For half a year William King and John C. Hocking and I have been exchanging ideas about a subject I’m sure will be of interest to most regular visitors to this e-zine. More recently our discussion has been joined by artist Tom Floyd and writer C.L. Werner. Together we’ve been trying to codify what we want to see in modern sword and sorcery; specifically, what sort of strengths we want to take inspiration from in older fiction as we craft new material. We’ve optimistically been thinking of ourselves as a movement and have even given this movement a moniker—the New Edge.

Sword and sorcery has deep roots, and we mean to find a way to the groundspring from which those roots draw nourishment so that our fiction can grow in similar, though new, ways.

It has been long and long again since a steady selection of sword and sorcery has been available to readers. To those coming upon an honest-to-goodness sword and sorcery tale after a long diet of big fat fantasy books the frantic pacing of the sword and sorcery sub-genre will probably course through their system like a high-octane energy drink.

Those who come to the New Edge looking for parody or mocking irony must look elsewhere. Sword and sorcery has been down and out for so long that it has often survived in a bastardized form by parodying itself. Writers who claim to craft it have had to do so with sly winks and nods, looking the while straight into the camera to let the audience know it's all just a giggle.

To be new, to be fresh, we must throw off the shackles of those who have tried to remold the genre to be respectable to the literary set, to step past those who hoped to de-fang it to apologize for the genre's faults (and it has faults, just as it has bad practitioners). Twist the genre too far and it breaks.

I can sense right now that someone will read this and immediately assume we’re grim and humorless about sword and sorcery. Far from it. We love Fritz Leiber, and Clark Ashton Smith, and Jack Vance, and Roger Zelazny—all who use both humor and irony in their works. And lest we forget, despite the stereotype, REH’s Conan could crack a smile. These writers, though, wove the humor, the irony, through their work. The story was still paramount. And that’s because they were working writers. They earned their livings sharing their work. They were trying to please the same sort of audience who gathered at the foot of ancient storytellers, not the young poet who lurked on the edges of the campfire, sneering at the story.

There are different conceptions of what components really make up sword and sorcery. I could go on about that at length, but that’s not the point of this essay. Look instead to Joe McCullough’s excellent article on the difference between heroic fantasy and sword and sorcery, or visit my own essay about sword and sorcery (or the more condensed definitions found at the bottom of the home page of sword and sorcery.org). Suffice to say that those of us who are nominally signed on to the New Edge support these broader definitions of the genre.

As to the discussion of the New Edge, we set out less to define rules than to craft guidelines--things to strive for as we generate our own fiction. We set out to move past the genre's weaknesses and build on its strengths. To set aside the sexism and racism and the suspect politics, but to embrace the virtues of great pulp storytelling. In the best of the pulp writers, John Hocking said, “there's this intense sensation of forward, headlong movement, of events unfolding relentlessly before you in a strange and dangerous fashion.”

Bill King wrote that: "One of the main problems with High Fantasy is that it has become a sort of post-Tolkien monocrop where a good deal reads and looks the same. The thing about the writers I grew up reading is that every one of them read differently and wrote about different types of worlds. Hyboria was very different from Zothique which was very different from Carter's Lemuria and so on."

By no means do we mean to pick at Tolkien or Robert E. Howard. When they crafted what they wrote their worlds were fresh and new. They never set out to create unbreakable molds from which all fantasy had to be cast. Tolkien did not mean to suggest that all fantasy had to be quests with bands of elves and dwarves in a vaguely European world marching off to fight an all-powerful baddie by destroying a magic whatsit. Likewise, it should be understood that sword and sorcery is not limited to a barbarian with a sword, despite Conan's prominence as the first sword and sorcery hero(Kull was actually the first, but not as prominent). The adventures of Henry Kuttner's Elak of Atlantis and Catherine L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry, probably the first to follow Howard (Jirel stories were written while Robert E. Howard lived) were clearly the same sort of thing as Conan, no matter that their protagonists were educated landholders. (Elak was pretty much an outcast, but he used to be a prince. Oh, and Jirel was a woman, incidentally.)

When Bill and I started emphasizing the importance of evoking a sense of wonder, John Hocking had this to say:

Modern s.f. fans mock fans of Golden Age s.f. for seeking Sense of Wonder as if it were some phantom grail for fools. They even have a scornful, short-hand catchphrase for it--"sensawunda". And it isn't much better in the field of fantasy. Most fantasy now is so formalized that it's gone beyond predictable to lifeless. It isn't even the fact that it's become formula that kills it. Formula can work if played with vigor. Coca Cola's made with a formula and I still want to drink one every now and then. Nope, what's happened is that all sense of wonder has been sucked out of the books because there is no experience of Exploration, of the discovery and unveiling of new and mysterious places and circumstances. Couple this anemic deficiency with an absence of headlong, driven, vital storytelling, and you have a prescription for a moribund genre.

So what are those New Edge guiding principles? Briefly:

1. A hardboiled tone - as in terse and unsentimental

2. Exotic settings and/or settings that live - as in NOT faux Tolkien (if the settings echo Tolkien or other writers then they must be twisted or seen from some new perspective)

3. Evoking a sense of wonder - magic is never banal or easy, the fantastic should not be mundane

4. High energy storytelling - as in fast and without padding

There’s even more to it than this, but these points are enough for now.

And what does this mean for Flashing Swords, you ask? Not all of the fiction published here will meet all of the guidelines above, although I can’t see myself ever printing a story that fails to deliver on point number four. Stories can be grand fun without charting new courses or creating new worlds. I will, however, give preference to writers who can practice these guidelines while delivering a good tale with compelling characters. Sword and sorcery, sword and planet, swashbuckling historical—they are related genres, and Flashing Swords means to be a home to them all. Especially if they deliver New Edge style storytelling.

Now it’s time for me to step aside and let the fiction take over. We have a special jumbo-sized issue this time and I’m sure most sword and sorcery aficionados will enjoy what they find here. I have come public with our discussion of the New Edge with the permission of my fellow conspirators both as an attempt to explain the philosophy behind this e-zine and to promote discussion about modern sword and sorcery. We'd love to hear what you have to say on the subject and I invite you to post in the Flashing Swords forum at SFreader. If you're not interested, that's fine, as there are scores of other sorts of fantasy to go read. Live and let live. But if what we're talking about sets your pulse thrumming, then by all means, there is room at our side.

Swords together!

--Howard Andrew Jones

July, 2005