Witch of the Demon Seas

Leave it to SFF grandmaster Poul Anderson to write a sword & sorcery tale with no real sorcery, and yet still make it work. Witch of the Demon Seas is an entertaining romp with pirates, witches, wizards and bizarre sea aliens. And yet there are some more serious elements than you'd typically find in a pulp of that day, including themes of political oppression and subversion of the masses by an elite ruling class, as well as elements of romance with a heroine that's more than the usual two dimensional female placeholder. The witches and wizards employ an intriguing brand of "magic", enabling them to exert a degree of mind control as well as casting illusions. Anderson bases this sorcery on psychic capabilities, though never calling it such, involving the imposition of thought patterns. Thus he eschews the typical supernatural underpinnings in favor of the more scientific. While Anderson was extraordinarily talented writing both fantasy and sci-fi, his natural proclivities tended more towards sci-fi, if evidenced by nothing more than the sheer volume of sci-fi he produced relative to his works of fantasy.