Black Gate

When I first wrote about the New Edge back in an editorial for the Flashing Swords e-zine, there were a number of bloggers who LOUDLY misinterpreted what the crafters of the manifesto and I were after. One proclaimed that we must not be in touch with modern fiction; after all, writer A had just written a novel with some sword-and-sorcery in it a few years back, so, see, the genre was alive and well!

Anyone who’s been trying to get sword-and-sorcery published knows better. First, there’s really not much sword-and-sorcery in long form. Write me with examples if you want, but those examples are the exception, not the rule. And short fiction markets, well, those have been unwelcoming and hostile to sword-and-sorcery for a very, very long time. Ask anyone who’s been trying to get it published. I’m not talking about the bad stuff, either; I’m talking about talented authors. Take James Enge, whose Morlock stories were routinely bounced before John O’Neill pulled him out of Black Gate’s submission pile. Those of us who write sword-and-sorcery have been duking it out in the trenches, fighting for a place in the small press and dreaming that the larger magazines that claimed to accept sword-and-sorcery on their guidelines pages really would.

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. The parodies, the mocking irony, the humorous send-ups; they have all the charm and finesse of a man who chuckles as he sneaks up to kick a sleeping dog.

To be new, to be fresh, we must throw off the shackles of those who have tried to remold the genre to be respectable, and we must step past those who hoped to de-fang it to apologize for the genre’s faults and bad practitioners. That is not to advocate being humorless. Fritz Leiber and Clark Ashton Smith and Jack Vance and Roger Zelazny (and others) all employ both humor and irony in their works. And lest we forget, no matter the stereotype, Robert E. Howard’s Conan could crack a smile. These writers, though, wove the humor, the irony, through their work. The story was still paramount. They were trying to please the same sort of audience who gathered at the foot of ancient storytellers, not the young critic who lurked on the edges of the campfire, sneering at the conceits of the story, or the notion that anyone would really want to hear about heroes and brave deeds.

It might be that those critics were sneering for a reason, of course; it might be that they wanted to spread their wings and try new things and were angry that they had no forum that would take them. Once upon a time, they were the minority. They were the rebels yearning to break old forms. Once upon a time, when the short fiction magazines offered nothing but adventure fiction, I might have joined them, or at least experimented a little bit along with them. Maybe you would have tried it too.

Those rebels overthrew the evil empire, drove out its adherents, and assumed the throne. But the rebellious work that daringly flew in the face of all the sword-slinging, raygun-blasting adventure fiction has transformed into the kind of intractable behemoth it fought so hard to overcome. Now, all too often, it is only those flavors that we find in short fiction markets. It might be that this change in featured fiction has something to do with declining magazine readership, but there are so many other factors involved in declining readership that this point would be difficult to prove. No matter: you will never convince me that the shift in publishing preferences and decline in readership are unrelated.

For quite some time now, poets and artists and musicians and writers have been struggling against the crushing judgment that art that resembles things, poetry that scans and rhymes and tells stories, music that’s actually melodic, and stories about heroism are unrefined, staid, and unworthy of notice. Despite the weight of all prior human artistic achievement, despite basic common sense, we’ve sheepishly bowed our heads and gone along with it.

Maybe a lot of human behavior is petty and small. Maybe a lot of people and events leave us bemused and saddened and feeling powerless. But even if that’s true it doesn’t mean that we need to drown in tales of powerless people emoting their woes, or that it is good for us to subsist only upon that fiction (or that we are childish if we don’t find satisfaction reading it!). No; if those things are true then we have all the more reason to need stories of heroes — stories of men and women who stood up when the odds and the gods and even their dearest friends and family seemed against them and did the right thing anyway.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that there aren’t any real heroes and that everyone’s in it for themselves; we’ve been trained to be skeptical and ironic and detached and sarcastic and hip. Yet even as we sneer and laugh with our friends, we know it’s a lie. Heroes really are out there. They’ve lived and breathed and sacrificed right here on this very Earth, and some of them are still at it. Students of history know them. Sometimes we can even find them covered by our local news stations. Stories of heroes, not of dejected mopers, have inspired us since the dawn of humanity, and we should not be embarrassed if they continue to fire our imagination.

I do not say that turnabout is fair play; I do not advocate overthrowing the current mindset with an older one. But I do say that all short fiction has a place. Sword-and-sorcery and other tales of high adventure should no longer be cast out from the camp fire, or given only grudging room there, like a crazy uncle with fleas. We have not outgrown these stories, no matter what some would have you think. You know in your hearts we need them still.

Coming Soon: Part 3

Howard

Black Gate 12 is off to the printer, and when it returns, I think no further evidence need be presented that this is the truest home for sword-and-sorcery in a modern print magazine. With that in mind, I thought it high time to revisit The New Edge manifesto.

When I helmed Flashing Swords I sat down with William King and John C. Hocking, and, later, Tom Floyd and C. L. Werner, and together we hashed out an outline for what we thought ought to be the paradigms for new sword-and-sorcery fiction (or, if you want to cast the net a little wider, for heroic fiction). A tremendous amount of support flooded in, but so to did some vitriol. Some of those bad reactions came from purposeful misreads, and some from a knee-jerk reaction to our use of the term sword-and-sorcery. And some people out there just delight in being snarky.

I’ve been meaning to take another look at those paradigms for months and was inspired to expand the manifesto after I saw an essay from Martin Zornhau. This time I won’t be as shocked by the barbs.

Before I venture into the manifesto, though, I want to briefly revisit the tenets of sword-and-sorcery, and what makes it different from other fantasy, by looking at the environment, the protagonists, the obstacles, and story structure. These bullet points and the following paragraphs are how I define the genre, with a little help from John Hocking, William King, Robert Rhodes, and John “The Gneech” Robey.

• The Environment: Sword-and-sorcery fiction takes place in lands different from our own, where technology is relatively primitive, allowing the protagonists to overcome their martial obstacles face-to-face. Magic works, but seldom at the behest of the heroes. More often sorcery is just one more obstacle used against them and is usually wielded by villains or monsters. The landscape is exotic; either a different world, or far corners of our own.
• The Protagonists: The heroes live by their cunning or brawn, frequently both. They are usually strangers or outcasts, rebels imposing their own justice on the wilds or the strange and decadent civilizations which they encounter. They are usually commoners or barbarians; should they hail from the higher ranks of society then they are discredited, disinherited, or come from the lower ranks of nobility (the lowest of the high).
• Obstacles: Sword-and-sorcery’s protagonists must best fantastic dangers, monstrous horrors, and dark sorcery to earn riches, astonishing treasure, the love of dazzling members of the opposite sex, or the right to live another day.
• Structure: Sword-and-sorcery is usually crafted with traditional structure. Stream-of-consciousness, slice-of-life, or any sort of experimental narrative effects, when they appear, are methods used to advance the plot, rather than ends in themselves. A tale of sword-and-sorcery has a beginning, middle, and end; a problem and solution; a climax and resolution. Most important of all, sword-and-sorcery moves at a headlong pace and overflows with action and thrilling adventure.

The protagonists in sword-and-sorcery fiction are most often thieves, mercenaries, or barbarians struggling not for worlds or kingdoms, but for their own gain or mere survival. They are rebels against authority, skeptical of civilization and its rulers and adherents. While the strengths and skills of sword-and-sorcery heroes are romanticized, their exploits take place on a very different stage from one where lovely princesses, dashing nobles, and prophesied saviors are cast as the leads. Sword-and-sorcery heroes face more immediate problems than those of questing kings. They are cousins of the lone gunslingers of American westerns and the wandering samurai of Japanese folklore, traveling through the wilderness to right wrongs or simply to earn food, shelter, and coin. Unknown or hazardous lands are an essential ingredient of the genre, and if its protagonists should chance upon inhabited lands, they are often strangers to either the culture or civilization itself.

Sword-and-sorcery distances itself further from high or epic fantasy by adopting a gritty, realistic tone that creates an intense, often grim, sense of realism seemingly at odds with a fantasy setting. This vein of hardboiled realism casts the genre’s fantastic elements in an entirely new light, while rendering characters and conflict in a much more immediate fashion. Sword-and-sorcery at times veers into dark, fatalistic territory reminiscent of the grimmer examples of noir-crime fiction. This takes the fantasy genre, the most popular examples of which might be characterized as bucolic fairy tales with pre-ordained happy endings, and transposes a bleak, essentially urban style upon it with often startling effect.

Part 2 Coming Soon

Howard

I may be addressing a small number of folk here, but I wanted to call attention to a few folks who I think deserve some credit. So… if you happen to have attended the 2006 or 2007 World Fantasy Convention and are in the mood to vote for such categories as Life Achievement, I hope you’ll lend me your ears.

Here’s who I’ll be voting for, Life Achievement wise — Glenn Lord. Who’s that, and why should we care? Well, Glenn Lord’s the man who tracked down, on his own initiative, hundreds of Robert E. Howard stories and texts in the 1950s. He then safeguarded those texts for many decades and eventually became the agent for the Howard heirs — not because of any desire for self-aggrandizement, but because he cared deeply for the stories. Without what has been a lifetime of work on Lord’s part, numerous stories would now be lost, and outlines, alternate takes, correspondance, and other matters would not be available to scholars. Fantasy fans owe him a big thanks, and the least we can do is vote him this award.

You can’t just drop by and vote for one category, though. So allow me to make another suggestion — I’ll be voting for Leo Grin in Special Award, non-professional. Leo runs the Black Gate web site, but he’s up for nomination again this year (third year!) because of his sterling work on The Cimmerian, the journal of Robert E. Howard studies. If you want some small idea of the quality work he does, drop by The Cimmerian web site.

Here’s where to find a ballot (read the fine-print on the ballot — you can e-mail it once you know the categegories). Don’t delay, though. I believe votes can only be made through the end of June!

I’ve got a stack of interesting things to post — I hope to upload more things later this week.

best,
Howard

1. I finished proofing Black Gate 12 and will be dropping the pages with corrections in the mail around noon. You’d probably expect me to say this, but it’s my favorite issue yet. All but one of the entries is a fantasy adventure piece, which is about the perfect ratio. Those of you who want to see Black Gate as the home for exciting sword-and-sorcery and heroic fiction should rejoice. If you don’t want to see that, don’t hold it against me. There’s plenty of magazines NOT offering adventure stories. Really. Some are pretty good, too. Don’t complain to me; go read those and point your friends who DO like adventure our way.

2. John will make the corrections and ship it to the printer, and launch promptly into prep work for number 13. In the meantime, yours truly is going to take a whack at layout of number 14. It will speed everything up if both John and myself can be relied upon to lay out the magazine, and if I’m working on 14 it gives me more time to learn the program.

3. I’ve been reading more and more Morlock these days. James Enge has a new Morlock tale in this issue of Black Gate, and I had two more in my in box that I read last night, so I’ve had three more Morlock tales this week than almost anyone else. I feel like a guy who got let into the kitchens of some posh restaurant to sample the finest meals before they were introduced to the rest of the world.

4. I’ve been re-reading some texts for historical research on the Abbassid Caliphate. You know, Thousand and One Nights era Baghdad. What to do when one source says ALL men were wearing turbans, and another that says turbans were optional? What to do when one calls the outer layer of clothing a diraa and the other calls it a jubba? More cross referencing, of course. Sources on the period in English are scarce. Perhaps I should get back to learning French beyond counting exercises and tourist information.

5. I have a novel out making the rounds. I grew accustomed some years back to the fact that publishing moves at the speed of slow, so I don’t think too much about a manuscript out there until at least three months have gone by. I figure a year with an agent or publisher probably means it’s time for a query. If anyone else has opinions out there on that, I’d love to hear it. Unfortunately, I’m not even at the six months spot with either the agent or the publisher considering the book, so I shouldn’t have my curiosity up. But I do. No news is good news, right?

6. Work continues apace on my Dabir and Asim novel. The break away from mist novel 2 has gotten me liking the whole mist world again (I needed either a pat on the back or a breath of fresh air) but in absence of any movement with mist novel 1 I’m going to keep cranking on the Dabir and Asim novel, which I’m really enjoying. If someone comes knocking about mist world 1, I have an outline and over 30 k of text roughed out on mist 2, so I’m in what I think is respectable shape. I must admit, however, to giving some thought to “branding.” As I’ve said, I consistently sell Dabir and Asim, and the stories helped land me this Black Gate gig. If those stories are a wedge in to publishing, maybe I should keep hammering away with them, hence the novel. Maybe writing of other characters and settings, much as I like them, isn’t as smart as creating a “brand” and honing that and getting it out there until it’s established. I would say if rather than until, but I would tell myself and other writers to practice craft and believe in yourself. Not because I’m promoting arrogance, but because we need to believe in our work if it’s going to shine, and because the world, honestly, doesn’t really care that much and a writer has to learn that and live with it and find support from within. We also have to work hard on our craft, but that’s a whole separate post.

7. We have a huge number of reviews in the queue. I’m not sure about the monthly game column now, as I’d like these book reviews to come out sooner rather than later. Maybe I’ll take a vote. How many of you want a monthly game column? Maybe bi-monthly is the way to go.

Howard

The new WIP feels real this morning, as I have just crossed over the 10 k mark. Not bad for a month’s work, especially since this last month I usually got less than an hour to write on writing days, and usually only managed about four writing days a week. I’m hoping I can improve that over the next three months, as I’m not teaching. Or editing anything but Black Gate.

My goal will be to write between 500-1000 k a day, and to manage 5000 k a week. Will I make it? I don’ t know. I’d like to have a 68 k historical mystery/fantasy piece drafted by the end of August. 10 k down, 58 k to go.

Howard

First, I’m almost through with my once-over of Black Gate 12, which I’ll be sending back to John this weekend.

I’ve been looking forward to Indy IV for a while, but as reviews come in I’m less excited. Don’t get me wrong; I’ll probably go see it. Reviews have been fairly positive; the problem is that the descriptions make it sound like the things that bugged me in Last Crusade are to be found in Crystal Skull. My kids just turned old enough to watch the movies, so I borrowed the trilogy from my friend Brad. Crusade ended up being better than I remembered; Temple much worse. Raiders was nearly as good as I remembered it being when I was, what, 10, 12, and that’s saying something. Some of what I liked when I was 12 seems pretty execrable now.

For me, Raiders inspires a willing suspension of disbelief; Crusade only a grudging suspension of disbelief. Temple of Doom didn’t inspire much of anything at all except groans this time through. It was painful. I had remembered later parts of it being better, and while watching it with my kids I kept thinking, ah, well, after this groaner part is a good bit — but, really, not so much.

Temple and Crusade both seem to have lost their footing. Everything is more cartoonish. Take Marcus Brody. In Raiders, while Indy is packing to go after the Ark, Brody says something like “You know, five years ago I would have gone after it myself” and you believe him. He seems competent and seasoned and is played with gravitas. Come Crusade, he’s a goofy absent-minded professor and is scripted only for laughs. Contrast the ridiculous relationship between Indy and the Austrian beauty in Crusade — which is truly awful to watch — and the dialogue between him and Marion in almost any part of Raiders. It’s almost as though they got Raiders right by accident and never figured out how to do it again. The writing is several degrees sharper in Raiders. There’s no villain in the rest of the series who is scripted to be even half as interesting as Belloq, and even the “infodump” scene in Raiders, when Indy and Marcus are telling the American Agents about the Ark, is good. Rather than sounding like an infodump, it’s revealing of character AND builds interest and suspense. That’s just good writing. And acting. In the next two it’s almost as if they got the script to a certain point and said “ah, it’s good enough, let’s go.”

On the whole, I’d rather watch the first of the Brendan Frazer Mummy movies than either Crusade or Temple. It has a bad infodump scene early on, but after that it fires on all cylinders like Raiders, and unlike Temple and Crusade. To my mind, even a movie that is supposed to be “light” has to take itself seriously rather than going in with a wink and a nod at its own cleverness and the audience. I didn’t make it through the second Mummy movie, which seemed to have lost sight of what worked about the first one, but I saw a preview for the third that actually has my interest up. More fool me, probably, but I do love a pulpy romp done properly, and my hope springs eternal.

Now, though, the wife and I are heading out to see Iron Man this weekend. Almost every one of my friends has called or e-mailed to say that I MUST go see it. So we will.

Howard