Over the course of 2025 and early 2026, I undertook to read all 16 historical fantasy novels by Thomas Burnett Swann, which were published between 1966 and 1977. In those 16 essays, I charted Swann’s importance to and uniqueness in the emerging fantasy genre of the 1970s. I fell in love with his work as a critic and historian of sff and found myself increasingly surprised that Swann has only ever been a minor figure, a brief aside, a passing mention in the history of fantasy fiction—if he’s ever mentioned at all. So, in addition to writing more than 50,000 words on Swann’s fiction across those first 16 essays about his novels, I wanted to write something that brought the gist of my readings of Swann to a broader audience.
That piece became “The Bittersweet Temporality of Love,” published in April 2026 by The Los Angeles Review of Books, just ahead of the 50th anniversary of Swann’s death in May 1976. To be completely transparent, at the time of publishing this, I am an associate editor for LARB’s sf section; but when I pitched this piece in June 2025 I was not affiliated with LARB, aside from having published a few pieces with them in the past, including my 2018 essay on The Futurians. The title of my Swann essay—albeit a totally apt description of Swann’s oeuvre borrowed from a description of Swann’s work written by his former colleague at Florida Atlantic University, sff scholar Robert Collins—was not my first choice. LARB gives essays provocative, evocative titles and puts the salient details in their metadata blurbs. I think that ultimately hurts discovery, since someone interested in Swann as a fantasy writer is less likely to click on a piece with the title LARB gave it, but sometimes you have to work with what they give you (I also asked if they could wait just one month to publish this on the anniversary of Swann’s death and the answer was, for unknown reasons, “no”). My initial title was far more useful and explanatory: “The Forgotten Fantasies of Thomas Burnett Swann,” which I’m now recycling here!
Here’s a teaser for the LARB essay:
Swann was a prolific and provocative writer of romantic, often subtly queer, historical fantasy novels that offered glimpses into imagined pasts of gentle heroes and melancholy heroines. His novels, published between 1966 and 1977, collectively told the “secret history” of how the mythological “prehuman” peoples—centaurs, fauns, dryads, minotaurs, and more—were driven into extinction and memory by the barbarity of humanity. Swann recast the rise of human civilization as a tragedy, marking the loss of an antediluvian world of sexual freedom, gender egalitarianism, and unabashed queerness. His legacy was an impressive body of work that crafted a new, fantastical vision of human history by rewriting ancient myths, and it was so unique in the emergent landscape of 1960s–’70s fantasy that it beggared comparison and occasionally courted controversy.
But a half-century after his death, Swann is—unfairly—a mere footnote in the history of fantasy.
In addition to my short, introductory essay on Swann’s work at LARB—which I sincerely hope, given LARB’s broad audience, will encourage people to read and engage with his work—I also wanted to write something to bring all of the links to my writing about Swann together in one place, and at the same time offer what I’m calling a “reader’s introduction” to this incredible, overlooked writer. So I hope you find this useful!
As an aside, Rob Latham, one of LARB’s editors who worked on my piece, has been a key figure in sff studies for decades and he told me that Swann inadvertently played a key role in the development of sff studies. I mentioned above that Robert Collins was Swann’s colleague during his brief time at Florida Atlantic University. After Swann died, his mother endowed The Thomas Burnett Swann Fund for the English department at FAU, which offered scholarships to students and also, according to Latham, funded an event called Swann-Con in the late 1970s. This became the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in 1980. Harlan Ellison was the Guest of Honor at ICFA in 1983 and apparently gave a bombastic lecture that caused Swann’s mother to withdraw her funding from future IFCAs. As a result, the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts or IAFA was founded and subsequently took over the funding and running of ICFA. What a surprising legacy for Swann in sff studies, even if he has been largely forgotten by the scholarship now coming out of the field.
Swann: Where to Start?
Below, as a sort of reflective exercise, I present my totally-up-for-future-revision ranking of Swann’s novels. I’m generally against such rankings, but in this case, given how much Swann wrote and my desire to proselytize his fiction to anyone who will listen/read, I thought a breakdown of Swann’s novels into four categories—great, good, fine, and bad—would offer readers unfamiliar with his work a useful, quick gloss to think about where to begin with his writing. Also, should anyone happen to read all of his novels, I gleefully welcome someone disagreeing with my ranking.
In general, any of Swann’s “great” novels are an excellent place to start, with the caveats that Will-O-the-Wisp is probably the hardest sell for new readers and Lady of the Bees is probably the best overall entry point (although, to be completely transparent, Wolfwinter is my preference). I acknowledge that Swann is probably not for everyone: his idiosyncratic blend of cutesiness and seriousness, and some of his more ludicrous ideas (e.g., evil telepathic fennecs who enslave an ancient race of moth-people in an underground city carved from giant mushrooms beneath Jericho), could be supremely offputting to a given reader. No one has to like Swann, but if you’re the kind of person who just might benefit from discovering the treasures in his trove, I hope this proves helpful.
I also want to warn future readers that, although fans and multiple websites group six of his novels into two trilogies (the Latium and Minotaur trilogies), they are only trilogies in the loosest possible sense. Should you choose to treat those novels as trilogies, be forewarned that it’s not a good idea to read them in chronological—that is, in story—order. They should instead be read in the order of their publication (which is the reverse of their story order, in both cases) because Swann recast major elements of each story as he wrote them, such that reading them in story order would be rather awkward. Of course, do what thou wilt.
Swann also wrote a number of stories, some of which were collection in two story collections: The Dolphin and the Deep (1968) and Where Is the Bird of Fire? (1970). I don’t think either would be a great place to start, and I haven’t put them in my ranking below, but they will appeal to the completionist and those who want to compare his short fiction to his longer works (they both include stories that were later expanded into novels).
The Official Genre Fantasies Power Ranking of Swann’s Novels
| The Great | Lady of the Bees (1976) Wolfwinter (1972) Will-O-the-Wisp (1976) How Are the Mighty Fallen (1974) |
| The Good | Queens Walk in the Dusk (1977) The Weirwoods (1967) Green Phoenix (1972) Moondust (1968) |
| The Fine | The Tournament of Thorns (1976) Day of the Minotaur (1966) The Forest of Forever (1971) Cry Silver Bells (1977) |
| The Bad | The Gods Abide (1976) The Not-World (1975) The Minikins of Yam (1976) The Goat Without Horns (1971) |
Swann Resources
Across my sixteen essays on his novels, and in my LARB piece on Swann’s career, I’ve written about and linked to the best writing about Swann. To be completely frank, while there are a number of academic articles and even master’s theses about Swann, most of what’s been written about his work is not very good—or at least I found it either theoretically outdated/uninteresting, a bit obvious, or totally wrong. But don’t take my word for it: you can find a comprehensive list on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database’s subject page for Swann.
For further resources and information about Swann, you can check out his ISFDB page, but the most comprehensive bibliography of all of Swann’s writing—including his scholarship, poetry, and fanzine essays—can be found on Steven Saylor’s fan page for Swann (Saylor also has a page for Swann criticism that captures a ton of stuff, mostly from fanzines, missed by the more academic SFFRDB). That bibliography is based on Robert A. Collins’s obscure, thirty-page pamphlet, Thomas Burnett Swann: A Brief Critical Biography and Annotated Bibliography (1979). Collins’s pamphlet is the best resource on Swann’s biography, especially since it quotes liberally from Swann’s letters to friends and fans. The second best resource is the May 1977 issue of the fanzine Guying Gyre, no. 7/8 (available in PDF scans thanks to The FANAC Fan History Project), which includes essays on Swann’s writing and reminiscences by those who knew him. The third best resource is Gerald W. Page’s essay “Remembering Tom Swann,” published as the afterword to Queens Walk in the Dusk (1977). For more recent criticism, I really like this personal essay by Andrew Darlington published on his blog in 2013 and Geoff Ryman’s essay on “The Manor of Roses” published in Foundation in 2020.
Whether you’re new to Swann or returning to him again, I’m glad you’re here and I hope you find something worthwhile in his writing—and in my writing about his writing!
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