© Swords and Sorcery Magazine
The January 2024 edition – Issue 144 – of Swords and Sorcery Magazine is now available online and it contains a new story by Rab Foster entitled The Fleet of Lamvula. Rab Foster is the alias by which I write fantasy fiction and, by my calculations, The Fleet of Lamvula is the 20th piece of fiction I’ve had published under that name.
The first Rab Foster story to get into print was one called The Water Garden, which appeared in the now-defunct ezine Sorcerous Signals in 2010. Back then, I thought fantasy – and particularly the sub-genre of it I enjoyed most, sword and sorcery – was something I might experiment with once or twice, but no more than that. I certainly didn’t expect it to develop into a major strand of my writing, which it is today. One thing that’s helped is the fact that there are a lot more outlets publishing sword and sorcery in 2024. There seemed to be hardly any back then. Let’s hope this happy situation continues.
The Fleet of Lamvula, to quote Swords and Sorcery Magazine’s new editorial, “is the tale of a band of mercenaries exploring a pirate fleet stranded on the bottom of a dried-up sea.” The original idea for the story was an image of some explorers on camel-back crossing a psychedelically-coloured desert – the ‘dried-up sea’ angle hadn’t occurred to me yet – under a psychedelically-starry sky. This image came to me one day while I was listening to the trippiest song of all time, 1970’s Planet Caravan by Black Sabbath.
Also shaping the story was the fact that I’m a sucker for ‘graveyards of lost ships’ stories. Ships’ graveyards exist in real life, of course, but I find fantastical, fictional examples of them irresistible. For instance, when I was 11 or 12, I thought the 1968 Hammer movie The Lost Continent, wherein a tramp steamer full of British character actors wanders into a Sargasso Sea ridden with marooned ships, monster crabs, monster octopi, carnivorous seaweed and the murderous descendants of Spanish Conquistadores, was the best thing ever. The dreamy, Hammond-organ-heavy theme song by the Peddlers has a certain charm too. I also love an outer-space variation on this trope, the episode Dragon’s Domain from the Gerry Anderson sci-fi TV series Space: 1999 (1975-77). This had the crew of Moonbase Alpha stumbling across a sinister graveyard of lost spaceships, with a tentacled monstrosity lurking inside it. Even when I was a kid, I knew Space: 1999 was a deeply silly show, but that episode still scared the crap out of me.
© Hammer Films / Seven Arts Productions
And one other source of inspiration for The Fleet of Lamvula was the film-work of one of my heroes, Ray Harryhausen…
For the next month, The Fleet of Lamvula can be read here, while the main page of Swords and Sorcery Magazine, Issue 144, is accessible here.