This post is brought to you by The Masterless Apprentice and The Masterless Assassin by T. Neil Thomas. The third volume, Masterless Apex is due out soon. These books follow the adventures of Tin the Necromancer who has been imprisoned in a glass bottle for three hundred years. He emerges into a world that has banned necromancy. It’s a good thing Tin is now seven plus feet tall with claws and horns for he’s going to need everything he can to deal with a world hostile to his magic. He has the help of Lenara and the other assassins of the guild, won over by Tin’s new ideas on management. This rolling romp is both Sword & Sorcery and fun.
In a previous post I discussed the first all-Sword & Sorcery magazine, since most heroic fantasy appeared alongside Horror Fiction. That title was Adventures of Sword & Sorcery (1995-2000) edited by Randy Dannenfelser. But before that 1990s magazine there had been attempts to create a Sword & Sorcery publication. Sword & Sorcery #1, 1970, a Fantasy companion to Visions of Tomorrow, was to be such a magazine, edited by Kenneth Bulmer in England. According to Terry Gibbons, the magazine folded before publication along with VOT because the Australian backer dropped both projects. There was a draft version of the first issue so we can see what we would have had. (Much of it was published elsewhere, so the pieces aren’t all lost.)
“Myths for the 1970’s” was an editorial by Ken Bulmer. We don’t have this document but I find the choice of editor interesting. Bulmer did write several Sword & Sorcery pieces that later appeared in Fantasy Tales. Some of his novels come close but aremore Sword & Planet. The Odan the Half-God trilogy appeared at DAW in 1977-1980. Bulmer was a writing machine, producing prolific series like the Alan Burt Akers Scorpio novels. In England, he had a better reputation than in the US, editing New Writings in SF after John Carnell.
“Upon a Whitening Shore” by Greg Pickersgill & Leroy Kettle is a lost story. Pickersgill wrote a few articles but Kettle wrote several Horror novels with John Brosnan.
“Djinn Bottle Blues” by John Brunner was later published in the US in Ted White’s Fantastic Stories, February 1972. If you only know Brunner from SF novels like The Sheep Look Up (1972) or Stand on Zanzibar (1968) you may not know about his Sword & Sorcery. His Traveler in Black stories appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s in anthologies like The Mighty Swordsmen (1970). He later contributed to the Thieves’ World shared world. Despite this CV, this story is about Jazz and not a Sword &Sorcery tale. And it’s not the only one…
“The Head and the Hand” by Christopher Priest showed up in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds Quarterly 3, January 1972 and is another soft SF tale that isn’t Sword & Sorcery but about actors. Priest is famous for this type of Fantasy that crosses boundaries of reality. Still no swords. No sorcery.
“By Tennyson Out of Disney” by M. John Harrison was in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds Quarterly 2 , September 1971. This article by the author of The Pastel City (1971) is an attack on Tolkien and C. S. Lewis’s brand of Fantasy. Harrison’s primary complaint is that Tolkien lacks the small bites of reality that he feels makes works like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast or the Fantasy of James Branch Cabell so appealing. He also has a nice stab at rock groups and hippies who like Tolkien. (You had to be there. 1970, I mean.)
“The Fantasy Ethic” by Bill Spenser is another lost piece. The title suggests a discussion of why authors write Fantasy. It appears to be the only thing he wrote.
“To Snare the Pale Prince” by Michael Moorcock is the second third of The Sleeping Sorceress (aka The Vanishing Tower). The middle section of the novel has Elric and Moonglum caught in a trap by his enemy, Theleb K’aarna. Frozen by ghouls, the swordsmen are given as sacrifices to the eldritch entity, Checkalakh, the Burning God. Escaping, they have to face a scaly green guardian. (See Michael Whelan’s cover.) Running away, they join their army fighting the Elenoin, killer redheads from the eighth plane. They return to the tower before it vanishes. Moorcock admitted the novel felt commercial to him as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock did in later stories. Moorcock had a popular character and the publishers wanted more even if he had moved on. I think this would have been the gem in this issue.
“Death God’s Doom” by E. C. Tubb later appeared in Witchcraft & Sorcery #9, 1973. For more on this story, go here. I was surprised that E. C. Tubb wrote a Sword & Sorcery series about Malkar. His reputation lies with SF and novelizations for Space 1999. He was actually another writing machine like Bulmer with tons of novels and series including the famous DuMarest series and the “Gregory Kern” novels for DAW. At least this one is S&S!
“Sober Noises of Morning in a Marginal Land” by Brian Aldiss was included in Man In His Time: Best Science Fiction Stories of Brian W. Aldiss, September 1971 and is a complete question mark for me. A New Wave story that isn’t even remotely Sword & Sorcery. If this was going to be much of the content for this magazine, a mix of real S&S with British SF, I can’t see the magazine succeeding with the Americans, or with Conan fans either. Why? Aldiss was big news but it just doesn’t belong here.
“Is Tolkien Overrated?” by Margaret Pain is another lost piece, “…a searching new analysis…”. Knowing Michael Moorcock’s opinion on Tolkien, I suspect this one may be similarly negative. I am only guessing, of course. I haven’t read it. In 1970, there were more critically negative reviewers than there are now. The huge popularity of The Lord of the Rings in 1965 and onward beg for responses like Bored of the Rings (1969) and others. The decades have softened this somewhat. We have new things to bitch about like Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit films.
Conclusion
I have questions that will never be answered. Who were the artists in the magazine? The ones in Visions of Tomorrow were excellent. How would such a magazine have changed the 1970s history of S&S? What Fantasy masterpieces did we lose because authors wrote Science Fiction instead? Could we have grown the British branch of S&S beyond just Elric? Would more people hate The Lord of the Rings? Would the whole thing become Sword & Sorcery and Science Fiction? We will never know but I don’t think we lost much. (I would have liked to see that Pickersgill & Kettle tale if it was actually Heroic Fantasy.) What we seem to have been looking at was a continuation of Science Fantasy, the mixed magazine that published the original Elric tales. It had changed its name to Impulse SF in 1966 before folding a year later.
Sword & Sorcery from RAGE machine Books
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