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Here's a quick question for all you younger readers out there. And by "younger," I mean anyone under 40. Do you remember the Men's Adventure genre? You know. Stories about tough guys doing tough guy things. Mack Bolan. The Executioner. Phoenix Force. William W. Johnstone's post apocalyptic Ashes series. Or his amazing standalone adventure, The Last of the Dog Team. They always featured their alpha male heroes in exotic locations, getting into fist fights, knife fights, and gun fights. The women were always fast and dangerous. The bad guys were always powerful and ruthless. The covers usually depicted some hard case with a gun, striking a tough guy pose with a scantily clad woman nearby. Maybe she had a gun of her own, watching his six. Maybe she was just clutched onto the hero, begging his protection. Politically incorrect? Maybe. But so what? As anyone who's been following my recent post apocalyptic reviews can attest, I'm a believer that escapist entertainment doesn't have to make any apologies for what it is, or for what audience its trying to court. One critic who shares that opinion is pulp sword and sorcery expert Morgan Holmes. In this interview with Legends of Men, he rightly points out that the sword and sorcery genre is a subset of Men's Adventure fiction, and that it's aimed primarily at an audience of young men. Unsurprisingly, Morgan's opinion ruffled some feathers. This lengthy response to Morgan's interview by scholar Jason Ray Carney makes the case that sword and sorcery is primarily a gender neutral genre, less concerned with action, adventure, and alpha-male archetypes than with depicting human frailty in the face of natural forces. It also contains this doozy of a quote: "Gender aside, sword and sorcery dramatizes our gender-neutral, all-too-human fight against (and inevitable defeat by) time." With all due respect to Mr. Carney, I couldn't come up with a less-exciting description for the sword and sorcery genre if you held a fucking gun to my head. To give him some credit, Carney isn't entirely wrong. Sword and sorcery has always had a strong element of cosmic horror to it, and man's futile struggle against the universe—and time—is a big part of that. But let's be real, folks. Nobody is reading a story like Robert E. Howard's "The Queen of the Black Coast" because it "dramatizes our gender neutral, all-too-human fight against... time." We're reading it to see Conan get hot and heavy with Belit, raid and plunder the Black Coast as her pirate king, and finally take bloody vengeance on the unholy creatures that killed her. We're reading it for the fantastic settings and the visceral action. We're reading it to vicariously experience thrills we can't in our day-to-day lives. What's more, the people writing and marketing these stories understood that. Howard deliberately wrote scenes of scantily clad women in peril, knowing it would ensure a lurid cover illustrated by Weird Tales great, Margaret Brundage.  Pictured: The gender-neutral fight against (and inevitable defeat by) time Sex and action are big sells, folks. They always have been. They always will be. And their expression is almost never "gender neutral." Don't believe me? Check your grandmother's garage. You'll probably find a giant box of paperbacks in there, several of them featuring a shirtless Fabio on the cover as he passionately embraces the heroine. I suppose if I tried, I could write an essay arguing that those books really aren't aimed at women at all, and in fact dramatize our gender-neutral, all-too-human struggle against loneliness. But nobody would buy that argument. Least of all not a bunch of lifelong romance novel fans. I don't read sword and sorcery for what it has to say about my own crushing and inevitable defeat by the marches of time. I read it to experience the hot-blooded action of Howard's "Queen of the Black Coast," the weird and tantalizing thrills of Fritz Leiber's "While the Sea King's Away," or the lust-and-honor driven vengeance of Michael Moorcock's "The Dreaming City." In other words, I read it to get the same thrills I get from the Men's Adventure genre, with the added layer of supernatural or cosmic horror on top. And I'd bet good money I'm not alone. But then, according to Carney, I'm probably missing the point.
14 Comments
Jessie Smith
7/11/2019 03:08:40 pm
Wrote a sword & sorcery short story in high school, but made the hero an African (continent of Keshana in those Atlantean times). Made a B+ but that was because of punctuation and a couple of misspelled words. It was about 9-10 pages in longhand. Wish I knew where it was.
Daniel J. Davis (admin)
7/11/2019 04:15:52 pm
Might be with revisiting. Especially if you still have a strong mental image of the character. There's still plenty of fertile ground in the Sword and Sorcery genre. We just need storytellers to work it.
Fractal Rabbit
7/11/2019 05:47:18 pm
"Gender aside, sword and sorcery dramatizes our gender-neutral, all-too-human fight against (and inevitable defeat by) time."
Daniel J. Davis (admin)
7/15/2019 07:20:09 pm
That was the exact quote that triggered my response.
Gavin Chappell
7/12/2019 01:48:53 am
Regardless of his description of the genre Jason Ray Carney's 'Ink of the Slime Lord' is truly one of the best sword and sorcery stories I've read from this century. More in the vein of Clark Ashton Smith than REH, but maybe that's the point. Not all sword and sorcery is Conan.
Daniel J. Davis (admin)
7/15/2019 08:23:34 pm
I never said it was. I just pulled out Conan (and Elric, and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser) to illustrate the point that S&S is supposed to be exciting and visceral. Clark Ashton Smith's work fits the bill on both counts. But Carney's dry and neutered-sounding description doesn't do him any more justice than it does Howard. 7/17/2019 01:39:38 pm
"Ink of the Slime Lord" really is pretty good. However, there's one section that's so awkwardly written I gave up on it the first time I tried to read it. Early on in the story the heroine is in a bar with a sailor, then all of a sudden they're in bed together, but it's not clear at all that there's been a change of scene. On top of that, she somehow puts her foot on his chest when they're lying next to each other. It drives me crazy when talented authors fuck up in stupid ways like that. A term you have never seen: "Women's Adventure." If sword and sorcery fiction is gender neutral, where were all the female readers? If the genre is gender neutral, why did female editor's kill off the genre in the mid-1980s (Betsy Wollheim at D.A.W. and Susan Allison at Ace)? Why did Karl Edward Wagner write in his story "Neither Brute nor Human," a new female editor kills a sword and sorcery series calling it "sexist trash." It certainly was not viewed as gender neutral when it was being published.
Daniel J. Davis
7/15/2019 08:34:19 pm
Great points as usual, Morgan. 7/16/2019 08:42:29 am
Jason Carney’s essay is excellent, and I agree with what he is saying. As a writer, I fully understand his point that s&s deals with the human condition, even though many readers may prefer their fiction as literal and without nuance. Sincere writers of merit have been expanding the boundaries of s&s since the seventies—Saunders, Cole, Taylor, Salmonson. Saying that there is no “woman’s adventure fiction” is pointless; it is a false equivalency, such as saying that there is no men’s mystery fiction that has cats solving the crime or that includes cookie recipes in the text. These are market decisions. And while the feminist editors of the eighties and after clearly championed fantasy fiction by women, the real disappointment is that their corporate vision was not sufficiently liberal to allow for writers such as Saunders and Wagner to be included in their lists. No doubt they were on a mission and saw themselves as championing women authors who had been sidelined for years. So be it; markets change in reaction to reader response as well as because editors manipulate which manuscripts to accept and which to reject. Masculine-oriented s&s put out by the commercial houses quickly gave way to far more profitable corporate creations—time wheels and throne games, followed by YA fantasy. It’s about the money. Meanwhile, a whole new generation of writers has been writing fantasy that goes in all directions (and includes all genders, colors, and ethnicities). They are writing from the heart with little opportunity to make much money—exactly where Charles Saunders, Adrian Cole, Keith Taylor, and the rest of us were back in the day. I’m an old white guy and I welcome this; I want to see the creativity keep coming. Otherwise, why write? Why read? And why be so threatened by an intellectual such as Jason Carney who wishes to discuss the gender boundaries of a genre when such new fiction is included with, but does not replace, the old-school masculine fiction? There’s room for everything. While s&s moved to the sidelines for a while, it is seeing a resurgence and is still written, published, and enjoyed by small presses and online publishers. No one wants to take away the “visceral” fiction, as Daniel Davis calls it. It’s still around. I’ve spread plenty of viscera around myself on the printed page, and I’m pretty good at it. Jason Ray Carney is an intellectual doing his job by broadening the conversation. Once more, because I am a writer and thus can see this discussion from that perspective as well as that of a reader, I feel that Carney is absolutely correct when he says, “Gender aside, sword and sorcery dramatizes our gender-neutral, all-too-human fight against (and inevitable defeat by) time.”
So you're saying that the feminist editors of the 80s who pushed men's adventure aside to make room for fantasies by women weren't liberal enough? 7/17/2019 06:50:37 am
Yes.
The assumptions inherent in your reply are so far off the mark that it makes the whole thing ridiculous. Leave a Reply. |
AboutI'm an award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer based out of North Carolina. This is where I scream into the digital void. I like cookies. Archives
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