What ISN'T Sword & Sorcery?

[Martin]

When you ask people what Sword & Sorcery is, probably almost everyone will first think "Conan". While Conan certainly is the archetype for Sword & Sorcery, it's not everything that Sword & Sorcery is or all it can be.

I was thinking about what possible forms Sword & Sorcery could take and still feel like Sword & Sorcery. But I think asking what could conceivably be added to the basic archetype without fundamentally changing it might quite well lead to too limited thinking. What if instead we ask what things would really not fit in Sword & Sorcery and then examine what could be done with the things that remain. Which might not have initially seemed like good candidates.

To me, the fist thing that Sword & Sorcery is not is passive heroes. I don't mind protagonists who have fears or doubts, lack great strength, or who don't have great confidence around other people. But even then, they have to do stuff. And not just being pushed to stuff by others, but display initiative, determination, and agency.
Protagonists who rely on others to deal with obstacles for them are not Sword & Sorcery.

Another thing I just don't see happening in Sword & Sorcery is too many plot lines. I could see splitting the protagonists for a while as they go on different paths temporarily, but they need to work on the same problem and regularly come back together to coordinate. Having two or three separate stories that all come together at the end conflicts with the immediacy and urgency that I see in Sword & Sorcery.

Also, magic as a tool or precise science. Sorcery is a supernatural force, not an extension of physics. People don't have magical kitchen appliances or things like that. There are no stores that sell mass manufactured magic items.

[Mary]

Mass produced magic items would also change it in another way: sword and sorcery is a low-tech world. And any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable, or at least bears a powerful family resemblance to, technology.

[Skallagrimsen]

That's Arthur Clarke's Law, I believe.

[Mary]

Nah, it's Niven's inversion of it. Clarke said technology was like magic, not vice versa.

[Mary]

And another topic: in the originals, it was the swordsman who was the hero, and the sorcerer the villain. (Not the hero was intensely heroic.) Does making a sorcerer the main character make it not, or borderline, sword and sorcery?

[Martin]

It depends on how sorcery works and how much of it the protagonist can use and understand. Magic in Sword & Sorcery is an unnatural alien force, and I think it's mandatory that it remains so.

Kane is a very powerful sorcerer, but he's basically never seen using it, and he also is a villain. He still represents an unknowable unnatural evil.

[Alex]

Interesting thread. So, I'm grasping here that we're looking for proactive heroes rather than passive ones, not too many diverging storylines, and sorcerer as the villain embodying 'unnatural evil'.

Q: does the main protagonist have to be heroic? What if he/she had anti-hero leanings? Would this be cross-genre, with all S&S elements being the same?

[Mary]

S&S heroes tend to the anti-heroic. If anything, the more heroic heroes tend to be borderline.

Their stakes tend to be personal, and their own. Mind you, they can do incidental good deed -- save the human sacrifice from the evil cult -- and their personal stakes can be perfectly fine, morally, but a hero who sets out to kill a dragon in S&S is almost certainly seeing himself or his own menaced by it, or looking for fame and fortune in doing so, or enjoying the sheer thrill of it.

[Alex]

Thanks, Mary. It makes much sense the way you've explained it. Of course, anti-heroic, yes, like Elric from Michael Moorcock's books.