Sword & Sorcery versus Sword & Planet

A swordsman, his arms bearing red wounds, limps across a battlefield covered in bodies. His helmet is gone; his shield is broken. The flag of the Rampant Dragon is soiled with blood. He carries himself with sorrow and regret, his arm barely able to lift his blade into its scabbard. Home is so far way. Then he jumps into his rocket and flies back to his princess…

Both Sword & Sorcery and Sword & Planet have been around a long time. They weren’t always called that but these are the most common labels today. Sword & Sorcery got its name from Fritz Leiber who coined it in response to Michael Moorcock, in the Ancalagon (April 6, 1961) fanzine. Donald A. Wollheim gave us Sword & Planet shortly after. It is appropriate he did the naming because he would publish more S&P than anyone. I like both sub-genres but it irks me when fans use them interchangeably. I’m not sure why but it does. Perhaps by the time I get to the end of this piece I will know why.

First, let’s start with some definitions so we can compare parts. Sword & Sorcery is a sub-genre of heroic fantasy invented by Robert E. Howard in 1928 with the writing of “The Shadow Kingdom” (Weird Tales, August 1929). The story follows Kull, a barbarian usurper who has taken the throne of Valusia. Against him are a race of serpent creatures who can appear as normal men. The tale ends with a great battle in which Kull holds back his enemies, some human dupes, some disguised serpents, until Brule the Spear Slayer can show up with the Pictish cavalry. Robert E. Howard borrowed from historical fiction and the ancient traditions of myth and heroic tales. We find swordsmen, evil wizards, weird monsters, magic that works, and a vast panoramic world of colorful locales. Howard’s most famous character is Conan the Cimmerian.

Sword & Planet is a little harder to pin down. It is also heroic adventure usually set on an alien world. Though Edgar Rice Burroughs did not invent it, he did make it popular beginning with “Under the Moon of Mars” (All-Story, February-July 1912. A novel, rather than a novella, we are transported to Mars, where dying city states war for control of the ancient sea bottoms. John Carter, an outsider, wins the beautiful princess and the love and friendship of the people of Helium. Here we find brave swordsmen, Ruritanian plots to overthrow empires, weird aliens beasts, strange Science, and a vast panoramic world of colorful locales. Burroughs’ most famous Sword & Planet character is John Carter of Mars.

So on the surface the two might be mistaken for the other. Heroes, sword fights, villains, weird creatures, dire adventures that have happy endings. Critics have labeled Sword & Sorcery “Tits & Daggers” while saying Sword & Planet is just “Cowboys and Indians in space”. And in the case of the lowest common denominators this may be true. But with the very best examples, there is so much more. Edgar Rice Burroughs, despite his lack of literary polish, has remained in print for over a hundred years. What literary novel of 1912 can say the same? (The bestselling novel of 1912 was 1911’s The Harvester by Gene Stratton Porter. Read it?)

To make matters worse, the two types of books were marketed virtually identically. Artists like Boris Vallejo would paint an image for a Gor novel one time and then a Conan another. DAW Books, for instance, sells both sub-genres to the same audience with little or no difference. This may be in part because some of their authors write in both sub-genres. In more recent times, Amazon sells ebooks in either sub-genre. A search of popular Fantasy might turn up S&S along with the Harry Potters but Sword & Planet will more likely be in Science Fiction. In either case, you are better off searching by author.

Which one is the Sword & Sorcery book?

What of other media? Comic books. In 1964 Gold Key published The Mighty Samson, starring a muscular hero who lived in a post apocalyptic world who fought mutants and robots. Later DC had a version of Hercules who did the same. 1970 saw the hugely popular Conan the Barbarian by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor Smith that sparked an S&S comic boom that lasted decades. Anthology magazines such as Heavy Metal, Epic Illustrated, 1984 and other Warren mags all used both S&S and S&P, sometimes to the point where you couldn’t tell them apart.

Pulps. The 1950s were not kind to Fantasy. Most of the imaginative Pulps were Science Fiction. Were is an S&S writer to go? To Planet Stories. This adventure Pulp allowed writers like Poul Anderson, Gardner F. Fox and Leigh Brackett a place to weave Sword & planet dreams so close to the old Weird Tales days. Some writers like Jack Vance hid behind the Science Fiction label for decades. It would not be until Cele Goldsmith took over Fantastic that a real haven for true S&S would exist again.

Television. The Beastmaster. Hawk the Slayer. The Legend of the Seeker. He-Man and She-Ra. Conan the Animated. Merlin. The Shannara Chronicles. Thundarr the Barbarian. Now Thundarr is an interesting case. He started as Tarzan on Mars, an unauthorized novel that the Burroughs estate turned down. It got a rewrite and appeared as Thundarr, Man of Many Worlds (1971) by John Bloodstone (Stuart J. Byrne) and then was adapted into a cartoon. A cartoon that is often called Sword & Sorcery but it features robots and mutants.

The movies. there have been many but let’s look at two: 2010 saw a new Conan the Barbarian film starring Jason Momoa. 2012 saw the first John Carter of Mars picture starring Taylor Kitsch. (Both tanked at the box office but true fans know better.) Here might be a good place to mention Space Opera, another related SF sub-genre. The most famous film example is Star Wars. Space Opera is similar to S&P but has less emphasis on swordplay (what about light sabers?) but the opening segment of Return of the Jedi (1983) when Luke returns to Tatoonie to rescue Han and the arena scene from Attack of the Clones (2002) are pure Burroughs (with some Ray Harryhausen spear-jabs thrown in.)

Music. This one might not be as obvious but the 1970s produced a number of Sword & Sorcery flavored albums, with Michael Moorcock writing and performing with Hawkwind and Blue Oyster Cult. Warrior on the Edge of Time (1975) being perhaps the best. Uriah Heap had The Magician’s Birthday (1972) and folksy bands like Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention and Jethro Tull all did Fantasy-tinged pieces. Everybody had Roger Dean, Ken Kelly and Frank Frazetta album art on their album covers. Good times.

Games. Both video and role-playing. Advanced Dungeons&Dragons, Tunnels & Trolls to Diablo, Skyrim, World of Warcraft, S&S has been perhaps the most successful with young people in game form. It’s a natural, with combat and monsters and the panoply of adventure and exotic and dangerous places. Sword & Planet has RPGs called Mars, Beneath Two Suns, GURPS Planet of Adventure. This isn’t to mention all the product specific stuff such as Thieves World, The Lord of the Rings, Barsoom, etc. Oh, I forgot board games like Hero Quest, too.

So here is the rub. I believe the main difference– and whether it matters to you or not is an individual matter– is the philosophical basis from which each comes. The tale of Sword & Sorcery is an exercise in believing in a world where magic works, where lurking evil comes from the ancient past, a Gothic vision that comes to us through fairy tales and questing romances. How is a tale of Conan all that different than “The Golden Bird” or “the Song of Roland” except in its more realistic presentation.? This mode of storytelling inspired Lord Dunsany’s “The Sword of Welleran” (1908) and E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros (1922). In this way Howard and J. R. R. Tolkien share their love of “the Northern thing”, or tales of Nordic heroes.

Sword & Planet has a more scientific platform (which is funny when you think about the mystic mumbo-jumbo ERB used to get John Carter to Barsoom). The mindset of S&P is one in which Science, whether it is recognizable as Earthly Science or some weird Martian variety) is the power behind things. Think of how in true Burroughs fashion John Carter overthrows the false religion of the Therns in The Gods of Mars. Mystics are always found wanting whether on Mars or Venus. This scientific bent might mean rockets for a galactic empire or that the monsters are all aliens, not trolls. This flavor difference may be subtle or unimportant to most readers but to me it is essential. The Gothic stem of S&S links it to the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft (one of Howard’s influences) while the S&P tale is attached to Science Fiction, though perhaps of the clunky, goofy Ray A. Palmer variety.

So why do I care when people mix up the two? Because of the two Sword & Sorcery is the harder trick to perform. Convince me as the reader, who lives in a world of Science, of a place where sorcery makes the world move. Make my skin crawl as Bran Mak Morn enters the tunnels of the Worms of the Earth, Conan battles the Baboon-Demon of Hyboria. That is not an easy task and when someone like Robert E. Howard or Karl Edward Wagner or even clunky old Lin Carter pulls it off, I am impressed.

Falling back on the Heavy Metal scenario, so popular in the 1980s, where all is revealed to be actually be Science, is a major bummer for me. It’s a cheat. It’s lazy. I hated it when John W. Campbell cooked it up in Unknown and I hate it today. He did some good things for S&S, like publishing Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd & Grey Mouser, but he also robbed some good works of their glamor such as the novels of Wan Tengri by Norvell W. Page. Famously Arthur C. Clarke said: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Some see this as a good reason to jumble these sub-genres together. I have to work very hard to ignore the SF opening of Andre Norton’s Witch World (1963), which becomes a pretty standard Fantasy series. Tanith Lee’s Birthgrave (1975) is a great book until that stupid reveal at the end. I don’t want all my wonders to be explained ala Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions (1954). I much prefer his The Broken Sword (1954) with its elves and vikings.

So why does it all matter at all if Science Fiction and Fantasy readers are pretty much the same crowd? Won’t we enjoy the book whether it is S&S or S&P? As the massive popularity of The Lord of the Rings has shown, Fantasy has a wide-reaching popularity that does not include SF readers. Science Fiction has had big sellers with Frank Herbert’s Dune but in most regards SF does not sell as well as all those fat trilogies. George R. R. Martin has sold way more copies of The song of Fire and ice than he has of his very excellent SF like Dying of the Light (1977). I have met fans who loved one or the other but not both. (Usually rationalist with a chip on their shoulders or people too lazy to learn Science.) The majority of us can go either way, along with enjoying Horror, or Mysteries, or other forms of genre fiction. We are an adaptable bunch.

Sword & Sorcery and Sword & Planet (let’s call them the Sword genres) are smaller sub-genres within that mix. Sword & Sorcery is considered by some to be less worthy than the epic scale Fantasy of Tolkien, while no self-respecting SF nerd would call Sword & Planet “Science Fiction” at all. It is Science Fantasy or Planetary Romance. Lots of labels and finger-pointing but the fact of that matter is that S&S and S&P share one big factor: they are both read for fun.

The intent of H. G. Wells’ Science Fiction was to examine the real world and make comment. The intent of the Sword genres is (to quote L. Sprague de Camp ):

…neither to teach the problems of the steel industry, nor to expose the defects in our foreign-aid program, nor yet to air the problems of the housewife. It is to entertain. These stories combine the color, gore, and action of the costume drama with the atavistic terrors and delights of the fairy tale. They furnish the purest fun to be found in fiction today.

L. Sprague was speaking of S&S in his first anthology, aptly named Swords & Sorcery (1963) but applies to both. The Sword genres are escape literature. They take you away from the day job and your troubles and let you imagine another world full of color and action and adventure. Does that make them the trash their critics like Harlan Ellison imply? Not any more than “Little Red Riding Hood” or Treasure Island or Alice in Wonderland. Humans are storytellers by nature, and somewhere in the Victorian age we got it into our heads that everything had to be instructive, or critical, or just plain dull. The reader of the Sword genres knows this isn’t true. Fun fiction is a vacation to another time, another place, another mindset. I hope you will join me there.