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Rogue Blades Presents: Charles, My Friend

Rogue Blades Presents: Charles, My Friend

The following is a memorial article from author David C. Smith for late author Charles R. Saunders.

Charles Saunders and I first began corresponding in 1977, when we were both writing for the semiprozines of the time. He wrote to me first, beating me to the punch, because I admired his work and had considered dropping him a line. As it turned out, I was privileged to know him for more than 40 years. I’ve lost count of the number of letters and emails we shared; unfortunately, all the early letters I received from him are now gone. I stored them in file folders in banker’s boxes that were destroyed when our basement flooded with 30 inches of water in 2001. I joked with him once about that: What will all the historians and fanboys do when they find out that I lost all your letters? There will be no history to write! He told me that he hadn’t held onto my letters, either, so we were even. We did not take it all that seriously. Now, of course, I regret the loss of those letters of his, as well as of his newspaper editorials, copies of which he sent me regularly.

Ironically, we never met in person, although we spoke on the phone just once. I called to bug him for the name and address of his producer at New Horizons, the Roger Corman outfit that had produced Amazons, based on Charles’s story Agbewe’s Sword. This was in 1986. I wanted to get my script Magicians at least read by someone in the business, and Charles was kind enough to help me make the contact, although of course nothing came of my effort. 

I don’t recall much of what we discussed in those early letters; mainly it was back and forth musings about our stories, our hopes of seeing them published, and our shared interest in history, as well as our political and social interests, which were aligned. As time went on, we both had middling success with our fiction, seeing some of what we wrote appear as paperback originals. The botched debut of the original edition of Imaro in 1981 by DAW Books hit him hard, although for any of us who know his work, it felt absolutely correct to have Imaro in print from a corporate New York publisher. Imaro was followed by The Quest for Cush in 1984 and then The Trail of Bohu in 1985. And there ended the saga of Imaro, it seemed, at least for a time.

By then, Charles had moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, from Ottawa, where he had gone in 1969 rather than be drafted to fight in Vietnam. He had been radicalized in the late sixties in Chicago, where he had associated with the Black Panthers — which, despite the image of them propagated by the FBI, were concerned primarily with doing good for, and fighting for justice in, African American communities. He had grown to maturity during days of rage in our country; although he was six years older than I, inevitably, our politics were of a kind: we believed in and supported progressive causes on both sides of the border, especially social justice issues. (In the 90s, a mutual correspondent of ours referred to “feminazis” in a letter to Charles. Imagine his reaction to that.) And he was, I believe, twice married and divorced, something else we had in common. 

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Charles Saunders, Father of Sword & Soul, July 1946 – May 2020

Charles Saunders, Father of Sword & Soul, July 1946 – May 2020

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“I started reading more about the history and culture of Africa. And I began to realise that in the SF and fantasy genre, blacks were, with only few exceptions, either left out or depicted in racist and stereotypic ways. I had a choice: I could either stop reading SF and fantasy, or try to do something about my dissatisfaction with it by writing my own stories and trying to get them published. I chose the latter course.”
–Charles R. Saunders

Sword & Sorcery is one of Fantasy’s (or perhaps, to call it by its other term, Weird Fiction) oldest sub-genres, reaching back to the first decades of the 20th Century, as a “weird” outgrowth of the fantasy historical adventure fiction that had flourished in the 1880s – 1920s.

A great deal has been written about the the antecedents of Sword & Sorcery (especially by the tireless Deuce Richardson) and the first generation of writers (giants like Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, CL Moore, and Henry Kuttner), and those who carried the flickering torch forward during the dark days of the mid-century — writers like Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Poul Anderson and the loved-hated Lin Carter — and brought that legacy to the second great wave of S&S that flourished in the 60s and 70s, where we met the likes of John Jakes, David C. Smith, Richard Tierney, and Keith Taylor.

Today I want to talk about a man from that second flourishing of the Third Generation who, in my opinion, stands apart, because he was also the father of an entire genre only now beginning to see its potential — Sword and Soul.

Charles  R. Saunders was born at the start of the Baby Boom in Elizabeth, PA, a small town near Pittsburgh, moved to the Philadelphia suburbs, and was educated at Lincoln University, a historically  black institution in Pennsylvania from which he graduated in 1968 with a degree in Psychology.  The next year he moved to Canada, where his life as a writer began, primarily, as fate would have it, as a journalist — both as an editor, but also as an editorialist and columnist.

With a somewhat restless intellect, he didn’t just fall into journalism and stick — his life was a wandering, as writers often do, from lowly cut-and-paste editor, to scholarly writer, to teacher, and then at last to columnist. He slowly worked his way east through Canada, settling at last in Nova Scotia in 1985.

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Dossouye: The Dancers of Mulukau

Dossouye: The Dancers of Mulukau

Dossouye The Dancers of Mulukau-smallDossouye: The Dancers of Mulukau
Charles R. Saunders
Sword & Soul Media (326 pp, $20.00, Paperback, 2011)
Reviewed by Bill Ward

Dossouye: The Dancers of Mulukau will feel a bit like new territory for fans of Charles R. Saunders. Unchanged, of course, is the terrific action and imagination of Saunders, and the fidelity to character and setting — indeed everything there is to love about Saunders’ Imaro and Dossouye stories is evident in this latest offering. But The Dancers of Mulukau is Saunders’ first full-length sword & sorcery offering of recent years that is not based wholly or in part on existing material, and represents the Saunders of today, not of decades ago. After the various ups and downs of Saunders’ publishing career, it feels good to at last come to a place in which this author’s classic works are now safely preserved and easily available. Now he is able to move forward into as yet uncharted territory to tell new stories and develop new themes, reminding us once again why he must be counted among the giants of the field of heroic fantasy adventure fiction.

Dossouye herself is in new territory at the start of The Dancers of Mulukau. The story of how Dossouye, formidable warrior woman of the Abomey, came to leave her people and wander the land is told in the first book, a picaresque fix-up novel based on classic novellas penned by Saunders in the 70s and 80s, with additional unpublished material and a new story added for the book’s release in 2008. I won’t trouble to repeat much of what I said about Dossouye in my original review of that book, but readers can be assured that all of the hallmarks of those foundational stories have returned and are enlarged upon in The Dancers of Mulukau.

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Charles R. Saunders’ ‘Luendi’

Charles R. Saunders’ ‘Luendi’

0_61_100906_diamondCharles Saunders has posted a terrific short story over at the blog section of his website — the sort of story that would not have been out of place in a classic issue of Weird Tales. ‘Luendi’ is in four, rather short, parts, and gives us the fate of one Piet van Brug, a man that embodies all the vilest characteristics of imperialism. Colonial Africa in 1890 is the setting, or more precisely an unexplored section of the interior beyond the British and Boer possessions of South Africa dubbed ‘Azungaland’ by its conqueror. It is an area rich in diamonds — rich enough to bring the yoke down around the heads of the peaceful and previously unknown people that live there.

The Azunga rescued van Brug from disease and death in the wake of a disastrous expedition sponsored by Cecil Rhodes to explore the land “between the Zambezi River and the upper reaches of the Kalahari Desert.” Peaceful, living in a fabulous stone kraal akin to the ruins of Zimbabwe, the Azunga welcome van Brug with kindness and are repaid with treachery. When van Brug discovers they posses a rich seam of diamonds in a cave nearby, he returns to Johannesburg, raises an expeditionary army with the diamonds he managed to steal, and returns to enslave the people that had saved his life.

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