Modern Sword & Sorcery

[PogiRunner]

"[I]Unlike epic fantasy, sword and sorcery does not concern itself with world-endangering events; the stakes, rather, are far more personal. The danger to the hero is usually immediate rather than long term. Sword & Sorcery has a strong preference for fast-paced action tales rather than sweeping story arcs. That means there (is usually) no band of heroes facing off against dark lords that seek to destroy the world, but rather a lone hero on a personal quest of some sort.

Warriors Within by Janine De Tillio Cammarata fits this definition somewhat. The focal hero character goes on personal quests encountering immediate danger and Sword & Sorcery is present.

The story takes place between different overlapping time eras, 3rd Century Celtic Ireland and 21st Century New York City. That may not meet standard 'Fantasy' definitions.

Warriors Within is the first book of a planned trilogy. So far the first two installments have been released.

I found Warriors Within to be a very fast read. Arguably, it can be classified as 'Young Adult'. Although not too complex and at times predictable, for me it was enjoyable and decent for a debut novel.

[Randy M.]

A few things:

1) Although mentioned in one of the articles linked to, we should add here a mention of Karl Edward Wagner's Kane stories and novels. I haven't read them, but they had a huge impact on readers back in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

2) Tachyon Publications has a new anthology coming out in June 2012: The Sword & Sorcery Anthology by David G. Hartwell and Jacob Weisman, eds. I haven't found a contents list, but with Hartwell at the wheel, I'm confident it will be an interesting book.

3) Probably we should also mention Michael Shea's Nifft the Lean stories.

Randy M.

[Simon F]

'I also tried David Gemmell's works. They were good, but I much prefer series over standalones' - you should try his troy trilogy - brilliant - its sword, sword , sword with a bit of mystism rather than s&s. Then read all his other books because he's great :-)

[TooNice]

If you want a stand alone from Gemmell try Dark Moon. I thought it was really good. Troy is his best though.

[silvercue]

If you want a stand alone from Gemmell try Dark Moon. I thought it was really good. Troy is his best though.

I loved the Rigante Series, may re-read actually. And Druss of course...great fun reads

[Palfrey]

I disagree that Hobb and Sanderson are epic/high fantasy. Epic to me means unusually long, i.e. longer than a trilogy, and high fantasy means elves and goblins or equivalent with mythic quests and old-fashioned prose. I have no idea what sword & sorcery is as a genre.

But then, we could argue about these tiny divisions forever.

[Rob B]

I disagree that Hobb and Sanderson are epic/high fantasy. Epic to me means unusually long, i.e. longer than a trilogy, and high fantasy means elves and goblins or equivalent with mythic quests and old-fashioned prose. I have no idea what sword & sorcery is as a genre.

But then, we could argue about these tiny divisions forever.

By part of your definition, Lord of the Rings is not Epic/High Fantasy since it is technically one book.

Elves and goblins don;t make Epic/High Fantasy, they are merely fantastic elements that can be found in Epic/High Fantasy.

Hobb and Sanderson, by all accounts are High/Epic Fantasy:

High fantasy is defined as fantasy fiction set in an alternative, entirely fictional ("secondary") world, rather than the real, or "primary" world. The secondary world is usually internally consistent but its rules differ in some way(s) from those of the primary world. By contrast, low fantasy is characterized by being set in the primary, or "real" world, or a rational and familiar fictional world, with the inclusion of magical elements

[PeterWilliam]

I'm hardly an authority on S&S, but within the past 1 - 2 years, read the book Rhone, by John Karr. I rather liked it. It was something of a Greek tragedy, played out in a civilization on Mars. There was a Greco-Roman like pantheon, and a very old style to the book. The author, in his acknowledgements, even cites Burroughs, Howard and Moorcock as influences. Karr is also on SFFWorld from time to time.

[nuttz96]

Lots of good suggestions in this thread. Thank you everyone!!

Now, I just have to squeeze in reading time between cramming for finals and work.

[Mister]

Regarding the discussion of what is swords-and-sorcery, most of the descriptions given here are pretty great, but also seem incomplete. Swords and sorcery tales are usually tales of a frontier, whether it's Conan exploring unknown cities, Elric finding a magical island, Kane coming to another country, Nifft in hell. This frontier quality necessitates a world with less foreknowledge than most epic fantasy -- if the book's front pages include a detailed map, then it probably isn't going to be a story about exploring unknown territories. Even Fafhrd and the Mouser, though often in Lankhmar, also often find themselves aboardship exploring unknown seas.

S&S tends to be episodic. This probably was born out of its early publication history, in random periodicals, where readers couldn't expect to find all the issues in a specific order. I think -- this is supposition -- I think the not-about-saving-the-world element is due to the episodic nature of the stories.

There's also more than a little of the western or the wuxia. A lone traveler comes to a strange town, disapproves of what he or she finds, and follows a personal moral code to clean up the place. This is pronounced in Conan, where the barbarian ethics are presented as higher than urban squalor and religious decadence, and subverted in Kane, where the protagonist's moral code is infinitely self-serving.

I see a number of parallels between swords-and-sorcery and urban fantasy. The focus on the protagonist, whose world is built around them like the backdrop of a play; the episodic nature; the localized scope; the explorations of personal morality; and so on. But swords and sorcery was born from the same period, and often the same journals, that gave rise to detective noir fiction, so it's possible that urban fantasy takes its cues from the noir mysteries which were interbred with s&s.

And there's little to none of the frontier in urban fantasy. The protagonists usually live in a real city that they know well.

[KatG]

Sword and sorcery used to be the stories where the main characters take a trip or quest, whether historical, secondary world or cross-dimensional between the two. And epic were the war novels. High fantasy hardly ever got used. When it was, it usually meant the work was Tolkein-esque, loosely, rather than its original meaning. People tended to use the words every which way and over time, sword and sorcery got used a lot less, especially when the D&D craze died down in the 1990's, and epic became to chiefly mean the secondary world fantasy novels. And it rather made sense not to try a S&S/war distinction as many stories included both journeys and wars. So now S&S is rather loosely used sometimes to refer to stories about warriors with a lot of magic and swordplay in them, which is a much narrower thing. It's hardly ever used to refer to contemporary fantasy and not really bothered with in YA fantasy. S&S doesn't have to be at all broody and was often comic satirical fantasy or dark satire.

Very little on that original list would be considered sword & sorcery by most definitions. Sullivan's books might, but definitely not Rothfuss, Sanderson, Brust, Martin, Hearn, etc. Douglas Hulick's Among Thieves swashbuckles, but doesn't necessarily adventure. James Barclay's Raven series, as mentioned, might be, but basically they are war novels. The Brust novels are mostly crime thrillers. But then again, I wouldn't count Elric from Moorcock as S&S, but a lot of people do.

So basically, adventure fantasy with magic and armed conflicts -- which ones would we say are the adventure ones?

[barfly]

Did some research online and found the traditional definition of S&S:

"Unlike epic fantasy, sword and sorcery does not concern itself with world-endangering events; the stakes, rather, are far more personal. The danger to the hero is usually immediate rather than long term. Sword & Sorcery has a strong preference for fast-paced action tales rather than sweeping story arcs. ..."

FTR, this quote appears on bestfantasybooks.com (here). Promising looking site, found some stuff there that was new to me.

[Fedos]

FTR, this quote appears on bestfantasybooks.com (here). Promising looking site, found some stuff there that was new to me.

Yeah. I checked out that site's epic fantasy series list a while back. Was a bit surprised to see Amber on the list of classic swords and sorcery. I have the complete Amber series sitting on shelf and waiting to be read.

[spaziocain]

I find it interesting that we now have [the beta text of] the Science Fiction Encyclopedia 3rd Edition available online (Themes: SWORD AND SORCERY), but we are still referring to Wikipedia articles in this discussion.

[Contrarius]

I find it interesting that we now have [the beta text of] the Science Fiction Encyclopedia 3rd Edition available online (Themes: SWORD AND SORCERY), but we are still referring to Wikipedia articles in this discussion.

That's cool, but -- that's SF, not F -- and I'm not impressed with its inclusivity. I mean, it doesn't even list Joe Abercrombie in its author list....at least Wikipedia has Joe in it....