Unfettered III: New Tales
The Chathrand Voyage #Thasha's cure for cabin fever • Book 3
by Shawn Speakman, Tad Williams, Naomi Novik, Megan Lindholm, John Gwynne, David Anthony Durham, Callie Bates, Jason Denzel, Carrie Vaughn, Deborah A. Wolf, Anna Stephens, Patrick Swenson, Ramon Terrell, Peter Orullian, Terry Brooks, Lev Grossman, Seanan McGuire, Delilah S. Dawson, Mark Lawrence, Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson, Brandon Sanderson, Robert Jordan, Todd Lockwood, Cat Rambo, Robert V.S. Redick, Ken Scholes, Scott Sigler, Anna Smith Spark, Marc Turner
Why You'll Love This
This anthology exists because fantasy's biggest names donated their best work to help a colleague pay off cancer debt — and the stories are as serious as that origin.
- Great if you want: 30+ fantasy heavyweights writing freely, without commercial constraints
- The experience: Varied in pace and tone — gripping one story, haunting the next
- The writing: Authors unbound by series obligations — often their sharpest, strangest work
- Skip if: Anthologies frustrate you — tonal whiplash between stories is constant
About This Book
Few anthologies carry the kind of origin story that shapes every page of Unfettered III. What began as editor Shawn Speakman's way of managing medical debt through the generosity of the fantasy community has grown into something larger—a recurring act of solidarity that funds assistance for other writers and artists facing similar hardship. That context gives this 768-page collection a warmth that genre anthologies rarely possess. The stories here, contributed freely and without constraint, span ghost tales, epic returns to beloved worlds, and wholly original work from writers including Brandon Sanderson, Naomi Novik, Lev Grossman, Terry Brooks, Tad Williams, Mark Lawrence, and Seanan McGuire, among many others.
What makes reading this collection genuinely rewarding is precisely the freedom its contributors were given. Without editorial mandates tying stories to a theme or universe, the range is remarkable—tones shift from elegiac to propulsive, voices from intimate to sweeping. The structural variety keeps the experience fresh across its considerable length, and returning to familiar fictional worlds sits comfortably alongside discovering newer voices like Anna Smith Spark and Callie Bates. The anthology reads less like a sampler and more like a gathering of writers doing exactly what they want, which, page for page, turns out to be quite a lot.