Whatever Happened To Sword & Sorcery, Anyway?

(In my haste I have not done so before, but I should immediately express my gratitude to my friend and brother Kevin Regier for helping me set up this web site. I am no technician, and without his continual aid on every level it would not me a hundredth the blog it is. Thanks, amigo.) Posted on this site are a set of Youtube videos by a trio of sword & sorcery aficionados – David C. Smith, Jake Jaquet, and Joe Banadonna. In the course of this multi-part panel discussion they tackle one central question: Whatever happened to Sword & Sorcery? Why did the genre fizzle out in the early- to mid-Eighties? Historically speaking, S&S was a subset of pulp fiction that arose in the 1930s and 1940s (and thereafter) beginning primarily with Robert E. Howard and WEIRD TALES. Arguably, of course, he had his obvious ancestors, e.g. Edgar Rice Burroughs, the writers in magazines like ARGOSY, etc Point being, the genre had a tremendous resurgence which peaked, roughly, between the late Sixties and the early Eighties. I was there – my favorite and pretty much sole reading matter in junior high and high school was the Conan series edited/co-authored/fabricated completely by Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, and Lin Carter, may they all rest in peace. And their imitators. (Go Brak! Go Thongor!) (Lest it be assumed I put myself in the camp, so to speak, of critics of de Camp and Carter for their high-handed dabbling with Howard's work, finishing fragments, rewriting non-Conan stories to include them in the canon, all that junk? Frankly I remain torn. On the one hand, they – especially L. Sprague de Camp turned Robert E. Howard into his own cottage industry, rewriting his books, writing new material under Howard's name, and of course Carter did the same thing, as collaborator. On the other hand, if not for them, relatively few people would even know who Conan was, much less Robert E. Howard – they wouldn't have made the famous film if the books hadn't been so popular -- and S&S might well not have had any resurgence at all. I have heard disturbing rumors to the effect de Camp quashed Karl Edward Wagner's “restored” editions of Howard/Conan material that came out in the late Seventies or early Eighties – remember those cool paperbacks with the little pull-out posters? If true, then de Camp was attempting to preserve his paycheck based on material he may have edited, amended, and pastiched, but didn't really create, and if so it's a sad comment on him. I do know I saw de Camp and his wife Catherine at a convention in San Diego around 1990, and it was like watching the King and Queen of England walking by – they had style, those two. Anyway...) In the excellent Youtube panel reference above, the three authors discuss what more or less happened to old school S&S by the early Eighties. Though they make no definite claims, they make some vastly interesting points. One point is that the surge in popularity of Dungeons & Dragons may well have sucked off the readership of the traditional S&S adventure fiction into a more visceral, immediate form, i.e., gaming. They also make the interesting and possibly/probably true point that the readership for fantasy that evolved after this point may (probably was) affected by gaming to such an extent that their expectations of what good fantasy fiction should offer was markedly different than what came before. Examples? Okay: Classic S&S tended to be based on the short story form (with, always, obvious exceptions); it tended, in the words of the panelists, to be masculine, visceral, bleak, weird, and dark, and with a marked psychological aspect. Okay, this is obviously broad generalization, but there are plenty of examples to support it: Howard's the obvious one, but also Leigh Brackett, Moore's Jirel of Joiry, et. al. (And yes, I realize Jirel of Joiry was not masculine. Wotta woman! Point taken.) Although, in the panel video, David C. Smith (noted author of not only the Oron series, but also half a dozen Red Sonja books and the amazing pirate novel BLACK VULMEA: THE WITCH OF THE INDIES, and many another excellent tale) makes a good argument for the parallels between S&S and the classic western, his cohort Joe Banadonna makes, for my taste, a better argument: Old School Sword & Sorcery is a helluva lot like classic noir. It's dark. It's grim. There ain't a lot of happy rainbow unicorn punchlines. Conan, not to mention his inimitable cranked-up descendant, Karl Edward Wagner's Kane, are grim, to say the least. It's not that hard to imagine a Gil Brewer or Jim Thompson or David Goodis Sword & Sorcery novel – titles come to mind: MY SWORD IS DEADLY; KISS ME, BARBARIAN; THE WARLOCK INSIDE ME; or AFTER DARK, MY SWORDSMAN. It's not that far off. Point is, with noir, while everybody recognizes classic stuff when they read it, it ain't feel good fiction, and if you're looking for happy follow-up readers, you might want to look someplace else, sad to say. So it is that fantasy has followed the Tolkien track, rather than the Howard track: trilogies, massive (not to say bloated) multi-volume series. The panelists discuss the importance, the prevalence of world-building in this scenario. In a good tight S&S novella or short story, not only due to word count but also due to good writing, more is implied than spelled out, and more in dialogue than in info-dump exposition. One is taught that's how you do it, and when you do it well, it works brilliantly. But if, let's say just for purposes of conversation, the reader has cut his/her teeth on trilogies, or even, let's say, one comes from a background of gaming (Dungeons & Dragons or whatnot – and I played many a 12-hour session Back In The Day), the very concept of world-building being an essential part of the game itself, the story itself, takes on a level of importance not only totally absent (on stage) in the story, but almost antithetical. In the Old School stories, you go out of your way to imply rather than spell out. Thus the problem. Or the quandry. I am, at the belated age of 46, just getting into heavy-duty reading of books based on Warhammer, etc. And while I am very eager to do so, I already understand that background forefronted is important. In addition to everything else, given the cost of books, by god if I'm gonna pay $10-20 or something for a book, I appreciate poundage as much as anything. Lest it appear I am making no point at all, I'll say this much: I prefer the well-told tale regardless of length, and was weaned on the shorter form, and am glad it's coming back (if it ever entirely left.) Fortunately the whole situation is not a case of either/or. The multi-volume epic series is so well established at this point it's in no danger of anything, neither criticism nor – well, it's here to stay. (And lest anyone argue that this trend is historically new in S & S or something, let me point out that one of the true Grandmasters of S&S, Michael Moorcock, basically invented the epic series with his Eternal Champion books: Elric is Dorian Hawkmoon is Corum Jan Irsei is Jerry Cornelius is Whoever, and they're all pretty fucking great. All 75 books of them, or however many there are. In a good way.) On the other hand, we've got these new publishers, these new anthologies from Rogue Blades Entertainment, etc., RETURN OF THE SWORD, RAGE OF THE BEHEMOTH – a true return to the short, terse, punchy, grim short story that defined S&S from its beginnings until Whenever Things Got Big. It's all good, I'm not losing any sleep over it. Hope you feel the same.