High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Sword and Sorceress series is a series of fantasy anthologies edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley, and originally published by DAW Books. As she explained in the foreword to the first volume, she created the anthology to redress the lack of strong female protagonists in the sub-genre of sword and sorcery. At the time, most female characters in sword and sorcery were little more than stock damsels in distress, or pawns who were distributed at the conclusion of the story as "bad-conduct prizes" (Bradley`s term) for the male protagonists. Many of the early sword-and-sorcery works featured attitudes toward women that Bradley considered appalling.