（外文电子版资料）Tanith Lee - A Hero at the Gates.pdf

Default A Hero at the Gates Tanith Lee Heroic fantasy hasnt entirely been the domain of male writers. Back in the 1930s Catherine L. Moore produced a wonderfully innovative series featuring the warrior woman, Jirel of Joiry, and later Leigh Brackett and Marion Zimmer Bradley virtually cornered the market in planetary romances. Tanith Lee (b. 1947) writes material in the entire range of fantasy fiction, and she is almost impossible to define. She began with books for children, such as The Dragon Hoard (1971) and Animal Castle (1972). Her first adult book, The Birthgrave (1975), about a woman searching for her true name, blended the fields of sword-and-sorcery and planetary romance. The Flat Earth series, which began with Nights Master (1978), mixes the oriental and the exotic in almost Dunsanian tradition. The collection Red as Blood (1983) reworks well-known fairy tales in darker mode while Sung in Shadow (1983) takes us back to a Shakespearean Renaissance Italy. And theres a lot more. The following comes from Lees collection Cyrion (1982) about a wandering hero who is not quite as traditional as he might at first seem. The city lay in the midst of the desert. At the onset it could resemble a mirage; next, one of the giant mesas that were the teeth of the desert, filmy blue with distance and heat. But Cyrion had found the road which led to the city, and taking the road, presently the outline of the place came clear. High walls and higher towers within, high gates of hammered bronze. And above, the high and naked desert sky, that reflected back from its sounding-bowl no sound at all from the city, and no smoke. Cyrion stood and regarded the city. He was tempted to believe it a desert too, one of those hulks of mens making, abandoned centuries ago as the sands of the waste crept to their threshold. Certainly, the city was old. Yet it had no aspect of neglect, none of the indefinable melancholy of the unlived-in house. Intuitively, Cyrion k