Nifft the Lean in Sword & Sorcery: "An earthier sort of fantasy"

Mar 16, 2014 Joseph rated it it was amazing

Four adventures of Nifft the Northron, known also as Nifft the Lean and Nifft the Nimble. Michael Shea's first book, A Quest For Simbilis, was an authorized sequel to Jack Vance's The Eyes of the Overworld and this book is very firmly in that vein, although several steps removed from Vancean whimsy and into territory more frequented by, say, H.P. Lovecraft (in his Dreamlands books) or Clark Ashton Smith. (And territory more recently trodden by, say, China Miéville in his Bas-Lag books.)

Nifft's w ...more

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Jan 19, 2012 S.E. Lindberg rated it really liked it

Shelves: epic-fantasy, reviewed-by-se

More appropriately named “Nifft the Tour Guide” since the four short stories comprising this do not develop Nifft’s character or his motivations. His presence is a mere instrument for the author (or the author’s fictional historian, Shag Marigold) to describe entertaining adventures worthy of recording.

Shae offers a strange, effective mix: non-scary, detailed, weird narratives (this is weird fantasy to be sure, but a “fun” version). Readers should expect engaging, detail-packed guided tours thro More appropriately named “Nifft the Tour Guide” since the four short stories comprising this do not develop Nifft’s character or his motivations. His presence is a mere instrument for the author (or the author’s fictional historian, Shag Marigold) to describe entertaining adventures worthy of recording.

Shae offers a strange, effective mix: non-scary, detailed, weird narratives (this is weird fantasy to be sure, but a “fun” version). Readers should expect engaging, detail-packed guided tours through hell and otherworlds. There are battles and adventures, but one should NOT expect being terrified (it is not weird horror like Lovecraft) and do NOT expect heroic battles (Nifft is not Howard’s Conan).

Shae’s strength is his meticulous detail of strange worlds which can only be conveyed by using examples:

“Those waters teemed, Banar. They glowed, patchily, with a rotten orange light, and in those swirls of light you could see them by the score: little bug-faced ectoplasms that lifted wet, blind eyes against the gloom, and twiddled their feelers imploringly; and others like tattered snakes of leper’s-flash with single human eyes and lamprey mouths. And there were bigger things too, much bigger, which swam oily curves through the light-blotched soup. One of these lifted a complete human head from the waters on a neck like a polyp’s stalk. It drooled and worked its mouth furiously, but could only babble at us. All these things feared the raft, but you could feel the boil and squirm of their thousands, right through your feet. The heavy logs of the raft seemed as taut and ticklish as a drumskin to the movement of the dead below.” --- From the first story: Come Then Mortal--We Will Seek Her Soul

“Some grottoes, for example, were densely carpeted with victims whose faces alone retained their human form. The rest of their bodies—everted and structurally transformed—now radiated from each face’s perimeter in wormy coronas. They resembled giant sea-anemones. The souls within those faces still—all too eloquently—lived …
And there were others of our species who lay in nude clusters resembling the snarls of kelp which a northern sea will disgorge on the sand in storm season. Their legs and hips merged with central, fleshy stalks, while their arms and upper-bodies endlessly and intricately writhed and interlaced. These were the very image of promiscuous lust, but the multiple voice they raised made a hospital groan, a sick-house dirge of bitter weariness. Crablike giants, hugely genitaled like human hermaphrodites, scuttled over them with proprietary briskness—pausing, probing, nibbling everywhere.” --- From the third story: Fishing of the Demon Sea
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Sep 15, 2011 Derek rated it it was amazing

Shelves: sword-and-sorcery, dying-earth, imbibition-of-vance

Thoroughly satisfying. I am definitely seeking out the rest of Shea's fantasy work.

Nifft and his partner Barnar are true thieving professionals, and the stories come off as (mostly) planned heists by mutually trusted, reliable, and exceedingly competent partners, recalling the relationship between Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

Shea's unnamed world owes much to Jack Vance and the Dying Earth series, particularly Eyes of the Overworld. Where Shea's follow-on to Eyes, A Quest for Simbilis, felt constr ...more

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Nov 18, 2025 Jason Ray Carney rated it it was amazing

Shelves: sword-and-sorcery, dark-fantasy, fantasy

I had heard a lot about this one but never got around to reading it because copies can be difficult to come by. I paid fifty dollars for my old 1982 DAW first printing, a mass-market paperback. I’m planning to write a longer essay for a website, but I wanted to get some initial thoughts down here.

To begin, this isn’t really a novel. It is a series of four stories--more accurately, novelets or novellas--featuring the same character adventuring in the same world. The second/third story, “The Fishi I had heard a lot about this one but never got around to reading it because copies can be difficult to come by. I paid fifty dollars for my old 1982 DAW first printing, a mass-market paperback. I’m planning to write a longer essay for a website, but I wanted to get some initial thoughts down here.

To begin, this isn’t really a novel. It is a series of four stories--more accurately, novelets or novellas--featuring the same character adventuring in the same world. The second/third story, “The Fishing of the Demon Sea,” is the longest and is unmistakably novella length. The others are more comfortably described as novelets.

If I had to rank them all, I would put “The Fishing of the Demon Sea” first, followed by “Come Then, Mortal--We Will Seek Her Soul,” then “The Goddess in Glass,” and finally “The Pearls of the Vampire Queen.”

The Pearls of the Vampire Queen is probably the most conventional sword-and-sorcery tale, featuring two rogues attempting to pull off a heist in a decadent city ruled by a vampire queen and her cult. “Come Then, Mortal” is Dantean--a mythological excursion into hell that truly surprises. There is a scene in which a spirit incarnates herself that will stick with me: she literally grows from dust to bone and enfleshes herself through sheer force of will.

“The Goddess in Glass” is somewhat classifiable as weird science. It features aliens, giants, and strange lithophagic creatures, but the mode is that of a historical report. The characters are present, but they don’t feel quite like actors--more like observers or chroniclers. I loved this story, and its concluding image gripped me. It serves as a powerful allegory for the way we are all trapped by modernization, i.e. a historical process we initiated and that now incarcerates us. But it is a far cry from street-level sword and sorcery; it reads more like speculative fantasy, pure imagination.

The masterpiece of this whole collection, without a doubt, is “The Fishing of the Demon Sea.” It has pathos and humanity, strangeness and alien vistas, and a mythological resonance that feels earned. It is also Dantean, even metaphysical. One of the characters, a shapeshifting demidevil, gives a speech speculating about the origins of demons, and it was surprisingly thoughtful--unexpectedly so.

It feels a disservice to generalize about a collection that is more like a cabinet of curiosities, a board of weird and bizarre foods: each unique, strange, exotic. But if I were to test a few generalizations, I’d say this: Nifft the Lean is an anthology about the inherent evil or entropy of human civilization. Progress is not depicted as a teleological momentum toward liberation but as a curdling, the way milk curdles or wine sours into vinegar. This far-future world, not unlike the Vancean Dying Earth that inspired Shea, is a world turned against itself, suffocating under layers upon layers of miserable history. Scratch beneath any surface and you’ll find bones.

Nifft--and, to an extent, his various virtuous companions--do not attempt to rehabilitate or “re-story” the world. Instead, they are often mere spectators, survivors, bearing witness to the tragedy. If there is any joy in this world, it lies in the simple, ordinary moments that aren’t properly narrated: the tankards of ale, the board of food, the fire. In their absence, these ordinary moments become aesthetically vital and present, become rich, perhaps even more so than the bizarre. I write this as a finish this review and go downstairs to have dinner. ...more

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