1995 for her work, "Death and the Librarian," and the Nebula for Best Short Story of 1996 for "A Birth Day." (A Birth Day" was also a 1996 Hugo Award finalist.) Her novelette, "Jesus at the Bat" was on the final Nebula ballot in the same year that "Death and the Librarian" won the award. In addition, she has won the Romantic Times award for Best New Fantasy Writer in 1986 and the Skylark Award in 1994. Her short story, "All Vows," took second place in the Asimov's SF Magazine Readers' Poll for 1993 and was a finalist for the Nebula in 1994. Her Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novel, Warchild, made the USA TODAY bestseller list.
She lives in Connecticut with her husband, two children, two rambunctious cats, and a fluctuating population of hamsters.
Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in Asimov's, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Aboriginal SF, Pulphouse Magazine, Amazing, and Fantasy Book, as well as in numerous anthologies. Her story, "Love's Eldritch Ichor," was featured in the 1990 World Fantasy Convention book.
Her first stint as an anthology editor was Alien Pregnant By Elvis, a collection of truly gonzo original tabloid SF for DAW books. Wisely, she undertook this project with the able collaboration of Martin H. Greenberg. Not having learned their lesson, they have also co-edited the Chicks In Chainmail Amazon comedy anthology series for Baen Books, as well as Blood Muse, an anthology of vampire stories for Donald I Fine, Inc.
"Ask Auntie Esther" was her regular etiquette and advice column to the SFlorn in Pulphouse Magazine. Being paid for telling other people how to run their lives sounds like a pretty good deal to her.
Ms. Friesner won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story of 1995 for her work, "Death and the Librarian," and the Nebula for Best Short Story of 1996 for "A Birth Day." (A Birth Day" was also a 1996 Hugo Award finalist.) Her novelette, "Jesus at the Bat" was on the final Nebula ballot in the same year that "Death and the Librarian" won the award. In addition, she has won the Romantic Times award for Best New Fantasy Writer in 1986 and the Skylark Award in 1994. Her short story, "All Vows," took second place in the Asimov's SF Magazine Readers' Poll for 1993 and was a finalist for the Nebula in 1994. Her Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novel, Warchild, made the USA TODAY bestseller list.
She lives in Connecticut with her husband, two children, two rambunctious cats, and a fluctuating population of hamsters.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
May 15, 2015
Published in 1998, this is the second of several installments in editor Friesner's series of original-story anthologies featuring strong, mostly warrior women in (mostly) a sword-and-sorcery fantasy milieu. Marion Zimmer Bradley's older, long-running Sword and Sorceress series is the closest counterpart, but the stories Friesner selects are much more often on the humorous side, and relatively lighter on actual violence --the protagonists here can handle themselves well in a fight, but tend in practice to triumph more by the use of intelligence, or to be able to find common ground with potential opponents where that's possible. (Lethal violence is more apt to be mentioned, if at all, as an event that happened before the action in the particular story.) Many of my comments in my review (www.goodreads.com/review/show/16090294 ) of the first collection, Chicks in Chainmail, are relevant here, and my overall enjoyment was similar. (I rated both books at four stars.)
There are 19 stories here, written by 23 authors (three are two-person collaborations); as she did the first time, Friesner herself contributes a story, in addition to her role as editor. Eleven of these, including Harry Turtledove, Elizabeth Moon, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, and Margaret Ball, also contributed to the 1995 first collection. Among the authors new to the series (and to me) here are Barbara Hambly, Sarah Zettel and S. M. Stirling. Besides her story, Friesner also prefaces the book with a dedicatory poem to Lucy Lawless, star of the then still-running Xena, Warrior Princess TV show. In keeping with the tone of most of the stories, her poetic style is more Ogden Nash than Dante, and she doesn't take herself too seriously (after the poem, she appends a quote from Dr. Johnson, "Bad doggerel. No biscuit!" :-) ) --but there's an underlying seriousness of equalitarian feminist message as well. (The final selection, Adam-Troy Castro's "Yes, We Did Say Chicks!" is a similarly tongue-in-cheek flash fiction, but it's cute!)
Not all of the stories are actual sword-and-sorcery, or fantasy. One of the two strictly serious ones, Turtledove's "La Difference," is a science-fiction yarn set on the Jovian moon Io, as a male-female pair of scientists trek across a dangerous and unforgiving alien terrain as they flee from enemy soldiers bent on slaughtering them. (This is also one where the female doesn't singlehandedly save the day; she and her male partner work as a very good team.) Laura Anne Gilman's "Don't You Want to Be Beautiful?" is set in our own all-too-familiar world, where females are pressured by advertising and culture to fixate on their appearance and spend vast sums on products that supposedly enhance it; and it isn't clear if the surreal aspects of the story are really happening or are the protagonist's hallucinations. (This is one of a few stories that women readers will probably relate to more easily than men will.) Slue-Foot Sue, the heroine of Laura Frankos' contribution, is the bride of Pecos Bill in the American tall-tale tradition, of which this story is definitely a continuation (though it's also one of two stories that feature Baba Yaga, the witch figure from Russian folklore). And while the story is fantasy, the title character of Doranna Durgin's "A Bitch in Time" isn't a woman, but a female dog --albeit one who's trained to detect and guard against magic.
My favorite story here is Hambly's "A Night With the Girls," the other strictly serious tale in the group. This features her female warrior series character, Starhawk, here on an adventure without her male companion Sun Wolf; I'd heard of these two before, but never read in that fictional corpus. (I'm definitely going to remedy that in the future!) Both Moon and Ball bring back their protagonists from their stories in the first book for another outing here, to good effect. The protagonist of Lawrence Watt-Evans' "Keeping Up Appearances" is a professional hired assassin, who approaches her chosen line of work pretty matter-of-factly, without noticeable moral qualms. But she's also capable of genuine love and loyalty, especially towards her business partner and common-law husband, with whom she hopes to one day settle down and retire. So when she returns from a trip to find that he's unilaterally accepted a contract on a powerful wizard and, while trying to scout the job by himself, gotten turned into a hamster, we can sympathize with her distress, and hope she can reverse the situation. (Can she? Sorry, no spoilers here!) If you've read Beowulf and want to know what really happened to Grendel, check out Friesner's "A Big Hand for the Little Lady." And Steven Piziks' "A Quiet Knight's Reading" is another tale that's close to my heart (you'll see why if you read it!). At the other end of the spectrum, two stories I didn't especially care for were Scarborough's "The Attack of the Avenging Virgins" and Mark Bourne's "Like No Business I Know." (The former story, among other things, delivers an essentially sound message, but in a story so message driven that it's more of a tract, and with an annoyingly "PC" vibe.
As with the original book, bad language is absent or minimal in most stories. Bourne's is the exception, with quite a bit of it, including religious profanity and one use of the f-word. :-( Sexual content is more noticeable in this volume, with unmarried sex acts (not explicit) in a couple of selections, rape of males by females in another, and a lesbian/bisexual theme thrown into another one as a surprise (not a pleasant one for this reader, because of the way it's handled). In fairness, though, the most frankly erotic story, "Oh Sweet Goodnight!" with its focus on the heroine's sex life, is essentially subversive of the modern ethos of sexual looseness, predation, kinkiness and nihilism. Fern's learned some lessons the hard way, by experience, but the male-female author team here doesn't glorify the situations where she was taken advantage of, and the one relationship it does celebrate isn't a loose dalliance; the message here is actually relatively wholesome. (This is also a story where magic is absent; she's a sword-toting guardswoman in a low-tech society, but she could just as easily be a divorced single mom in modern America, making a living as a cop or security guard --and modern readers will find her easy to relate to on that basis.)
Here as in the first volume, the short bio-critical end notes on all of the authors are an interesting plus.
There are 19 stories here, written by 23 authors (three are two-person collaborations); as she did the first time, Friesner herself contributes a story, in addition to her role as editor. Eleven of these, including Harry Turtledove, Elizabeth Moon, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, and Margaret Ball, also contributed to the 1995 first collection. Among the authors new to the series (and to me) here are Barbara Hambly, Sarah Zettel and S. M. Stirling. Besides her story, Friesner also prefaces the book with a dedicatory poem to Lucy Lawless, star of the then still-running Xena, Warrior Princess TV show. In keeping with the tone of most of the stories, her poetic style is more Ogden Nash than Dante, and she doesn't take herself too seriously (after the poem, she appends a quote from Dr. Johnson, "Bad doggerel. No biscuit!" :-) ) --but there's an underlying seriousness of equalitarian feminist message as well. (The final selection, Adam-Troy Castro's "Yes, We Did Say Chicks!" is a similarly tongue-in-cheek flash fiction, but it's cute!)
Not all of the stories are actual sword-and-sorcery, or fantasy. One of the two strictly serious ones, Turtledove's "La Difference," is a science-fiction yarn set on the Jovian moon Io, as a male-female pair of scientists trek across a dangerous and unforgiving alien terrain as they flee from enemy soldiers bent on slaughtering them. (This is also one where the female doesn't singlehandedly save the day; she and her male partner work as a very good team.) Laura Anne Gilman's "Don't You Want to Be Beautiful?" is set in our own all-too-familiar world, where females are pressured by advertising and culture to fixate on their appearance and spend vast sums on products that supposedly enhance it; and it isn't clear if the surreal aspects of the story are really happening or are the protagonist's hallucinations. (This is one of a few stories that women readers will probably relate to more easily than men will.) Slue-Foot Sue, the heroine of Laura Frankos' contribution, is the bride of Pecos Bill in the American tall-tale tradition, of which this story is definitely a continuation (though it's also one of two stories that feature Baba Yaga, the witch figure from Russian folklore). And while the story is fantasy, the title character of Doranna Durgin's "A Bitch in Time" isn't a woman, but a female dog --albeit one who's trained to detect and guard against magic.
My favorite story here is Hambly's "A Night With the Girls," the other strictly serious tale in the group. This features her female warrior series character, Starhawk, here on an adventure without her male companion Sun Wolf; I'd heard of these two before, but never read in that fictional corpus. (I'm definitely going to remedy that in the future!) Both Moon and Ball bring back their protagonists from their stories in the first book for another outing here, to good effect. The protagonist of Lawrence Watt-Evans' "Keeping Up Appearances" is a professional hired assassin, who approaches her chosen line of work pretty matter-of-factly, without noticeable moral qualms. But she's also capable of genuine love and loyalty, especially towards her business partner and common-law husband, with whom she hopes to one day settle down and retire. So when she returns from a trip to find that he's unilaterally accepted a contract on a powerful wizard and, while trying to scout the job by himself, gotten turned into a hamster, we can sympathize with her distress, and hope she can reverse the situation. (Can she? Sorry, no spoilers here!) If you've read Beowulf and want to know what really happened to Grendel, check out Friesner's "A Big Hand for the Little Lady." And Steven Piziks' "A Quiet Knight's Reading" is another tale that's close to my heart (you'll see why if you read it!). At the other end of the spectrum, two stories I didn't especially care for were Scarborough's "The Attack of the Avenging Virgins" and Mark Bourne's "Like No Business I Know." (The former story, among other things, delivers an essentially sound message, but in a story so message driven that it's more of a tract, and with an annoyingly "PC" vibe.
As with the original book, bad language is absent or minimal in most stories. Bourne's is the exception, with quite a bit of it, including religious profanity and one use of the f-word. :-( Sexual content is more noticeable in this volume, with unmarried sex acts (not explicit) in a couple of selections, rape of males by females in another, and a lesbian/bisexual theme thrown into another one as a surprise (not a pleasant one for this reader, because of the way it's handled). In fairness, though, the most frankly erotic story, "Oh Sweet Goodnight!" with its focus on the heroine's sex life, is essentially subversive of the modern ethos of sexual looseness, predation, kinkiness and nihilism. Fern's learned some lessons the hard way, by experience, but the male-female author team here doesn't glorify the situations where she was taken advantage of, and the one relationship it does celebrate isn't a loose dalliance; the message here is actually relatively wholesome. (This is also a story where magic is absent; she's a sword-toting guardswoman in a low-tech society, but she could just as easily be a divorced single mom in modern America, making a living as a cop or security guard --and modern readers will find her easy to relate to on that basis.)
Here as in the first volume, the short bio-critical end notes on all of the authors are an interesting plus.
April 26, 2018
These are funny, lots of snerks and snickers. Good for quick reads, easy to pick up and put down for later.
reading-collection
August 19, 2015"No Pain, No Gain" by Elizabeth Moon: Nice follow up to "And Ladies of the Club", but I do think that the first story was better. The second one was less humours and was using the same gimmick.
"Slue-Foot Sue an the Witch in the Woods" by Laura Frankos: Ok I do not like stories from the american tradition of tall tales and this story has not convinced me otherwise. I don't like the story telling style and I don't find the stories interesting.
"Slue-Foot Sue an the Witch in the Woods" by Laura Frankos: Ok I do not like stories from the american tradition of tall tales and this story has not convinced me otherwise. I don't like the story telling style and I don't find the stories interesting.
August 24, 2016
From the back cover: "For a good time check out Chicks...There's something to offend everyone...so bring your sense of humour, and prepare to be entertained."
-Locus
Well, that was...interesting. This was a totally new genre for me, this whole woman-warriors-taking-a-poke-at-sword-and-sorcery-thing. Short, amusing, fluffy: perfect commuter fare.
-Locus
Well, that was...interesting. This was a totally new genre for me, this whole woman-warriors-taking-a-poke-at-sword-and-sorcery-thing. Short, amusing, fluffy: perfect commuter fare.
March 1, 2011
A collection of humorous Amazon stories; a nice change of pace from Honor Harrington (David Weber) or Ky Vatta (Elizabeth Moon). Read Last of the Amazons (Steven Pressfield) for a serious look at the female warriors.
September 13, 2012
These books are rather fun. I picked it up on a whim and remember I quite enjoyed it. There are several in this series and I've read at least 2 of them. Would like to reread them, but my books are all packed up and stored - if I didn't give them away....
March 2, 2008
I liked this book, some of the stories were OK. But most of them were very entertaining. I can't wait to read more from this series of anthologies!
February 14, 2009
The feminism is a bit heavy handed in some of the stories, otherwise it's fun chick-lit fantasy.
September 27, 2009
The second of the Chicks in Chain Mail series. I have read all four of these that I've seen and enjoyed them all.
December 27, 2010
Funny. This book was the first of this series that I tried. It was OK, but after readng the next one, I'd had enough.
November 24, 2011
Entertaining fluff
March 19, 2013
Good read!
Want to read
July 13, 2017Zettel, Sarah - A Young Swordswoman's Garden Primer ****
March 11, 2016
Collection of short stories about women warriors. Most are of a humorous bend. Recommended
May 24, 2023
The followup to Chicks in Chainmail possesses the same humor, irreverence and love of take-charge women as its predecessor. Whether the women wield magic, broadswords, daggers or simply strength of arms, these ladies forge their way through adversity or the idiots who think they don’t have what it takes. They may be tackling racist, sexist douchebags or slimy Hollywood agents. They may be wagging the finger at men who think the wee ladies need their help. But they do it with style, guile and an occasional terrifying smile.
This is a terrific compilation, filled with tongue-in-cheek humor and enough action to make Conan the Barbarian envious. The gals may sport shoulder-to-thigh leather gear (face it, chainmail is cold and it chafes like the devil on bare skin) or spacesuits. They may go it alone or face off with a competent (or dimwitted) male by their side. They aren’t perfect. They make mistakes, they take terrible chances and chancy guesses. But they are engaging, fun to read and rarely dull.
I usually have one or two favorites from any anthology but it was honestly hard to pin down just a couple. Perhaps it would help if I stated those that I really disliked. I didn’t care for “Don’t You Want to be Beautiful?”, e.g. The wan protagonist seemed to be having some kind of mental breakdown, succumbing either to advertising pressure or one too many pills. “La Différence” suffered from an excess of technical and astronomical jargon that reminded me of Isaac Asimov, only without his humor.
Under pressure, I would state that “A Quiet Knight’s Reading” was my top favorite. Its unexpected truce between a wounded dragon and a swordswoman tired of her boorish, porcine coworkers was heartwarming. It didn’t hurt that they bonded over books, either. The second would be “A Bone to Pick”. It’s a Baba Yaga tale. I confess to having a soft spot in my heart for this particular creature out of folklore. She’s said to favor clever girls and punish naughty boys. In this story, she too is a misunderstood creature who gains an unexpected ally. In fact, those stories I really liked were those that featured alliances, friendships or romances that worked to solve dilemmas.
If you have different criteria for adventurous women, I’m certain you can find something here to love. For those who are fans of this series and haven’t read this installment, take a few hours and check out the proper way to disable an enemy warrior.
This is a terrific compilation, filled with tongue-in-cheek humor and enough action to make Conan the Barbarian envious. The gals may sport shoulder-to-thigh leather gear (face it, chainmail is cold and it chafes like the devil on bare skin) or spacesuits. They may go it alone or face off with a competent (or dimwitted) male by their side. They aren’t perfect. They make mistakes, they take terrible chances and chancy guesses. But they are engaging, fun to read and rarely dull.
I usually have one or two favorites from any anthology but it was honestly hard to pin down just a couple. Perhaps it would help if I stated those that I really disliked. I didn’t care for “Don’t You Want to be Beautiful?”, e.g. The wan protagonist seemed to be having some kind of mental breakdown, succumbing either to advertising pressure or one too many pills. “La Différence” suffered from an excess of technical and astronomical jargon that reminded me of Isaac Asimov, only without his humor.
Under pressure, I would state that “A Quiet Knight’s Reading” was my top favorite. Its unexpected truce between a wounded dragon and a swordswoman tired of her boorish, porcine coworkers was heartwarming. It didn’t hurt that they bonded over books, either. The second would be “A Bone to Pick”. It’s a Baba Yaga tale. I confess to having a soft spot in my heart for this particular creature out of folklore. She’s said to favor clever girls and punish naughty boys. In this story, she too is a misunderstood creature who gains an unexpected ally. In fact, those stories I really liked were those that featured alliances, friendships or romances that worked to solve dilemmas.
If you have different criteria for adventurous women, I’m certain you can find something here to love. For those who are fans of this series and haven’t read this installment, take a few hours and check out the proper way to disable an enemy warrior.
April 5, 2018
I really wanted to love this anthology: parodies of sexist sword and sorcery stories are right up my alley, and I've always enjoyed Friesner as both an author and an anthologist. Some of the stories are very good: Doranna Durgin's "A Bitch In Time" about a faithful hound; "A Quiet Knight's Reading," Steven Piziks' tale of unconventional dragon treasure; and of course, Friesner's own "A Big Hand For The Little Lady." (The title in itself is a terrible pun.) But too many of the others have humor that was too broad for my taste, silly rather than funny. The comedy required too much suspension of disbelief for me. It was hard to sympathize with the characters or feel much tension, and a tale that is just laughs rings hollow.
... and I still don't quite understand why the anthology title is funny.
... and I still don't quite understand why the anthology title is funny.
June 26, 2021
I love fantasy/humour and anything that Esthner Friesner has been involved with, I have enjoyed. The whole concept of chicks in chainmail is a great one. I just wish it wasn't so hard to find her books now as they have been around awhile but there are some I just can't get ahold of that I want to read.
August 27, 2019
Light stuff. Fun, disposable reading. "A Big Hand for the Little Lady" was cool.
January 17, 2021
All the stories are really good.
August 7, 2009
Hunt: Hambly's A Night Out with the Girls (Starhawk and Sun Wolf).
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews