On Sword and Sorcery and Cheese

Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser

A few years back (Covid) I decided to dive headfirst into Sword and Sorcery movies. Until that point, my exposure to the genre had been limited to the writing of Robert E. Howard (primarily Conan) and Fritz Leiber (Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser). Of the two I preferred Leiber's work, due to his portrayal of the comradery between his two protagonists.

When most folks discuss this genre of movies, they're talking 70s/80s action-fantasy. Not having watched many S&S movies as a child, I initially found it difficult to love them as an adult. The low-budget nature of most productions, the lack of convincing special effects and the generally poor scripts limited what could be achieved on-screen, but what I found most difficult to process was the cheese.

And when I say cheese I mean that these movies often don't take themselves seriously, which immediately breaks my suspension of disbelief. Conan movies buck the trend, but I found many other productions, like the Deathstalker series, Amazons, The Sword and the Sorcerer and various others both exploitative and unserious. I'm not saying S&S has to be serious, or that characters must be fully-clothed at all times, but I did end up feeling as though a lot of folks contributing to these movies were simply making up the numbers. Their hearts weren't really in it.

Deathstalker II was the best in this series

The reason I began poking around in this genre was due to my childhood memories of reading some of the greats, but even the original Conan movies, while commendable, didn't capture the depth of REH's writing, and as far as I know Leiber's Swords books have never been adapted for the big screen. I want to write S&S, but in the traditional style, honoring the genre's roots.

Nowadays S&S is published mostly by magazines such as Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Savage Realms Monthly, Swords and Sorcery Magazine and Crimson Quill. A few of the better-known magazines also dip their toes in S&S waters, but they're few-and-far-between.

There's no money in writing S&S and you really have to do it for the love of the genre because, even if you're published, readerships are small and memories of cheap, hyper-masculine and sexually exploitative movie productions from the 80s persist.

What I've discovered reading modern Sword and Sorcery fiction is that the tongue-in-cheek nature of those films has bled back into current writing trends, resulting in a kind of Dungeons and Dragons campaign-style of storytelling.

Still, I'm going to give S&S short fiction a try (minus the cheese) and we'll see how it goes. There's so much to explore here and I'm really looking forward to it.