One of my first loves is nearly dead. I’d like to try to breathe some life back into her—but I need your help.
I’m not talking about a person, of course. More of an idea, and kind of a small one at that. A whole genre (ok…maybe a sub-genre or two) that was once vibrant has withered away during our lifetimes. We let it happen. I’m sure no one wept at the slow demise of Sword & Planet, or for that matter, its cousin the Lost World adventure, both of which were once among the greatest of the Portal Fantasies.
I assume anyone reading this site has a general idea of what I’m getting at, but just in case…by Portal Fantasy I mean a catch-all for stories in which someone from Earth is transported to an alternate world, usually one with some degree of magic at work. In the broadest sense, we’re talking everything from the Wizard of Oz to Harry Potter. The popularity of the latter franchise pretty clearly demonstrates that portal fantasy itself is a perfectly healthy genre.
The same cannot be said for Sword & Planet however, a largely-dormant sub-genre of the portal fantasy world. Here you have stories that blend sci-fi and fantasy elements in that alternate world—wizards and ray-guns alike. The first and most famous example is probably Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Princess of Mars series, but it endured for decades. John Norman’s Gor saga had a good run in the 60s and 70s, along with Mike Grell’s the Warlord comics, which I read in the early 80s after watching the similarly-themed Saturday morning cartoon Blackstar. So it was still going as late as that era. But afterwards—virtually nothing. It just seemed to fade away.
Barsoom. Pellucidar. Skartaris. All of these places shared a common thread. Unlike Middle Earth or Westeros, these were invented worlds that one of us went to. Where one of our own entered the magical world, and usually fought his or her way to glory once there.
These days, you’d be hard pressed to find many “serious” novels in this vein. In fact, if you google Sword & Planet, one of the first results is a Reddit forum discussing its demise. The conclusions vary, but the gist of it is this: the genre got played out. It became the fodder for spoof. Even worse, it was just plain juvenile.
I get it. A lot of that criticism is well founded. It has been the butt of jokes. Portal Fantasy as a whole has definitely lent itself to some childish forms of fantasy, which is actually part of its appeal, I imagine. Even the literary stature of C.S. Lewis doesn’t change the essential fact that the Narnia adventures of the Pevensie children were just that—adventures for children.
These days, it seems that it’s nothing that serious fantasy fans (writers and readers alike) want to be caught dead endorsing. Some of that strikes me as a bit of snobbery, and maybe a little bit of defensiveness. I get that too. For a long time, in fact for most of the time that Sword & Planet was at its height, fantasy as a whole was a bit of a disrespected genre. It lived in the pulp magazines, in comic strips and movie-house serials like Flash Gordon. Entertaining sure, but not serious.
In a lot of ways, Tolkien changed that. His literary bona fides, the beauty of his prose and the depth of his material made it possible for fantasy to be respectable. Others followed suit, not always reaching those same heights, but with a definite eye toward a more literary product. After a while, the fans didn’t have to apologize anymore. Far from it, now they could boast about the complexity of the mythology and the world building, the deep issues being tackled, etc.
So if you consider yourself a serious fan of fantasy, you might have grown up reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but these days you’ve moved on. Now you sit down proudly at Starbucks with your copy of the latest Song of Ice and Fire book (or something by Brandon Sanderson or R. Scott Bakker, among many others.) Please don’t get me wrong, by the way. I actually love all of that stuff. I’m not in any way trying to denigrate the genre, far from it. Half of the shelves in my apartment are crammed with these books. I love that it’s taken its rightful place as a more respected genre.
What I am advocating is that we take the same approach to the one corner of the fantasy world that never reached that level of respectability, and has now fallen by the wayside. Because Sword & Planet doesn’t have to be childish, and it doesn’t have to be un-serious.
Standards are higher today, no doubt. Fantasy readers expect a complex, well-thought out invented world. They demand internally consistent magical systems, along with deeply considered histories and the complex mythologies that come along with them. As well they should.
But there’s no reason those things can’t be accomplished in a Sword & Planet story. Advanced technology can exist side-by-side with magic, if you structure things the right way. It can be a left-over from an earlier time, from a golden age fallen to ruin. And just because flying machines or ray guns exist in your invented world, it doesn’t have to negate any other fantastical elements. Like any resource, advanced tech and sorcery can both be limited, either in scope or in reach. They can be controlled by a select few. As long as they’re created and handled with attention to detail and with the same respect for the reader’s intelligence as in any other fantasy, these ideas can work together just fine.
Star Wars isn’t a portal fantasy and it isn’t Sword & Planet, but it accomplishes exactly what I’m talking about. It’s mostly spaceships and droids and lasers, but everything to do with the Force is basically just re-packaged sorcery.
The point is, it can work.
Beyond that though, there’s another reason why I think Sword & Planet could make a come-back—and it’s woven into the DNA of the genre itself. Science fiction flows from actual science. It’s at its best when it extrapolates from what we know into the arena of what we don’t, using imagination to make the leap from what we can do to what we wish we could do.
When Sword & Planet was in its heyday back in the 1910s through the 1930s, science suggested some strange and tantalizing things: there were dense clouds on Venus; there might be canals on Mars. Writers took this information and dreamed up tales of dense Venusian jungles crawling with lizard men, dying Martian civilizations desperate for water, or lands that “time forgot.”
We now know those conclusions were wrong, and as a result those stories are rendered a bit quaint. But science hasn’t stopped advancing, and the cosmologists of today are pointing us toward even broader, even wilder horizons.
Discussion of parallel universes, a multiverse of endless possibilities, is now on the cutting edge of science. These ideas are firmly established in the theoretical models, backed up by mathematics I can’t even begin to grasp, but which people much smarter than me seem to find convincing.
Can those dimensional barriers be breached? Can we travel to parallel universes where ancient creatures and as-yet-undreamed-of technologies co-exist? Or can we envision entire universes with their own, different laws of physics that could seem like magic?
At the moment—no. Not in the real world, anyway. But if we wanted to dream, wouldn’t we maybe dream about one of us doing just that? Couldn’t we very seriously take what “hard science” is now telling us about parallel dimensions and other universes and imagine someone from our world crossing over, and having a fantastic adventure in the process?
So with that in mind, here’s my plea, to writers and readers alike—give Sword & Planet another look. Maybe the time has come for a revival, to take a new view of an old genre with a modern eye. It can be done, and I think it can be done well.
Full disclosure, I already gave it my best shot. My recent novel Eye of the Storm is an attempt to do exactly what I just outlined, to revive Sword & Planet in the modern era. But I can’t do it alone. Hopefully, some of you will take up the mantle too, and maybe together we’ll breathe some new life into my long-neglected first love.
About the Author:
Horror and dark fantasy author Frank Cavallo’s work has appeared in magazines such as Another Realm, Ray Gun Revival, Every Day Fiction, Lost Souls and the Warhammer e-zine Hammer and Bolter.
His latest novel, Eye of the Storm, was released in August 2016 by Ravenswood Publishing.
“In Eye of the Storm, I try to bring back some of the elements that I like from old time pulp fiction,” says Frank. “It is a throwback to old school adventure stories, combining the pacing and the feel of those classic tales with some newer elements that are not all that common to typical fantasy fiction.”
Frank’s previously published works include The Lucifer Messiah, The Hand of Osiris, and the Gotrek & Felix novella Into the Valley of Death. He is currently working on a new novel, The Rites of Azathoth, with Necro Publications, due out in February 2017.
Frank was born and raised in New Jersey. He graduated from Boston University with a degree in Communications in 1994 and he earned a JD from the Cleveland Marshall College of Law in 2001. He currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio, where he has been a criminal defense attorney for fifteen years.
Readers can connect with Frank on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.
To learn more, go to http://www.frankcavallo.com/
