William King, though deep in the midst of writing his next book, was kind enough to spend time talking about one of his favorite subjects, sword and sorcery. I'm sorry to say I was unfamiliar with Mr. King's work until I read his submission to Flashing Swords, which now graces the first issue of the Ezine. Not only did it impress me--and many other readers of Flashing Swords, who have universally praised his short story--it moved the rest of his work to the top of my "must-read" pile. It seemed high time to invite him to SwordAndSorcery.org for a chat.

There are really two Warhammer worlds. The first is called Warhammer 40000. It is set in the far future and is a sort of blood-soaked cross between Dune and Michael Moorcock's Runestaff books. Its space fantasy done in a very dark, very Gothic style. I write a series about a Space Marine called Ragnar. He's a genetically engineered super-soldier who fights all manner of alien threats in defence of humanity. He comes from a sort of Space Viking background and I have tried to give the stories a kind of bleak Nordic quality, such as you find in Poul Anderson's work.

The second Warhammer world is similar to a classic fantasy world, although technology wise its much closer to the Renaissance, or even in some cases, steampunk. The world is home to all the usual fantasy races such as Elves, Dwarves and Orcs but they are done in a very dark, hard, and often blackly humorous fashion. Tolkien it is not. The world is threatened by the Powers of Chaos. These are like a cross between the depiction of Chaos in Moorcock's Eternal Champion books and the Great Old Ones in Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. Secret cults are everywhere, worshipping demons and plotting the overthrow of sane society. The two main characters in the series are Gotrek Gurnisson and Felix Jaeger. Gotrek is a Trollslayer, a berserker dwarf sworn to seek death in battle against overwhelming odds to atone for some as yet unnamed crime. Felix is human, the poet son of a rich merchant who was kicked out of university for dueling. After a night of epic drunkenness he swore an oath to follow Gotrek and record his doom in an epic poem. It's an oath that has bound them together through many bizarre adventures.

So far there are seven books in the series. They can be read in any order but if you read them in sequence they do form one huge story arc, which has just come to an end in the seventh book. There may well be others. The series will definitely come to a conclusion when Gotrek finally meets his well deserved doom. Hopefully that is a few books away yet though.

There are four Ragnar books. Space Wolf, Ragnar's Claw, Grey Hunter, and Wolfblade.

Thanks for that. I am halfway through a story called "Shadows of the Black Sun" at the moment. The story came about in an unusual way. I normally write huge "bibles" for books I am thinking of writing. I think it comes from my years of working in the game industry. I work out the world in enormous detail, with maps, and histories, and background sketches of everything from city states to major personalities. It can take up a great deal of time, and an awful lot of the work does not get used. For my last book, Death's Angels, I wrote about 50000 words of background, and a lot of that never got used. I was sitting around thinking there has to be an easier way than this of building a world, and I thought of what Howard, and Moorcock and a lot of others had done, which was to develop their worlds by writing short stories. Why not give that a try, I thought? So I sketched out the background quite vaguely by my standards and set out to write some stories that would explore it from the inside. "The Guardian of the Dawn" was the first result.

I have a very one track mind. I can usually only work on one thing at a time. I have tried writing two books at once in the past and for me its torture. I know there are many people who can keep a number of balls in the air at once but I am not one of them. Once I begin a novel, I need to keep up momentum or the whole thing starts to feel stale and dead. The book I am working on now is called Tower of Serpents. Its a sequel to Death's Angels set in the same world. It features a group of mercenary soldiers in a land ruled by what might best be described as Nazi Elves, a cross between the British Raj in India and Moorcock's Melniboneans. Gunpowder exists alongside magic and dragons. I am taking a break from Warhammer work at the moment. I wrote 12 books in about 4 years and was feeling a bit burned out by the end of that. I thought I would try my hand at something else for a while, and sat down to write some books I had been wanting to write for a while. I have some ideas for other books I am keen to try. I would like to do a sort of Robert E. Howard style S&S series set in a decadent far future world like Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique.

Probably the lack of a strong central character. When you think of Howard, you think of Conan not the Hyborian Age. When you think of Moorcock you think of Elric, not the Young Kingdoms. Of course, this thesis falls down with Lovecraft but there you go, no theory is perfect.

Smith's prose is difficult, and his stories are very downbeat--which does not necessarily go down well with the modern audience, but he had a brilliant, if somewhat sick, imagination and a very funny sense of humour. I liked his inventiveness and his humour.

Certainly many Warhammer readers are aware of S&S. The Warhammer readership though is a broad spectrum ranging from people who are simply into the games and want to read more about the world, to people who have stumbled onto the books in bookstores. I get a number of comments from people who like old-fashioned hardcore S&S and are surprised to find it in Gotrek and Felix. My stuff tends to place more emphasis on the swords than the sorcery which is increasingly uncommon in modern fantasy.

I've been thinking about this since we first discussed it and I have thought of several reasons. The first is purely economic and historical. If you think of all the greats of S&S--Howard, Smith, Moorcock, Karl Edward Wagner--they began their definitive series in magazines, and developed their characters through short stories. I don't know why but classic S&S seems to me to have been defined by short stories. Certainly for me, it tends to be the shorts and the stories that were fixed up into novels--like the original Stormbringer--that I remember.

Possibly one reason for this is because S&S tends to take a realistic, pragmatic, morally grey view of the world as opposed to the predominantly optimistic, black-and-white morality world of its cousin Epic or High Fantasy. I think people are more inclined to put up with the downbeat nature of most S&S in a short story than to sit through it in the long form novel. It can be a bit disappointing to get to the end of the book and have the heroes fail or die. Perhaps also because of the style S&S lends itself to simple forms of story--you know boy meets treasure, treasure meets monster, boy kills monster, boy gets treasure. Anyway, I am running off at a tangent here--what I wanted to say is that if this part of my thesis is true, the fact that markets for short S&S went away most likely prevented the creation of many new cycles of S&S stories and heroes.

I was also very struck by something John Hocking said in the interview you did with him. We do indeed live in a world where we are surrounded by S&S-computer games, movies, rpgs etc.--and yet the genre has dropped from sight in fiction. One thing I would say is that most of the alternatives that John mentions strip S&S of its most easily recognizable elements and present them in more immediately immersive and interactive ways than stories do. They take violent action, gathering treasure, and sense of wonder settings (the stuff of many a boyish fantasy) and present them in very appealing ways. I mean why read about Conan the Barbarian fighting monsters when you can be Conan and fight the monsters vicariously yourself. Why try and imagine Shadizar The Wicked when artists have created 3D models of the place that you can explore.

The first real S&S author I read was Moorcock. The Mad God's Amulet was the first book I can remember buying with my own money. I was about 11 at the time. I moved on to Elric. I can remember Moorcock being interviewed in the New Musical Express in the early 70s and being quite disapproving of Howard, so I gave Conan a miss for awhile and then was blown away when I encountered Howard's original stories a year or so later. I read a lot of Clark Ashton Smith and Lovecraft as well. I was very lucky when I was in my early teens there was a real revival of fantasy going on. There was Lin Carter's Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, and reprints of many of the Weird Tales authors. Speaking of Carter I always really liked the world's of his S&S series although even as a teenager I found his writing a bit suspect. He did the fantasy genre a great service as an editor though I am bound to say.

I don't know why people try and distance themselves from S&S. Perhaps they think it will affect their sales or their credibility. I never really understood the latter. I always put liking S&S alongside liking punk or heavy metal--you don't judge the Ramones by the same criteria you judge Mozart. It is possible to enjoy both.

Moorcock or Harrison are still both very fine writers--they were when they were young too--but they are different writers now and not quite so much to my taste. It seems to me to be a very sad thing if Harrison wants to distance himself from The Pastel City. It's a book most writers would have been proud to have written. Some of the books Moorcock wrote in a booze-soaked weekend are better than a good deal of modern fantasy.

It's very primal storytelling. Its about action and violence and heroism. It often has a great sense of wonder as well. Escapism is a bad word these days, but S&S is just about the best escapist genre there is, at least for me.

It's quite sad, isn't it. I mean Fritz Leiber was perfectly happy to write S&S and he was a very fine writer indeed. The same was true of Poul Anderson. The fact is that S&S is easy to sneer at. Its not literary, and its has no pretensions to making deep statements about the human condition. Some people seem to resent that. For me, its a matter of personal taste. And people seem to have very strange views on that. Its like saying you like S&S--or SF or fantasy in certain circles--means you are admitting to being brain dead. This is nonsense. I love S&S--it does not stop me from appreciating Dickens or Tolstoy or Camus. And I have actually read them, unlike many of the people who talk disparagingly about S&S.

The pity about Viriconium is that The Pastel City is a beautifully written story. It's sad someone would dismiss it just because they thought it belonged to the S&S genre. You'd think that people would get by now that it's not the genre that makes a book good or bad, its the writer. Elmore Leonard wrote westerns before he turned to crime (as it were), I am sure they were good books too.