Swordspoint reads like the Atlas Shrugged of LGBT Fantasy. The book reads more like mediocre fan-fiction or something from a collegiate LGBT Literature syllabus than actual literature fiction with a point to be preached. Vier and Michael Godwin seemed primed to jump into homoerotic tableaus with no more invitation than a pregnant look, despite both men being shown to also (though seemingly as a minority preference) engage in heterosexual liaisons as well. The bizarre thing about this book is its extreme and forceful insistence on the inclusion of an improbable number of sexual, and primarily homosexual, liaisons. Michael Godwin is the precocious son of landed gentry, relatively newly introduced to the glamour of City living.

Richard is the swordsman du jour in an un-named City that sports a hierarchical social class and an honor culture wherein swordsmen are hired to fight duels of honor or simply as high-class entertainment. Vier and Michael Godwin as the book’s primary protagonists. In those beginning chapters, the reader is introduced to Richard St. I read only the first eight or so chapters before it became clear that my enjoyment had cratered and further time investment would not pay off. Ultimately, the novel is an adolescent exercise in sexual wish fulfillment couched in adequate prose. Unfortunately, the dearth of quality writing that afflicts the ‘epic’ subgenre is a similar blight on the ‘manners’ subgenre.Īn extreme degree of hype surrounds Ellen Kushner’s 1987 debut Swordspoint a level of praise largely undeserved. I have been looking for fantasy primarily oriented along a social, political, or personal axis.

Swordspoint novel