I've … seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

It strikes that there is a lot left to be done in the field of sword-and-sorcery studies. To paraphrase the poignant lament of Roy Batty, I don’t want to see these bits of sword-and-sorcery history lost forever, though I fear they could be. The S&S boom of the mid-’60s through the ‘80s was something unique, a moment in time that we can’t recapture. And one that is fading into yesteryear, even as new venues and authors seek to carry on the old traditions and take S&S in new directions.

But this receding past and its attendant nostalgia also presents a rich mine of opportunity for aspiring pop culture writers and historians. There is a lot of material to write about and many who still enjoy the esthetics and ideas of S&S.

For an ostensibly niche subgenre sword-and-sorcery has managed to hook its far-flung tentacles into many surprising, odd, and wonderful corners of popular culture. Yet so much is uncatalogued and unexplored. The following is a non-exhaustive list, broken out into three categories: 1) Popular culture, 2) Authors, editors, and lit, and 3) Publishing.

A caveat: Many have written, vlogged, or podcasted about these things, and this list is not meant to disparage anyone’s past efforts, merely to point out that they haven’t gotten the excessive, exhaustive, “full monty” treatment that I prefer. Nor is it meant to demean any of the new S&S authors working today. They need our attention, too. But it’s the end of the year, and my mind and heart are attuned to reflection and nostalgia. So without further ado…

Popular culture

Pinball games. When I was a kid Canobie Lake amusement park in Salem, NH boasted Hercules, the world’s largest pinball game. The artwork on this monster was not something off a classic Greek vase, but sword-and-sorcery all the way. A quick web search turned it up here on YouTube. Check it out in all its glory. Sword-and-sorcery themed pinball machines were a thing in the ‘70s: I saw a recent image of Lost World (1977) that dropped my jaw with its awesomeness. We need more on these machines of metal and glass, and I need one in my basement.
Videogames. Someone not named me needs to connect the dots between S&S and modern videogames, how designers are taking tropes from the literature and incorporating them into game design. I haven’t played video games with any regularity since the early 1990s, and am wildly out of the loop. But even at my level of superficial understanding I can see S&S in the likes of World of Warcraft, and there are far more obvious examples like Age of Conan.
Films. We need an in-depth study of the 1980s sword-and-sorcery film phenomenon. There was a recent book on these, Barbarians at the Gates of Hollywood, but it appears to be more of a select collection of reviews. I would love to see a deep look explaining how and why so many wonderfully awesome B-grade schlock films all came out at the same time, how they were financed (or not), colorful stories from the film sets, interviews with actors and actresses, etc.
Van art. What an awesome and weird niche. How and why did vans in the ‘70s start sporting Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo images, save for the obvious (they are awesome)? A gorgeously illustrated coffee table book is what is needed here. Are any of these vans still around, underneath a dusty drop cloth in a barn in Ohio or a garage in Topeka, Kansas, waiting to be discovered in an episode of American Pickers?
Comic books. Yeah, we’ve got a fair amount of ink spilled on Conan the Barbarian and Savage Sword of Conan, and even a three-part history by the great Roy Thomas available at Pulp Hero Press, but what about the likes of Arak, Son of Thunder, or Warlord? Or all the one-shots from the likes of Warren and others? Epic? Heavy Metal? Some good work has been done here by G.W. Thomas and others but I want more, a full accounting.

Authors, editors, and lit

Proper biographies of the major authors including Fritz Leiber, Karl Edward Wagner, and Michael Moorcock. How can these major figures not have them? I do wonder whether in 50 years anyone will remember these titans of S&S. You might be skeptical of that claim, but who today really knows and reads A. Merritt? Even H. Rider Haggard, hugely popular in his day, seems to be fading into yesteryear. Biographies would help.
A “The Last Wolf” equivalent documentary on Lin Carter. Wouldn’t that be an absolute blast? His soaring passions for S&S, his vast fiction output of questionable quality, his Conan and Lovecraft and Burroughs and Dunsany pastiche, starting up S.A.G.A. and the Gandalf Awards, his work on the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, his inability to kick a bad smoking habit that cost him his life. So much drama and passion and something of a train wreck quality that would make for compelling viewing.
More work on the pastiche phenomenon, including the work of writers like Gardner Fox, John Jakes, Lin Carter, Andrew Offutt, the Tor Conan line, etc. Who was the best and the worst? What makes for good and bad pastiche? Etc.
Pieces connecting the literary titans of the late 19th/early 20th century to S&S. I’ve done some of this work, and Deuce Richardson has done a ton of it for DMR Books. But I’d love to see a proper study of its influences.
Transition of S&S to Grimdark. Grimdark is in many ways the spiritual successor to S&S, taking elements of some of the darker works of REH, Wagner, Moorcock, and Vance, and amping them up to 11. I suspect one day in the grimdark future, perhaps the 41st millennium, we’ll get a history of Grimdark fiction (unless it proves too dark and grim to write). But here I’m talking specifically about the progression of one subgenre and how it influences the next.

Assorted Lancer, Zebra, and Pyramid sword-and-sorcery paperbacks

Publishing

A history of the small paperback publishers and imprints. I’d read the hell out of a look into the small publishers and imprints that popped up in the ‘60s and ‘70s to meet the demand for S&S and speculative fiction. Lancer, Zebra (what an outfit), Star, Belmont Tower, Pyramid, etc. Do we have any readily available figures including print runs and sales? The names behind the scenes including the publishers and acquisition editors.
Fanzines. While we’ve got some decent scholarship on the likes of Amra I’d love to read a deep dive into fanzines and the smaller circulation magazines of the era, including the likes of Fantasy Crossroads, Chacal, and Midnight Sun. These labors of love were the equivalent of the internet before Al Gore created it, with columns and reviews that today are served by blogs and forums and substacks. There is a lot of history and weirdness tied up in their pages that needs to be catalogued.
Paperback oddities and outliers. A look into the lesser-known corners of the subgenre like Kavin’s World, the Raven series, Ardor on Aros by Andrew Offutt, The Seedbearers by Peter Valentine Timlett, etc. I’m thinking of something along the lines of Grady Hendrix’ Paperbacks from Hell with beefcake. One chapter could be an exposé of all the books that appropriated S&S’ imagery for a quick sale but in fact were not S&S. Let’s finally call out the bastards.

So there you have it. Aspiring essayists and scholars, filmmakers and authors, get started on this list of Things That Are (largely) Undone in S&S, But Ought To Be. The time has come for sorcery and swords in 2022.

Brian Murphy is the author of Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery (Pulp Hero Press). Learn more about his life and work on his website, The Silver Key.