The Moon Beast

It came under the moon, a heavy tread beneath star-dusted skies, passing like a shadow under the ice-sheathed trees as the winds howled, desperate and endless. It crossed over the gulfs of the dark that lay in the valleys and deep places, until it could look down from a high crag upon the hill where men had laid their final refuge.

It had been a valley blasted by the fall of a burning star, but now men had raised stones over the fire, and heaped up a great hill around it, and walls atop the hill, all of stone fitted and clean and smooth. Fires burned along the walls, and at the gate, and greatest of all was the fire hidden deep within, where the power that came from the sky lay burning with the fire unending. Long houses lay clustered inside the walls, huddled as against the cold, smoke rising from their chimneys to vanish in the cold air beneath the glow of the sky fire.

The beast came down from the hills, silent and murderous, giving no warning, making no sign. It did not come in terrible open war against the works of men; it moved in the dark, a part of the dark, and gnawed with hunger at the corners of the world. Huge, it still crept almost silent over the heavy snow and ice-rimed stone. It breathed out smoke, and steam, and its eyes glowed cold and pale in the shadows.

It came over the wall, unseen, keeping away from the flames, and no guard saw it, nor heard it pass. Some of them huddled deeper in their furs, closer to their fires, but they did not wonder at the chill. Only one man lay in the path of it, walking the wall, looking up to the bright moon. He saw something huge and shadowed, and then he died before he could make a sound. Blood steamed upon the stone, and the broken corpse fell crushed and bleeding.

The Chainmail Bikini

I have talked about Red Sonja in particular before, but now I want to address the more general issue of sexism in Sword & Sorcery literature and how it seems to be embedded in the very fabric of the genre. Since all of this started in the pulps back in the 1920s, it is hardly surprising that the general approach to sex and women in S&S was a very pulp approach. Women were present, if at all, as adornments, prizes, or temptations, not as characters.

The conventions of pulp adventure fiction are very male-centric, with square-jawed, male heroes who fight their male way through legions of enemies. Women were wanted only as a pretty girl to put on the magazine cover – preferably in some kind of skimpy attire – and this enhance the sex appeal of the stories, even if the woman in question was not much part of the plot. This was a standard demand of publishers, and even Howard complained that editors pressed him to include a love interest of some kind.

However, the woman could not usurp any of the male hero’s glory, and so an array of princesses, slave-girls, kidnapped heiresses, and concubines paraded across the pages of Weird Tales and the other early sources of S&S. There needed to be someone to put on the cover in a dark ages bikini, and often the woman could serve as additional motivation for the hero if he needed it. A kidnapped princess was such a standard trope it was cliché even a hundred years ago, but it was an easy way to work a female into an adventure story.

Things got a little better with the move from pure pulps and into more general print. We got writers like Leigh Brackett and C. L. Moore writing tough female protagonists, and support characters that were more than just scenery. And yet things seemed to kind of stop there.

The S&S boom in the 60s was mostly reprinting and pastiching the works that had come before, and in the 70s the genre moved beyond literature into comics and games, and then later into movies. All of this seems to have done more to freeze or even regress that role of women in the genre, rather than allowing it to evolve and grow.

Comics and game art have visual demands and require excitement, and one of the ways to up that excitement was with naked flesh. More relaxed standards allowed for even more nudity, or near-nudity than before, and the ubiquitous oiled-up barbarian was almost universally accompanied by a naked or almost-naked girl who posed prettily while the hero brandished his axe. Even when a female hero is presented, she is stuck in the same kind of pinup role.

It can be argued (and often is) that the barbarian male heroes often wear little but a loincloth and vaseline either, but it is the posing and presentation that tell the tale, as no male hero is posed to look sexy. They stand ready, legs set wide, weapons uplifted, an expression of anger and defiance on their faces. The females, by contrast, pose with backs arched and chests thrust out, pouting kittenishly at the viewer. Often, they are in the twisted “boobs and butt” pose that shows off what we are presumed to want to see. The male is centered in a way that makes him look powerful, the female in a way that focuses on how sexy she is.

And it’s not that a female character should not be sexy, it’s the fact that every female character is drawn this way, posed this way. It’s not the exception, it’s the rule, and the oppressive ubiquity of the imagery has kept the S&S genre from progressing out of its overheated teen fanservice phase. It’s 2017, and even comic book superheroes are trying to stretch out beyond the “skintight boobs” approach to female characters, while S&S almost defiantly remains neanderthal in its attitudes. Sword & Sorcery fiction needs to be lurid and vivid, but it doesn’t have to be sexist.

Star Fire

Druan rode the border in the twilight gray at the edge of winter. It was the deep, cold abyss before the faint spring that crept into the northlands, when the sun rose to the horizon and cast a glow over the hillsides and turned the snow to silver. The sky was endless overhead, filled with stars like scattered shards of ice, and always the fitful glow of the sky fires gleamed and shimmered at the far north. There, in the darkness that ebbed but never faded, dwelled their enemy.

Two years gone, since the slaughter at the Pass of Bones, and Druan was grown into a warrior. Now he knew how to ride a horse and wield a sword and a spear. He wore his own iron scale armor and bore a shield of oaken planks and dark hide. He was harder as well, his long limbs filled in with muscle and his face drawn into grim lines. He was no boy any longer; his cold gray eyes had seen too much death.

He rode to the top of a hill and looked north, always north. Soon he would turn south and ride for home, for even the weak day was enough to keep the enemy at bay. Only in the dark they came, the wind always with them to snuff out the flames they feared. Now the race of men had been driven out of their homes by the scourge of the winter wraiths, and they lived in fortified villages, protected by earthworks and by wooden palisades, but most of all by men. Riders ever patrolled the highlands, into the hills, seeking the signs of an attack.

Six times they had come, on the coldest nights. Six times the walls had flamed with fire and cold steel, leaving death in the wake of war. Each time the enemy took away their slain, and the people of the valleys had learned bitterly to guard their own dead. The dead, as well as the living who were dragged screaming into the dark, were never seen again.