Nifft the Lean by Michael Shea
"Nifft the Lean" is a fantasy novel that consists of four interconnected stories featuring the titular character, Nifft, a thief with a penchant for daring heists and a complex view of heroism. The stories are narrated by a scribe named Shag Margold, who provides commentary throughout the narrative. Nifft's adventures include engaging with supernatural elements and powerful beings, often reflecting a blend of heroic and ironic tones.
The first story, "Come Then, Mortal, We Will Save Her Soul," follows Nifft and his partner Haldar as they navigate the realm of the dead to fulfill a promise made by Haldar's former lover. In "The Pearls of the Vampire Queen," Nifft and another partner, Barnar, delve into blackmail against a Vampire Queen while pursuing valuable black pearls in dangerous swamps. "The Fishing of the Demon-Sea" sees them descend into the underworld to rescue a youth who mishandles powerful spells, ultimately resulting in a failure to save him but a success in releasing a trapped Privateer. The final story reveals that Nifft's world is a distant future version of Earth, where alien powers and remnants of past human civilizations shape their reality.
The novel has received acclaim, including the World Fantasy Award, for its unique storytelling and rich world-building, appealing to fans of the heroic fantasy subgenre.
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Nifft the Lean
First published: 1982
Type of work: Stories
Type of plot: Fantasy—heroic fantasy
Time of work: The distant future
Locale: Earth, but no currently identifiable location
The Plot
Despite winning the World Fantasy Award for best novel of the year, Nifft the Lean is formally a sequence of four separate stories, connected by the central character, Nifft the Lean, and by a framework of commentary from the scribe supposed to be compiling these stories, one Shag Margold. Nifft himself is a character of relatively standard type within the subgenre of heroic fantasy. He is a thief, but one delighting in the daring and artistic quality of his thefts, and a hero, but one who takes an ironic attitude toward his own heroic role.
The four stories are titled “Come Then, Mortal, We Will Save Her Soul,” “The Pearls of the Vampire Queen,” “The Fishing of the Demon-Sea,” and “The Goddess in Glass.” In the first, Nifft and a partner, Haldar, find themselves by accident on a site of sorcerous power, from which a dead woman appears to urge them to bring to her, in the realm of the dead, the partner who joined her in a suicide pact but then failed to honor his promise. Haldar is smitten with love for her. He and Nifft kidnap the betrayer by ambushing the Guide of Ghosts and the Taker of Souls when they come to collect a dying man’s spirit; they take the betrayer with them down to the land of the dead. There, after many adventures, the dead woman rejects her former lover and chooses Haldar to live with her instead.
“The Pearls of the Vampire Queen” is a relatively straightforward story in which Nifft and a new partner, Barnar, first engage in fishing for black pearls in swamps haunted by polyps, lurks, and ghuls, then take the more profitable road of blackmailing the Vampire Queen who controls the pearl trade. They do so by withholding from her some part of the blood she needs to renew her youth each year. In the third story, “The Fishing of the Demon-Sea,” Nifft and Barnar are forced into descending once again to the underworld, to rescue a youth who carelessly has used spells he cannot control. Their quest is in the end a failure, for the youth repeats his mistake. The pair does succeed in releasing from the Demon-Sea its once-human Privateer.
In the last story, it becomes clear that the world Nifft inhabits is not completely detached from modern Earth in space and time but is in fact Earth in a future so far removed that all memory of the current era has been lost. Some of the powers on Earth, moreover, prove to be not magical or sorcerous but merely alien, the products of former travels among the stars. In the story, an alien Flockmaster, who has been preserved as a sort of oracle, returns to life to control her immense and city-destroying flock.