This post is brought to you by Sword’s Forge, our new Sword & Sorcery fanzine. We are getting the first issue together so things are in flux. I thought for this post I might pick ten topics that could make it into SF. We are getting plenty of good vibes from Sword & Sorcery fans and writers but I feel sometimes they’d like a little more direction. (The best thing about a fanzine is that it has a theme but no real direction. Every issue is a different mix of whatever we want to do.) Still, here are ten subjects that I wouldn’t shy away from. Some are dead serious, others, well…
(In no particular order)
1. Everybody has their own definition of Sword & Sorcery.
This one is for Jason Waltz. He is a guy with a very definite definition of S&S. For him, and I am summarizing here, every good S&S story is told at a fever-pitch, a massive explosion of action with titanic heroes and heroines launched against terrible foes. I like that definition for some stories. Think of the ending of “The Shadow Kingdom” by Robert E. Howard, the very first official S&S tale. The battle scene at the end with Kull holding off the Serpent Men with his battle ax. Wow! One of my favorites.
But. This definition doesn’t describe another one of my favorites: “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” by Clark Ashton Smith. That one is a mood piece with Lovecraftian squidgies. Zeiros is about as far from Conan as you can get. Other stories that would not fall under this definition include most Jack Vance Dying Earth tales, again more sorcery than sword, “The Valor Cappen Varra” by Poul Anderson, a writer who can bring the big fight in some stories, many of L. Sprague de Camp’s Pusad tales, not so much The Tritonian Ring but the short stories.
I think Jason’s definition describes a Sword & Sorcery tale based on Robert E. Howard. I couldn’t find any Howard tales that don’t follow that formula to some degree. The further away you get from Howard, the less it is true. Which begs the question: at what point does it stop being S&S and become something else? The whole point of a definition is just that.
2. Short stories dominate.
I wrote a very long round-up on what is the right length for an S&S tale, go here. The conclusion was: all lengths. It really depended on the writer, the story, the market. That being said, I still think Sword & Sorcery is dominated by short stories. Robert E. Howard only wrote one Conan novel, but dozens of stories. The 1990s on, novels became the only real source of S&S, as Fantasy rebranded away from any association with “that stuff”. (A good example of this was DAW Books which started in 1971 with a roster full of S&S and ERB-type novels. But in the 1990s they shed these like a dog in spring.) So it may depend when you are looking, but if you were to draw up a list of the all-time best tales, most would be shorter. (I am particular to the novella, but that’s just me.)
3. A Conan novel can’t be written by just anyone.
I’ve been reading some of the Tor Conans and they vary. The Robert Jordans are good as their own thing but carry a lot of Tolkien tropes. Others feel like retread. If you want a reliable (non-challenging) read then these books will fill time but I keep thinking why not read Glen Cook’s Black Company or anything by Patrick Rothfuss or even Andrew Offutt’s Cormac books instead. I will read all the Tors someday but not in a hurry.
4. The Gothic element is key. Like chocolate, the darker the better.
It was a fortunate circumstance that spawned Sword & Sorcery. Howard wanted to sell to Adventure, not Weird Tales, but when the stories came back he would graft in a supernatural element and Bob’s your Silverberg. This inserting of monsters and magic is the entry point for the Gothic side of things: ghosts, conjured demons, evil priests and priestesses. (You know, the good stuff.) It sends a chill (not the good kind) down my spine to think if Hoffman over at Adventure had embraced REH’s work, we would not have got S&S. What we would have would be closer to John Myers Myer’s The Harp and the Blade (Argosy, June 22-August 3, 1940), or Farnham Bishop & Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur’s In the Grip of the Minotaur or Mundy’s Tros of Samothrace (1926), a novel with warriors but no real magic. Howard would have loved it, but we wouldn’t. Sometimes failure is good.
The Gothic has many tropes. One is “The past destroying the future.” That one gets used a lot in S&S. The ancient ring/crown/thingy/resurrected sorcerer imbued with evil energy. There is a reason all those baddies look either like M. G. Lewis’s Ambrosio The Monk or Horace Walpole’s Manfred. I’ve never seen a Sword & Sorcery tale where a dude gets crushed by a giant helmet, but wait, it’ll happen eventually. All those castles and tunnels (not the trolls) are very Gothic too. Like I said, the darker the better for me.
5. Humorous Sword & Sorcery is difficult. And possibly a bad idea.
Here’s a good place for me to vent about humorous Fantasy. I’m not a Harold Shea fan, and never will be. And I think this topic tells me why. The magic/Gothic element in a Shea story is always poked fun at. The point seems to be to say that accountants and tax reform are important and dreams of dragons and swords are not. And if that is your jam, then jam away. I like my S&S more serious (that’s not to say I want Fafhrd & Gray Mouser to be sober as judges. The humor between the characters is okay, I don’t want the narrator to be in on it, I guess.) If you chase the humor you end up at Xanth, a place I don’t care to visit. (I know, cheer the &^%$ up but I’ve said my piece.)
6. Sword & Sorcery is the oldest genre despite being invented in 1929.
Heroic Fantasy embraces thousands of years of myths and legends, fairy tales and ghost stories. Gilgamesh is a Sword & Sorcery epic. So why do we say it begins in 1929? “The Shadow Kingdom” by Robert E. Howard, of course. Howard paired the trappings of a medieval tale with a ghost story and threw in some Gothic snake men and voila! A new coat of paint on a very old chassis. But is S&S really it’s own thing? I wrestle with that one constantly every time I watch The Lord of the Rings. Every time I read a Western, a private detective story or a space opera with a Flash Gordon type hero. They all sprang from the same Pulps. They are American as baseball. They all sprang from that same fount.
7. Frank Frazetta is still king.
I can appreciate many great artists. My latest favs include Tom Grindberg and Garry Gianni. But when it comes to Sword & Sorcery, Frazetta is the wellspring. Not every painting is a masterpiece. That’s true for all artists. But the seminal works, the Conans, the Burroughs stuff, the Kanes, and so many others remain such powerful images. And so well known that I know instantly when someone is cribbing from him. Frank cribbed too but thankfully I don’t know all his sources.
8. More women need to write Heroic Fantasy. You need to read their stories.
C. L. Moore, (Leigh Brackett gets close), Andre Norton, Ursula K. le Guin, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Joanna Russ, Emma Bull, Phyllis Ann Karr, Phyllis Eisenstein, Elizabeth Boyer, Lynn Abbey, Patricia A. McKillip, Deborah Wheeler, Diane Duane, Evangeline Walton, Joy Chant, Jane Yolen, Robin McKinley, P. C. Hodgell, Linda E. Bushyager, Carole Nelson Douglas, Joyce Ballou Gregorian, Lois Tilton, Mildred Downey Broxon, Vera Chapman, I could go on. I don’t think they get the readership they deserve.
9. Marketing has not done Sword & Sorcery any favors.
After Conan the Barbarian (1982) came out, it was followed by a flock of turkeys. The marketing for these duds gave everyone the sense that Sword & Sorcery was all thud and blunder. Forget the elegance of Elric or The Pastel City or the cleverness of Niven’s Warlock or anything by Thomas Burnett Swann. Heroic Fantasy is the Heavy Metal movie (1981). Molly Hatchet re-using Frazetta paintings or any number of stupid SatAm cartoons. We won’t even go near Jeremy Irons in The Dungeons & Dragons Movie (2000). Everything got the same brush and it was dipped in feces.
10. Elric is a whiny little bitch – but I love him anyway.
It is no secret that Michael Moorcock was channeling the Gothics, not Robert E. Howard. Everything in Melnibone has that same frenetic energy as The Romance of the Forest or The Monk. And it tends to make Elric a little bit of a Heathcliff. At least at the beginning. Boo hoo, I’m an albino. Wait, I have sword that’s better than cocaine! And just as addictive. If there is a Howard trope Elric can subvert, he does. But as I said, I love it that way. The same way I love the fact that Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane is a self-served sot. Or that Elak’s sidekick is a complete drunk. Or Fafhrd & Gray Mouser have to work for wizards, or… you get the picture. New invention is what saves Heroic Fantasy from becoming a fossil of the Pulp pages. Moorcock says more about reality playing with his white wolf in one story than some entire novel series. Push the boundaries. (Or don’t. Sometimes I just want Brak/Kothar/Thongor to get a sword and whack some bad guys.) But what I want most is a vibrant, multi-faceted sub-genre that surprises me, annoys me, pushes me, but never bores me. And if I gotta wipe Elric’s nose and give him a hankie, that’s okay too.
Sword & Sorcery from RAGE machine Books
Leave a Reply