Magic in Ithkar
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10) J. W. Schutz began his writing career in Africa while living in a tin-roofed shack on the borders of the Sahara. At the time he was acting ambassador to the Republic of Niger. He has lived through the hazards of modern diplomatic life, such as anti-American riots and the like, helped fight a fire aboard a ship, and once stole a railroad train for the embassy in Berlin. He says it has been a lively life, but it has not kept him from writing—nor from having a maker of dolls appear at Ithkar.
11) Susan M. Shwartz, having earned a Ph.D. in medieval studies from Harvard, now reviewing and contributing to a number of fantasy anthologies and editing one of her own, is also information coordinator at a Manhattan investment firm. Her interest in the bard as a source of literary lore shows clearly in “Homecoming.”
12) Again a mixture of Welsh and Irish blood has brought the field an outstanding writer in Nancy Springer. No one who has read her novels—The Silver Sun, The White Hart, The Sable Moon, and others, which create the history of her beautiful, if sadly haunted, imaginative world—can gainsay that she is firmly a mistress of the fantasy genre. Her adventure of the undemanding horseleech brings an autumnal glow to Ithkar’s chronicle.
13) A genuine note of humor in fantasy is one of the hardest to obtain, as any writer will declare. But in “Cold Spell” Elisabeth Waters inserts into the Ithkar pattern one of the neatest turnabout bits of magic to be read in many a year. She has been writing for five years and lives in California with a well-known author, two teenagers, and two cats. Perhaps something in this mixed background has tightened her hold on the power and led her to such careful bespelling.