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A review by connorcoyne
Imaro by Charles Saunders
5.0
Brilliant.
Imaro's on everyone's "must read" list of Sword-and-Sorcery authors, alongside Robert Howard, Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, and C. L. Moore. He is notable in most of these lists as being one of the first Black authors of S&S fiction (C.L. Moore as cited as holding a similar position vis a vis women, though she was a generation older than Saunders).
The representation matters, especially in a time when it was so scarce, and so I don't want to minimize that. At the same time, I think it's reductive to tokenize his writing as merely paying dues to diversity in S&S, because Saunder's writing is freaking brilliant. Not only is his imagination and capacity for world building equal to all of the authors I described above, but he excels all of them (except maybe Leiber) for crafts, pacing, and character development. I have seldom read an "anthology" of stand-alone episodes paced so much like a novel, and the cliff-hanger ending makes me want to read more in a way that, say, (with apologies to St. Moorcock) your typical Elric story simply does not.
Nyumbani is fully-realized, a mythic Africa as richly imagined and described as Howard's Hyborean Europe (as was very much Saunder's explicit intent). Many of our favorite S&S tropes are here, from the unsullied barbarian of conflicted conscience to the wordly woman trained in the ways of pleasing men (though Tanisha is far less a mere cypher for male desires than most of her contemporary heroines), and the villainy of sorcery (here m'chawi) is potent and omnipresent. But these are not cookie-cutter plots, and Saunders squeezes great suspense and ambiguity out of these tropes. I think it is unfortunate that he was not more celebrated for his achievement. Not only are Imaro and his many companions vivid characters in their own rights, but Saunders did much to establish the versatility and latent possibility in so-called "pulp fantasy."
Imaro's on everyone's "must read" list of Sword-and-Sorcery authors, alongside Robert Howard, Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, and C. L. Moore. He is notable in most of these lists as being one of the first Black authors of S&S fiction (C.L. Moore as cited as holding a similar position vis a vis women, though she was a generation older than Saunders).
The representation matters, especially in a time when it was so scarce, and so I don't want to minimize that. At the same time, I think it's reductive to tokenize his writing as merely paying dues to diversity in S&S, because Saunder's writing is freaking brilliant. Not only is his imagination and capacity for world building equal to all of the authors I described above, but he excels all of them (except maybe Leiber) for crafts, pacing, and character development. I have seldom read an "anthology" of stand-alone episodes paced so much like a novel, and the cliff-hanger ending makes me want to read more in a way that, say, (with apologies to St. Moorcock) your typical Elric story simply does not.
Nyumbani is fully-realized, a mythic Africa as richly imagined and described as Howard's Hyborean Europe (as was very much Saunder's explicit intent). Many of our favorite S&S tropes are here, from the unsullied barbarian of conflicted conscience to the wordly woman trained in the ways of pleasing men (though Tanisha is far less a mere cypher for male desires than most of her contemporary heroines), and the villainy of sorcery (here m'chawi) is potent and omnipresent. But these are not cookie-cutter plots, and Saunders squeezes great suspense and ambiguity out of these tropes. I think it is unfortunate that he was not more celebrated for his achievement. Not only are Imaro and his many companions vivid characters in their own rights, but Saunders did much to establish the versatility and latent possibility in so-called "pulp fantasy."