Wednesday, August 14, 2024

SSW: "She-Bear" by Janet Fox, a "lost"/unreprinted Arcana story, FANTASTIC STORIES, January 1974, edited by Ted White: Short Story Wednesday

The FictionMags Index entry for this issue:


The ISFDB index entry:

  • 4 • Editorial (Fantastic, January 1974) • [Editorial (Fantastic)] • essay by Ted White

  • There were, unfortunately, only three stories in the late Janet Fox's series about Arcana, a young witch who becomes also a somewhat reluctant warrior in narratives that deserved a bit more exploration, and a collection, but Fox only published two collections of her short fiction during her lifetime, and the other two stories, one each, were collected from first publication in Fantastic in the '70s, in her 2003 volume A Witch's Dozen and 2004 (and final) collection Not in Kansas. I'd read and very much enjoyed the last, "Demon and Demoiselle" in the October, 1978 Fantastic, which I purchased and read when it and I were new...along with the Barry Malzberg and Bill Pronzini story, "Another Burnt-Out Case", they were the best things in the issue, and have read the initial story "A Witch in Time" (1973) some years back in Not in Kansas, but somehow never got around to reading the middle story, even though I have a copy of that issue somewhere.

    If her work in sword & sorcery fiction resembles anyone's, it most closely (in my experience) matches a slightly more plainspoken version of Fritz Leiber's, and his wasn't the worst model to emulate, in fact essentially the best. Perhaps I've been putting off reading "She-Bear" since we'll have no more of her, nor Fox's other fine work.

    In this story, Arcana is seeking a magic-driven sword, in the company of a pony which has been possessed by a hobbled demon under her control, and having found it, meets a displaced northern band of a warrior culture (women and children as well as men), and seeks out (with one of their male warriors) the troll that forced them away from their settlement. Thus, nothing in outline Too surprising in s&s, but written with grace, wit, and an acute sense of women's estate (in our society as well as the northern band's). 

    I'm glad I've finally read it, and am sorry Fox didn't choose (or wasn't able) to write more of Arcana.

    For more of today's short fiction, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

    Christopher Rowe's blogpost about Fox's Arcana stories.

    My memorial post for Janet Fox from 2009

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