Are we in a new sword-and-sorcery renaissance? Not yet. At least commercially.

Some corners of the internet are speculating whether we’re in a third sword-and-sorcery wave. This assumes a first, unnamed wave in which S&S was invented (roughly 1929-36—thanks REH), and a second in which it rose to commercial prominence (roughly 1965-75).

Following a collapse in the early 1980s S&S lay moribund for decades, with a few authors soldiering on and a couple outlets toiling in corners of the internet. This was the general state of the genre until the last few years. 

Today there is a new interest in this old, weird, gritty, sword-slinging alternative to epic fantasy. A non-exhaustive, top of mind list of publications and publishers includes:

• Tales from the Magician’s Skull
• New Edge
• Whetstone
• Savage Realms
• DMR Books
• Swords and Sorceries
• Heroic Fantasy Quarterly
• Rogues in the House
• The Cromcast
• Old Moon Quarterly
• Baen
• Swords and Sorcery Magazine

Recently we’ve had a few successfully funded kickstarters: New Edge magazine, which landed Michael Moorcock for issue no. 1, and now Swords in the Shadows, which features authors like Joe Lansdale, Stephen Graham Jones, and Brian Keene.

Conan is the closest thing we have to a sure thing in S&S and new Conan material is out. Titan Books published a new Conan novel, Blood of the Serpent, with more titles to come. Rogue Blades Foundation has just published Hither Came Conan.

In short, there is quite a bit of contemporary S&S to sink your teeth into, sample, and enjoy. At all levels, from amateur and free, to traditionally published mass-market paperbacks and hardcovers.

But what is actually going on, commercially?

Despite all this output, much of which I have backed and all of which I am grateful for, we are nowhere near a commercial renaissance. While great enthusiasm exists in many quarters, and some good authors and artists serve this space, the simple fact remains: there isn’t enough readers. 

Publishing is a winner-take-all enterprise, existing on what marketing guru Seth Godin and others have described as the long tail theory. One on side, a few huge winners, making millions due to their mass appeal. Think Stephen King, GRRM, J.K. Rowling, Brandon Sanderson. As the tail stretches rightward, we find more writers able to make a living writing, some comfortably, but not as many as you’d think. And then a LONG tail of authors selling hundreds or perhaps tens of copies of books, laboring in obscurity. The same theory applies to publishers. 

This is not necessarily a bad thing, as the long tail is also to serve the needs of niche consumers with obscure interests in a manner that The Big Five (now four) cannot.

The problem is that S&S is way out on the end of that tail, a highly specialized subgenre that appeals to a small subset of readers. How small?

I feel like there could be as few as 1000 hard core S&S fans keeping this enterprise afloat. Some evidence to support that claim:

• Swords in the Shadows: About 600 backers (as of April 11), pledged $16,400 to launch the project.
• Tales from the Magician’s Skull: 640 backers pledged $68,975 to help bring this project to life.
• New Edge: 479 backers pledged CA$ 22,846 to help bring this project to life.
• Whetstone: 755 followers on Facebook
• Contemporary S&S: 743 followers on Facebook
• The Cromcast: 1,000 followers on Facebook
• Rogues in the House: 1.3K followers on Facebook

Pulp Sword and Sorcery is an outlier with 5,200 members on Facebook. But are they just nostalgia-seekers? Nothing wrong with nostalgia, I dwell in it daily. But the numbers don’t support more than 5,000 buying new product.

DMR Books has 2,800 followers and is a publisher that offers its readers old and new material. Perhaps this is our most accurate number.

Admittedly I’m an old fart with so many blind spots I should have my license revoked. I’m not on Instagram and I don’t have much of a handle on Twitter. There are comics to consider, and S&S inspired video games. Both of these have fanbases that might be tapped for the prose fiction S&S I’m speaking about here.

But I’m skeptical, and based on my limited data set these are not big numbers.

A lot closer to home, as of Feb. 1 of this year, Flame and Crimson sold 842 copies. Frankly, better than I had hoped when Pulp Hero Press published the book in Jan. 2020. But, if you add up what I made, and divide by hours worked, its pennies on the hour. 

It is still much too early to say anything definitive. Baen has just published a new book by Larry Correia, Son of the Black Sword, which could be a hit. I have read and enjoyed Correia’s Monster Hunter International. Later this year we’ll see two Hanuvar books by Howard Andrew Jones, whose stuff I enjoy, also from Baen. 

We need just one series to catch a little fire, garner some good press, and attract new blood to this thing we enjoy. That might be enough to build some momentum and lift additional boats.

S&S is undoubtedly going through a spiritual renaissance. People are talking about it again, enjoying the old stuff, and celebrating the new. Exploring what it’s all about, the aesthetic itch it scratches. I will be participating in an informal S&S panel at Howard Days and will do my small part to keep spreading the word. I've read a few really good stories by the likes of Schuyler Hernstrom, John Fultz, and others. This is all a good thing, regardless of whether we see commercial sales the likes the Lancer Conan Saga enjoyed.

But if S&S is ever going to approach what we saw circa 1962-82, we need the type of commercial successes that allow talented writers and artists to do their best work. We’re not there yet and the jury remains out if we will. 

Caught in the Middle, Ronnie James Dio

Metal Friday this week, we're going with an upbeat rocker from the late, great Ronnie James Dio. 

"Caught in the Middle" is not the first song most think of on Holy Diver, and of course it's not the iconic title track, but it's a fun, energetic, guitar forward tune I greatly enjoy. A great pairing with a cold beer and the start of the weekend.

Oh yeah, and that band you like, with that lead singer you dig? Dio is a better singer than that guy. Will put Dio up against anyone, anywhere, anytime.

The Goshawk, T.H. White

Enraptured by a raptor...

The author of a blog I follow mentioned in an off-hand way the life-affirming power in this obscure title by T.H. White. Prior to that I had never heard of The Goshawk (1951). But I love The Once and Future King, so with nothing more to go on than this sleight recommendation I purchased and read it over the last few days.

And found it to be a wonderful little book.

In the summer of 1936 White holed himself up in an old workman’s cottage in the woods, miles from civilization, with only a pet dog, a wireless radio, and some booze for company. And set to work training a goshawk (a male hawk) based on the methods of three archaic books on the subject, including one volume originally printed in 1619. These books explained that a hawk could not be forced to submit to training and the will of the falconer, you had to win its love through patience and persistence and closeness. Part of this process of acclimation included staying up for three straight days/nights (!) with the bird, so that it would perch on its master out of sheer exhaustion. Man and bird becoming one. Something akin to love.

White actually did this, and it’s all described wonderfully in The Goshawk, as only White can. His descriptions of the bird and its unpredictable moods and odd quirks are lovely. It's a snapshot into a world that feels almost alien, so far removed from 21st century life.

I knew essentially nothing of falconry and left with an understanding of how it might have been practiced by medieval falconers. Which is about as practical as learning how to master hoop rolling or leaded window installation.

What’s the point, and why read something like this? Fair question.

To which I would answer: Because there are difficult crafts worth pursuing for their own sake. That we might pour two months or more of training to tame a wild raptor to see if it can be done, and to have had that experience and sense of accomplishment. And might learn something about nature, human and animal, if we carefully observe the process.

The Goshawk is mainly focused on the training of the bird but does have a few wonderful asides and commentary. Little observations like this, of the end of the old ways of falconry:

It happened like this in the world. Old things lost their grip and dropped away; not always because they were bad things, but sometimes because the new things were more bad, and stronger.

Or this, on writing and more broadly on any craft practiced well, which touched something in me. It’s something I love about writing, that if done well can achieve a sort of small and unassuming immortality:

To write something which was of enduring beauty, this was the ambition of every writer: as it was the ambition of the joiner and architect and the constructor of any kind. It was not the beauty but the endurance, for endurance was beautiful. It was also all that we could do. It was a consolation, even a high and positive joy, to make something true: some table, which, sat on, would not splinter or shatter. It was not for the constructor that the beauty was made, but for the thing itself. He would triumph to know that some contribution had been made: some sort of consoling contribution quite timeless and without relation to his own profit. Sometimes we knew, half tipsy or listening to music, that at the heart of some world there lay a chord to which vibrating gave reality. With its reality there was music and truth and the permanence of good workmanship. To give birth to this, with whatever male travail, was not only all that man could do: it was also all that eclipsed humanity of either sex could do: it was the human contribution to the universe. Absolutely bludgeoned by jazz and mechanical achievement, the artist yearned to discover permanence, some life of happy permanence which he by fixing could create to the satisfaction of after-people who also looked. This was it, as the poets realized, to be a mother of immortal song: To say Yes when it was, and No when it was: to make enduringly true that perhaps quite small occasional table off which subsequent generations could eat, without breaking it down: to help the timeless benevolence which should be that of this lonely and little race: to join the affection which had lasted between William the Conqueror and George VI. Wheelwrights, smiths, farmers, carpenters, and mothers of large families knew this.

Observations like these are what make White worth reading.

Is this book The Once and Future King? No, it’s not. The Goshawk is far less awesome in breath and scope, and not as artful. But I can’t really describe it as lesser. Just less ambitious. It’s a little slice of White’s life, utterly charming, a bit of sanity disconnected from the modern world, in between two savage world wars.

Heroes behaving badly: The wondrous and bastardly creations of Jack Vance

S&S protagonists: Occasionally lovable scumbags.

Cugel the Clever probably isn’t a guy you want to invite to dinner.

You’d be guaranteed belly laughs and an unforgettable night’s entertainment … until later, when the check comes due. And you discover he made off with the priceless silverware set you inherited from your grandmother, and tried to make time with your wife.

Bastard!

Cugel is a loveable rogue, nicknamed “the Clever” for good reason; he consistently escapes harrowing scrapes and near-death through pluck and quick-thinking, which makes him and his adventures entertaining for the reader, even when he’s behaving badly. Which is quite often.

Read the rest on Tales from the Magician's Skull. My latest essay for Goodman Games. Had fun writing this one and revisiting a couple of Vance stories while doing so.

En Force, Queensryche

The Warning... feels a little more prescient every day.

We plead for the signs, give us a second chance

In hopes it will stifle the fear

The battered remains of world gone insane

We are near

Here's to a (metal) weekend.

One month until Howard Days

This one escaped the pyre...

One month until Howard days…anticipation is building. A couple recent items of note as the clock counts down to April 27.

Longtime REH fan/observer/contributor Brian Leno generously sent me a free copy of The Cimmerian journal, vol. 4, no. 4 (August 2007), along with a pair of REH postcards from the foundation. I would be hard-pressed to even begin to provide the level of Cross Plains coverage here on the blog that Brian offered in this issue. Brian took a trip to Cross Plains in 1967 at age 11 with his parents and two brothers, and his TC article “Down the Rabbit Hole” details his second trip, 40 years later, this time to Robert E. Howard Days 2007.

This article has stoked a greater fire in me, if that’s possible. Brian writes eloquently of an evening trip to Howard’s gravesite in Brownwood, which he experienced in the moonlight. Of a wild evening in the company of whiskey-drinking Howard scholars. Of a long car ride to Fort McKavett, location of a famous REH photo; of a day trip to Enchanted Rock, near Fredericksburg, where Howard first envisioned Cimmeria. And a culminating tour of the Howard house with Don Herron as a tour guide. The same Don Herron who edited The Dark Barbarian and The Barbaric Triumph. Pretty amazing. And much more besides, including a bus tour of Cross Plains, a visit to the famous icehouse where REH once boxed, panel sessions in the Cross Plains library, and the Foundation Awards, of which he was a nominee for the Venarium (emerging scholar) that year. Plus some other interesting asides. This was a great primer for the trip.

Thank you Brian, for the generous gift!

I finished my paper for the Glenn Lord Symposium, tentatively titled “Far countries of the mind: The frontier fantasy of Robert E. Howard.” I hope it’s worthy of the occasion. A little longer than the 1500-1800 word cap Jason Ray Carney imposed, but not much. 

I’m planning to bring a few copies of Flame and Crimson and have heard from a couple folks who are attending with copies they want me to sign. I’ll gladly leave my mark. Maybe in blood.

A dream fulfilled... 40 years in the making.

Contemporary sword-and-sorcery: 2023 reading updates

A "striking" cover (<=see what I did there?)

This year I am trying to add more contemporary sword-and-sorcery into my reading. To date I’ve read four S&S titles, including:

• Blood of the Serpent, S.M. Stirling
• Sometime Lofty Towers, David C. Smith
• New Edge #0
• A Book of Blades

You can read my reviews of the first two books here and here.

Short stories collections are hard to review; inevitably there will be stories I like more, others less. That is true of New Edge #0 and A Book of Blades. But having finished the latter last night, I can say there were more hits than misses. Favorites included John C. Hocking’s “By the Sword,” Howard Andrew Jones’ “The Serpent’s Heart,” and John R. Fultz’s “The Blood of Old Shard.” The last story in particular is terrific, probably worthy of some type of end of year award consideration.

This is not to slight any of the others, I liked most of what I read in here. A whole bunch of fun, blood-pumping stories of adventure and the weird.

Coupled with some awesome art, both on the cover and then in an expected gallery at the back, I greatly enjoyed A Book of Blades.

Considering I’m in New Edge #0 with an essay, and am also slated to appear in issue no. 1, reviewing it seems a bit self-serving. But, I enjoyed the rest of the contents of issue #0. The standout story for me was David C. Smith’s “Old Moon Over Irukad.” T.K. Rex’s “The Beast of the Shadow Gum Trees” while not traditional sword-and-sorcery was well-done, and pushes the borders of what S&S is, which fits with the new magazine’s mission. I also very much enjoyed a pair of essays, one by Cora Buhlert on C.L. Moore, the other by Nicole Emmelhainz on Howard’s “Sword Woman.” Will be very interested to see what issues 1-2 will bring, as both met fundraising goals on editor Oliver Brackenbury’s recent kickstarter.

Next I’m hoping to wade into a couple recent titles from DMR Books.