The Long Goodbye

Properly speaking, the genre of Sword & Sorcery is a part of the history of the pulps, because it grew out of the pulps and in many ways still embodies them. “Pulp” is a broad and rather nebulous label, originally applied just because of cheap paper, it later came to exemplify a certain style: tough, lurid, action-oriented, and sensual. Pulp stories did not join in with the restraint and subtlety of mainstream or literary fiction, pulp stories gave you exactly what you wanted to see. In the pulps all the heroes were tough, all the heroines were beautiful, all the violence was bloody and all the mysteries were real.

The label covered and intersected with a multitude of other genres: crime, adventure, Science Fiction and Fantasy. As S&S was a distillation of elements from all of these, it should be no surprise it was perhaps the pulpiest of them all.

One of the great subgenres of the day – now sadly all but vanished – was Planetary Romance, or Sword & Planet. As the name implies, it shares more than a few characteristics with Sword & Sorcery, especially when written by the woman who was in her lifetime the queen of the genre: Leigh Brackett.

Leigh Douglass Brackett was born in Los Angeles in 1915, sold her first story at 25, and had an indelible effect upon the genre of adventure stories. Today she is most often mentioned for her contributions to the script for The Empire Strikes Back, but by then she was already a master of the Space Opera, though her other works are little read these days. If you have not read her “Planet Stories”, then you should, because there you will find stories that are S&S in all but name.

Brackett wrote about lost and dying civilizations on Mars or Venus and the interactions Earthmen had with them. But like Ray Bradbury, she was not really concerned with anything resembling facts. In fact, aside from the use of the names of real planets, her stories were Lost Race tales set in fantastical landscapes populated by ancient ruins, lost secrets of dead races, and super-science that is functionally identical to magic.

It could be argued that this makes her not a Sword & Sorcery author, rather a pulp writer more in line with Edgar Rice Burroughs. But Brackett was not really working in the essentially Victorian tradition of Burroughs or Merritt. She wrote about a morally ambiguous world with heroes who were not often really heroes, but who existed in shades of ethical gray. Her other great love was crime fiction and noir, after all, and her screenwriting credits include The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye.

So unlike a lot of the optimistic hacks of the adventure fiction realm, her world had no underlying absolute right or wrong, and her heroes were frequently conflicted and questionable. Stories like "Black Amazon of Mars" are genuine S&S classics despite their supposed SF pedigree, and Brackett’s fascination with fallen empires and the colorful lyricism of her prose fit her squarely in the tradition.

Like all the best Sword & Sorcery writers, her work traded in exotic settings, inner conflicts, spectacular action, and a brooding sense of antiquity and doom. She lived a quiet life, was respected and rather successful, and left behind her a dazzling body of work that is largely forgotten now. She remains one of the most polished and versatile writers of the pulp era, no matter that she long outlived it.

Wars in the Storm Age

The wind driven ahead of the storm was heavy and smelled of war, and in among the ruins it gathered up dust and whirled it into the shapes of devils out of the past. All around reared statues and reliefs cut by the hands of men who were almost gods, and now carved again by the wind and the sand of the desert. Al’kirr stood in the shadow of giants and the dying sun glinted on the spears of her warriors. She stood ahead of them, on a point of sand-blasted stone, and looked north to where the dark shadow of her enemy came over the earth.

Riding ahead of the storm, below a darkening sky that flickered as though the lighting itself lashed them on, came the riders of Masur the Dragoncrowned. His men rode behind him in a sweep of black-robed riders, cloaks billowing in the hot wind. She saw the gleam of storm-fire on spears and swords, heard the thunder of hooves beneath the growl of the storm. Two hundred men at the least, each of them a hardened desert hunter and killer, each with blood on their hands and on their swords.

Al’kirr awaited them with her bow in her hands, sword sheathed at her side. Her men wore red, in honor of their ancestors who once ruled this place. She wore red and gold, for she was their Queen, the Heir of the Stormriders. Above her veil, her eyes were wide and glinted like gold, rimmed with kohl and indigo. She crouched down and put her hand on the rock, felt the vibrations of the horses. She had less than a hundred men, all of them weary and thirsty. A moon of battles, a moon of blood, and now this remnant of her army waited here to die, in this place where once her bloodline were as gods.

She gathered up a handful of sand and felt it sift through her fingers, then she stood and let it fall, judging the wind. It was chaotic, swirling and eddying on the forward edge of the storm. Al’kirr had hoped to lose him here, to shelter in the ruins while the storm came in and drove him away, but he would not stop, and now it seemed they would spill their blood upon this ancient sand while the skies thundered and cast down fire.

Death Dealer

We cannot really talk about the resurgence of Sword & Sorcery or its longevity without discussing the role of art, and the Grand Master of Sword & Sorcery artwork was Frank Frazetta. Without him, it is entirely possible that the revival of Howard’s work, and of the genre in general, would never have happened. His influence on fantasy art, and on the image of S&S in the popular mind, are both probably impossible to calculate.

Frazetta was a New Yorker, born and raised in Brooklyn, and his artistic career spanned seven decades and saw him work in everything from comic books to book covers to movie posters. He was a flexible and skilled artist who mastered several mediums and could do bold, action-oriented work right beside detailed, iconic paintings – all within his highly recognizable style. He was, and remains, one of the most influential and indelible masters of modern fantasy art.