Recently, I sent my best friend a text stating “SiriusXM is reminding me how boring I find grunge.”
Do I find grunge boring? No, in fact, I do not.
That wasn’t, per se, my point. My point, which I knew the BFF would understand, is that the grunge sound completely dominates what is now labeled alternative rock. One can spend hours on the SXM app listening to their contemporary alternative channels and never realize that synthesizers were once an important element of modern rock, or that New Wave, punk, ska, goth, jangle pop, neo-swing, EDM, and a couple of dozen other subgenres used to appear regularly on Rock of the ‘80s/’90s radio stations.
The term “alternative rock” was coined for DIY/indie rock music in the ‘90s, when grunge was exploding. In response to the boom, major labels signed grunge acts and put the squeeze on established acts to sound grunge, even as performers inspired by the nascent genre formed or became grunge bands. Of course, the more the grunge sound dominates alternative music, the more alternative fans lose access to other sounds, in a feedback loop which can sometimes turn listening to Lithium and the contemporary altSXM channels into a chore.
So, in a world throttled by algorithmic manipulation and trend simulation, you can imagine this old-school sword & sorcery fan’s pleasure at discovering the 21st century revival of S&S, which had almost disappeared during the epic fantasy boom of the ‘80s and was now returning from the edges.
I am thrilled to discover there is so much great new sword & sorcery out there. Excellent new work from 21st-century authors like Milton Davis and Bryn Hammond and Dariel R.A. Quiogue and many others. Excellent new work from Second Wave veterans like Glen Cook and Michael Moorcock and David C. Smith and others. And, as the late skald of speculative fiction, Poul Anderson, hoped in his classic essay “On Thud and Blunder” (Swords Against Darkness III, 1978), the new S&S is “drawing [more] inspiration from other [i.e., non-European] milieus—Oriental, Near Eastern, North and Black African, Amerindian, Polynesian, an entire world.”
I’m pleased to see S&S has gotten more diverse since the mid-twentieth century.
I’m less pleased to see that it’s also gotten less diverse since the mid-twentieth century.
By “less diverse,” I mean that the definition of S&S has considerably narrowed.
I began reading and writing S&S mid-century because, damn, was it weird! S&S prose and comics had barbarians and Amazons and nomads. Sorcerers and witches and priests. Mercenaries and pirates and thieves. Demons and gods and dinosaurs. Peasants and princesses and kings. Elves and dwarves and mer-folk. Bards and spear-women and serial killers. The disabled and the maimed and the accursed. And any of these characters could have a starring role, and many of the stars occupied more than one category (most famously, Elric of Melniboné, the disabled nonhuman prince granted strength by a demonic sword, and Conan of Cimmeria, barbarian, thief, mercenary, pirate, king, and more). The star might even be a cat (Mark E. Rogers’s Samurai Cat) or an aardvark (Dave Sim’s Cerebus the Aardvark).
Visions of a space-faring future might be glimpsed, as in Marvel Comics’ Conan the Barbarian #1 (1970), or a character might pass back and forth between our modern world and a mystic realm—and between different ages of her own body—as DC Comics’ Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld does. An alien might fall to earth, as in Robert E. Howard’s Conan story “The Tower of the Elephant” (1933; adapted by Marvel Comics twice in the 1970s), or in Clark Ashton Smith’s tale “The Beast of Averoigne” (1933). A romance might transcend time, as does that of Conan and 1970s cab driver Danette in What If? issue #13 (1978). Eldritch Lovecraftian horrors might intrude (or worse), as when John Jakes’ Brak the Barbarian faces Yob-Haggoth, or Richard L. Tierney’s gladiator/mage Simon of Gitta (a.k.a. Simon Magus) deals in matters both Mythic and Gnostic. An elf’s quest might meet with another elf hatching from an egg (“Weirdworld,” Marvel Super Action #1, 1976). And the visuals could get distinctly trippy, as evidenced by Eerie Magazine’s recurring adult comic El Cid.
No wonder S&S in the ’70s and early ’80s—like fantasy and science fiction more generally in that era—was read predominantly, if not exclusively, by freaks and geeks.
No wonder I loved it.
And, given that the modern S&S revival is arising from the margins and is still largely an underground scene, I expected a return of that old-school unpredictability.
But it turns out that with S&S, as with alternative rock, things have grown distinctly less loosey-goosey.
Now, I very much doubt the operating logic of the modern S&S reader, viewer, or creator is “let’s be more formulaic!”
But I do have to wonder what’s going on when I encounter increasingly narrow definitions of S&S being increasingly prescribed or enforced.
When I see so many arguing in online fora that “real” S&S just simply cannot have epic scale, or nonhuman sentient races, or a quest, or too much magic, or any element that might suggest science fiction instead of fantasy.
When it seems like almost every new character is a warrior.
Who is almost inevitably whole and able-bodied.
Who is frequently a barbarian.
Who typically wields a sword.
And who usually has a straight white cisgender male identity.
At this point, what is weird?
Nothing.
And I haven’t even touched on the latter-day arguments I’ve seen—rare but there—that S&S is a man’s literature; nor touched on the new-zine editorial which describes S&S in “chest-thumping” warrior terms and tells fans we “follow in the footsteps of great men” (Battleborn #1, ARC, forthcoming May 2026); nor touched on a recent how-to-write-S&S handbook (Arcane Arts and Cold Steel: Writing Sword-and-Sorcery Fiction by David C. Smith, 2025) which explicitly dismisses the entirety of the female-writer-dominated Sword & Sorceress anthology series (34 volumes) as “only ostensibly sword-and-sorcery fiction”…
…Even though women have been writing S&S since 1934, when C.L. (Catherine Lucille) Moore introduced Jirel of Joiry, medieval ruler and woman warrior, in “The Black God’s Kiss” (Weird Tales, 1934). Moore’s Jirel adventures were, according to Wikipedia, “among the first sword and sorcery stories of any kind [and] introduced a female protagonist to the genre.” You can get some information on the series’ and the author’s original reception, often warm, and not only from men, at the critic Bobby Derie’s blog, On an Underwood No. 5.
Women have been involved with S&S ever since—and we did yeoman work to keep it alive, particularly in the droughts between pre-war pulp and the 1960s, and between the 1980s and the modern revival. Discussing every woman involved would require a far longer article (or, more accurately, a book), but I’ll mention four.
In the mid-twentieth century, Cele Goldsmith (later Cele Lalli), editor of Fantastic, took the uncommercial gamble of commissioning Fritz Leiber to resume his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series and “in so doing she improved the climate and conditions that allowed sword-and-sorcery to reach full flower later in the decade [1960s]” (“The Fantastic S&S contributions of Cele Goldsmith,” The Silver Key, 2021). The writer and editor Jessica Amanda Salmonson not only turned the historical woman samurai Tomoe Gozen into a classic S&S character and trilogy, but edited Amazons! (1979), which received the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology in 1980, and Amazons II (1982), the first heroic fantasy anthologies to focus on female protagonists, which were also unusual in having a female majority of contributors; one contribution to Amazons!, Elizabeth A. Lynn’s “The Woman Who Loved the Moon,” tied for the World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction in 1980, in the same year that Lynn’s heroic fantasy novel Watchtower won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.
Reprehensible as she has turned out to be, the late writer/editor Marion Zimmer Bradley wielded enormous influence on S&S in the second half of the twentieth century. She created the once immensely popular Darkover planetary romance series, which influenced many later S&S writers. She also created Lythande, the cross-dressing bladeswoman/magician who originated in the first volume of the first modern shared-world series, Thieves’ World (launched in 1979), and is arguably S&S’s first major lesbian character. In addition, she edited the first twenty books of the female-centric Sword & Sorceress anthology series, with fourteen postmortem volumes appearing from other female editors; as well, she edited Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, which also published S&S works.
Given that it was mostly women who contributed to MZBfm, Sword & Sorceress, and Amazons; given that the evidence indicates their audiences were female-majority; and given that many women writers were publishing S&S novels and series in the 1970s-1990s, I think it is fair to state that S&S was kept alive through the decades of the millennium-spanning drought predominantly by women and girls.
Yet in the current quest for “true” S&S, we see increasing efforts to exclude this entire population of practitioners and fans.
It’s ironic. When I first encountered S&S, the fan base was so tiny, newcomers were welcomed into the fold that helped us nonconformists survive and even thrive in a dominant culture which bluntly labeled us a deviant subculture…when, that is, the outsiders were being polite (this is not to say that every individual in the S&S world then was welcoming, but the overall vibe was). Now, in some quarters, S&S is quite ready to exclude some of its own in order to police an intensifying conformity.
These days, I find myself speculating about the iconic S&S character Elric of Melniboné, who was created by Michael Moorcock and who made his first appearance in the novella “The Dreaming City” (1961). An inhuman, antiheroic, multiverse-tripping, doomed albino princeling who is weak and effete, Elric is also a druggie, a fuck-up, and a demon-master and demon’s slave. Had he been introduced in the 2020s, I am convinced many would reject him out of hand as sword & sorcery.
From the available evidence, Joanna Russ’ pivotal S&S character, the assassin/thief/time traveler Alyx the Adventurer, was excised from S&S decades ago, despite a dalliance with Fritz Leiber’s beloved barbarian character, Fafhrd, in one of Russ’s stories and one of Leiber’s.
Manifestly, purity is overrated.
The fewer ideas and perceptions and influences you allow into the gene pool, the smaller it gets. And the smaller the gene pool, the weaker the population.
For the arts, homogenization leads not only to stagnation and retrogression, but boredom.
And if you think the pool’s not going to get any smaller, I’ve already witnessed an exclusion from S&S of the preeminent 21st-century S&S series, the Chronicles of Hanuvar, written by the late and much-lamented Howard Andrew Jones—who, as writer, editor, and critic, was the most important figure in modern S&S until his untimely passing.
To be clear, I’m fine with a definition of S&S that doesn’t want a lot of SF elements or a lot of grand fantasy quests or a lot of world-saving or multiverse-traveling. That’s reasonable. We want people to understand what we mean when we recommend something as S&S.
And I’m fine reading about white cisgender barbarian swordsmen. I’m currently reading Battlepug: The Compugdium, an omnibus graphic novel featuring exactly such a character. It’s a lot of fun—fun that respects and subverts and sends up the trope—and it embeds its lead, the Warrior, in a lot of weirdness.
What I’m not fine with is having one character type or one identity increasingly foreclose other possibilities.
I’m not fine with Jirel of Joiry and Cugel the Clever and Imaro of the Ilyassai and Tomoe Gozen and Corum Jhaelen Irsei and Alyx the Adventurer and Stalker and Jaisel and Tyndall of Klarn and Frostflower and Cutter Kinseeker and Dossouye and Paksenarrion Dorthansdottir and Sorren and Luc de Chaudronnier and Kerowyn and entire identities being excluded from the definition, practice, and history of S&S.
That’s even more boring than song after song grunging up my app feed.
With mass media now the dominant means of introduction to speculative fiction, I suspect many (if not most) S&S fans are introduced to S&S by the Conan and Red Sonja comics, movies, cartoons, and games. These have made Conan an archetype as well-known and influential as Tarzan, James Bond, and Sherlock Holmes. Which is wonderful! But it’s lost to later generations, just how weird a barbarian hero used to be. And it’s no surprise the newcomer to S&S would not only expect, but would in many cases demand, more barbarian swordsmen.
Barbarian swordsmen are a good starting place, to be sure; but they shouldn’t also be the ending place.
Sword & sorcery was, can be, and should be way weirder than that.
In the David Lynch movie Wild at Heart (1990), Lula Fortune observes, “This whole world’s wild at heart and weird on top.”
S&S was, and surely can again be, wilder and weirder yet.
If we restore S&S’s heirloom strangeness to the globally aware 21st-century S&S renaissance, we’re in for one hell of a time.
“Purity is overrated.”
Yes! I’ve been saying this for years — and not necessarily about S&S. See also SF, horror, Star Trek, etc.
Far too many folks in far too many fandoms seem way too prescriptive when it comes to defining what counts as “real” S&S, SF, whatever. They seem determined to sort everything into neat little boxes, with the rules and borders clearly defined. Period.
Drives me nuts.
I mean…LitRPG/cultivation is the home of weird S&S these days. You just have to stretch your imagination a little. Defiance of the Fall, Thousand Li, Depthless Hunger, all hit the weird and feature swords and sorcery in usually equal amounts…they just don’t fit the eurocentric model at all. Heck, the LitRPG trilogy I wrote was intended at the start to be a love letter to Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser (with a trans Fafhrd and an elderly Grey Mouser).
The genre may not appeal with the same old covers, but the folk today that reach for them are kin to the same folk that devoured Corum’s tales way back when I was young.
now I need to read your trilogy.
The thing about S&S is that, like fantasy in general, you tend to get two different strains: Homages and reactions.
Conan spawned a host of imitators, usually monosyllabic and manaphobic. And that strain is still endemic in the genre, even if there’s more variation in race & gender.
But in my mind, the real progress was made from those writers who reacted to Howard and said “Let’s do different”. You glossed over the Nehwon stories, but they were ground-breaking for the time, not only because they embraced magic as a part of the world, but also because they spoke in common vernacular, like real people, instead of the vaguely formal language of Conan and his ilk:
As opposed to:
And Elric is, in many ways, the anti-Conan. Sickly, sophisticated, magical. Still a bit prone to philosophizing, though:
Personally, I prefer Lieber.
I agree, but also I find myself wondering if what’s being observed here is a function of marketing, the algorithmization of publishing and fandoms or deliberate balkinization and redefinition as part of the ongoing culture wars. Because there IS weird stuff out there – Jirel of Jory has new licensed stories in print by Molly Tanzer with a novella I think crowfunding right now – and there are publications pursuing the weird fiction angle currently. What makes it more complicated is the fact so much of it is happening in the short fiction spaces which exist in ‘zines or in self publishing which tend to foster smaller communities that don’t always have the same impact on discourse outside of their confined orbits. I kinda wonder if we’re seeing the transition point where S&S is less a genre than a collection of tropes ; where it’s becoming a shorthand for a vibe that’s now being repurposed by various writing and reading communities much like how Lovecraftian fiction has been in the past few decades.
Good essay, some thoughts:
The original Conan stories have word counts between 9000 to 21000 for all the classic stories featured in Weird Tales. Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd & The Gray Mouser stories, with few exceptions, are of similar word count.These are the building blocks of the genre.
The current dedicated magazines have with few exceptions say they will accept stories that range from 5-8k in length which means that the opportunities that Howard and Lieber had to give their work personality that spark to strike the interest of the reader, the urbane wit and camaraderie of Fafhrd & The Gray Mouser, the empathy a young Conan feels upon discovering the true secret of the Tower of the Elephant the sorrow he feels over his great love’s death in Queen of the Black Coast, are likely to be not written when an author is trying to write to an editor’s expectations.
Instead, we would have gotten grim hardcases no more or less interchangeable than the ones written today.
Frankly, the S & S scene needs more markets willing to publish novelettes and novellas and less flash fiction and short stories that can’t go beyond a long-haired lunkhead fight with a big snake and calls it a day.
We also need a genuine willingness to engage with new stories and discussion over them. Something that has actually dwindled in the past year or so across blogs, social media, Goodreads, what have you. We need more reviews of these stories shared that are more than someone giving a summary with a final “recommended if you like Conan”
We need writers to frankly be more honest with themselves. There is no shame in writing fan fiction in regard to the stories that thrilled you as a youth, but take a good, hard look at what you write and the other writers you are surrounded by and ask if that really is all that you have to offer the world?
We need publisher/editors who actually want people to read the contents inside instead of avoiding all marketing so that these stories sit unread, or worse, use ”magazine editor” as an excuse to sit pontificating on social media platforms, enforcing those gatekeeping attitudes.
However as long as the community only engages with Sword & Sorcery as a series of collectibles, whether as a yellowing Conan paperback or as a limited edition hardcovers with special bookmarks, without engaging in the contents within in any meaningful way, to communicate the Weird that they could encounter that makes the genre dangerous and memorable across the decades, then Sword & Sorcery is no more than a death cult, obsessive in its keeping the gates shut to conceal the silence and ritualistic obeisance to the characters who founded the genre within those dust-coated halls of the community.
I’m largely a dark fantasy and horror writer, but in the last year I sold two S&S stories, neither of which feature any sort of Conan homage.
DIRTY MAGiCK magazine featured my 10k piece, “The Red Priests of Zaggua,” in issue #21, while its sequel, “The Fed Priest’s Curse,” is in the just-published antho DREAMS OF FiRE AND STEEL II.
The former involves an ass-kicking but conflicted woman protagonist, while the latter is centered on an outcast wizard in Mesopotamia….
No Conans here. Just people.
The market’s out there for non-barbarian short S&S fiction.
Who is saying this and where? From my knowledge the magazines currently leading the S&S renaissance (like New Edge Sword & Sorcery) openly embrace diversity of subject matter, of setting, of style, and most importantly, of people. I am not saying it doesn’t exist, all across nerdom their is often a reactionary impulse to exclude people from marginalized and oppressed backgrounds, but it doesn’t really seem to that big of a problem here, in this niche (like who is excluding Howard Andrew Jones from the modern discussions about s&s, a niche figure who helped keep s&s alive throughout the 2000s and 2010s).
Sorry if this comes off as argumentative, but I am genuinely not seeing this desire for homogeneity within current s&s rebirth.
It’s interesting, isn’t it? I was born in the early sixties which – for my money – really ended around ’73. That period had a very distinct vibe to it. A lot of fantasy and SF had a welcome streak of nihilism, a reflection of turbulent times. So we had Elric and Kane, both attempts to subvert popular heroic archetypes. What changed? I think things came a full circle. S&S was a huge influence on RPG. Now RPG is a huge influence on S&S. Call me (with some justification) a literary snob, but authors who first got interested in fantasy literature via gaming (and there are a lot of them about) will see being an author as, in effect, being a glorified Dungeon Master. Their priorities are fundamentally different from, say, Moorcock, who drew on a wide range of sources and who repurposed those sources to suit his own ends.
It’s natural not to name names in a general broadside like this, but I also think that not doing so may be a mistake; one is as likely to wound friend as foe. However, since I’ve been writing for decades about an alcoholic wizard suffering from scoliosis, I’ll assume I’m not among the intended targets.
Appeals to weirdness fall friendly on my ear, anyway. Personally, if imaginative fiction isn’t weird I’m unlikely to be interested in it. What’s the point? If the only weird thing about your story of an elf going through a midlife crisis is that it’s an elf going through a midlife crisis, you might as well de-elf that character and see if that story needs to be told at all.
Sameness has been a potential problem with S&S from the beginning, emerging as it did from the commercial magazine market before WWII, swarming with archetypes, tropes, and imitations. To the eye of love, there is an enormous difference between The Shadow, The Man of Bronze, and The Spider (personally, I’m a fan of The Spider, and Norvell Page generally), but a reasonable person might reasonably remark, “These guys are all the same!”
They are and they aren’t. But someone seeking strangeness is as likely to find it in the variety of events and characters that the heroes encounter as in the heroes themselves. That’s where the heroic pulpsters of yesteryear really brought the weird, and it’s one place where would-be heirs to pulp traditions should be bringing it.
More diversity in characters in heroes and characters is important, too, but (a.) I would distinguish that from weirdness of subject matter, and (b.) I think that some in the modern S&S renaissance are already on the case (e.g. New Edge Sword and Sorcery and Old Moon). Charles Saunders, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, and Samuel Delany are as important to the rising generation of S&S writers as REH, C.L. Moore, and Fritz Leiber. Anyway, that’s what I hear when I put my ear to the ground.
Re novellas and novelettes: these houses are already working on projects at longer lengths, and I wouldn’t be suprised if other S&S-inclined small publishers are, too. But it’s the nature of the short fiction market that there are always going to be more spaces for shorter stories than there are for longer stories. And longer stories aren’t necessarily weirder stories; arguably, they allow for a different, more slow-burn type of weird. But very short can be very weird. I cite R.A. Lafferty, and anyone reading this can probably think of other examples.
Re sameness: in conversations about sword-and-sorcery online there is the memetic sameness that bedevils all online conversations. Instead of making arguments, people wave tropes like flags: “Barbarian!”, “Big Snek!”, “Thews and More Thews!”. What this represents about what people actually think is moot.
All genre fiction—maybe all storytelling—exists in tension between two contradictory desires: the desire for something that’s the same (“I want something like Star Wars!”) and something that’s different (“This is boring—it’s just like Star Wars!”). (The academically minded might want to have a look at Umberto Eco’s “Interpreting Serials”, which talks some about this.)
That this tension exists is not a problem. The problem happens when it’s resolved—when lovers of the barbarian-warrior get their wish of 100% barbarian-warrior content and die of barboredom in the midst of barbundance.
I guess if the weird gets so weird that there’s no sameness anymore, no connection to the genre as the reader understands it, that this might also be a problem. However, in my experience, weirdness is harder to invoke than sameness, so I’d recommend always erring on the side of weirder.
Robert Howard himself wrote female led stories. And better Cthulu stories too.