Periklis’s Comments (group member since Sep 30, 2012)

Periklis’s comments from the Sword & Sorcery: "An earthier sort of fantasy" group.

Really interesting observation. From the little I have read in this (sub)genre, Sword Noir resembles Raymond Chandler's setting and (his) characters' ethos. In fact I was reminded of the opening chapter from The Big Sleep:

“The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying.”

William King has updated Kormak's worldmap and presented it on his website:

Ski's LEGENDS OF LOG book series wrote: "Hi to all. I'm a long time fan of Sword & Sorcery and I'm sure like most of you, it started with Robert E. Howard's Conan The Barbarian. From the books to the comics, never could get enough of that..."

Welcome Ski, thank you for joining us. Most of us had the same influences, but I'm happy to find out that A. Bertram Chandler wrote S&S. Feel free to join our two group-readings.

T.c. wrote: "So to me, gunpowder and firearms are of no consequence as determinants of what "brand" of adventure-fantasy I'm writing; merely more tools for me to manipulate from that exhilarating, godlike position where I work the strings of a marionette cosmos.[...] Maybe what they're struggling to describe is my outside-Pandora's-box attitude toward adhering to recognizable sub-genres---? "

Thanks for taking the time to comment, and most importantly offering a behind-the-scenes look at Gonji. I refered to the use of different weapons along with sorcery, not in comparisson with Solomon Kane, but as another example of sword analogies.
I'm glad you teased the multiversal nature of the latter Gonji tales, as there may be a comparison between him and Elric. Perhaps both of them seem to be having the tapestry of their fate, weighing upon them, on their heroic journey of self-discovery...

Teresa wrote: "Several other authors and I have started a new collective called BookSworn. We are kicking things off with a contest and giveaway. Afterwards, we'll be writing about writing and genre fiction. Right now, we're just trying to get word out about the blog."

Having participated in the Gender Bending contest on your website (which must have been the occasion for the gathering of such an eclectic collective), I know this will be fun. I'm off to try guessing the first three masks!

Phil wrote: "On the 'swords not guns' point: traditionally gunpowder technology is the cutoff point for s-&-s, certainly - probably for any number of reasons. For one I think that introducing modernish tech..."

Also, the recent Gonji: Red Blade from the East, where Katanas, Longbows and gunpowder-handguns coexist with supernatural and sorcerous adversaries.

Finished "The Mouths of Light", which reads like a Sword & Sorcery pastiche of Plato's allegory of the cave. The next two stories ("The Stages of the God" & "The Song at the Hub of the Garden") are wonderful homages to Clark Aston Smith, where words are (literary) Sorcery.

Lol... We're probably treading into the realm of tropes. "Khlulhloominoid", anyone?

Added the Sword Noir shelf. More on Sword Noir, here.

As I was watching the 6-part Sword and sorcery panel discussion again, I was wondering if series like Gonji, characters like Dorgo the Dowser and authors like David C. Smith, gained their deserved popularity only too late due to -traditional- publishers', sudden "disinterest" in the genre. Charles R. Saunders' books, suffered the same fate up until recently...

S.E. wrote: "Was there another Tond tale? The backcover mentions 8 tales of heroic fantasy, but the Table of Contents has only 7. The introduction by Campbell mentions another Tond tale called "A Madness From the Vaults" which debuted the "Tond" world...but this reference is not in this collection. "

Nicely spotted. If there wasn't a backcover reference, I'd thought that A Madness from the Vaults is an obscure Lovecraftian fantasy, along with The Face in the Desert which is also mentioned in the introduction. Perhaps due to the fact that "A Madness from the Vaults" is "[...] peopled [...] with creatures other than human", it wasn't included in this slim volume of "tales of heroic fantasy", although it seems to be a part of the Tond cycle(?) of stories...

EDIT: I tried messaging Ramsey Campbell on Facebook, regarding the omission of this tale and "Ryre" character's arc.

I've been slowly (due to the lack of reading time, that is) reading Book 1 and planning on staying until Book 5. That post-literary finger-crossing must be working! ;)

Good news for the Sword-and-Pug sub-genre is , Battlepug Volume 2 is out this August from Dark Horse, in glorious Hardbound.

In Duke Elric, there is a short essay (Elric: A Personality at War by Adrian Snook - 2008), a psychoanalytic observation about Elric's relationship with his sword, "Strombringer", which the author sees as a symbol for the "id".
I'm actually intrigued by the outsider quality of most S&S heroes and heroines, which usually set those stories apart from Epic Fantasy.

Dan wrote: "I'm reading a couple crime books at the moment but I've got Giant Thief and The Blade Itself on deck."

Dan, have you tried any Sword Noir books? You'll probably enjoy them if you like both S&S and hardboiled crime novels.

Phil, really enjoying your observations. Looking forward to your comments when you read the entire colection. And do keep your comments lengthy and interesting.
S.E., I can see the Identity Crisis theme you mention. I'm not sure if Ryre will evolve in the next two stories that close his short cycle of adventures. Perhaps, like Howard or Wagner, Campbell exorcized his demons in those early shorts, using Ryre as an alter ego, without a longer arc in mind.

Just finished "The Pit of Wings" and being slightly obsessed with the metafictional/deconstructionalist feeling of Campbell's Ryre stories, I felt that the "Wings" stand for the religious/extatic experience. Campbell confessed his experimentation with hallucinogens in the past (from an interview, a few years ago) so maybe this tale is about the highs and lows of a psychedelic "trip".
Also, regarding Ryre's appearance from this story, I was reminded of Gemmell's Skilganon, as illustrated by John Bolton:

He shook his head, snarling like a trapped beast-like the beast whose emblem was the V-shaped mane which widened from his shaved crown to his shoulders

Book 2, Gonji: The Soul Within the Steel, was released not ten days ago.
Also, according to the official FB page, book 4: "Fortress of Lost Worlds" has been digitally converted.

Martha Wells writes on Black Gate magazine:

" The books I read that I thought of as sword and sorcery usually had one (or two) loner characters, bumming along in a fantasy landscape as mercenaries, looking for treasure or opportunities to make a living. They had been outlaws in the past, or were fleeing accusations of something, or a past of slavery or powerlessness or something in their lives that they had to hide. [...] When I wrote The Cloud Roads, the first of the Books of the Raksura, I still felt it fell mostly under the category of sword and sorcery, despite there not being any swords, and the sorcery being internal and intrinsic to the characters."


Read the full post at Black Gate.

Steve wrote: "These will all be re-reads for me on the Ryre stories, but it has been a while."

Same with me. I've read a couple of these stories more than twice.
From the limited (and quite generic) description of Ryre, I've been reading these tales as a play on the form (or a deconstructing of tropes) on S&S stories. "The Sustenance of Hoak" is about the city as "the villain" and "The Changer of Names" presents a hero's reputation as his Achilles' heel. Or perhaps I'm reading too much into the text.
I'm currently (re)reading "The Pit of Wings"...

Post-human space opera mixed with Sword and Sorcery, or Science-Fantasy like C.J. Cherryh's works?
Sounds interesting anyway:

"In the village of Raven's Mill, Edmund Talbot, master smith and unassuming historian, finds that all the problems of the world are falling in his lap. Refugees are flooding in, bandits are roaming the woods, and his former lover and his only daughter struggle through the Fallen landscape. Enemies, new and old, gather like jackals around a wounded lion. But what the jackals do not know is that while old he may be, this lion is far from death."