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Sunday , 28, December 2014 Morgan Fiction , Uncategorized 14 Comments

In the early 1980s, if you were new to the sword and sorcery genre, you could go to your local chain bookstore,
generally B. Dalton or Walden Books and get the core library in short order. Robert E. Howard’s Conan, Fritz
Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Michael Moorcock’s Elric were all there. There was a period around 1983
that you could get Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane books, C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry, and Timescape editions of
Clark Ashton Smith. Sword and sorcery in paperback form went back to 1966 with the Lancer editions of Conan.
There was a post-Conan sword and sorcery boom in the late 1960s where you had Brak, Thongor, Kothar with
eye catching covers painted by Frank Frazetta or Jeff Jones. That died out around 1971.

There was a second boom in the late 1970s fueled by Zebra Books reissues of Robert E. Howard non-Conan
material and Berkley Medallion issuing of nine collections and one novel and another six reissues of previous
Zebra paperbacks with new covers. All this created a coat tails effect with new sword and sorcery novels and Search Store

anthologies published. Many of them were bad. Some of the books were really science fiction disguised to look Search . . . Search
like sword and sorcery. The minor publishers such as Manor, Zebra, and Tower were looking for anything to slap
a barbarian with a sword on the cover. Those publishers were gone in the early 80s leaving Ace, D.A.W.,
Bantam, Del Rey, and the new Tor Books as the main publishers. Search Blog

Ace Books did a lot of classic reprints of Fritz Leiber, the twelve volumes Conan set, Andre Norton. You didn’t Search . . . Submit

see much in the way of stand alone novels but rather series from Andrew Offutt or eventually Steven Brust.
D.A.W. Books always seemed to love sword and planet more than sword and sorcery fiction though the genre
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was well represented in The Year’s Best Fantasy under Lin Carter. Dell Books published a small but steady
number of sword and sorcery paperbacks but publishing mainly media tie in novels after 1982. Tor was a science An Update on Arkhaven’s Will
fiction imprint, it might thrown in a Poul Anderson collection of his fantasy stories but was not publishing any Caligan Campaign
sword and sorcery at this time. Signet was the domain of Robert Adams’ Horseclans books, those appeared to
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suck the proverbial oxygen out of room allowing no competition within the publisher. Berkley had one of the best
MURDER OF MANATEES
sword and sorcery lists in the late 70s reprinting Michael Moorcock, Robert E. Howard, and even Norvell Page.
The very interesting Dark Border books by Paul Edwin Zimmer came out in 1982 alongside Glen Cook’s early Geek Gab: the Steemit
Dread Empire novels. Revolution

Del Rey was the science fiction and fantasy division of Ballantine Books. Started in 1977, it struck upon the idea Arkhaven Special Freestartr
of publishing derivative fantasy novels by unknown authors with an emphasis on Tolkienesque packaging. Darrell Campaign for Will Caligan
K. Sweet and to a lesser degree, the Brothers Hildebrandt were the house artists. Terry Brooks, Stephen R.
HAPPY ELEVENTY SECOND
Donaldson, and David Eddings were big sellers for Del Rey Books. A fair number of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy
BIRTHDAY TO ROBERT E.
titles were reprinted with new covers. About the only pulp sword and sorcery that Del Rey published was L.
HOWARD!
Sprague de Camp’s The Tritonian Ring. Berkley and Ace were bought by the same publishing corporation and
the Berkley imprint phased out. Zebra’s science fiction and fantasy was scaled back by 1983.

At the same time the numbers of publishers shrank, you had a change in science fiction publishing. For decades, Archives
classic titles were kept in print. The idea was to sell smaller but steady numbers of your Heinlein, Arthur C.
Clarke, Isaac Asimov etc. Titles were allowed to lapse. A good example is Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray January 2018

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Mouser series. Ace would generally reprint all six titles every year. In 1985, only December 2017
Swords and Deviltry was reprinted in the series and that had not been reprinted in
1984. All the titles were reprinted for the last time in 1986 and that was it. A similar November 2017

pattern took place with the Conan titles. It seemed in 1983 that you could walk into a October 2017
K-Mart and see a bunch of Andre Norton titles. You didn’t in 1985. Ace was going the
the Del Rey route and allowing pulp sword and sorcery to lapse. The main sword and September 2017

sorcery series was Geo. W. Proctor and Robert E. Vardeman’s Swords of Raemllyn. August 2017
The editor at Ace must have liked Steven Brust as his Jhereg (1983) and Yendi (1984)
July 2017
as those enjoyed multiple printings.

D.A.W. Book went through similar changes. Kenneth June 2017

Bulmer managed to put out three of the Dray Prescott May 2017
sword and planet novels in 1985 and that was it. One last
One of the last in early 1985, novel came out in 1988. Charles Saunders’ The Trail of April 2017
actually an historical novel thatBohu was near impossible to find in fall 1985. Meanwhile,
March 2017
gets on the border of sword Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Warrior Woman (irritatingly told in
and sorcery. February 2017
the present tense) was ubiquitous. So ended an era, you
were not going to find a reprint of Henry Kuttner’s Elak of January 2017
Atlantis or Gardner F. Fox’s Niall the Wanderer stories collected as paperbacks. I can
December 2016
remember seeing a wire rack at a grocery store in October 1985 with all of Dennis
McKiernan’s Iron Tower trilogy all displayed at the book section. The mighty barbarians November 2016
were vanquished by the Tolkien imitations. You did have the Tor Conan pastiche series
October 2016
ramp up right when the rest of the genre died. The series was so dismal that it didn’t What replaced sword and
count. sorcery September 2016

Sword and sorcery fiction did not disappear completely. There were a few books still August 2016
coming out in the late 1980s that might have been in the pipeline from contracts years before but they were
July 2016
noteworthy due to the scarcity of titles by this time.
June 2016
Tags: Morgan , sword and sorcery

May 2016

April 2016
14 Comments
March 2016

February 2016
Reply
Dave Hardy says: January 2016
December 28, 2014 at 7:40 pm
December 2015
I always like these publishing histories. Seems like publishers (and writers) have always been looking for
consistent money-makers. If you can pay the bills and make a profit publishing Tolkien knock-offs, why not? November 2015

I remember trying to read Sword of Shannara and Lord Foul’s Bane. They was like Tolkien, except with October 2015
excruciatingly woe-is-me protagonists. They seem to have took mundane heroes to mean whiney ones.
September 2015

Reply August 2015

deuce says:
January 24, 2017 at 2:43 am July 2015

Keith Taylor’s BARD books kept being published until about 1990, carrying the torch for historical June 2015
S&S up to that point (and doing it very well).
May 2015

April 2015
Reply
Kull says:
March 2015
December 28, 2014 at 10:12 pm
February 2015
I love these histories too. I grew up on sword and sorcery. I remember rifling through my father’s massive
collection for the classics. Then at Waldenbooks I would see the same stuff but the trippy seventies covers were January 2015
replaced by more Vallejo-esque tanned, gym-rat barbarians. Then the fantasy door stoppers rolled in. I read
Sword of Shannara and remember vaguely enjoying it but it left no lasting impression whatsoever. Then December 2014
Dragonlance. Not the worst way to spend a lazy afternoon but I am thankful my dad was there to suggest better
November 2014

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stuff, as I have mentioned before.
October 2014
I remember standing in a store, a game store actually, holding Dragonlance, volume 7 or 8, perhaps, and
thinking, screw this, I’m keeping the 4.95 and going back to the archives for some Leiber. The long series model September 2014
did well for them for a while but I think they rode that horse to death, relying on one kind of reader for sales.
August 2014
Things haven’t improved. Not that I am against epic fantasy. Just a bit tired of it. ATOB 2 will scratch that itch
when its finally out. July 2014

June 2014
Reply
Jeffro says:
May 2014
December 29, 2014 at 3:03 am

April 2014
Dragonlance was just godawful.
March 2014

Reply
February 2014
JD says:
December 28, 2014 at 11:30 pm

For decades, classic titles were kept in print. The idea was to sell smaller but steady numbers of your Heinlein, Categories
Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov etc. Titles were allowed to lapse.
Appendix N
Thor Power Tool Company vs Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 1979. That’s why.
Appendix X

Art
Reply
Angus Trim says:
December 29, 2014 at 12:04 am
Authors

When it came time for me to pretend I was a writer, there wasn’t much modern stuff that would work for Before the Big Three
inspiration for a swords and boots fantasy.
Black Gate
Had to go back to Glen Cook’s first three “Black Company” books, really.
Book Review
Conan and the Grey Mouser was what inspired me when younger. But as this kind of fantasy declined, both in
quality and quantity, it’s not that easy to find anything to use as an inspiration. Comics

I wound up going to other genres for some of what I felt I needed. Comment

Louis L’Amour, for instance, for things like the tempo and duration of a fight scene………. Computer Games

Fiction
Reply
Hunsdon says: From the Editor
December 29, 2014 at 5:12 am
Game Design
I just think it’s the neatest thing of the year (and the year is just about over) that I’m reading an Angus
Trim comment here. Games

GURPS

Reply Illustration
Daniel says:
December 29, 2014 at 12:50 am
Interview
One of the Jeff Sutton books has gunfights on the moon, and they don’t read correctly, even though they may be
Just Released
fairly accurate from a physics perspective.
Movies
The art of an action scene is in the blend of accuracy (i.e. You can’t auto-fire a long bow, you can’t cock a glock,
you can’t fire dual M-60s from the hip) with art and rhythm that somehow even better captures the accuracy and News
enjoyment.
Otherscience Stories
I’ve noticed a recent tendency (particularly in the Warhammer books) to “stack” fights, where the good guy goes
from weaker to progressively harder foes in a fight, kind of like what happens in most video games. It actually Policy
reads better to occasionally follow a very difficult and intricate conflict with a tough guy, followed by a short
Production
sentence dismissing weaker foes, and so on.

This relates to the evaporation of the sword & sorcery backlist in that those stories were co-opted by other Promotions
publishing interests in the 1990s. Publications
Interesting: the elimination/reduction of book inventories were followed by a period of entryist takeover which
Pulp Revolution
resulted in the elimination of a number of genres from popular sale. These entryists were once a hard target,
because no one even knew that there was an argument to be made. Sensor Sweep

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1/23/2018 The Mid-1980s Paperback Sword and Sorcery Extinction Event – castaliahouse.com
Now they are soft, and the sentences describing their demise are becoming much, much shorter. Short Fiction
Today any hero with a keyboard has access to an Enchanted Ebook of Antiensorcellment. You just need to…
Submissions
wield it.
Superversive

Reply
Tabletop Games
RM says:
December 31, 2014 at 6:02 pm Top Book Bloggers

The Dark Border books by Paul Edwin Zimmer …. Traveller

Who owns the rights to these? Uncategorized

I wonder if Castalia could get them and re-publish. War

PS: How about a post about the Dark Border books and/or Paul Edwin Zimmer>
Wargames

Reply
Morgan says:
December 31, 2014 at 9:14 pm

I have given thought to doing a post on Paul Edwin Zimmer. I have been tracking down his
shorter fiction. A collection of his short fiction would probably just fill up a book.

Reply
Massimorgon says:
February 27, 2017 at 3:15 pm

I know I am some two years late but republishing PEW would be great! And there is
“The King Who Was of Old” the Fifth Novel from the Dark Border Universe, that I
dream to see published one day!

Reply
C. Dean Andersson says:
May 21, 2016 at 11:51 pm

Great article. Interesting to me because in the mid-1980s I wrote a sword and sorcery trilogy about Bloodsong,
the name of a Viking-like warrior woman who stood against the minions of the Norse Death Goddess Hel to save
her daughter and all Life on Earth. The “Hel Trilogy” was written as mass market paperback originals for the
Questar Books imprint of Popular Library/Warner Books. I wrote them under my pen name of “Asa Drake.”
Questar was just starting up at the time. The late Brian Thomsen was the editor who championed my sword and
sorcery. He described the books as being about “a female barbarian.” He told me there was a hold-out on the
editorial committee who did not want the books for Questar. He also said that he waited until a day that person
was absent to bring the books up for a vote of the committee in order to get them accepted. Brian then got Boris
Vallejo to do the original art for the covers. The first novel, Warrior Witch of Hel, was written in ’84-’85, the 2nd
and 3rd in ’85 and ’86, Death Riders of Hel and Werebeasts of Hel. The books were reprinted as trade
paperbacks in 2000 by Hawk Books with the Vallejo covers but under new titles, Warrior Witch, Warrior Rebel,
and Warrior Beast, and under my name (C. Dean Andersson). They were translated into Russian and published
in Russia by Alpha-Kniga in 2002 with cover art by Ilya Voronin, in hardback editions. All three novels are now
available in an ebook omnibus called HELX3 (HEL X 3) published by Event Horizon, available on Amazon and
from Baen ebooks, and elsewhere. The HELX3 editions are revised and expanded “author’s cut” versions which I
plan to eventually break back out into three separate books and make available in both ebooks and versions. I
am currently (2016) writing a 4th book in the series with the working title, Valkyries of Hel.

Reply
Stan Wagenaar says:
October 16, 2016 at 2:04 pm

I recommend Andersson’s Hel trilogy for anyone looking for good S&S with a Norse twist. I have the
original 3 paperbacks, plus the ebook omnibus collection…

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