Recently there has been a fair amount of discussion about the definition of Sword and Sorcery, and about “new” S&S, i.e. “new edge” or a kind of new wave S&S. As a writer of S&S (among a lot of other things) I thought I’d give my simple views on the subject, and how I have approach it over the years.

When we talked about S&S in the 1970s, we generally meant stuff like REH’s Conan, Carter’s Thongor, Jakes’ Brak and C.L. Moore’s Jirel. There was a fun group, calling themselves SAGA (Sword and Sorcerer’s Guild of America, which actually included England’s Mike Moorcock, of Elric fame) whose heroes were the solid core of S&S. Jack Vance’s Cugel and Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were part of this happy band. This type of fiction was very popular at the time and spawned a whole lake full of simulacra, good, bad, and ugly. It was easy to define it as Sword and Sorcery. And to make it even easier to recognize, there were plenty of comic book adaptations. Iconic artists like Frank Frazetta and Jeff Jones, Barry Windsor-Smith and John Buscema pretty well defined the S&S look.

By the 1980s it was evident that if S&S were to survive, it would have to mutate into something a whole lot fresher. It was going to be much harder to dream up new material in the vein of the originals, because, to be honest, it had all been done – the characters, the plots, the monsters, the barbarian tough guy. There was a danger that anything new in this vein would sink under its own weight of cliches.

Today, with S&S enjoying a new lease of life, those dangers still exist, partly I think, because there will always be a place for the old heroes, if only people would write new material that was as good as that from the heyday. Not so easy to do. I’ll come back to that.

So, where did I start with S&S? Well, given that I went to school with Methuselah and helped Noah build his Ark, I was around during the first wave of S&S and at the time I gobbled up everything. I loved most of it and wanted to try my hand at it, but even then I thought that I’d have to opt for something outside the envelope (or to be more accurate, right outside the Post Office altogether). I came up with a bizarre character whom I called the Voidal. His genes were care of Moorcock’s Eternal Champion saga, Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique cycle and Philippe Druillet’s stunning French artwork, such as Yragael and Urm le Fou, and probably a number of others. The original Voidal short stories and novella (in magazines like Weirdbook and Fantasy Crossroads) were ridiculously overwritten in a lurid and ultra-dark style, but I think they did at least make an attempt to leap right off into the left field, and gave me a chance to exercise my wild imagination. (This had been commented on for years by the teachers unfortunate enough to have partaken in the process known as my education.) The results were certainly original and, by the response, effective, but they did contain just about every stumbling error you’d expect from an enthusiastic young writer who planned to storm the world bestseller lists, sans experience.

I’ll cut a long story short and say that, over the intervening years (nearly 50 of them) I have rewritten, revised and reshaped those Voidal stories and added more. They came out in a tidied-up trilogy at the turn of the millennium (Wildside Press, UK) and by introducing a laconic, humorous note via a narrator, I think I achieved a far better product. And it was very much an S&S series that stood out on its own two (or more) feet. I had wanted to stretch the boundaries of Sword and Sorcery, particularly because I thought there could hardly be a better genre (or subgenre if you will) that would allow this. Plans are afoot to relaunch the series, so you have been warned.

Okay, so I mentioned above how I would tackle S and S today. In fact, I’ve been doing it for a while, in the more “traditional” way. I was given an opportunity to write some new Elak of Atlantis stories, using Henry Kuttner’s characters from his Weird Tales days. These worked out reasonably well and there was enough interest generated in them for me to write about a dozen new stories, the first bunch of which came out in the collection, Elak, King of Atlantis (Pulp Hero Press).

These stories, while being, I hope, good fun, are shameless pastiches of what I’d call old school S&S. Kuttner wrote the originals as homage to REH, after his death, and here I was, doing the same with Kuttner’s Elak. I read the original (4) tales a couple of times, made copious notes and set about my new series. My yarns are not slavish copies of style, setting et al, but what I have tried to do is capture the spirit and zest of Kuttner’s work. I’ve expanded his concept of Atlantis and referenced much of his material (even some of the obvious anachronisms). My problem, an increasing one, is finding ways to be original and stay fresh. Short of leaping off the cliff into the deep unknown (and probably shifting away from being rooted in Kuttner’s creation) it’s become tougher to sail the same waters. After all, this is not my world, and however I try to expand it and the things within it, I will always be constrained to some extent by its boundaries. I’ve shifted slightly recently, by having Elak and company off-stage, and using new characters, agents of the king, the centerpieces, but in all honesty they are always in danger of being clones of Elak and Lycon, his buddy.

The writer in me wants to emulate Freddy Mercury and break free, and as far as S&S goes, I reckon I stand a better chance of doing that by creating a new cycle of Voidal yarns or working on something else that blurs all the borders. Perhaps if I do one last blockbusting Elak story, I can put him to rest, for a while at any rate.

And now for something completely different. My latest creation, a lengthy trilogy with the overall title, War on Rome, is a fantasy set in an alternative Romano/Celtic world, covering the period from around 4 AD to 35 AD, in which history as we know it, under Tiberius, Claudius and the Germanic tribes under Arminius, takes a very significant turn – this is not history as we know it. At first you can’t see the joins, but as the saga moves on, the Roman world is plunged into a war whose repercussions will reverberate down the centuries. And Boudica? Hell, she’s something else.

Now, you could label the books Sword & Sorcery – after all there are enough battles (swords, spears, all the paraphernalia of S&S) and sorcery (in this world, magic and the supernatural are growing in use and power) to satisfy any devout fan of the genre. But I’ve never been one to impose those sort of labels on my work, especially this series, which could equally be called Heroic Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, or even Grimdark, given that some people have cited my Omaran Saga as a progenitor of that murky genre. (I don’t actually know what Grimdark is. I experimented with a short story a while ago, writing it as what I thought constituted the genre, but was told that it wasn’t. Not nearly nasty and downbeat enough, I imagine. Anyway, it got published as an S&S yarn, so everyone ended up happy.)

Personally I reckon there’s no point in trying to get too prescriptive about labeling S&S. By the late 1980s it needed to change, to mutate into something fresher, more original. You can still have the old brand (and I see a new Conan novel has just risen up to entertain us) and that’s fine, if the writers can pull it off. Otherwise it’s originality that counts and the bottom line is that it’s the imagination that powers all successful writing, the stretching of boundaries, not the prowling about within their limitations.

My teachers (if any of them are still alive, which is pretty unlikely, unless they moved to the shores of the Caspian Sea, where everyone reaches 120 as a matter of course) would be nodding sagely if they saw my work now. We told you! Overactive imagination. Yes, and that suits me fine. I imagine you’d agree with that, no?