The Winter of My Soul

Karl Edward Wagner was one of the most important of the second generation of Sword & Sorcery authors, and he is one of those whose contributions as an editor are just as important as those as a writer. This was a middle but formative period for the genre, when it began to expand and be practiced by those who had not been born when it was created.

Wagner was born in Tennessee in 1945, at the very front edge of the baby boom. Originally trained in the medical profession, he later became profoundly disillusioned and renounced it in favor of writing, and he never had much good to say about medicine thereafter. I have heard that at conventions he would deal smoothly with the most oddball fans and then quietly mutter an aside to a friend about how much Thorazine they should be given. His worldview was anarchic and nihilistic in a distinctly modern sense, rather than the atavistic primitivism of someone like Howard.

His great creation was the immortal swordsman known only as Kane, who appeared in three novels and a number of stories through his career. Kane was almost an amalgam of Howardian barbarism and Moorcock-esque existentialism. Kane is cursed with immortality, and as a man of great age he is cultured and intelligent, able to appreciate and discuss art, music, and philosophy. But he is a born killer, and it is his savage and violent nature which always drives his turbulent life.

Kane is even more morally compromised than Elric, as he is not a good man trapped in an evil world, but a man who is often simply malevolent, stretching the idea of the anti-hero to its limits. All that saves Kane from being outright evil is that he inhabits a world that is more bitter and hostile than perhaps any other depicted in a Sword & Sorcery universe. If Howard’s Hyborean Age exists in shades of gray, then Wagner’s world is in shades of black.

Aside from this, Wagner established himself as an editor dedicated to propagating the S&S genre, and his first outstanding work was a three-volume collection of Howard’s Conan stories restored to their original text. The boom in S&S in the late 60s had the unfortunate side effect of encouraging some people to bowlderize Howard’s work, removing violence and sexual references to make them more palatable. Wagner was the first one to recognize that the original works could be lost if action was not taken, and he succeeded. He also edited the well-regarded Echoes of Valor anthologies in the 80s, printing many of the best S&S tales, as well as collections of pulp luminaries like Manly Wade Wellman and E. Hoffmann Price. He had an archival instinct to preserve, and the field owes him a great deal in this regard.

Dark fiction was produced by a dark mind, and Wagner struggled with alcoholism for many years. He died at the tragic age of 48, in 1994, essentially from the long-term effects of alcohol abuse. His fiction, his views, and his ideals were uncompromising, but he blazed a trail, seeking to preserve the roots of the genre even as he expanded it.