Evolve or Die: Is this the End for Sword and Sorcery?
Can the genre ever move on from Robert E. Howard's Conan? How can writers possibly innovate within this narrow fantasy subgenre? Is the sword and sorcery barbarian facing his last stand?
Original Heroquest box art by Les Edwards, © MB Games, 1988.
BARBARIAN SOUP
A classic, no-effort comfort dish, handy for those back-of-the-cupboard ingredients a little past their sell-by date.
© 20th Century Fox
Writing time: 30 minutes
Serves: Men over fifty, lazy editors
Ingredients:
1 ripe barbarian + sword
1 wilted slave girl (clothes removed)
1 mad sorcerer + minions (you can substitute the traditional robed cultists for animated skeletons if you prefer a little crunch)
1 giant snake (or unknowable horror if you’re feeling exotic)
Serve in a ruined temple (sacrificial altar optional).
Each serving provides 72g repetitive combat, 82g straining thews, 500g nostalgia (of which 499g exhausted tropes), 0g originality, minus-1,000,000g imagination.
It’s the eternal challenge facing writers of genre fiction: how do I keep things fresh? How do I stop my vampires from feeling bloodless, my romance from running out of steam, my hard-boiled dick from going limp mid-investigation?
As I fight to clear a couple of weeks to pen a tale of my own, I’ve been reading Flame and Crimson (2019), a stirring and comprehensive survey of sword and sorcery fiction by the excellent Brian Murphy, and it’s got me wondering if the genre can ever escape its past…