Asimov on Sword & Sorcery

This post is brought to you by Bearshirt #5: The Beacon House and Other Stories by G. W. Thomas. This collection about Arthan the Bear-man features six classic Sword & Sorcery tales including the novella “Descent” in which the were-bear faces off against a race of evil scientists. Can he defeat the cyborg machines that guard the depths of a pit that the Smoulderers mine for a lost magic?

In the January 1985 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Ike wrote an editorial all about Sword & Sorcery. No surprise, it was called “Sword and Sorcery”. As an SF snob, which Ike was admittedly in such books as Before the Golden Age (1974), you know Asimov is not going to say things like “Wow! Sword & Sorcery is better than SF!” His attitude towards Weird Tales is typical of the SF snobs of the 1930s dismissing the publications as “creepy-crawlies”. (This despite the magazine publishing plenty of Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton and Henry Kuttner, all writers he knew and admired. Ike and Fred Pohl appeared in that magazine together in September 1950 with “Legal Rites”.) Weird Tales was the birthplace of Sword & Sorcery so there’s a strike against it before we have even begun.

Asimov begins by acknowledging Robert E. Howard: “I don’t represent myself as an expert on the history of science fiction and its various sister-fields and cousin fields, but I suspect I won’t be far wrong if I say that the contemporary Sword-and-Sorcery tale owes its existence to the imagination of Robert Howard and to his invention of the Conan stories.” He rightly acknowledges that hero tales go back to Gilgamesh. But he then goes on to define most S&S as stories filled with lunk-headed barbarians, which is a cliche from the 1960s.

Asimov gives the thumbs up for Odysseus in the old literature, because he succeeded by using his wits rather than his muscles. He then, I think quite rightly, talks about how trickster heroes are not quite accepted by society as brawny ones are. (He fails to point out why this is so. If a hero is too clever he might just pull one over on the reader, as any person faced with a very intelligent individual might also feel challenged. We are more comfortable with the predictable.) He speaks as any nerd in high school could speak: the brawny guys get all the chicks.

Lastly he makes the leap to the swordsman-versus-sorcerer scenario, what he might call the typical S&S plot and how it feeds into society’s distrust for the brainy type. Because sorcerers are brainiacs. You have to be, if you are going to manipulate time and space to do magic. Asimov feels the intelligent deserve to be the heroes and those who use violence to achieve their ends are the bad guys. Which I think we can all agree when we look at the world around us.

Asimov finishes by basically saying if this is what Sword & Sorcery is, it will never appear in a magazine with his name on it.

And I wish Ike was still around so that we could rebut his claims. He makes some pretty prejudicial claims that bother me to no end. Let’s break them down:

Most S&S characters are lunk-headed barbarians. On the yes side: Brak, Kothar and the poorer pastichers. But counter to this (and it shows Asimov has not read much S&S) are Elric, Dilvish, Cugal, Larry Niven’s Warlock (Niven would agree with Ike), Kane, Felimid MacFal, Simon Magus, and Fafhrd & Gray Mouser. I am rather surprised if he hadn’t read Fritz Leiber! Ike does acknowledge Tolkien as being more intelligent but misses the nuances between S&S and Epic fantasy. (And Asimov might not care.)

Yes, heroic fantasy involves battle. But this action-oriented stuff is Beowulf versus Grendel or the Dragon. The hero is usually the underdog and we enjoy the struggle much as people who watch sports. It is an element but does not preclude intelligent stuff going on as well along with some great Lovecraftian Horror in the background.

The swordsman-versus-sorcerer plot. This is a classic plot but it is also only one of many. Sorcerers are intelligent but many of them are evil. They use knowledge not for the good of all but for their own ends. If Thoth-A-Mon was trying to manipulate Hyborian Age politics to feed the people of Stygia, we might see him differently. Asimov has missed the common man versus the big rich element that fuels Howard’s tales as much as that of Dashiell Hammett or Louis L’Amour. (For more on that, see “A Cowboy, A Space Captain, A Private Detective and a Barbarian Walk Into a Bar”.) Conan kills plenty of non-nerds, too.

Asimov, perhaps, should have read plenty more heroic fantasy including Charles R. Saunders, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Gene Wolfe, Karl Edward Wagner, David Drake and many others rather than focusing on the Lin Carter/Gardner F. Fox style pastiches of 1969. This was 1985 after all. Andrew J. Offutt had Swords Against Darkness, Marion Zimmer Bradley had Sword & Sorceress, Lin Carter had finished with Year’s Best Fantasy, and that’s just a few anthologies.

What makes this annoying for me is that Isaac Asimov was a respected non-fiction writer on Science subjects as well as limericks, Shakespeare and the Bible. His opinion mattered. But could he be bothered to read “Ill-Met in Lankhmar” by Fritz Leiber before commenting. This story won the Nebula in 1970 and the Hugo in 1971. If you want to judge a sub-genre, look at its best as well as the lowest common denominator. Ike should know better. Science Fiction, he groused on several occasions, is always judged by Buck Rogers comic strips rather than “A Martian Odyssey” by Weinbaum or the best of John W. Campbell’s Astounding. He would also point to Sturgeon’s Law and say, look at the best 10%. He’s done the same thing mainstream critics do all the time: based an opinion on assumptions.

Conclusion

Let me finish by saying that despite disagreeing with Asimov’s over-all attitude towards Sword & Sorcery, I did find his discussion of the brainiac/trickster-as-hero intriguing. I would agree that SF in general applauds intelligence and the learned person over  the brute. A real life Conan the Cimmerian would be a frightening and terrible person to cross. I think this is partly what Karl Edward Wagner was saying with his Kane character. Certainly Elric was created as an opposite/criticism to the Cimmerian. Sword & Sorcery is part of a much older tradition, thousands of years old as opposed to only two hundred. There is a basic primitiveness to battling heroes that writers like Robert E. Howard and one of his models, Jack London, thrived on. This stuff is meant to be visceral if not cerebral.

But this action-oriented stuff does not mean heroes are dull-witted morons. They are often talented swordswingers, clever opponents and ultimately, winners in a life that tries to beat them down. They use all the skills they have to survive. Asimov’s scientists heroes dwell in a more civilized time, where the dangers are more removed, more intellectual, more modern. Both story types have their pluses and minuses, but I don’t think reading Sword & Sorcery turns you into a punch-dunk dullard (despite the opinions of Harlan Ellison and Larry Niven). I have found it a life-long blessing that fuels my imagination.

N. B. I had a look in the Letter Column to see all the rebuttals by famous Sword & Sorcery writers but there aren’t any….

Sword & Sorcery from RAGE machine Books