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

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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May 27, 2024 Oliver Brackenbury rated it it was amazing

It has definitely earned its reputation.

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Feb 28, 2015 Christopher rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction

Some unmatched imagination and creature-building are to be found in here. Though I feel none of the stories quite matched the longest one 'Fishing in the Demon Sea', which has quickly become one of my favorite novellas of all time and on its own would surely be a 5-star enterprise in goodreads terms. ...more

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