Half the Sky: A Meditation on Battleborn Magazine #1
This is a man’s, man’s, man’s world
— James Brown
One blustery Maine spring day, I blew off class to spend an hour hanging out with a friend in the math department’s student lounge. Picture a Coke welded to my hand and a coffee to hers, as we discussed fantasy and science fiction and divers other subjects in the “wrong” lounge (we were English majors, but it was the English/Math Building and the math lounge was empty. What can I say?). Picture my friend as the reason I figured out I’m a feminist a lot sooner than I would have otherwise. Picture the talk turning to men, a gender to which only one of us is attracted.
“I’m fine with men,” she said. Then she said something I hadn’t heard before, but have heard other women echo many times since: “I just want them to remember women hold up half the sky.”
It was 1983, and, despite the recent-ish election of Reagan, we had cautious reason to hope things were getting better in the United States for (as we would have worded it then) women and lesbians and gays and bisexuals and racial and ethnic minorities, and maybe even for the deviant subculture of SF and fantasy aficionados.
Didn’t we?
Spring ahead 40+ years.
Pourin’ salt in my sugar won’t make yours any sweeter
— Kacey Musgraves
It’s the spring of 2026 and the one-time deviant subculture of speculative fiction has taken over American culture, though gains made by other disenfranchised communities are being actively pushed back. Sword & sorcery, which slipped into decades of doldrums during the ’80s, is making a comeback. I am starting the eARC of a brand-new sword & sorcery magazine, Battleborn.
First up is something written by the Commander, a fictional male mascot/host/master of ceremonies persona (like the Skull for S&S magazine Tales From the Magician’s Skull or Uncle Creepy for Creepy Magazine). The Commander, per the accompanying black & white illustration, looks more-or-less like a modern U.S. Army sergeant, though S&S is distinguished by settings in pre-industrial (or equivalent post-industrial) lands and worlds. The disjunction leaves me confused.
S&S tends toward warrior characters, but I can perceive no particular link between the modern military and S&S. If I had to name the kind of energy found in most S&S, I would say rebellious. Lone-wolfish. Even anarchic. Which is the opposite of the regimentation implied here.
Soon the Commander is inveighing against “So-called ‘cozy’ fantasy, whose highest ambitions are sitcom escapades and working in coffee shops [and w]orst of them all, romantasy – by all means, enjoy your Harlequin romances with dragons, but publishers should have the honesty for what they’re peddling and slap Fabio ripping off some lady’s corset on the cover.”
This borders on non-sequitur. But, yes, these subgenres are not like S&S. So? Besmirching another artform doesn’t add luster to the artform you are seeking to burnish.
After a pause for Kacey Musgraves’s “Biscuits” MV, I return to the fray, and the Commander returns to S&S, and well and good, although the description of “the love of chest-thumping, first-pumping, blood-and-thunder sword-and-sorcery beat[ing] like a battledrum in your chest” is an eyebrow-raiser. Chest-beating would be a painful activity for a lot of women — this is distinctly male-coded language.
Then, after the “unlucky” are threatened with a visit from the Commander, we move on to the editorial, “Welcome to the Ranks,” by Editor-in-Chief Sean CW Korsgaard. He discusses his family background and his own with pride in their military service. He talks about the men contributing to the issue, and the stories and articles they contributed. He concludes with:
“So to all of you sword-and-sorcery faithful, be you longtime fans or new, blooded veterans who’ve penned dozens of stories, or aspirants about to put one to pen for the first time, take these words to heart as I once did: Stand proud. Be brave. You follow in the footsteps of great men.”
From a later online comment by Mr. Korsgaard, I have learned he was quoting his late grandfather. I learned this because including this quote in my recent Reactor article caused him pain, and I regret that. But while reading the issue and starting this review, I did not know that, and I was simply left mystified and troubled by the monogender reference.
This happened because I had no reason to think Korsgaard, an editor and writer deeply knowledgeable of S&S, was unaware of C.L. (Catherine Lucille) Moore, who is not only the first published woman author of S&S and the creator of S&S’s first female protagonist, Jirel of Joiry (“The Black God’s Kiss,” Weird Tales, 1934) at the dawn of the S&S era — and not only the creator of the iconic planetary adventure hero Northwest Smith — but also a leading light of, and immense influence on, science fiction and fantasy in general.
It seemed unlikely that Korsgaard was unaware of Fantastic Magazine Editor Cele Lalli née Goldsmith, who in the 1960s commissioned Fritz Leiber to revive his indispensable S&S characters, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and thereby sparked the storied Second Wave of S&S; or of Tanith Lee, the writer proclaimed “Goddess-Empress of the Hot Read” by the Village Voice before she’d gotten halfway through the early, S&S period of her multiple-genre-transforming, decades-spanning career in SFFH; or of WorldCon 2026 Guest of Honor Barbara Hambly, whose decades-long career in prose and media fiction began with widely acclaimed S&S novels; or of the many other women creators and editors of S&S.
My perplexity continued with the first nonfiction article, Korsgaard’s “The Devils Dogs of Belleau Wood,” which does an excellent job of describing the actions of the US 2nd Infantry Division in the titular World War I battle. However skillfully and sympathetically penned, mere words cannot, I suspect, capture the horrors of serving on a Great War front, with its catastrophic conditions and its mind-bendingly high casualty and fatality rates (“6,000 dead soldiers per day” per “World War 1 casualties“), nor capture the heroism of those with guts enough to fight there. The men of the US 2nd Infantry Division are worthy of respect, to say the least; but a specific connection to fictional pre-industrial protagonists seemed tenuous.
Then I saw a Facebook remark by Korsgaard that he was “Getting [out] a column about the history of science fiction in the pulps and Men’s Adventure magazines.”
Then it dawned on me. The excision of the distaff half from S&S. The male-only contributors. The putdowns of the female-coded cozy fantasy and romantasy subgenres. The invocations and semiotics of the modern military.
With Battleborn — if I have it right — Korsgaard is presenting S&S as men’s adventure.
It is not.
Men’s adventure is a different category (“genre” would be the wrong term here).
To conflate S&S with this category ignores a fairly significant chunk of S&S work, S&S history, and the S&S audience.
To be sure, S&S is read and created more by males than by females or by enbies. I’d never cavil at anyone who said so. S&S does appeal more to men.
But that’s a very different thing than positing S&S as “men’s literature.”
I have many feels over this, O my comrades-in-arms.
But you know what my dominant emotion is?
A feeling of betrayal by a sword-brother.
Wait, what? Why?
— Men reading this essay
I understand that my reaction may seem like a non-sequitur, or completely out of proportion, or worse, to many who read these words. I was initially surprised, too. It took me a while to sort out, even though it was my own reaction.
So I’m going to explain my response, which of course involves not only BB #1, but also things which are outside the pages of BB #1 (because we all bring our entire selves to our reading), things which may not be part of your experience.
My reaction happened for three reasons.
It happened because we women have been here from very nearly the beginning (or, given Kull of Valusia debuted in 1929 and Jirel of Joiry debuted in 1934 — almost a century ago — I should probably say we’ve been here from the beginning).
And because the late writer and editor Howard Andrew Jones (July 19, 1968-January 16, 2025), the initiator and leader of the 21st Century S&S revival, discussed “setting aside the sexism and racism and the suspect politics [of older S&S] but embracing the virtues of great pulp storytelling” in his essay “The Origin of the New Edge” (New Edge Sword and Sorcery Magazine Issue 0 Fall 2022 Epub, Kindle Locations 1785-1786), and I have seen Korsgaard discuss his efforts (and they are considerable) to carry on Jones’s legacy.
And also because, in the midst of this expanding and more expansively intended Third Wave revival which owes so much to Jones, there has also been some quite conscious pushback in some quarters against women as S&S creators. This is pushback in which I have never seen Korsgaard engage, by the way; I want to be clear about that.
But I also want to be clear that women have historically been welcome in S&S as readers and creators since the Swordsmen and Sorcerers Guild was founded mid-century, if not since the early Weird Tales era. Women have made far more contributions to S&S than the few I mentioned earlier. And modern redefinitions of S&S which narrow the subgenre to a thing women don’t do, or a thing women do far less of than women understand, rewrite history and erase women.
Consider, for example, the unsupported claim that “Marion Zimmer Bradley’s ongoing Sword and Sorceress anthologies [were] only ostensibly sword-and-sorcery fiction” (Smith, David. Arcane Arts and Cold Steel: Writing Sword-and-Sorcery Fiction (p. 58). Pulp Hero Press. Kindle Edition). What does “only ostensibly sword-and-sorcery fiction” even mean? This writing handbook offers no explanation, no explication. It simply abets the recent trend of dismissing women several S&S editors and scores of women S&S writers and thousands of women S&S readers as not knowing what S&S is, and persisting in our ignorance for decades.
This is simply incorrect.
And so, though I do not see Korsgaard engaging in active pushback, the timing of when I read the essentially all-male BB #1 meant that it felt like a door once wide-open to women was receiving the final in a recent series of masculine pushes to move it the last few inches and shut it in the female face.
What might have made the difference for me between feeling like this and not feeling like this?
A statement along the lines of “To paraphrase my grandfather, you follow in the footsteps of the greats.”
If no meaning can be given to human suffering, if our wounds are not capable of becoming sacred wounds, the human project is surely doomed to a blaming war of all against all. The future, like the past, will be full of scapegoats and victims. This is no peripheral question.
— Richard Rohr
If you are a man and still find my state of mind difficult to fathom, imagine reading a brand-new fantasy magazine which portrays and publishes fantasy as exclusively the product and idiom of women. Which was a widespread stereotype in the 1990s, by the way: women wrote fantasy and men wrote science fiction — a stereotype supported to no little extent by the changing-weekly contents of the new arrival shelf in the science fiction section. And, in that decade, the only original short S&S in your neighborhood chain bookstore might well have been found solely in the pages of the Sword and Sorceress anthology series.
And if you are wondering, “What does she want?” This is what I want: Dialogue. To move respectfully forward, with the understanding that we’re never going to all be on the same page, but that there is space for us all as full participants in S&S, as creators as well as consumers, regardless of gender and other distinctions.
Mentioning my painful experience does no good if we stop here, with me upset and others unhappy or defensive. If we stick rigidly to opposite poles of a closed loop where blame and shame are passed back and forth, a loop in which S&S gains nothing and loses much. S&S is a subgenre, of course, but it also exists as a dynamic conversation.
Howard Andrew Jones probably said this better than I ever will, when he said:
Swords together.
An axe age, a sword age… a wind age, a wolf age
— Vǫluspá
Of course, there’s no reason to think the contributors to Battleborn #1 have any uniform opinion about women in S&S, one way or another, so this concern is put aside for my review of the rest of the contents.
Up first, and appearing (in revised form) for the first time in physical format, is “A Stone’s Throw: A Tale of Hanuvar,” the first published story by the late Howard Andrew Jones. From the beginning, Jones — the creator of multiple S&S series and the man who would become the Twenty-First Century’s most significant writer, editor, and critic of S&S — was writing about his most important character, General Hanuvar Cabera. Hanuvar was inspired by the legendary Punic general, Hannibal Barca, and he may be read as the Hannibal of an alternate timeline, one in which the Carthaginians avoid extermination by Rome, and their leader seeks heroically to reunite and establish them in a new land.
“A Stone’s Throw” opens in media res, with Hanuvar, a hunted man, already holding an assassin-wannabe at sword’s point. Whoever hired the assassin knows Hanuvar’s appearance, even down to his newly-purchased garments — which means the man who wants Hanuvar dead is a mage. But the hireling clearly has no idea he was sent up against a wily general, dangerous fighter, and reputed necromancer. Jones delineates his protagonist’s intelligence and courage as Hanuvar solves the mystery of his own near-murder. It is not the strongest Hanuvar adventure, but it is a fine introduction for anyone new to the hero of the Volani, or to the work of Howard Andrew Jones; and it gets the fiction of Battleborn #1 off to a bang-up start. It also reminds those who knew Jones or his work of what a tremendous loss we have suffered with his untimely death.
Up next (after a moving tribute to Jones by editor Korsgaard) is “Blood of the Oni: A Tale of Shintaro Oba” by C.L. Werner, which is something of an origin story for Werner’s samurai demon-slayer, and a great starting point for newcomers to the series. Assigned to track and slay a demon, novice Oba quickly finds himself confronting a bloody-minded mob led by four of the Shogun’s own samurai, in violation of the code of the bushido. Matters complicate speedily and grimly, pushing Oba to the limit, and demonstrating why he is one of the more popular S&S characters of the new millennium. He’s a fit comrade-in-arms for S&S samurai stalwarts Tomoe Gozen and Gonji Sabatake.
“Jaguar’s Children: A Tale of Azatlán” by Gregory D. Mele is set in another S&S world new to me, one intriguingly mingling elements of ancient Greece and pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, and one in which the sailor Sarrumos’s problems have only begun with shipwreck on a far-away shore. He’s fleeing hot pursuit through unfamiliar jungle with a wound in his ass and the most unusual loot I’ve ever seen — loot which is distinctly uncooperative. And, oh, yeah, the locals have good cause to be hostile and are not necessarily what they seem, while Sarrumos’s own side isn’t necessarily lining up to assist him. This is a quite exciting and imaginative tale, one with unusual depth regarding appropriation and imperialism, and this series is one I intend to explore in greater depth.
“Vengeance Vow: A Tale of Jain” by TJ Marquis opens with a distinct sense of the strange and exotic (something which has been rather muted in the rising Third Wave of S&S, in my experience). A lone outlander on a sworn mission of revenge must thread the gauntlet of a loud, drunken, decadent, and debauched festival of bloody-minded, tight-fisted gods to infiltrate a well-guarded palace complex and slay a cruel conqueror. With superior strength, razor-sharp reflexes, and quick wits, Jain wins entry to the quarters of Ahmulah III, where it seems the finale should be comparatively easy. Only Jain’s not the only one on a mission, and the king possesses numerous guards, divine advice, and potent magic. A rousing tale with convincing violence.
Next is a reprint of Robert E. Howard’s classic three-quatrain poem on the price of power, “The Road of Kings.” Implicitly told in Conan’s voice, it’s as commanding as any story to come through REH’s Underwood No. 5 typewriter. I first read it in the ’70s, and the first four lines have blazed in my memory ever since.
The article “Sword & Sorcery: Weird Pulp Beginnings: Part I” by Morgan Holmes cogently sketches the origin of S&S as a pulp-era melding of the horror and adventure genres in the work of Robert E. Howard, whom most regard as the creator of S&S. Holmes discusses REH’s characters and especially his greatest and most famous creation, Conan the Cimmerian. Worth a read even for the most informed S&S fan.
Erik Waag’s “To Boast of Victory: A Tale of Skarde” opens with an amusing situation, in which a trio of intoxicated warriors (a Northern barbarian and a pair of land knights) boast, one-up, throw shade, and egg each other on to a frankly stupid (but believable for drunks) deed. This (with a little help from some friends) is to break into the castle under siege by the medieval-esque army of which they are a part. Which side will succeed is not greatly in doubt, but it’s a fun trip to the outcome.
“Temple of the River King: A Tale of Izrak the Deathless” by Lee Patton amps up (in very different manner) the Weirdness of “Vengeance Vow,” as a khan seeking restoration of his daughter summons the warrior and revenant (and possible skeleton) Izrak Laav. Matters grow only darker, moodier, more dangerous, and more unnerving as Izrak passes into and beneath the River King’s decaying fane. It’s an atmospheric work of considerable imagination, which shows influences not only from Robert E. Howard’s and Karl Edward Wagner’s S&S and horror fiction, but from the Weird tales of Clark Ashton Smith and Darrell Schweitzer — a tale which stands on its own, fit to rank with their eeriest.
“The Last Spell: A Tale of Urbarra: Part 1 of 3” by Schuyler Hernstrom is an excerpt from the Third Wave S&S star’s debut novel. Suggesting influences of Dune and the Dying Earth while embodying a unique wit and imagination, Hernstrom’s milieu is a far future which has, at least partly by design, returned to pre-industrial technology and (re)gained a magic potent enough to allow seemingly inescapable enslavement and ready multiplanar travel, at least on the part of the most powerful wizards. Said wizards are banding together in the service of creating an extraterrene library which all might access, and which must (they decide) be protected by a powerful slave. This is not necessarily good news for the one chosen — Urbarra, a northern barbarian from Thurgia — even though he’s being rescued from execution. Urbarra fiercely resists Turza, his new master, but gets nowhere (Hernstrom apparently having made an observation that’s also crossed my mind, to wit, that mighty wizards might easily outclass even the most powerful, intelligent, and ferocious barbarian). However, by the end of this self-contained excerpt, it appears barbarian and wizard might be attaining a respect for one another’s talents and a sort of rapprochement, a plot twist I have not previously seen in five decades of reading S&S. This excerpt is a very promising start to the novel.
“The Fury’s Blade: The First Tale of Gabriela de Quetar” by Robert Rhodes is probably my favorite in BB #1. The issue’s first (and only) female protagonists, the titular swordswoman and her mentor and comrade-in-arms, Bianca, are Furies: well-named female warrior-servants of the Supreme Church, entrusted with difficult and delicate missions. At this point you’re probably thinking of Inquisitors and the Catholic Church, and they’re probably the inspiration; but they are not the substance. The God of this Church is a phoenix, for example, and there is no indication the Furies deal in torture or doctrinal enforcement. Instead, they’re seeking the stolen Cloak of the Bronze Martyr, a Church treasure which grants near-invulnerability — a trait which makes recovery at least as difficult as tracking down the unknown thief. Oh, and when it comes to Fury missions, death comes before failure. Despite many obstacles, the redoubtable pair succeed in tracking down the Cloak, but victory may prove devastating.
The generous fiction of the issue concludes with a classic reprint, “The Pearls of the Vampire Queen: A Tale of Nifft the Lean” by Michael Shea. This novelette is probably the strongest fiction in a strong issue, and only in part because it’s among the longest tales. It takes the form of a letter from Shea’s classic character, as Nifft recounts his pearl-harvesting adventure with his buddy, Barnar. This description, if you haven’t read the novelette, may have you envisioning a couple of South Seas divers contending with giant, man-eating oysters, and maybe giant man-eating clams and/or man-eating sharks and/or lethally cranky kraken. Actually, these pearls come from huge, dangerous swamp polyps, which are furthermore keeping company with the lurks who love (to attack and eat) the polyps (and also love to attack and eat any passing humans). The setting — a giant swamp-lake with a great pyramid-city at its center — is suggestive of Tenochtitlán and Lake Texcoco, but I don’t get any particular Aztec or Indo-Mesoamerican vibe here.
As it’s a huge amount of work and risk just to get a handful of pearls — if not one or none — Nifft and Barnar conceive a plot to gain a thousand pearls at the expense of the local ruler, the ancient and sharp-witted vampire queen known as Vulvula (a distracting name, and not in a good way). Of course, the attempt to outfox Vulvula may make snatching pearls in ones and twos from lethal monsters look like a walk in the park. It’s a great adventure, and one which has convinced me to look further into Nifft’s adventures.
This particular Niffty adventure is followed by “The Queen Who Drinks the City: Power, Predation, and Michael Shea’s ‘The Pearls of the Vampire Queen'” by Jason Ray Carney. This work of criticism assesses the novelette’s portrayal of power with a breadth and depth which would be as much at home in an academic journal as it is here. I must admit, I never thought I’d see Marx, Foucault, and Bataille quoted in serious and non-derisive manner in a pulp magazine of apparently conservative bent. My stereotype, my mistake. This is really quite good, deepening my understanding of Shea’s novelette and making me hope Carney has penned more S&S criticism.
The final prose work is “Three to Read: Building a Better Sword & Sorcery Library” by Gregory D. Mele, contributor of the astute Azatlán tale discussed above. Astute as well is his column, which spans pulp from recent to early, and makes me eager to read all three books under discussion.
Following the review and letter columns, the issue concludes with a deftly illustrated one-page color comic, “Frug,” by another double-dipper, Schuyler Hernstrom. Since I didn’t “get” the three-panel cartoon, I initially thought it was supposed to be more than one page long. Since it’s a hat-tip, perhaps it would have helped if I were more familiar with the comix of the late Vaughn Bodē, an apparent influence.
In the second half of life, we do not have strong and final opinions about everything, every event, or most people, as much as we allow things and people to delight us, sadden us, and truly influence us.
— Richard Rohr
So we come to the summary, and to the recommendation of whether or not to read Battleborn #1. To return to modern military parlance, this is a bit of a minefield. The fiction is excellent and abundant. The nonfiction is also strong. I haven’t seen the story illustrations. But, even without knowledge of the illos, there is much here to please S&S fans, and many readers outside of pulp, as well. In a word, the issue has depth.
However, the first issue makes the magazine seem very deliberately designed for a fairly narrow audience, to whit, cishet males. Outside that demographic, I can’t make a blanket recommendation. I have, I hope and trust, given sufficient information for the reader to make their decision.
I backed the Battleborn Indiegogo campaign, so I will read the rest of the issues I’ll be receiving before I make any further decisions about where I spend future discretionary income. Perhaps BB #1 isn’t intended to launch a men’s adventure magazine. Maybe I misjudge this issue if I presume it predictive of future installments.
Cynthia Ward is the author of The Adventure of the Incognita Countess (Aqueduct Press, January 2017), Writing the Other: A Practical Approach (with Nisi Shawl), and more than 70 short stories and chapbooks. Her last article for Black Gate was a review of Hellebore & Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic.