Sword & Sorcery

The form was built in the pulp magazines. Robert E. Howard's Conan first appeared in Weird Tales in 1932, a barbarian thief-turned-king moving through a prehistoric age of decadent cities and sorcerers who deserved to be killed. C. L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry followed in 1934, and in 1939 Fritz Leiber introduced Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, a pair of rogues whose friendship gave the form wit as well as muscle.

The name came later. In 1961, answering Michael Moorcock's call in a fanzine for a name for this kind of story, Leiber suggested “sword-and-sorcery,” and it stuck. The same year, Moorcock's Elric appeared as a deliberate inversion of Conan: physically weak, morally tormented, and dependent on a sword that fed on souls.

The 1960s Conan paperbacks, with their Frank Frazetta covers, sold in large numbers and inspired a wave of imitators. Charles R. Saunders' Imaro (1981) moved it to a world drawn from African history and myth, and Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher stories carried its episodic, job-by-job structure into the present. The form has been through several revivals since, and short fiction is still its natural home.

Expect short stories and novellas collected into books, or novels built from linked episodes. Each story is a self-contained job: a theft, a rescue, an escape. The pace is fast, the violence is physical and immediate, and the prose often has a vivid, sometimes purple, energy inherited from the pulps.

Sorcery is almost always alien and corrupting, the province of villains and ancient things in ruined temples. The hero survives on wit, steel and luck. Reading order rarely matters much, which makes the classics easy to sample.