Recently I wrote an essay about the dangers of too much ‘realistic thinking’ in fantasy fiction — When Realism Isn’t Real — Conan the Jazzerciser. In that article I used an example from Poul Anderson’s Conan pastiche Conan the Rebel to illustrate my point. The following post, which originally appeared at Black Gate, is a brief look at Anderson’s ‘On Thud and Blunder’ essay and his realistic approach, and tells the other side of the ‘realistic thinking’ dichotomy in fantasy fiction. In particular I look at how fantasy fiction as a whole has moved on from the time of Anderson’s original writing, and now features a new set of pit-falls and follies.

. . . writers who’ve had no personal experience with horses tend to think of them as a kind of sports car.

It’s been thirty years since Poul Anderson wrote his essay on the need for realism in heroic fantasy, ‘On Thud and Blunder,’ which you can read in its entirety at the SFWA site, and I think it holds up well even though the genre — and the perception of it — has changed greatly. ‘On Thud and Blunder’ originally appeared in the third installment of Andrew Offutt’s classic anthology series Swords Against Darkness; though it was in the excellent, if unimaginatively named, collection of Anderson’s called Fantasy that I first encountered it. But already at the time of my reading a whole generation of writers had made a name for themselves by following the dictates of realism and common sense in designing their fantasy worlds.

The essay begins with a satire of the genre that features a barbarian cleaving through armor with a fifty-pound sword and riding a horse as if it were a motorbike, among other ridiculous things. It’s the kind of thing that gave heroic fantasy and sword and sorcery a bad name, and perhaps the sort of thing that meant it would soon be eclipsed by a rising tide of ‘high fantasy’ in the eighties and nineties. But, in 1978, hf — as Anderson terms heroic fantasy in an abbreviation that seems to have never caught on — was an emerging star:

Today’s rising popularity of heroic fantasy, or sword-and-sorcery as it is also called, is certainly a Good Thing for those of us who enjoy it. Probably this is part of a larger movement back toward old-fashioned storytelling, with colorful backgrounds, events, and characters, tales wherein people do take arms against a sea of troubles and usually win. Such literature is not inherently superior to the introspective or symbolic kinds, but neither is it inherently inferior; Homer and James Joyce were both great artists.

A wonderfully concise statement in defense of the genre, something I could easily see being forwarded today on some blog in support of the much-hoped-for internet revolution in pulpish storytelling. However, on today’s bookstore shelves, it isn’t sword and sorcery but high fantasy books that are all the rage — a genre possessing a set of conventions that do tend to nicely address the concerns Anderson raises in ‘On Thud and Blunder,’ but one that itself brings a whole host of new excesses to the table. Perhaps a contemporary writer of Anderson’s perspicacity could produce a follow-up article aimed at high fantasy’s faults, which I propose be titled ‘On Bloat and Blather.’

But that is not to say I dislike high fantasy, far from it. I no more dislike it than Anderson does hf when he lampoons it. Nor is that the focus of this post, I merely wanted to suggest how the background of fantasy publishing has shifted dramatically — so dramatically, in fact, that many of the virtues Anderson enumerates have themselves been used to excess by certain authors in the quest for better fantasy worlds.

Another thing that Anderson decries that has changed for the better, though perhaps not to the extent that it should, is the development of fantasy worlds based on histories and mythologies outside of the European and Near Eastern tradition. Already in the seventies the shift could be seen, and on today’s shelves, too, an increased variety of influences are in evidence. While many veins of culture remained to be tapped, there are at least Asian, African, and Native American inspired fantasies available — even if the generic brand of fantasy remains overwhelmingly a bland distillation of Medieval Europe.

Though all of that is incidental to the purpose of Anderson’s essay, which is a call for greater realism in fantasy — and not merely realism, but logic and common sense, too. Anderson does a wonderful job of skewering so many of the misconceptions and lazy assumptions of the genre, bringing his historical knowledge to bear on such things as the day-to-day realities of a pre-industrial society, the likely workings of politics and religion, and, of course, some of the practical aspects of fighting and combat. ‘On Thud and Blunder’ does more to get the reader thinking in these terms, and inspired to go out and do some research, than a great many of today’s shallow, cynical books written on the subject of world building and aimed at the would-be fantasy writer.

And, while this essay is targeted at writers, ‘On Thud and Blunder’ will be appreciated by anyone interested in both fantasy and history. Anderson throws off interesting historical anecdotes like sparks off a grinding wheel, from the pervasiveness of disease and the development of cities, to the social underpinnings of a nation’s army and the fragility of a horse’s health. It is fascinating stuff — and for a writer looking for ideas, it’s a goldmine.

It has sometimes been said that we are now witnessing the Golden Age of fantasy — and, with so many series out there varying from the extremely sophisticated to the utterly banal, it’s hard to disagree with the statement at least from the standpoint of quantity. It seems to me fantasy has had to change from it’s sword and sorcery roots in order to generate the mass appeal that it now holds; it had to get away from many of the flaws Anderson is drawing attention to. In some ways it’s a shame that the pendulum has swung so far away from the rollicking good action tale, but it does show signs of swinging back and, perhaps, ushering in a new crop of tales at once sophisticated and viscerally paced. I don’t know if this really is the Golden Age, and I can’t claim that I like all the changes I see in the genre, but I do believe fantasy has improved with time — and I fully expect it to get even better.

Readers of this blog know that I often decry the lack of publications that feature secondary world fantasy — especially of the action-packed, fun sort that is called variously Sword & Sorcery, Heroic or Epic Fantasy, or just plain old pulp. Recently, we’ve been lucky to get two new online venues that cater to just this sort of thing, first Beneath Ceaseless Skies back in October and, as of last month, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. I’m pleased to report that I really liked what I saw in HFQ’s inaugural issue.

HFQ #1 features three stories and two poems — like BCS, it seems to focus on quality rather than quantity, something I’d like to see from more online venues regardless of theme. And HFQ’s three stories are each meaty, well-drawn tales of secondary fantasy worlds that contrast and compliment one another nicely.

The issue opens with James Lecky’s ‘Black Flowers of Sevan,’ a Near Eastern flavored story of in which roguish mercenary captain Tula becomes infatuated with his Prince’s consort. After winning the ruthless Prince’s favor, Tula pushes beyond the bounds of hospitality and discovers a dark secret about the woman he has become fascinated with. A nicely crafted setting and smooth style distinguish the piece (though I did find the use of the word ‘Nestorian’ to indicate an imaginary kingdom a little jarring).

Perhaps my favorite of the issue is the tale of an over-the-hill dragon-slayer’s last battle, ‘Man of Moldania.’ In it, Richard Marsden gives us a real-world Eastern European setting injected with a dose of the fantastic. Golorus, an itinerant killer of drakes, plies his trade in a small town and ends up stepping on the toes of the town’s local favored son. Facing a skeptical citizenry and hostile hetman, Golorus cleverly defeats threats both draconic and human. A very fun story.

The final story of the issue, ‘Beyond the Lizard Gate’ by Alex Marshall, is a gritty dark fantasy very reminiscent of Warhammer Fantasy fiction. It deals with a quest for revenge against an evil sorcerer by his siblings, a warrior and a blind sorceress. Verging at times into the horror spectrum, this action-packed tale revels in a dark aesthetic, and its often ornate prose, though at times straining the purple, compliments the theme well.

Three stories, all good reading. If HFQ can deliver the same four times a year, fans of adventure fantasy might just find short stories back on the menu. And if that happens, maybe we really will be able to say we are living at the dawn of an electronic pulp revolution.

This week at Black Gate I was thrilled to step back into the lands of Nyumbani in my review of the third book in Charles R. Saunders’ superb Imaro saga. Imaro: The Trail of Bohu ramps up the action and increases the stakes over the previous two volumes (both of which I reviewed here), and includes quite a few unexpected surprises — which I was at pains not to spoil in my review.

Imaro: The Trail of Bohu continues the saga of the outcast warrior Imaro in the land of Nyumbani; a rich fantasy setting based on African history and myth. But, while the first two books in the series, Imaro and Imaro: The Quest for Cush, were essentially episodic in structure (constructed as they were of Saunders’ short stories), The Trail of Bohu, the first Imaro book written as a novel from start to finish, presents us with a bigger overall story — it is, in fact, the beginning of the arc that will carry the reader through books four and five and, let’s just say, things really start to get going in this installment of the Imaro saga.

And as I and many others have said many times — this series is the work of an overlooked master of the genre and to miss it would be to miss a modern day Howard or Leiber. Thankfully, Sword & Soul Media are making Imaro, and Charles R. Saunders’ other work like the equally fantastic Dossouye, available again, and you can find The Trail of Bohu by clicking this link.

Over at Black Gate this week I posted a short reflection on Poul Anderson’s 1978 essay ‘On Thud and Blunder,’ his call for more realism in adventure fantasy fiction. A lot has certainly changed in thirty years, but Anderson’s essay is well worth reading for a lot of reasons — not least of which is the wealth of fascinating historical anecdotes he throws around.

. . . Anderson does a wonderful job of skewering so many of the misconceptions and lazy assumptions of the genre, bringing his historical knowledge to bear on such things as the day-to-day realities of a pre-industrial society, the likely workings of politics and religion, and, of course, some of the practical aspects of fighting and combat. ‘On Thud and Blunder’ does more to get the reader thinking in these terms, and inspired to go out and do some research, than a great many of today’s shallow, cynical books written on the subject of world building and aimed at the would-be fantasy writer.

It’s a great essay for the prospective writer of fantasy fiction, as well as for anyone interested in the way the genre has changed over time.

Click here to read ‘On Thud and Blunder’ — Thirty Years Later

As in a daze Cormac turned his steed and rode back across the trampled field. His horse’s hoofs splashed in lakes of blood and clanged against the helmets of dead men. Across the valley the shout of victory was thundering. Yet all seemed shadowy and strange. A shape was striding across the torn corpses and Cormac was dully aware that is was Bran. The Gael swung from his horse and fronted the king. Bran was weaponless and gory; blood trickled from gashes on brow, breast and limb; what armor he had worn was clean hacked away and a cut had shorn half-way through his iron crown. But the red jewel still gleamed unblemished like a star of slaughter.

• Title: Bran Mak Morn: The Last King
• Author: Robert E. Howard
• Genre: Dark Fantasy/Historical Adventure
• Year: 2005 (1928-32)

Conan is more famous than his creator, Robert E. Howard. Most readers approach Howard through the lens of Conan, as is only natural, and tend to look at his other heroes in terms of Conan — digging for those elements that later make their way into the stories of the Hyborian age. Kull is perhaps the most famous ancestor of Conan for, after all, it was a Kull story that was later modified to become the first Conan tale, ‘The Phoenix on the Sword.’ But all of Howard’s creations are different, as he was too good a writer to spin the same yarn twice, and all of them are informed by the age in which they find themselves. Bran Mak Morn, last King of a dying race, is a hero that Howard spent less words on than Solomon Kane, or Kull, or certainly Conan, but he was also perhaps Howard’s most personal creation.

This review is of Bran Mak Morn: The Last King from Del Rey, part of a new series that collects Howard’s tales and publishes them in their original form and chronology, with a wealth of accompanying notes, essays, and unfinished ephemera. Perhaps not all of this information is of value to the casual fan, but having Howard’s creations available in their proper form is a tremendous improvement from the situation of twenty or thirty years ago, when Howard was only available in diluted, rewritten, or rearranged form alongside a group of modern pastiche writers as part of massive, artificially-conceived series. I always distrusted those books as a kid and so unfortunately never grew up reading Howard, but now his unaltered writings are available in faithful collections from several publishers.

Bran Mak Morn grows from Howard’s fascination with the Picts — but not the Picts of modern, sober archaeology — rather the Picts of turn-of-the-century pseudo-scientific conjectural history, the sort of thing that was available in 1908 for a young Howard to read. But that, believe it or not, is a good thing; for these Picts are a mysterious people with a strange past rooted in lost continents and trans-world migrations and civilizations long vanished. Some of Howard’s magic, whether in the Bran stories or those of Solomon Kane’s skewed 17th Century or Conan’s Hyboria, grows out of the freedom of his time to fill in the gaps of the historical record with imagination — wild speculation on Atlantean colonies and strange transpositions of race were not yet the sole province of semi-educated cranks. If it was the case that less reliable history and questionable science was what Howard had to draw upon, that just had the effect of allowing him to dream bigger dreams.

And Bran Mak Morn is something like a dream of Late Antiquity. Bran, the last King of a people that are the degenerate and near-savage remnants of a race that once ruled a mighty civilization lost to the shadows of time, must fight the Roman Empire as it encroaches on Pictland north of Hadrian’s Wall. These stories are bleak and Bran is heroic precisely because he fights a battle he knows he cannot win, one that, in effect, has already been lost centuries ago. And his heroism underscores too his aloneness as the only ‘civilized’ man amongst a people who have succumbed to barbarity. Unlike Howard’s other heroic outsiders, Bran is an exemplar of his people, his fate bound entirely to their own, his significance to them resonating down through the ages long after he fought and lost his last battle.

What may be disappointing to many readers is just how few Bran stories there are; the Bran cycle consisting of essentially four stories — only two of which feature Bran Mak Morn in the sort of heroic mold of a Conan or Kull. That’s two stories in a 300 plus page hardback book. Readers expecting to discover another Conan will be disappointed, but this collection goes beyond just being about Bran Mak Morn to illuminating Howard’s keen interest in the idea of lost races of men lurking at the fringes of human history.

The first Bran story is an example of this, ‘Men of the Shadows,’ which is essentially a history of Howard’s Picts in which Bran is seen through the eyes of a captured Norse mercenary in Rome’s employ. The Picts, which are akin to H.G. Well’s Morlocks with their twisted limbs and hunched backs, are given a detailed — and highly speculative — history based on then-current theories of population migration in the ancient world. Howard’s Picts are descended from Mediterranean stock, and are slighter and darker than their Celtic and Germanic neighbors, and also debased by millennia of barbarous living. ‘Men of Shadows’ is not much of an adventure, but as a weird history illuminating one of Robert E. Howard’s driving passions, it serves as a fine introduction.

Three excellent stories follow, forming the heart of this book. In ‘Kings of the Night’ we see Bran in action for the first time, leading a coalition army against Roman onslaught, dealing with issues of his command and deployment. It’s a great battle piece, and it also features an appearance by another Howard hero — summoned from his own time to lead an unruly Norse contingent. Again we see Bran through another’s eyes, this time a Celtic chieftain, and Howard’s characterization of Bran as a shrewd leader whose paramount concern is the well-being of his own people is well-drawn.

In ‘Worms of the Earth,’ another classic tale, Bran is the viewpoint character for the first and only time. Very little of the Picts are featured here, instead Bran treats with loathsome magics to get revenge on a cruel Roman governor who has executed one of Bran’s countrymen. Bran is consumed by his hatred, and employs the aid of an even older, more degenerated people than his own. Again Howard plays with the theme that dominates all of the stories in Del Rey’s collection, but this time Bran is alone amongst forces older and darker than even his Picts.

And that’s it for Bran . . . or almost. In ‘The Dark Man’ we jump ahead some 600 years to the eleventh century, for the story of an Irish warrior fighting to rescue the woman he loves from Viking raiders. Bran Mak Morn appears in the story as a statue — the mysterious and potent Dark Man of the title — and his presence looms over the action in one great, moody piece of storytelling. The setting and concerns of ‘The Dark Man’ are completely different than those of the other Bran tales, but thematically it fits perfectly alongside the others, even giving those earlier pieces a weight they may not have had as we look back from the bloody vantage of ‘The Dark Man’ to the half-remembered past of the age of Bran Mak Morn.

More stories of Picts and lost races follow, some set in the past and some in the present, but there are no more completed Bran Mak Morn tales to be had. These later stories are worth reading, but are frankly anti-climactic after ‘Kings of the Night,’ ‘Worms of the Earth,’ and ‘The Dark Man.’ But that’s to be expected, and the book is worth it for those three pieces alone — any of them as good a Howard story as the best of those featuring his brooding Cimmerian. Everything else in Bran Mak Morn: The Last King is a bonus: some poetry, story fragments and drafts including a piece of Howard juvenilia featuring Bran written in Howard’s own hand, and an excellent appendix featuring an examination of Howard’s interest in the Picts and notes on the stories.

Ultimately, one cannot read Bran Mak Morn without wanting more, say a good dozen stories of the nature — if not the stature — of ‘Worms of the Earth,’ to really do the character justice. Unfortunately, outside of pastiches, that’s not possible, and one is left with the lingering feeling that Howard’s most mysterious hero was perhaps never meant for our knowing, and that we should be grateful for whatever glimpses of his lost world that have survived intact into our own.

• Bran Mak Morn: The Last King at Amazon
• Conan.com
• Howardworks.com

There are philosophers who argue that there is no such thing as evil qua evil; that, discounting spells (which of course relieve an individual of responsibility), when a man commits an evil deed he is a victim himself, the slave of his progeniture and nurturing. Such philosophers might profit by studying Sanctuary.
– from Joe Haldeman’s Blood Brothers

• Title: Thieves’ World
• Author: Robert Asprin, ed.
• Genre: Fantasy/Sword & Sorcery
• Year: 1979

The late Robert Asprin’s Thieves’ World is the granddaddy of the shared-world anthology, and it’s success can be seen in its numerous sequels (the original series ran to twelve anthologies in ten years, plus a few spin-off novels) as well as related matter such as rpg products, in addition to, of course, the many similarly themed anthologies that came out in homage or imitation to the original. In his afterward, ‘The Making of Thieves’ World,’ Asprin describes the shared world idea as a way for many authors to write fantasy without first having to each come up with their own worlds. Imagine, Asprin says, if Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser inhabited the same world as Conan, or if Elric and Kane opposed one another at the head of rival armies. It’s a great, fun idea, and it works well, and it certainly attracted a wide panoply of science fiction and fantasy writers over the decade it ran.

Thieves’ World is the first book in the series, from which the whole derives its name. It centers on the town of Sanctuary, a rats’ nest of rogues and hotbed of skulduggery, a conquered city on the edge of empire rife with competing factions and conflicting religions. It’s a fairly standard fantasy backdrop, at least in this first installment, but it’s also a consistent and well-realized one replete with just enough world-building style details to make the place come alive without the danger of the setting taking over from the plot. Or the characters — and this last is where Thieves’ World really shines.

Each author in the anthology has created his own character, and the book contains a larger-than-life cast of scoundrels, magicians, street folk, and thieves. The ne’er-do-well minstrel Cappen Varra, the cursed magician Enas Yorl, ruthless crimelord and ex-gladiator Jubal, ageless madame Myrtis, and mysterious Lythande, his forehead marked with a glowing blue star that burns with his anger or agitation — just a few of the most prominent personalities of Sanctuary. And while a story might focus on only a few of these characters, they turn up repeatedly again and again in the background of different tales. Indeed, this is part of the fun of the shared world, as different authors handle each other’s characters a bit differently, and even whole scenes from one story may be repeated in another with a twist in perspective. A nice touch, and one that lends the stories the feeling that many lives are brushing up against one another and interconnecting in the world of Sanctuary.

As for the stories themselves, ranging from short story to novella length, some stand out more than others. John Brunner opens the anthology with Sentences of Death, a clever piece centering around apprentice translator Jarveena and her employer, an opportunistic book merchant and scribe. When a magical scroll falls into their hands they decide to profit from it as best they can, and set off a chain of events that involves a strange magician, a foiled assassination attempt, and the fulfillment of Jarveena’s lifelong thirst for revenge. In Poul Anderson’s The Gate of Flying Knives, we have a more traditional sword & sorcery tale, in which the rogue Cappen Verra must venture into another world to rescue his love — and where he discovers that a certain slight-of-hand can be worth more than any sword or spell. In Joe Haldeman’s Blood Brothers the odious One-Thumb, a man confident in his continued existence because of a magician’s curse of damnation on anyone that should ever dare to slay him, meets his comeuppance in a most unusual and ingenious way. In my favorite story of the collection, Asprin’s own The Price of Doing Business, shrewd operator Jubal discovers just how differently those who don’t share his ruthlessly practical outlook see the world, and finds himself confounded first by a child, and then by one of the Emperor’s own elite guardsmen.

Other names that the reader will recognize, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley and Andrew Offutt, also have strong offerings; and overall the anthology is a solid mix of stories from writers of varied sensibilities at different points of their career. But the book is cohesive, the styles complimentary, and the fun firmly at center stage. I can understand how it started something big, especially as it was released before the modern fantasy explosion, and I only wish there was a comparable series today showcasing a similar broad array of talent against a shared world backdrop. One can hope — and in the meantime there is plenty in the Thieves’ World series to satisfy the cravings of sword & sorcery fans.

• Thieves’ World at Amazon
• A Notable Guide to Thieves’ World