Today, the term sword-and-sorcery has become so diluted by marketers – who slapped it on the cover of any role-playing game or movie with swords and magic in it – that it doesn’t mean anything specific to most people. When asked, your typical Reddit fantasy reader will include Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson in a list of sword-and-sorcery authors. Twenty five years ago or so, folks knew better than that, although their definition wasn’t right either – they thought sword-and-sorcery was solely devoted to muscle dudes in fur diapers, because there were an awful lot of dime store Conan knock-offs in sword-and-sorcery movies and on paperback covers. The mainstream magazines didn’t want any of those loincloths and heaving bosoms, thank you, especially when they seemed determined to prove the legitimacy of fantasy as literachuh. Aside from an occasional piece from Tanith Lee and one or two others, the major magazines didn’t want sword-and-sorcery. It was far easier to find parodies in print magazines than the real thing, because that sword-and-sorcery stuff was all just a quaint laugh, fiction from a backward time.

William King’s *Trollslayer* (1999), the first S&S novel from BL Publishing/Warhammer.

The book publishers were all chasing the newest craze, doorstopper fantasy, which, as we all know, is pretty much at the opposite fantasy extreme from sword-and-sorcery. For some reason readers seemed to have an endless appetite for the mostly glacially paced unfolding of these huge books, which grew to dominate the fantasy fiction market to such an extent that many modern readers have little idea other ways of presenting fantasy stories are possible.

Yes, the sword-and-sorcery subgenre was moribund around the turn of the millennium, at least as far as magazines and major book imprints were concerned. It had been long years since it had been any kind of regular feature in bookstores. Oh, there were occasional outliers – for some reason David Gemmel could write sword-and-sorcery and be pretty successful doing so, and you could find some pretty swell examples of it in the Warhammer universe, a fact that seems to continue to elude even some pretty well-read in sword-and-sorcery. (Probably those readers were/are skeptical of game tie-in fiction, with good reason.) If I thought a little harder I’m sure I could name a handful more, but these were all exceptions.

You did have the small press, of which Black Gate was the largest presence, for it was wide open to adventure fantasy. It appeared only twice yearly, and it was open to all sorts of adventure fantasy or science fiction, so there wasn’t really that much sword-and- sorcery inside, and it certainly wasn’t frequent. Paradox took historicals, including historical fantasy, but, fine as it was, it didn’t last very long. Other magazines claimed that they’d be open to sword-and-sorcery, but they weren’t, not really.

Even the classics were hard to come by. You could snag a Wandering Star or Donald M. Grant edition of some Robert E. Howard stuff, but most of us in our 20s and 30s didn’t have that much cash handy, so there was no way to get ahold of genuine Robert E. Howard fiction without haunting used bookstores. Baen did have the David Drake edited REH paperbacks, which were a great way to get ahold of the complete Kull and Solomon Kane, not to mention some other rarities, and they were how I finally fell in love with his work.

Yes, the genre we knew and loved was down and out. Surely, we thought, people would come to their senses. Surely it was time for a resurgence. A lot of us wanted to see it happen; we thought we might even be instrumental in making it happen. I certainly hoped to be involved.

I had fallen in love with genre fiction when I was 4 or 5, courtesy of original Star Trek reruns. In the early 70s Trek was the only good genre adventure fiction on television. Learning that Kirk had been based upon Hornblower, I found my way into historical swashbucklers (Hornblower, incidentally, wasn’t that much like Kirk at all, but I loved the tales anyway). By junior high I was reading a lot of space opera seasoned with the occasional cool historical, and then, when friends introduced me to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, I sought out books from the famed Appendix N list. The local used book store had the best Lankhmar collection – Swords Against Death – and the first Corum trilogy from Moorcock, and friends set me up with the Amber series, which, if not precisely sword-and-sorcery, was close enough. Those tales pretty much blew my little mind, in the span of a few months shifting my focus from space opera with a salting of other stuff to almost nothing but fantasy adventure, preferably sword-and-sorcery. I did retain an interest in both historical fiction and good history books, which is how I came to fall in love with the work of Harold Lamb, particularly his Hannibal biography and the stirring adventures of Khlit the Cossack.

I was always writing, but it was far more imitative than innovative. By my middle 20s I’d finished a number of novels and began to collect rejection letters for those to add to my short story rejections. It dawned on me that if I wanted to be a good fantasy writer maybe I ought to study the founders of the genre and get a sense of its history. I read my way through Lord Dunsany and Clark Ashton Smith, and, bit by bit, an awful lot of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series and other goodies. After several years of this deep dive I came away with a pretty thorough feel for what had come before and how it had developed and a deeper understanding of what I loved and why. I think it was one of the most important educational experiences I ever had. I’d finally found my way to Robert E. Howard, and rediscovered Leigh Brackett, to whose Skaith novels I’d been introduced by one of my sisters in grade school.

Owing to a recession, I hadn’t been able to find any job in my field, so I’d taken a position as a third shift proofreader at Macmillan’s computer publishing division. Eventually I worked my way up to a developmental editor, and by the time I was in my late twenties I was a freelance editor.

I still had a lot to learn, but by the turn of the millennium I could edit pretty well and knew my way around the history of fantasy. I don’t entirely remember how I met Daniel Blackston, one half of Pitch-Black, but he had read and enjoyed some of my Dabir and Asim stories – I’d finally acquired a little writing skill -- and he published at least one of them. One day he asked me if I wanted to edit an e-zine for him, devoted to sword-and-sorcery. I jumped at the chance. It seemed like Lin Carter’s old Flashing Swords title was abandoned so I thought that seemed a fine title for our enterprise, and we announced we’d be opening up to subs pretty soon.

At that time, Flashing Swords was really the only paying quarterly market strictly devoted to sword-and-sorcery, and that’s why I immediately got subs that were far better than a barely semi-pro zine ought to be seeing. (The Latta brothers had an e-site full of great pulpy adventure tales, but if memory serves it was mostly their stuff, and it was a “for the love of it” market.) Warhammer writers C.L. Werner and William King sent me stuff before the first issue even went live. I was in contact with Nancy Varian and John C. Hocking and Joseph McCullough and Shauna Bryce and a few other talents I’d met over the years who were drafting stories for us. And then there were a whole bunch of really talented writers I’d never heard of who wanted to write sword-and-sorcery but had no markets to write it for. They came by the droves.

Flashing Swords didn’t just have stories far better than you’d expect, Pitch-Black had a wonderful forum associated with it. There were an astonishing number of inspiring and informative and supportive threads. It was a fantastic gathering spot for fans and writers of the genre. Aided by a whole bunch of folks who contributed articles, we built a sword-and-sorcery database at swordandsorcery.org that included info on all the founders of the genre, reviews of more recent books, a timeline, and other information besides. Clearly something felt like it was under way. William King and C.L. Werner and John C. Hocking and I even started wondering what this something was – it felt like a new resurgence of sword-and-sorcery and we tried naming it the New Edge and giving it a manifesto – which I wrote with some input from those three worthies. I was a little too young to get that maybe the people in the movement shouldn’t be trying to name or even codify it, which is probably why some of the literati mocked me – although I think they were also just snottily dismissive and judgmental because we took pleasure in sword-and-sorcery.

*Black Gate #11*, the first issue with Howard Andrew Jones as Managing Editor.

At the time it seemed like our little fireside gathering burned brighter than it really did, but then I was so heavily involved in Flashing Swords and sword-and-sorcery that it took up most of my waking moments. In truth, Flashing Swords under my aegis only lasted about a year and a half –six full issues. Pitch-Black was having some cash flow problems, and the editing was taking so much of my time it was getting in the way of my writing. Eventually I had to step away. Before that, though, I remember how excited I was to see and be involved in Pitch-Black’s Lords of Swords anthology, and to see the release of their follow-up, Sages and Swords.

It wasn’t just us – it really did feel like something was in the air. GW Thomas was doing some online publications as well. Around then Jason Waltz was launching a small press imprint with even more titles. Lou Anders was putting some sword-and-sorcery projects together for Pyr, including some of Chris Willrich’s Gaunt and Bone adventures, and signing James Enge for a total of six books starring Morlock the maker. And that led to the last time, so far as I know, that a sword-and-sorcery novel was nominated for a major award. James didn’t win the World Fantasy, more’s the pity.

And that, alas, is about as far as the needle moved, although, thankfully, unadulterated Robert E. Howard texts were finally made available again.

By the mid to late 2000s John O’Neill of Black Gate had invited me aboard as Managing Editor. Eventually I found a way to get Harold Lamb’s historicals into print, owing partly to my vast collection of his works that I had scanned but probably more to the fact that, being an editor, I knew how to talk to other editors and write proposals. And then shortly after that – although it seemed a very long time, really, because I’d been hoping to achieve it for decades – I finally signed a book deal for my historical fantasy/sword-and-sorcery series starring Dabir and Asim. I’ve been a professional writer ever since.

Looking back at all that activity a quarter century later is a little bittersweet. I regret losing touch with a lot of those people. Some of them, like Blair Latta, have passed away. I still miss the energy and support of that forum. There was good stuff happening there, and it’s sad that most of it lives on only as memory. None of it is accessible now.

It’s not that I don’t want people to have their big fat fantasy, or their romantasy, or their grimdark or their YA fantasy or what have you, it’s just that I’d like to see our own genre with a seat at the table. Right now, this very minute, it once again seems like there’s a blaze of sword-and-sorcery among the small press, and this time the fire seems larger, and to have sprung up in a multitude of places, and to be longer lasting. That certainly suggests a market interest, so maybe larger venues will finally take note and pay a little more attention. Baen has backed my new sword-and-sorcery series in a major way, signing me on for 5 books. Perhaps that, too, is an important indicator. It has been more than a decade since an explicit sword-and-sorcery series was picked up by a large publisher.

Maybe, just maybe, this time we really will see a mainstream resurgence in sword-and- sorcery. It sure would be nice. I think that if we could get the kind of thing we love in front of enough people, they’d love it too.