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Not so long ago there was a new generation of sword-and-sorcery writers on the shelves. They were young, they were talented, they were popular, they were selling... and then they disappeared. David C. Smith was one of the foremost of those writers, and while well known for penning some exciting Robert E. Howard pastiche with Richard Tierney, he may be better known as the creator of Oron. Fans will be happy to know that David's hard at work writing again, and in this lengthy interview he shares his thoughts about publishing, fantasy, the practice of writing, and the untimely disappearance of sword-and-sorcery back in the 1980s.

Howard Andrew Jones

Did you have any idea that there would be such a demand for Oron after the first book? Why do you think the character proved to be so popular?

I think it’s the Howardian aspect of the character and that the stories are old school and unpretentious. The Oron stories feel very much like prewar pulp fiction. But my writing them that way was inevitable. I like the pulp fiction of the 1930s and 1940s and I read a lot of it in the ’70s. Lots of it was being reprinted then. I still have most of my copies of Adventure and Argosy and Blue Book and Weird Tales and the other pulps I bought in the ’70s.

How many books are there in the Oron series? Do you have a favorite? How challenging was it to retrofit his adventures to include prequels after the conclusion of the first book?

Four books are Oron books. Zebra included The Sorcerer’s Shadow as part of the series and numbered the three later books to reflect that. The genesis of the books actually goes back to my early short stories. For several years in the early and mid ’70s, I wrote about an equal number of horror stories and adventure fantasy stories. The fantasy stories were not set in any particular milieu; I didn’t create a “world.” But when I decided to try writing something novel-length,

I had to choose between writing one of two kinds of stories: contemporary suspense, which likely would have developed some sort of supernatural or horror undertone, or a historical novel. Those are the genres I really wanted to write in. I’d always wanted to write a pirate novel, but it soon stalled. Then I started a novel about the battle between the Romans and Germans in the Teutoberg Forest in 9 BCE. But as with the pirate novel, I got hung up on doing research.

My third attempt was Oron. The advantage to this was that I could approach it as a quasi-historical novel, in a way, drawing upon what I know about ancient and medieval history, but I could let the story lead the way because it would be a fantasy adventure. I wouldn’t worry about doing any research. At the time, sword-and-sorcery fiction seemed to be as viable a genre as detective stories or Westerns.

Obviously the books owe a debt to Howard; I’d read most of his stuff that was being reprinted at that time. But I also drew upon other historical novels I’d read, adventure movies, silent movies—I’m a big fan of silent movies—and to some degree, I think, Clark Ashton Smith’s fiction. Friends of mine who read it in manuscript liked it, so, as naļve as I was, I was surprised that it took a long time to sell. I was completely ignorant of the business of writing. I knew no other writers, and I surmised that if you told a good story, somebody would just publish it. I don’t think you can be more naļve than that.

When Oron didn’t sell, I wrote a suspense novel about opium smuggling in Limehouse on the docks of London in the 1920s. Write about what you know, right? So I wrote a silent movie, basically. Very artsy. I had the collection Limehouse Nights by Thomas Burke; one of the stories had been the inspiration for D. W. Griffith’s famous movie Broken Blossoms in 1919. So that was the inspiration for my story, The Opium Dragon. It never sold.

But sword-and-sorcery still seemed to be popular, and I still had ideas for that genre, so instead of writing a historical novel or a modern suspense story, I wrote another adventure fantasy, The Shadow of Sorcery, which was published as The Sorcerer’s Shadow.

The other three Oron books came later, after Dick Tierney and I had written the Sonja novels and I’d done other stuff. Oron and Shadow sold well enough that Zebra made me a standing offer to write three more books with the Oron character. I decided that if I ever wrote them, I’d write them as prequels and fill in his story arc that way. But I didn’t want to write any more books for Zebra; I wanted to try to sell stories to other houses. But eventually I signed the contract. I’d started to get ideas for the character, and it was sure money.

I like the second one. And I like the first and last stories in the third of those books. Also “The Jewel of the Sorcerer’s Daughter” in the third book. My titles for these books, by the way, on the typescripts, are Reign, Sorcery! (which Zebra retitled as Mosutha’s Magic), Deathwolf (The Valley of Ogrum), and Death in Asakad and Other Stories (The Ghost Army). Each of my titles is more artistically sound than the title Zebra used. Roberta Grossman changed the titles, as I understand it. I swear to God, she would have renamed War and Peace. It would have been Mosutha’s War or The Valley of Peace or something. Moby-Dick—it would have been The Valley of Moby. Jesus.

One point of trivia about Oron, the first book. It’s 24 chapters long, and I broke it into three equal parts of eight chapters each. Each section has a heading used to demarcate the trajectory of Oron’s life and career: "Part I, The Warrior"; "Part II, The King"; and "Part III, The Na-Kha". When Roy Torgeson bought the manuscript, he requested some changes in the last third. I volunteered to go ahead and rewrite that last part to avoid having to write a lot of notes in the margins and to replace some of the scenes he wanted to change. The one I remember is that I had a scene in which Oron and Desdira spend the night on the roof of the palace under the stars and they share a foreboding of evil. What Roy wanted was a scene in which Oron rides out alone under the stars, trying to recapture what he’d felt as a young man, and he broods about the futility of life. He specifically referenced "The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune." In that regard, Roy was right; it was a better idea for a scene at that stage in the story.

Anyhow, when I returned that stack of pages to him, I neglected to place a slip sheet on top that indicated it was the beginning of "Part III". He still had the whole original manuscript, right? He never sent me the galleys to review, or I would have caught the error. So the book was printed with two sections, one eight chapters long and one sixteen chapters long. That annoys me. It detracts from the structure. A few years ago, when Oron was reprinted in the Czech Republic, they published it in two volumes, and sure enough, the second book is twice as long as the first.

The Sorcerer’s Shadow is set in the same universe as Oron, but much later, is that correct? What led to its creation? Did you ever consider writing more work in the same world?

Actually, there are a number of short stories set in this universe. More than a dozen, I’m sure. I called it Attluma; the word sounds something like "Atlantis," and that was deliberate. When I started to write Oron, I felt that I should set it in the same backdrop as the short stories I’d had published in the fanzines, so I did indeed wind up creating a fantasy world. I drew a map, gave it a history the way Howard envisioned his Hyborian world. This was so that I could go back and place the short stories into some kind of context or timeline, and I found that to be useful. It was common even that early with this sort of fiction for authors to create maps of these worlds or landscapes in which they set their stories.

When I wrote The Shadow of Sorcery, I wanted to try something different. I’ve deliberately experimented with some of my books. The Fair Rules of Evil is an experiment in style, and so is The Shadow of Sorcery. Shadow is an opera. It’s an oversized, over-the-top grand opera. It’s a nightmare, and deliberately written as one. The violence is over the top, the sex is raunchy, it’s in a completely different landscape. I wanted to write a novel that explored the shadow sides of these elemental characters, a warrior and a witch-woman.

Shadow is set several hundred years after Oron. I wrote some more stories about this character later on, Akram. He winds up suffering from a sorcerous curse and he can’t die. The stories are all part of the Attluma background. Roy Torgeson, the editor at Zebra who bought it, asked me to rewrite it and expand it. He wanted an epic the size of Oron. To increase the length, I added a whole new chapter—it’s the one where Akram meets the pirate woman—and this chapter thematically encapsulates or synopsizes the entire story.

Torgeson also wanted a new name for the main character. I had named him Dever. He didn’t like that because he pronounced it "Deever," and that sounds dumb. He said he’d had lunch with Lin Carter and had asked Lin Carter to come up with a name for my character, and Lin Carter suggested Drax. I said, "It sounds like a scouring cleanser, can I please name my own character?" I almost went with Garth, which I still like, but wound up creating the name Akram. It turns out that Akram is a legitimate name in the Arabic culture, so I must have come across it somewhere and had it in the back of my mind. I thought I’d twisted around "Arkham" to get some kind of resonant name. Doesn’t matter.

Anyhow, there are many more of these Attluma stories. I’ve been scanning them in and am reviewing them and reworking them. Some of them are pretty bad, but that’s how you learn. And some are very good indeed.

Black Vulmea is one of the more obscure Howard heroes. Were you asked to write about him, or was there a story there clamoring to be told? Did you ever plan more adventures for Black Vulmea?

Kirby McCauley, my agent at the time, came to me with the idea. He’d had the manuscripts of Oron and Shadow and couldn’t place them, but somebody at Zebra had read them and was impressed with the idea that I could write material in the Howard vein. Up to that time, I’d appeared only in the fanzines. Zebra first approached me about writing a Bran Mak Morn novel; we know now that that was because Karl Wagner owed Zebra a Bran manuscript. When it looked like I might be writing the next Bran book, Karl sent me a letter and a bunch of helpful material. But then Zebra changed the offer to a pirate story about Terence Vulmea. I’d never heard of him before; Kirby sent me the Don Grant book, I read it, and I was excited because I’d always wanted to write a pirate novel. I wanted to write Captain Blood or The Black Swan. So I did. I wrote the novel the way I thought Robert Howard would have: I let myself have a rip-roaring good time. I like that period, too, that general period. Charles II and the Restoration, the Monmouth Rebellion, Lorna Doone, the West Indies. So I fudged on the dates compared with when Howard set his stories, and I wrote the pirate story I’d have liked to see at the movies (The Witch Of The Indies). And then the next year, Zebra came back and did want the Bran Mak Morn novel. I’d written the first chapter already and had the outline; that’s the first book Dick Tierney and I coauthored (For The Witch Of The Mists).

There’s a second Vulmea novel in typescript, but it’s not very good. I started it hoping that Zebra would want a sequel, but the first one sold only modestly. My enthusiasm dwindled the more I worked on that second script.

Well-read Howard fans claim both of your REH "witch" titles are among the best Howard pastiches written. How did you approach working with these characters?

You must be referring to a new generation of Howard fans. The readers I recall nearly all regarded me as an interloper and wanted nothing to do with any writers who elaborated on Howard characters, aside from Karl Wagner and perhaps Dick Tierney. I’m not even sure that they gave Andy Offutt a pass.

I think I have a knack for writing these sorts of characters in these situations. It’s as simple as that. I couldn’t do it if these stories were set in other locales, or if these were stories based on technology. I like the sense of wonder and danger and the primitivism, so it’s a good fit.

When I wrote the Howard pastiches, the whole genre was new, or seemed to be, and we were all a lot younger and more enthusiastic, and that has a lot to do with it, too. But it’s also a matter of respect. I have an enormous amount of respect for what Howard wrote, for his intelligence and his drive. I learned from him. I learned from Jack London and from Tolstoy and Homer and Frank Norris and from many other writers I admire, and so I was able to show my respect and appreciation for Howard by trying to write something he might like. There is a measure of sincerity involved.

In all, you and Richard Tierney wrote six Red Sonja books. I've read that there was some unwelcome help on at least one of the first three. Can you tell us a little about the writing of the series? How did you become involved, and which volumes were your favorites?

This was a very strange situation. Kirby McCauley, who was Dick Tierney’s and my agent at the time, put together a deal with Ace Books for, at first four, later six Red Sonja novels based on the Marvel comic book that Roy Thomas wrote. This was in early 1978, as I recall. So Dick and I signed the contracts and got to work. I wrote the first drafts, he wrote the final drafts. Roy Thomas, who after all had created the character, reviewed the first couple of manuscripts to ensure that we weren’t crossing any lines contractually.

So through the rest of 1978 to 1981, Dick and I wrote a couple of Sonjas a year, more or less. We’d turn in the manuscripts, but there was no sign of Ace’s publishing them. Three, almost four years go by, and we had no idea what the hold-up was. In late 1981, around September or October, Susan Allison, who was the editor in charge of these books at Ace, contacted me because she considered the manuscript for the second Red Sonja novel to be so bad that it was unpublishable. Ace had already prepared the first book for publication under another editor, and now she was stepping in. She wanted a complete rewrite and she wanted it to be turned around quickly. She didn’t think too highly of the manuscript for the third book, either. I was very annoyed by this. The scripts had been sitting around for years, and they’d been read or vetted by Dick and me, Roy Thomas, and Kirby McCauley. Suddenly they’re no good. Ultimately what happened was that Susan Allison reworked all of the manuscripts because I’d signed contracts to write some more novels for Zebra and for Pinnacle, and those were my priority. So what you have with the last five books is text that has been line-edited by her or by someone else.

It doesn’t matter. Whether the books were helped by this is moot. They were popular at the time and went through several printings, although they are mainly forgotten now. I received some very nice letters in the early ’80s from young women who read the books and appreciated having a strong woman character they could admire. Someday my daughter will read them; I’ll ask her what she thinks. And Susan Allison has apparently had a great career at Ace. So we got off on the wrong foot, or she really disliked what Dick and I wrote, or whatever it was. At least she didn’t change the titles of our books to The Valley of Sonja or Mosutha’s Night.

The most annoying thing in regard to the Sonja novels is the modern curse word that got into the first one. On page 217, in the midst of all this fantasy land-ese kind of talk, Red Sonja says, "Get fucked." I hadn’t put it in there, and neither had Dick. It’s jarring, it’s all wrong, it’s anachronistic, the character wouldn’t talk that way. What I learned from Susan Allison is that the copyeditor who had worked on the manuscript had apparently inserted this language before the script went to press. I checked my rough draft of the manuscript, the carbon copy of what I’d sent Dick, and my line was along the order of "Sonja swore in three languages and six coastal dialects." I like my line better.

What are your Fall Of The First World books about, and how many were there?

It’s a trilogy, really one long book in three parts. The three books are The Master of Evil, Sorrowing Vengeance, and The Passing of the Gods. The manuscript of the first book is titled The West Is Dying, but my editor at Pinnacle changed it. So instead of three titles that express abstract concepts, we have one pulpy title stuck in there.

My agent at the time wanted a trilogy, specifically because the Thomas Covenant books had come out in the late ’70s and sold well, and so every publisher wanted to jump on the bandwagon with a fantasy trilogy. What I wound up writing was something very different. The model was late 19th-century fiction. War and Peace, in fact. So The Fall of the First World is an epic, a historical epic more than anything else, that follows a number of characters during the last couple of years before this ancient world is destroyed, like Atlantis. The premise is that a number of characters or themes that persist in Western legend and mythology had their roots in this ancient world. So I have a woman who serves as a kind of Helen of Troy and inadvertently causes a clash of two empires. The two empires are eastern and western, and the genesis of that was that, at some point, I’d wanted to write a historical novel about Richard the Lion-Heart and Saladin. I’m a liberal, and so I introduced my lefty political philosophy into the discussion, too. There’s a lot of that in the book, probably too much, but the overriding concern is about power, how we use power, not just strength but how power can turn into despotism or how we can use strength of character and insight to our best advantage. One of the characters in the book is a Christ figure, a prophet who has an experience of enlightenment. He’s the light, the best in us, and he ultimately confronts the character who is our shadow side, Thameron, a conventional, orthodox religious person who tries to take a short cut to salvation, meaning well, but leading to his damnation.

Pinnacle released the three volumes throughout 1983, and the first one sold very well. The second and third seem to have gotten poor distribution. Anyhow, Pinnacle went bankrupt within a year, so nothing much came of this series, and it’s been completely forgotten. I’d still like to go back and polish the book one more time, although it has some of my best writing in it. But the prophet character is too obviously a Christ figure; I borrowed heavily from the language of the gospels when I was writing it, but he needs to be truly universal. You know, if you’re going to conduct yourself in the world, you need to answer just one question: Are other people things, or are they other people? The earthy figure, the young woman, is too much a Playboy playmate, although she’s one of the better characters in the book. She grows probably the most. I need to cut back on some of the political dialogue. I could probably make the point with some shorter paragraphs.

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

Write as much as you can as often as you can; write regularly, but don’t write too much too fast. I did that. I wrote way too much copy in a very short time. Circulate your work. Show it to other writers or to critics whom you trust to give you sympathetic, honest criticism. Tell them to be brutally honest. It’s about the work. Develop your instincts. If your gut tells you that someone’s an asshole, then ignore that person. If your gut tells you that a critic has hit on something you couldn’t quite put your finger on, go with the critic. After a while you’ll develop a sixth sense.

Don’t wait around for agents or editors to give you approval. I made that mistake. You don’t want to give them that authority over you and, besides, most of them are no better or worse than you are in judging material. If you covet commercial success, then you’re going to need the advice and guidance of such people. But be careful. Some of them know what they’re doing, but many are simply blowing smoke.

Go to conventions. Meet people. Make contacts. People like to do business with people they know. I never did that, and I regret it.

Review your English grammar. Refresh your skills, or take a class, or do what I did: teach English for a few years. That experience gave me a renewed appreciation for our language and increased my desire to write as well as I can.

Don’t trust critics. This is important. Criticism always tells you more about the critic than it does about the book they’re reviewing. And if you’re going to believe and trust critics, then you have to believe and trust everything they say, and then you’re at their mercy. So never take candy from strangers.

Above all, however, write, and circulate your writing among people you trust for feedback. Join a writers’ group. Because gaining access to the commercial houses has become more difficult than ever, and because what the commercial houses publish is more mediocre than it ever has been before, young writers are not getting the benefit of having to work to meet some standard of acceptability, some level of basic quality. It can take years to achieve that, and it comes only from hard work. Writing is rewriting and cutting down to the bone. By not having a lot of places to submit to, young writers are not given the chance to improve gradually in the open market. The competition is formidable, and readers are less literate than they were a generation or two ago. That must be borne in mind, too.

Sword-and-sorcery virtually disappeared at just about the same time you and Charles Saunders and Richard Tierney and Lyon and Offutt all disappeared—and, of course, Karl Edward Wagner passed away. Sword-and-sorcery has been all but comatose for a long time. What do you think led to this? Why do you think the most promising writers of ’70s and ’80s sword-and-sorcery had either to walk away from the genre or walk away from writing altogether?

There’s a common denominator to all of the writers you mention. I’m not sure who Lyon is, and I can’t speak for Andy Offutt, but the rest of us have several things in common. First, we came out of the pulp tradition, and in many ways we represent the end of the line of pulp fiction as it had flourished from the 1920s through the 1970s. Second, most of us came out of the fanzines, the amateur publications of the 1970s, which is where the pulp tradition was kept alive. Third, those of us who came out of the fanzines achieved professional status but weren’t able actually to build careers because the machinery wasn’t in place for that. But the machinery was never meant to accommodate masculine adventure fantasy fiction, anyhow.

Fantasy fiction in the ’80s and ’90s became domesticated so that it could be regulated by publishers to serve as a corporate profit center. This was a marketing decision. Steering fantasy in this direction grew out of the popularity of the Tolkein pastiches. It also was an expression of the women’s movement. Publishers used the model of Tolkein fantasies, like The Sword of Shanarra, and promoted this sort of domesticated fantasy. It’s about packaging a product, creating a brand, and selling people the same thing consistently. You’re selling a ritual, you’re selling conditioning. The editors and publishers were very successful at this rebranding, your unicorns and elves and dragons and paperback covers with attractive young people walking with staves in the deep forest.

Sword-and-sorcery fiction was dropped in favor of this more lucrative demographic. The marketers of fantasy fiction redefined the genre to optimize mass-market sales, but it left a bunch of us out in the cold. We were the schmucks who were just gearing up to write some really interesting masculine fantasy, and we wound up hanging out there with nowhere to go. Can you imagine if Farnsworth Wright had decided in 1933 that suddenly he wasn’t going to publish any more of a certain kind of story? What if John Campbell had made a sharp turn in the 1940s and decided that he didn’t want to publish any more of some kinds of stories? What if Harlan Ellison had said, Well, I want stories for Dangerous Visions, but not those kinds of stories, or these kinds of stories?

Other kinds of masculine fiction, such as sci-fi war stories, still were published. But for individual reasons, those of us who wrote sword-and-sorcery fiction stopped producing it. Karl Wagner’s output diminished. DAW let it be known that they were no longer interested in publishing any more Imaro stories. I got tired of not having my career advance and dropped out. Dick Tierney returned to the small, private publishers. I’m not sure what happened to Andy. He and I corresponded for a while, and I know he sincerely championed Oron. I wonder whether he ever paid a price for that in the sci-fi and fantasy community!

But there was never a cohesive sense in the marketplace of sword-and-sorcery fiction. No one publisher took it upon himself or herself to champion certain writers or to promote this genre. In retrospect, it looks neat and tidy, but that was not the case at all. It was catch-as-catch-can. Sword-and-sorcery was more viable when we were all publishing in the fanzines. But the only authors who appeared in the digests, for example, were Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, Avram Davidson. I don’t think any of us broke into Fantastic. I’m not sure any of us even tried. We went to the paperbacks. And someone would buy a book here or some books there, but it was taking advantage of the interest in the Howard stories and it played off the comics and movies. We did have a viable genre of sword-and-sorcery movies there for a while, and they were terrible. A few of them are dumb fun, but as we know, most of them aren’t even stupid fun, they’re just bad. So the few authors who were writing serious, dark, energetic sword-and-sorcery moved on or stopped. There was still S&S Lite. You had some anthologies of stories. But it had all taken on this quasi-Tolkeinesque feel.

If you want to create a viable genre out of this, you have to get enough writers and editors and publishers and readers together to create a dynamic, to get it to the point where it is self-sustaining. I’m not sure that that can be done. It’s such a specific kind of story with a unique appeal, and I’m not sure that enough people are sufficiently entertained or interested or intellectually motivated to explore that possibility. You need enough people involved so that you have some creative tension going on, competition and cooperation at the same time, a movement.

So where have you been, and what have you been doing?

I dropped out and moved on to other things because I couldn’t make a living by writing books, and it became obvious that I was beating my head against the wall. It wasn’t clicking. I never got past the paperback-original stage despite talk of eventual hardcovers and possible movie deals.

To be successful writing mass-market popular fiction, you have to have a number of things all lined up and moving in the same direction. It helps to have talent, at least as a storyteller. Great skills with the language aren’t necessary, but the ability to write a page-turner of some sort is. Then you have to have an agent who is on your side, excited about your work and your potential. If your agent thinks he or she can make a lot of money with you, that’s what you want. But you also need an editor someplace who feels the same way, and surprisingly, in addition to that, a promotion or sales department at that publishing house to promote you. All of those elements have to be linked together. If it clicks, you’ll be turning out two books a year and doing a lot of publicity.

At any one time I had two or three of those elements in place, but never all four. So the brass ring would come around and I could never quite reach it. I didn’t have enough people holding me up to make it worthwhile for all of us.

It’s difficult for me to admit this, but I thought I had a knack for writing popular fiction, and it was very disappointing for me to come to the realization that I don’t. I wrote a lot in a hurry. Foolishly, I had put all of my eggs into one basket. I worked all sorts of day jobs to support myself and devoted myself single-mindedly to one goal, which was to sell books and support myself by writing as soon as I could. My life became very lopsided as a result, and I backed myself into a corner. It was a very unrealistic way to go about it.

Also—and this will sound pathetic—part of the appeal was the attraction of belonging, of being part of something. Any kid who’s grown up being treated like the odd duck or being picked on can empathize with that. It’s a common scenario. Friends I knew who were involved in science fiction fandom talked about how intelligent and creative these people are. I thought I could become part of something, get involved with other writers. You know, we’d all read stories about artists’ groups and writers’ groups. It seemed to be how these things developed, enthusiasts hanging out together with a common artistic purpose. When my first novel was published, Leigh Brackett sent me a letter. She said, "Welcome to the club." That’s exactly what it felt like. I’d joined a club and I was part of something. Ha!

The story has a happy ending, however. My instincts were right, after all, just misdirected. When the writing didn’t work out, I taught English for a while, wrote advertising copy, did some business writing, and wound up becoming a med-sci editor. It turns out that I have an aptitude for scholarly publishing. So this is good. I’ve been the managing editor of a clinical orthopaedic journal here in Chicago for several years now. I oversee publication of papers on distal radius fractures and heterotopic ossification, orthopaedic surgery. We’ve just brought out an important supplement on the treatment of extremity war injuries sustained by service personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan. The intention is to get increased funding in Washington for continuing research. We’re proud of it. And my wife and I just had a baby daughter in June, the first child for either of us. I get to be an older father. So I’m a lucky man. Things have worked out.

What do you think is the appeal of sword-and-sorcery?

It’s pagan. And no matter how sophisticated we think we are or how much inside our heads we are, we know that that is the truth of the world. A lot of sophists and intellectuals and otherwise very bright people operate on the premise that we’re basically rational and sane. We aren’t. We’re animals, we’re pack animals. We are somewhat domesticated and we are well-trained, but we are animals. I think that the best sword-and-sorcery fiction takes us on a walk along that thin line, hints at this truth, is frank about this truth, and lets us exercise our imagination in the face of this truth.

Just as important, though, and perhaps more important, is the existential awareness in sword-and-sorcery fiction. I call it looking into the abyss. It’s more than just facing our mortality; it’s a visceral reaction to ultimate meaninglessness. It’s not just that we’ll die one day; it’s the fact that we really don’t matter, and that we have no ultimate control over anything. There is always that shadow nearby. And that’s what the monster is, or the abyss, or the flying apes or whatever. The best sword-and-sorcery fiction recognizes this aspect in the genre and deals with it in some fashion. It’s no accident that this genre came out of the same alchemy that gave us H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction, and Clark Ashton Smith’s. I think that they were responding to the zeitgeist, the sense of purposelessness that existed after World War I. This uncertainty and ambivalence about life was pervasive in the 1920s. It was what Sartre would call existentialism. Lovecraft answered this dilemma, responded to this by expressing it as gothic science fiction horror, this awareness of our insignificance. Robert Howard’s characters threw themselves against it with all of their might and went down fighting. Clark Ashton Smith’s stories are the most sublime because they exhibit the wit and insight and irony of cultivated black humor. He was an extremely good writer, as well, the best of the bunch.

Also, if you’re going to write this stuff, it can’t hurt to have an emotional or behavioral disorder or to have a cranky streak or a bit of murder in your heart. Even if you just take it out on flies and bugs, the ability to be an s.o.b. once in a while is probably an advantage.

What do you say to the charges leveled against sword-and-sorcery? Particularly that it is sexist and that the genre is played out?

A lot of sword-and-sorcery is sexist. Or at least it was. Most of the books written in the sword-and-sorcery boom of the late ’60s and early ’70s were written by postwar guys. It had its root in men’s fiction of the postwar era. And after the success of The Sword and the Sorcerer and Conan the Barbarian, there was a tidal wave of so-called sword-and-sorcery movies written by really bad scriptwriters—bad even by Hollywood standards—that emphasized beefcake and cheesecake. But a lot of sword-and-sorcery fiction is pagan, earthy, natural, sexy in this way. It’s blue collar. It’s the Heartland. It has a blue collar appeal. This makes me wonder whether the charges of sexism actually have their roots in classism, in class bias. We actually have advanced slightly in the past 30 years or so, you know. We’ve just come through a generation of raising awareness about gender, and we’ve had a lot of debate about social issues, and we’re better off for it. So by this time, I think the criticism is about class or taste more than anything else.

The other thing is that these stories, like all genre stories, quickly can become reduced to a formula, to a ritual, the same thing told the same way over and over. It’s hard to find worth in expression that offers so little originality. Reading these stories and writing them—is that going to be ritualistic behavior each time? Or are we going to try to gain a sense of wonder or insight? Are we going to feel the keenness of life? Turn characters this way and that, turn the plot every which way, come out with something satisfying, something honest, not hollow? Can you tell that story and create a sense of vindication, or of vitality, or of insight, or accomplishment? Sword-and-sorcery can do that. Any kind of story can do that. Can we do it well, and frequently? That’s the question for sword-and-sorcery: Is there anything in it to be taken seriously?

If sword-and-sorcery remains only fanboy stuff, then it deserves to be marginalized. If it can adapt and be used imaginatively in ways other genre fiction has done, then it will become or remain a worthwhile genre. Detective and mystery fiction did this. Westerns did it. Science fiction did. Even horror. Is sword-and-sorcery a satisfactory genre in its own right or is it some sort of subgenre of fantasy? Well, hardboiled is a subgenre of mystery. Romance has its own subgenres. Labels, labels, labels.

Sword-and-sorcery has been treated as a subgenre of fantasy because when Howard was reprinted in the ’60s and ’70s, it was at the same time that Tolkein was reprinted. But sword-and-sorcery is men’s adventure fiction. Morgan Holmes and others have discussed this. It’s Westerns. It’s hard-boiled fiction. It’s noir. But Tolkein created this quasi-Middle Ages with Middle Earth, and Howard had a made-up map, too, so these two writers and their creations were conflated by publishers. And Howard had some stories with castles in them, and we were hit over the head endlessly by pictures of castles and gnomes and sunsets painted by the Brothers Hildebrandt, and it was all basically Victorian kitsch.

If you go back and look at what Howard started with—because sword-and-sorcery fiction starts with him—you find that it wasn’t centrally about making up funny names and building worlds. It was about experience on an elemental level, and he explored that through these quasi-historical stories of his. Patrice Louinet and Rusty Burke have pointed out that Howard was really writing historical adventures with the Conan stories. He preferred to write history, but the research can be daunting and he needed to keep turning out copy, so he answered the drive that way. And he created something original. This material was fresh and immediate in its time, and the other writers of his generation who came after Howard, some of them, continued to develop the genre. Now, there was a lot of hokey, shallow imitation, too, because once you develop something novel, people are going to pick up on the literal elements of it and package it and market it to the nondiscriminating. But we also were graced with stories by Fritz Leiber, for example. And when the second wave of sword-and-sorcery occurred in the 1970s and early 1980s, we had a new generation of writers who took the concept and ran with it. Karl Wagner did acid gothic fantasy or whatever he called it. Charles Saunders created Imaro. Jessica Salmonson did woman samurai stories. Dick Tierney and I probably veered closest to being back in the 1930s and writing material that was “Hyborian” or whatever you want to call it. And there are writers nobody mentions anymore or who almost got into the game before everything changed. Ted Rypel wrote a big series about Gonji, a samurai warrior who finds adventure in medieval Europe. Those books sold like crazy. How come no one talks about Gonji anymore? David Madison had some good stories in Space & Time at the same time that Charles Saunders and I were being published there. Joe Bonadonna placed a few stories but just missed selling a big epic he was writing. The timing was off.

Anyhow, even if we can develop sword-and-sorcery into a new direction and write it well, it will never be regarded as wholly legitimate by intellectuals and academics because those people tend to be snobbish, and the element of physicality annoys them. You know, it really is about sitting around the campfire and looking up at the stars and wondering what is over the horizon. It might be a castle, it might be a monster, it might be any kind of adventure. As far back as we can go in human history, the evidence is overwhelming that human beings always were on the move. That’s a big part of this genre. That and the dark, whatever’s out there just beyond the light of the campfire. I think that this is where the existential element comes in. This is where Lovecraft and Howard are joined at the hip. It’s amusing that some of the Lovecraft fans have to hold their noses when they discuss Howard. That sure isn’t the way Lovecraft himself thought about Howard. But it goes back to intellectuals and academics being inside their heads too much. You know, their guy never sweats. Lovecraft never sweats, but Howard is out there in the Texas sun every day, isn’t he? Lovecraft is a scholar; he’s inside at his desk. Robert Howard is out there shooting rattlesnakes or riding his horse or something, being vital. And the rest of us who write this fiction are out there with him, too. But there is a long tradition to this disdain. It’s the city mouse and the country mouse. Anything physical or having to do with the outdoors is boys’ adventure fiction, or in some other way it doesn’t qualify for serious thought. You know, for ten thousand years, we sat around the campfire telling stories about killing animals and boasting about physical contests and fighting the elements, and I honestly think that we would like to put that behind us. We have gotten comfortable and material, and it is brain power that has gotten us here. The brainworkers have created the modern world, not the physical laborers. I think this bias runs deep in the modern Western psyche.

Something else to keep in mind is that sword-and-sorcery does not grow specifically from the American experience the way Westerns and hardboiled detective fiction do. Sword-and-sorcery is about swords instead of guns. That limits its appeal right there. There are plenty of fans of edged weapons, to be sure, but when you think about America, you think about firearms.

Anyhow, to write good sword-and-sorcery, you need to write good stories, and that’s not easy. Give us characters and dialogue of interest. Show us how the characters grow and change. Show us who they are. Have them look into a deep hole—and have the hole look back at them. That’s what sword-and-sorcery needs. Come up with plots that grow out of people, not props. Throw in some interesting reverses and twists created by characters. Get past this Manichaeanism, this good-versus-evil bullshit. It’s not how the world works. Tell stories about grown-ups, people in desperate situations. That’s sword-and-sorcery.

Are you working on any projects now? If so, what can you tell us about them?

I have to give my friend Joe Bonadonna here in Chicago the credit for getting me back into writing. After I quit in 1984, I went on to teach, as I said, and I did other things, and I truly felt as though a weight had been lifted from me. I felt great. I didn’t have to feed the monster anymore. I didn’t have to go to the typewriter every night and try to prove something. It was wonderful. I would be normal and just live a life.

But there was one story that I’d never resolved successfully, and it kept gnawing at me.

This was Magicians, which was published eventually as The Fair Rules of Evil. And once that happened, I got sucked back into it again. I started getting excited again about writing, but it was the same old bullshit. You know, this agent I had was one of these very clever people. An editor at Doubleday wanted to see the script for Magicians. Would he show it to Doubleday? Oh, hell, no. He knows what he’s doing. He’s brought writers along. Let him handle it. So he sells it to Avon Books, and my editor at Avon is a wonderful guy, but Avon doesn’t promote the book. They buy the sequel and they never promote it. You can’t find these books in bookstores. I think a few other writers ran into the same problem with Avon at the same time. Chet Williamson, for one. Once again, it’s very obvious that my career is jinxed and I’m really cut out for some other line of work. This is not what I should be doing. I never learn, do I?

So when my wife and I moved to Chicago ten years ago, Joe was involved in a writing group, and he asked me to look at some dialogue he was working on, give him some feedback, just take a look at it, and before you know it, I’m there again, feeding the monster.

So, yes, I have been working on some projects. There’s a screenplay that a few producers looked at. It led to invitations to look at the next script I write. A couple of plays. One I coauthored with Keith Huff, and we had a nice reading at Chicago Dramatists last year.

Seasons of the Moon. This is another of those ideas that wouldn’t let go of me, so I worked on it very slowly, it took me nearly two years, but it’s the best thing I’ve done. It’s the story of a small rural village in Ohio that practices the Old Religion.

Women are holy, mothers are sacred, everything in the community is about natural religion, worshipping the seasons—it’s the way we should be living, quite frankly, not this farce we have now. We see this community through the eyes of the narrator, who’s recalling an event from one summer when he was a boy, what the community did with one of their own who was a murderer, a killer who attacked women. It’s literary, the writing is strong, the characters are strong. It’s good work. I decided to publish it myself as an e-book. Doing that let me take charge of the whole process. I showed the manuscript to more than a dozen people; they were my critics, they gave me feedback. They were my editors. I work in publishing, so another friend of mine, Dave Stanley, a graphic designer, did the cover. Another coworker, our proofreader, proofread the book. It was a great experience all around. It’s a quiet little book that is finding its audience. (Seasons of the Moon is available from Amazon.com.)

And now I’m working on Sometime Lofty Towers. Another idea from way back. I started it after my father died in 1997; it felt like a good way to work through that. I completed about 16,000 words and stopped. Now I’m back at it. I suppose it’s sword-and-sorcery, although, once again, it’s literary. By that I mean that I really want to use the language as well as I can, the way people used to use language, with care, with insight, the sounds, how the lines flow, all of it. Treat the language as though the words themselves were a character in the story. Treat Time as though it were a character in the story. But the story is a grim one, about mercenaries hired to do the dirty work of a corporation, clear out land so that entrepreneurs can expand their territory. Border wars, indigenous peoples put to the sword. So I’m slowly working on that one.

Dave Smith’s website, which he doesn’t update very frequently, is www.davidcsmith.net.

To read more interviews with writers and publishers
working in sword-and-sorcery and its related genres, go to the
Sword and Sorcery Interview Page .

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