Thomas Burnett Swann’s Where Is the Bird of Fire? (1970) is the author's second (and final) story collection, bringing together three works of short fiction from 1962–1970, including the Hugo-nominated title story.
Tag: Pub Decade: 1970s
Reading “Cry Silver Bells” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s Cry Silver Bells (1977), the author's sixteenth and final novel, returns to the Country of the Beasts on Crete and tells the tragic story of the Minotaur Silver Bells.
Reading “Queens Walk in the Dusk” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s Queens Walk in the Dusk (1976) is the author's fifteenth and only hardcover novel, which retells the melancholy, tragic story of Aeneas and Dido's ill-timed love.
Reading “The Gods Abide” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s The Gods Abide (1976) is the author's fourteenth novel and explores the violence of the rise of Christianity in Roman Italia and Britannia.
Reading “The Minikins of Yam” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s The Minkins of Yam (1976) is the author's eleventh novel, is set four thousand years ago in pharaonic Egypt, and is one of his weaker novels charting the "secret history" of the prehumans.
Reading “Will-O-the-Wisp” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s Will-O-the-Wisp (1976) is the author's tenth novel and is set in seventeenth-century Devon. It is a critique of Puritan moralizing against love, sexuality, and the body, and is surprisingly good!
Reading “The Not-World” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s The Not-World (1975) is the author's ninth novel and is set in eighteenth-century Bristol. It's not very good but articulates Swann's typical themes nicely in the context of the rise of capitalist, colonialist modernity.
Reading “How Are the Mighty Fallen” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s How Are the Mighty Fallen (1974) is the author's eighth novel and his most (in)famous for the “controversy” of telling a queer story about the biblical King David. Also, Goliath is a Greek Cyclops.
Reading “Wolfwinter” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s Wolfwinter (1972) is the author's seventh novel, one of his best, and a deeply moving meditation on love and choice set in the forests of sixth-century BCE Italy.
Reading “Green Phoenix” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s Green Phoenix (1972) is the author's sixth novel, a partial retelling of the story of Aeneas that deals heavily with gender relations and sexual violence.
Genre Fantasies 