The Forests of Forever: Thomas Burnett Swann

I can remember when I walked away from Fantasy in the late 1980s. I had read all the good stuff from the Pulp era, the best of what had followed up to the 1970s. The new products were just that “products” first, Fantasy second. I could not escape the photocopies of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I was about to walk away and spend the rest of my life reading George Simenon and Erle Stanley Gardner.

One writer brought me back from the brink. That writer was Thomas Burnett Swann.

It happened like this. I was sitting around a hospital waiting room — I can’t even remember why now — but it was a long wait. The lady with the Hospital Auxiliary book cart came by with books for a quarter. Cry Silver Bells was the only thing on that cart I came close to wanting to read. Minutes later I was a Swann fan for life…

Thomas Burnett Swann (1928-1976) was a Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University, who, like Tolkien, wrote fiction in his spare time. He published poetry in the literary magazines, wrote books of erudition. His fantasy books number only eighteen but each is a gem of anybody’s collection.

Swann set most of his novels in ancient historical times. Greece, Crete, Judea, Egypt, the Middle Ages, Celtic Britain and Etruria are the playgrounds of his half-animal heroes. Swann has a delightful pagan sense that is both poetic, sexual and deceptively readable. Beneath the sylvan glades lie deeper, mature themes that make the books worth reading over and over.

Swann published most of his short fiction in Science Fantasy, sister magazine to New Worlds and some later work in Fantastic. These stories and novellas are sometimes combined to form “novels” and sometime not.

Swann’s only series runs through three books, written in reverse order. The Day of the Minotaur, The Forest of Forever, and Cry Silver Bells tell about the mythological denizens of the Greek forests who are slowly losing their homes to Man. This theme pervades most of Swann’s work, focusing on the sense of loss and the dissipation of magic from our daily lives.

Two Swann books use the Bible as their setting. Moondust gives another account of how the walls fell at Jericho involving intelligent foxes that try to take over the Earth. How Are the Mighty Fallen tells the story of David and Goliath (who is, of course, a cyclops!) and David’s homosexual relation with Jonathon is handled with brilliant skill and understanding. Science fictional elements occasionally creeps into Swann’s work, but never intrude. He did write one straight sf novel, The Goat Without Horns that supposes a race of ocean-dwelling humans. Whether set in the past or the future, Swann’s fiction is always vibrant and touching.

Swann died of cancer at 48, robbing us of many more wonderful stories.

Novels and Collections