Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

In this same year, Moorcock would pen The Dreaming City, the first tale of his antihero Elric of Melniboné, arguably the only sword and sorcery protagonist to reach Howard’s level of influence. Conceived as an anti-Conan—or, rather, Conan as an angst-ridden teenager—Elric was a sickly, drug-taking albino who relied upon an evil, soul-sucking black sword to feed him the stolen energies to both maintain his life and increase his vitality. Simply put, Moorcock’s contribution to fantasy literature cannot be overstated. The New Wave movement that he later pioneered forever changed the face of science fiction, just as his concept of the “multiverse” would as well, even spilling out of the pages of imaginary tales to grace the lips of our contemporary physicists, but for our purposes here, it might be his alteration of the battle of Good versus Evil into that of Law versus Chaos (with disastrous consequences implied if either side ultimately triumphed over the other) that made the most significant contribution to fantasy literature. His heroes, whether Elric of Melniboné, or Dorian Hawkmoon, or the rock and roll assassin Jerry Cornelius, were all manifestations of the Eternal Champion, a soul doomed to forever maintain the “Cosmic Balance” by lending weight to one side of the scales or the other. Moorcock’s influence is colossal, his shadow cast everywhere from role-playing games (and thus, subsequently, all third-person computer and console gaming) to rock and roll to literature. The alignment wheel of Dungeons & Dragons is nothing short of his Law vs. Chaos and Good vs. Evil plotted on an X-Y axis, and it is no surprise that Michael Chabon’s foray into fantastical swashbuckling, Gentleman of the Road, is dedicated to the fantasy grand master. But it is Moorcock’s character of Elric the Albino that came to define the sword and sorcery subgenre as much as Howard’s creation.

Also of note is Andre Norton, whose long-running Witch World stories, beginning with Witch World in 1963 and continuing up through this century, were both seminal sword and sorcery works (albeit rather heavy on the sorcery), as well as seminal romantic fantasy works.

During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, led by Lin Carter, the Swordsmen and Sorcerers’ Guild of America promoted the interests of the subgenre. From 1973 to 1981, SAGA produced five anthologies, edited by Carter and featuring the contributions of their members, under the series title Flashing Swords! The year 1974 saw the debut of Charles R. Saunders’s Imaro tales, which appeared first in the fanzine Dark Fantasy but, by way of Lin Carter’s Year’s Best Fantasy Stories (DAW Books, 1975), eventually found their way to publisher Donald A. Wolheim, who urged Saunders to publish them as a novel in 1981. Imaro was followed by The Quest for Cush (1984) and The Trail of Bohu (1985).[§] The stories are notable for being the first sword and sorcery penned by a black author and starring a black protagonist. The title character, Imaro, inhabited the “black continent” of Nyumbani, an “alternate Africa” that existed thousands of years ago, perhaps contemporaneously with Robert E. Howard’s Hyperborea.

Then, in 1984, Marion Zimmer Bradley made a significant contribution to the field with her Sword and Sorceress anthology series. Feeling that, C. L. Moore excepted, the subgenre was dominated by men and typified by some fairly reprehensible attitudes toward and depictions of women, she produced twenty volumes (two published posthumously) of adventure tales featuring strong female protagonists and promoting such notable authors as Bradley herself, Glen Cook, Emma Bull, Charles R. Saunders, Charles de Lint, Pat Murphy, C. J. Cherryh, Jennifer Roberson, Mercedes Lackey, and many more. After Bradley’s death in 1999, the anthology series continued in a new volume edited by Diana L. Paxson (Sword and Sorceress XXI, DAW, 2004) and, recently, in two volumes from editor Elisabeth Waters (Norilana Books, 2007).