Where Did Fantasy Come From? A Review of Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy by L. Sprague de Camp

Where Did Fantasy Come From? A Review of Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy by L. Sprague de Camp

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Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers The Makers of Heroic Fantasy-smallI love fantasy literature. And I’m greatly interested in its history as well. Where did fantasy come from? Is Tolkien solely to blame? How does King Arthur and his round table knights enter in? What about this business with elves and dwarves? Am I the only one who thinks about where this stuff came from?

As far as I can tell, there are very few fantasy histories out there and not much more than cursory stabs at explaining how we have the fantasy literature that we do. (For a couple of very good ones though, see the introductions to David G. Hartwell and Jacob Weisman’s The Sword and Sorcery Anthology and Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders’s Swords and Dark Magic.) So, when I recently stumbled across a whole book devoted to the history of fantasy, I grabbed it!

The book in question is Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy by (now deceased) L. Sprague de Camp, originally published by Arkham House Publishers in 1976. Even if you haven’t been an SF&F (science fiction and fantasy) fan very long, you’ve undoubtedly come across de Camp’s name.

De Camp was one of the most prolific SF&F writers of the twentieth century. He wrote both fantasy and science fiction, as well as non-fiction. I first came across de Camp through my interest in Lovecraft. He seems to have been the first person to have written a biography of H. P. Lovecraft — one that unfortunately has not aged well. But it’s clear that de Camp was very interested in the history of SF&F and particularly fantasy.

I’m not enough of an historian to be able to criticize Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers on a scholarly level; but as far as being engaging and informative, de Camp’s book is superb.  I found it to be incredibly engrossing — one of those books that are hard to put down.

Lin Carter — another prolific twentieth century SF&F writer — gives a fairly long and informative introduction. It simply whets your appetite for what is to follow.

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A Man Writing Female Characters

A Man Writing Female Characters

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Men WritingThere is an idea in our culture – and perhaps it’s universally felt – that women are not as good at writing male characters and men are not as good writing female characters. I’m not going to waste my time or yours debating whether this is true. (Hint: it’s not.)

However, when I talk to people who have read my books, I’m sometimes hit with the comment, “I’m surprised how well you write women characters.” While I take the compliment in the spirit it was intended, part of me is always thinking, “Why wouldn’t I be good at it? I’ve known women all my life. My wife is a woman. Some of my best friends are women. Hell, even my mother is a woman!”

Yet, people sometimes get strange ideas in their heads when it comes to sex. It seems predetermined in some circles that women authors write squishy, feely, ‘romantic’ sci-fi/fantasy, while men write bloody and gritty. If that were true, I’d probably have to look into gender-reorientation therapy, because I firmly believe that emotion — that gooey, squishy stuff — is the bedrock of all fiction.

Even when writing all that ‘manly’ combat action and suspense, emotion must be at the heart of it, or else there is no substance to the style. Because it is not the cuts and thrusts that really get our hearts pumping, but the meaning behind those lethal blows.

For me, writing a female character is a little more challenging, only because I have to put aside a lot of preconceived notions, but that’s what writing is all about. Whether the character is a princess, a professional assassin, or an amorous Cyclops, it comes down to whether or not you can understand their personal reality and convey it convincingly on the page.

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Spotlight on Interactive Fiction: Choice of the Dragon

Spotlight on Interactive Fiction: Choice of the Dragon

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Choice of the Dragon icon, derived from a photograph under the Creative Commons. http://www.flickr.com/photos/wili/

In my first blog post, I wrote about getting hooked on web comics, but I have an older love that vies for my Internet time. I speak of interactive fiction, a type of storytelling in which I’ve indulged from childhood. I am a game writer and I also like to write about games. (Back in 2008, I wrote a long post about games and interactive storytelling for Journey to the Sea; this long interest continues to crop up in my blogging and my hobbies.)

The Internet is the perfect environment in which interactive fiction can thrive, whether it’s through forum games, freestyle shared twitter and blog communities, or games that are a little more structured. Since the user-driven games are hard to judge from outside the community, I’m interested in discussing the latter style. And the perfect place to start for that is with Choice of the Dragon, the first game put out by small game company Choice of Games. (Disclosure: I write for Choice of Games, but I played Choice of the Dragon long before I started working with them.)

Released in 2009, Choice of the Dragon was the first multiple-choice novel game I’d ever played. Reminiscent of a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, the story narrates in second person, allowing you, the reader, to become the main character. In this case, you’re a dragon.

As the story opens, a knight charges you. Do you deal with the predicament by engaging in combat, fleeing the scene, or quickly incinerating the knight with your fiery breath? The story progresses through a number of challenges, including a flashback to your hatchling days, a quest to find a proper mate, and a decision of how to deal with local humans.

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Ancient Worlds: The Beast Within

Ancient Worlds: The Beast Within

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How did I not know this was a real thing? This is a real thing. I now know what I am doing Saturday night.

Werewolves have gotten popular again.

I for one am glad to see it. Compared to their gloomy, night dwelling compatriots the vampires, werewolves are… well, they’re just more fun. Maybe it’s just me, but turning into an animal with great intelligence and heightened senses and running around howling to a full moon sounds immeasurably better than sleeping all day and drinking blood.

Ya know. If you had to pick. (I’m not the only one who plays this game, am I?)

In addition to being more fun, werewolves have the claim to being the older of the two Supernatural human hybrids, by at least two thousand years.

Herodotus (a Greek historian who wrote in the fifth century BC), for example, tells us that the Neuri, a people who lived in what is now the Ukraine, turned into wolves once a year for a few days.

Pliny (a Roman historian) tells a related story about a family in Arcadia who would take off their clothes, swim across a marsh, and come out the other side in wolf form. They would live as wolves for nine years, and if they managed not to kill any humans during that time they could reclaim their human form by reversing the process.

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Inspiration and Emulation, Tolkien and Gygax

Inspiration and Emulation, Tolkien and Gygax

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Ballantine The Return of the King-smallTo say that I have an abiding interest in the relationship between tabletop roleplaying games and the literary inspirations of their creators is something of an understatement.

Notice, though, that I said “inspirations” rather than another word that frequently gets bandied about when discussing the relationship between literature and RPGs – emulation. I can’t recall precisely when I first heard the term “emulation” used in the context of roleplaying games, but I’d be surprised if it were before the late 1980s. That’s about a decade after I entered the hobby, so my memory is admittedly fuzzy and I could well be mistaken. On the other hand, I heard the term “inspiration” a great deal, most notably in (you knew this was coming!) Gary Gygax’s 1979 Appendix N and the “Inspirational Source Material” found in the 1981 Tom Moldvay-edited edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Back in those days, game creators often talked about the books whose characters, plots, and ideas had fired their imaginations to such a degree that they decided to create a RPG that drew on them; they still do.

“Emulation” is something different. It’s one thing, I believe, to create a fantasy roleplaying game inspired by, say, Robert E. Howard’s stories of Conan the Cimmerian, but an entirely different thing to create a roleplaying game intended to emulate the adventures of Conan. Emulation implies a degree of fidelity to its literary sources (at least thematically), as well as some means – whether rules or advice – to ensure that experience of playing the game imitates that source material. An example of what I’m talking about that comes immediately to mind is Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu RPG. While its rules do not explicitly talk about emulation, they do include game mechanics for the loss of sanity that results from encounters with blasphemous tomes and eldritch horrors. The creator of a game that’s merely inspired by some literary source is under no such obligations. After all, inspiration can take many forms, many of which do not include aping one’s sources of inspiration.

I mention all of this as a prologue to a large, more contentious discussion, namely the place of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien in the creation of Dungeons & Dragons.

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The Magic Goes Away by Larry Niven

The Magic Goes Away by Larry Niven

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The Magic Goes Away-small

A swordsman battled a sorcerer once upon a time. In that age such battles were frequent. A natural antipathy exists between swordsmen and sorcerers, as between cats and small birds, or between rats and men. Usually the swordsman lost, and humanity’s average intelligence rose some trifling fraction. Sometimes the swordsman won, and again the species was improved; for a sorcerer who cannot kill one miserable swordsman is a poor excuse for a sorcerer.

So begins “Not Long Before the End” (1969), the first story in Larry Niven’s The Magic Goes Away series. His approach to swords & sorcery is the same as the one he brought to the hard science fiction he’s best known for: extravagant and colorful yet built on a framework of logic.

As you might infer from the tone of the quote, he also has a bias against the warrior hero typical of the genre and in favor of the sorcerer. In the short story above, its sequel “What Good Is a Glass Dagger?”, and the short novel The Magic Goes Away, he chronicled the adventures of a sorcerer called Warlock in a pre-historic Earth located somewhere to the right of Robert E. Howard’s Hyboria.

Niven’s starting point was to theorize how magic might work in a rational way. In his model, sorcery is powered by mana, a finite source. Instead of telling stories of the glory days when wizards built flying castles, and dragons and gods walked the earth, these tales are set in the magical world’s fading days. It’s a clever setup and one that drew me in enough to read the whole trilogy this past week.

“Not Long Before the End” is an inversion of the too-common S&S story of barbarian swordsman rescues girl from wicked sorcerer. Here Warlock discovers the nature of mana and realizes it’s running out.

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CONAN: “Caveman Battle Doom”

CONAN: “Caveman Battle Doom”

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Conan-SnailriderCLR
Cover to CONAN’s split release “Conan Vs. Slomatics” (2011)

What is the sound of Sword and Sorcery?

It probably sounds a lot like CONAN. This U.K.-based power trio gives a whole new meaning to the word heavy. But these guys aren’t hampered by “Cookie Monster” vocals or the demonic noise-worship that often plagues today’s heaviest acts.

CONAN have coined their own genre, calling themselves “caveman battle doom.” For hardcore fans, this is simply a new sub-category of the “Doom Rock” scene. For the rest of us, it’s an amusingly accurate description of CONAN’s unique sound.

As the band’s own bio puts it: “CONAN are as heavy as interplanetary thunder amplified through the roaring black hole anus of Azathoth.” TheObelisk.net christened them “Europe’s heaviest battle-sloths…” It doesn’t get much cooler than that.

After releasing an indie debut EP in 2010 entitled “Horseback Battle Hammer,” the trio signed to Burning World Records and released their critically acclaimed magnum opus, “Monnos.”

Both albums are perfect for headbanging, slow-grooving, couch-tripping, or simply cranking up loud enough to vibrate the walls of your apartment. And your skull. They are super sludgy brilliance in the vein of early BLACK SABBATH, KYUSS, MELVINS, and TOOL. Call it “stoner rock” if you will, but absolutely no drugs are necessary.

Fantasy and sword-and-sorcery themes are essential to CONAN’s lyrical cosmology, which makes perfect sense for a band named after Robert E. Howard’s famous barbarian. 

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When Niels Bohr Met St. Thomas Aquinas: Prince of Darkness on Blu-ray

When Niels Bohr Met St. Thomas Aquinas: Prince of Darkness on Blu-ray

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Prince of Darkness Blu-ray coverPrince of Darkness (1987)
Written and Directed by John Carpenter. Starring Donald Pleasance, Victor Wong, Jameson Parker, Lisa Blount, Dennis Dun, Alice Cooper.

“Are you asking me about the backstory of the movie? I have no idea.”
— John Carpenter on the commentary track for Prince of Darkness

This week, with the release of In the Mouth of Madness, all of director John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse Trilogy” movies will have reached Blu-ray. The Thing came out a few years ago (from Universal Home Video, doing a better-than-average job), and at the end of September, right in time for the crisp joys of October, Shout! Factory released 1987’s Prince of Darkness — one of Carpenter’s most underrated films.

(His most underrated film? In the Mouth of Madness. More on that in a week or so.)

The apocalypse trilogy films have no connection to each other aside from Carpenter’s interest in events that could bring about the end of the world, a hangover from his childhood fascination with the wild n’ wooly contents of the biblical Book of Revelation. The Thing threatened the globe with a shape-changing alien nasty capable a rapidly assimilating the human race. In the Mouth of Madness brought the Great Old Ones back in full Lovecraftian form, but also undermined all of reality through the power of fiction.

In Prince of Darkness, it would seem that Old Scratch himself is the force preparing to annihilate humanity. After all, what else to make of the title? But Prince of Darkness ends up confronting Earth with a destroyer as much imbedded in science fiction as The Thing. Carpenter combines Catholic-themed religious horror with, of all things, quantum mechanics. The resulting film frequently makes little sense — even John Carpenter acknowledges that — but when viewed as a deep well of bizarre ideas and unnerving atmosphere, it stands as one of the most creative horror films of its decade. I now rank it among Carpenter’s best movies, although it took me a few years to grasp its achievements and shrug off its faults.

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New Treasures: The Harsh Suns by Jason E. Thummel

New Treasures: The Harsh Suns by Jason E. Thummel

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The Harsh SunsThere I was, minding my own business, peacefully editing Connor Gormley’s Robert E. Howard tribute “Who Took the Flowers Out of my Prose?” and listening to him grouse about modern prose, when suddenly Conner took an abrupt right turn and started praising Black Gate author Jason E. Thummel.

Unfortunately, modern fantasy seems, for the most part, to neglect prose. And that’s a shame, because it means all those distinct literary personalities — the whimsy of Leiber, the melancholy of Moorcock, and the fury of Howard — are a thing of the past. Everyone seems to have adopted the same bland, middle ground style that isn’t really anything above functional…

Don’t get me wrong — there are a few standouts. I love Jason E. Thummel’s prose…

Well, that was a pleasant surprise. We’ve published three tales from Jason E. Thummel in the past 12 months — including the debut story in the Black Gate online fiction line, ”The Duelist,” which Adventures Fantastic said “Set a high standard,” and two stories of Gunnerman Clap, “The Gunnerman” and “Assault and Battery.”

Apparently it takes more than that to stay on top of Jason, however. Looking for an image to accompany Conner’s comments, I stumbled on the cover of Jason’s new book: The Harsh Suns, a handsome collection of three sword & sorcery tales published earlier this year.

I immediately ordered a copy and it arrived just in time to accompany me on my plane ride to San Francisco last Wednesday.

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Vintage Treasures: The Karma Corps by Neal Barrett, Jr.

Vintage Treasures: The Karma Corps by Neal Barrett, Jr.

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The Karma Corps-smallLast month, I bought a small collection of fantasy novels that included Mark Frost’s The List of 7, a terrific Clark Ashton Smith paperback, some vintage Lovecraft — and four early fantasy novels by Texas author Neal Barrett, Jr. I was especially curious about the Barrett, all four volumes in his Aldair series, published between 1976 and 1982. I first encountered Barrett in the late 80s with his post-apocalyptic novel, Through Darkest America (1987), and then his gonzo magic realist offering from Ziesing Books, The Hereafter Gang (1991). Those were more than enough to win my respect for Barrett’s gifted imagination, but I wasn’t familiar with his earlier work.

The four Aldair books rekindled my interest and I set off in search of what else I might find. The first title I found was The Karma Corps, an unusual science fantasy of demons, holy warriors, and a distant space colony with a very serious problem.

Captain Lars Haggart was a soul waiting to be reborn… but before that blessed event he has been inducted into the Arm of God Regiment fighting for the beleaguered Churchers on a newly colonized planet. Their foe — demons who could pop into existence, slay and pop out of existence the next instant. The demons were winning that war, sending their Unborn opponents back to limbo, driving the living colonists toward extermination.

But this was no fantasy, no business of the religious imagination. The fight was real, blood was blood, and swords cut sharp, for the Unborn were very much alive. Haggart was aware that this was frighteningly contradictory but first he had to fight the demons on their own terms — learn how to appear behind their lines and do to them what they were doing to the humans.

An unusual science fiction novel of a space colony in deepest trouble and of aliens who knew planetary secrets that were never in anyone’s Holy Book.

Given what I know of Neal Barrett, Jr. already, I didn’t really expect to find his name on a novel of space colonization. Throw in a strange religion and demons who defy our notion of reality, however, and now you’re talking.

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