Swords and Sorcery Magazine, May 2023 (#136)

Swords and Sorcery Magazine continues its astonishingly consistent publication schedule with this, the 136^th issue. Since launching over ten years ago, the magazine has only very rarely missed a month, usually offering up three stories, those usually being of excellent quality. Here are my thoughts on this month’s offerings.

 
Mike Adamson, a small press stalwart with over 75 published stories to his name, starts us off with “The Black Cult of Tarantium,” which is as sword and sorcery a title as you could possibly ask for. The story opens with several paragraphs of worldbuilding in the form of summary, making me wonder if this story, and its protagonist the warrior priest Zareft, are part of a series. It’s not an overly-elegant beginning, throwing a bunch of unfamiliar proper nouns at readers—a technique that can work splendidly (“Know, oh prince…”)—but here is a bit of a slog.
 
The reportage continues until the first line of dialogue, which doesn’t show up until well past the halfway point of the story. Descriptions of both the physical setting and of recent events are only very occasionally interspersed in the first half with a paragraph or two about actions being taken by Zareft, but even those are static.
 
Adamson writes here in consistently long paragraphs, usually of 150 to 200 words, only very rarely breaking the pattern with a welcome paragraph of one or two sentences. Even his dialogue is buried in such paragraphs, consisting mostly of long recitations of the villain about his plans and powers. The hero never speaks.
 
The story itself would be quite interesting but for the stylistic choices the author has made. Sword and sorcery characters who depend upon religious faith (upon even efficacious prayer, as is the case with Zareft) are few and far between. The world of the story is interesting and feels like it has a real history, but it is described rather than inhabited, just as Zareft remains something of a cypher despite the reader’s access to his inner thoughts. The piece has its merits but was ultimately a miss for me.
 
“In the Attic of the Mountain King” is by Dan Crawford, who has been writing material of genre interest for almost forty years—including a fantasy trilogy from Ace in the 1990s—most recently in Wyngraf. I love the allusion to Grieg’s “Peer Gynt Suite” in the title, but far from being an otherworldly “hall,” the “attic” of the title turns out to be an over-crowded curiosity shop.
 
The proprieter is one Olki, who has been in business for at least four and a half centuries. He is happy for an interruption to a task he loathes—tidying up—when he welcomes a customer, a would-be future queen of a dynasty that lost its throne seven hundred years in the past.
 
The secret of this delightful story is that it is anthropological in its methodology. Just as archeologists and anthropologists construct the past out of physical culture, here, the author constructs an entire fantasy world out of magical swords, self-thumping drums, and, of course, ancient tomes of wisdom, all haphazardly arrayed in Olki’s enormous shop, itself concealed somewhere deep in a swamp. 
 
But despite how dusty everything on the shelves is, there’s no dustiness to this prose and this worldbuilding. Crawford knows what he’s doing, and he plays tropes like the strings of one of his magical harps. Everything the proprietor and his customer seek or examine will be familiar to readers of fantasy in its generalities if not in its particularities, and those particularities are rendered with warmth and humor. Any fan of secondary world fantasy, not just sword and sorcery, will find much to admire in this piece.
 
At 8,000 words, “The Bog Witch of Dirk-au-fen” by Vincent Wolfram just nudges into novelette territory and is quite a bit longer than either of the other offerings in this month’s issue. Wolfram has trod light upon the internet indeed, but his biography here lists several previous publications and I assume he’s the same Vincent Wolfram who wrote Dread Sonnets, a horror poetry collection.
 
The language of this story certainly shows a poet’s hand. Here is one exemplary sentence from the very beginning of the tale: “The highland fields he had crossed were green, the mournful rains of autumn sustaining the grasses a little longer before frost turned them as white-haired as old men.” Lovely.
 
Our protagonist is a giant, “twenty hands tall,” named Bron of Sindrum. He and his long-horned bull mount, Vincarlo, are far from home and on an early winter’s day come to the village of Dirk-au-fen, which he finds being whipped into a paroxysm of witch finding.
 
The religious leader of the village recognizes Brom as the “Banesman of Chokefast,” a dragonslayer. Brom’s reaction to being so named, and his reaction to the villagers’ chattering about his legendary deed, bring to mind Barbara Hambly’s extraordinary novel Dragonsbane, with its reluctant foe of wyrms. For me, that’s high praise indeed.
 
Befriended by a villager, Brom accompanies the man into the swamp to fish for dinner. Brom is a vegetarian but agrees to haul in catfish for his host and his ailing wife. They are attacked by a monstrous agent of the witch of the title, but Brom handily deals with the matter, laughing all the while. The witch appears, “beautiful for a ghost-woman of the fen” with “moon-wan hands.” More poetry. (As an aside, I’m always delighted when I get to log on to the Oxford English Dictionary to look up a word new to me; here, one is “ingleside,” a chiefly Scots term for fireside. Even better, “treacher,” an obsolete word from Middle English describing a deceiver or a cheat.)
 
From there, the plot unfolds first at a leisurely, then at a quickened pace. Everything that is revealed is logical, and the secret behind the village’s woes is refreshingly original and topical at the same time. The relationships in the story are earned on the page with solid characterization and excellent dialogue.
 
A question raised at the outset is left unanswered at the ending, one having to do with a burden Brom carries, and his apparent quest to rid himself (and the world?) of it. This indicates that there may have been further tales of Brom, or at least, hopefully, that there will be more.
 
 
 
 

What I'm talking about when I talk about sword and sorcery...

In the field of literary theory, definitions are famously tricksome things. This may be most particularly true in genre fiction, specifically in the speculative genre fictions. 

The third edition of the Science Fiction Encyclopedia has an entry titled Definitions of SF. It runs to 3,000 words and concludes by pointing to another source for further discussion. Nothing is settled, though much is presented.

 

The great science fiction writer, editor, critic, and educator Damon Knight once seemingly threw his hands up over the matter, saying, “Science fiction is what we point at when we say it.” This borders on the tautological, of course, but points out the seeming futility of the quest for a definition in these matters. It may point, as well, to pointlessness. Why ask what?

 

But as things become more granular, as the discussion focuses in on, say, space opera or cyberpunk, cozy fantasy or planetary romance, definitions become more useful. Useful to whom? To marketers, certainly. But also, to publishers seeking to establish consistent lines, to editors seeking to provide needed discipline to writers, to writers seeking to establish both aesthetics and audiences, and, most importantly, to readers, who may be doing anything from exploring something new to seeking the joy to be found in encountering an old friend. It is in this view that definitions may be said to be useful.

 

In reading sword and sorcery, in studying its history and its contemporary expressions, in thinking about it as both a mode and a means, and yes, in writing it and writing about it, I have found it useful to not so much settle on a precise (or even vague) definition as to settle on a set of permeable and non-absolute parameters. Toward that end, I personally make use of what I will here call “the Seven, the Four, and the Alloy.”

 

I took these terms from three sources, which I will now describe.

 

“The Seven” is the seven-characteristic description of the genre provided in Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery, a 2019 book by scholar Brian Murphy. Murphy’s listed characteristics, or “elements” as he calls them, are these (I believe them to be pithy enough to be self-explanatory):

 

·      Men (and Women) of Action

·      Dark and Dangerous Magic

·      Personal and/or Mercenary Motivations

·      Horror/Lovecraftian Influence

·      Short, Episodic Stories

·      Inspired by History

·      Outsider Heroes

 

“The Four” were not only proposed by Howard Andrew Jones but put into practice in his roles as a novelist and short story writer and as the editor of the category-leading sword and sorcery magazine, Tales From the Magician’s Skull. When he wrote about them in a blog post at the Goodman Games website, he postulated that “[sword and sorcery is] not just a generic term that can be used interchangeably with fantasy fiction, but [is] a descriptor of a specific sort of fantasy fiction…” [emphasis  mine]. Then, rather than being prescriptive, Jones went on to say that sword and sorcery has “at least these four characteristics,” those being:

 

·      The Environment: which, for Jones, covers setting, which should be “exotic,” as in a different world altogether, or “far corners of our own;” magic, which does not often work in the interests of the heroes; and level of technology, which should be relatively primitive, meaning characters will usually use martial means to face their problems.

 

·      The Protagonists: The descriptive words Jones uses for typical protagonists in a sword sorcery tale are hero, stranger, outcast, rebel, commoner, barbarian, discredited, and disinherited (the last two applicable if the hero is originally born of a higher caste). 

 

·      Obstacles: I’ll here just quote Jones verbatim. “Sword-and-sorcery’s protagonists must best fantastic dangers, monstrous horrors, and dark sorcery to earn riches, astonishing treasure, the love of dazzling romantic partners, or the right to live another day.”

 

·      Structure: Jones argues that by and large, sword and sorcery stories eschew such (relatively) modern prose fiction techniques as stream-of-consciousness or any other “experimental narrative effects,” and when they do appear, they must advance plot. Those plots are most often traditionally structured, with discernable beginnings, middles, and ends. Sword and sorcery, according to Jones, must move propulsively, at a head-long pace.

 

 

Finally, “the Alloy” comes from the mission statement of the newest (as of this writing) active periodical in the genre, New Edge Sword and Sorcery Magazine. The editors behind that magazine put a great deal of thought into not just the aesthetics and characteristics they want stories they publish to evince, but into a sort of mission statement, which I quote here in full:

 

New Edge sword & sorcery takes the genre’s virtues—outsider protagonists, thrilling energy, wonderous weirdness, and a large body of classic tales—then alloys inclusivity, mutual creator support, a positive fan community, and the enthusiastic promotion of new works into the mix.

 

Note that none of the above offer a single, concrete definition of sword and sorcery. Rather, reflecting the fluid nature of the borders of any artistic genre, they each offer tools and intentions, and even, particularly in the Alloy, ideals.

 

Must any story, whether a flash piece of a thousand words up to an epic novel (which for sword and sorcery probably tops out at about 70,000 words!) reflect all of these characteristics to be usefully—and enjoyably—understood as sword and sorcery? Of course not! While it will almost certainly be the case that any given work will evince many of these intentions (I’ve never encountered a work that evinced all of them), taken together, I believe the Seven, the Four, and the Alloy indicate sword and sorcery’s mode and mood.

The three sets of indicators described above constitute an argument. I do not use the word in the sense of an idea or statement designed to influence the mind. Instead, I’m using a sense largely considered obsolete, that being a subject of contention or debate. It was this latter usage that Shakespeare’s Henry V was employing in the first scene of the third act of his titular play, when he says of certain men that they have “sheathed their swords for lack of argument.”

 

Which is to say, it is not my intent to convince anyone of a particular definition of sword and sorcery, not even myself! It is my intention to demonstrate that sword and sorcery is strong enough, established enough, and supple enough to support contention and debate (but hopefully not contentious debate). 

 

I am posting this brief essay on the blog I use to review contemporary works of sword and sorcery in the hopes that readers will understand what I believe to be generous, but helpful, parameters in deciding what to review and how to review it. My intention is to guard against pointing at something and saying it’s sword and sorcery. I will not always—I will not often—spend time explaining why I do or do not review a particular piece.

 

Instead, I will let this stand as my current thinking on the matter.