Short Sorcery: Poul Anderson’s “Witch of the Demon Seas” by Bill Ward “Let us not use words meant to impress the ignorant among ourselves,” said Chryseis scornfully. “Every sorcerer knows there is nothing of heaven or hell about magic. It is but the imposition of a pattern on other minds. It creates, by control of the senses, illusions of lycanthropy or whatever else is desired, or it binds the subject by the unbreakable compulsion of a geas. But it is no more than that—one mind reaching through space to create what impressions it wills on another mind. Your devil-powder, or an ordinary sword or ax or fist, is more dangerous—if the fools only knew.” Corun of Conahur, once prince of a conquered people, now pirate and rebel, has been captured and brought to Tauros, the seat of imperial sea power for the Thalassocracy of Archaea. Imprisoned, facing certain doom, he is offered a chance to preserve his life in the service of new masters, the sinister sorcerer Shorzon and his beautiful and terrible daughter, the witch Cryseis. As one of the few adventurers ever to return alive from the forbidden realm of the Sea of Demons, one who actually conversed with the mysterious inhuman Xanthi and lived to tell the tale, Corun is uniquely valuable to the sorcerer’s unrevealed plans. Thus begins Poul Anderson’s novella “Witch of the Demon Seas,” a straight-ahead blood and thunder quest over phosphorescent seas in a barbarian-crewed galley into ruined alien lands with the fate of an entire planet at stake.  Interestingly, when “Witch of the Demon Seas” premiered in 1951 in Planet Stories vol. 4 issue 10 it was one of two tales from the 25-year-old Poul Anderson in that issue, and was actually the cover story – yet it was published under the pseudonym A.A. Craig, the only time Anderson would use that name. The other story, Tiger by the Tail, featured the debut of the ‘James Bond in Space’ (although two years prior to Fleming’s  Casino Royale) character that would be Anderson’s most famous, Flandry. But in the shifting culture of post-war genre publishing in those days, the star of sword-and-sorcery style pulp was waning, the bright future of an ascendant people was to be chronicled in the chrome of science fiction, the mecho-fetishistic trappings of the genre and its avowed...