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Blog Sword and Sorcery

A Reader’s Guide to Modern Sword and Sorcery Magazines

Back in the days of yore, some 100 years ago at this point, pulp fiction magazines were everywhere. Publications like Weird Tales and Unknown Worlds were the places to be for short-fiction writers hoping to make a living. Throughout the twentieth century, publications like these introduced the world to the likes of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, C.L. Moore, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and countless others. Without such authors, fantasy as we know it would not exist. While all sorts of genre fiction were represented among the pulps, I’ve always been most interested in Sword & Sorcery and…

Blog Sword and Sorcery

Forging New Nexuses: Gassing Up Genre Writers of the 1920s and 2020s

Citation abbreviation notes: During the desperate economic precarity of the Great Depression, some of the most celebrated early writers of horror, weird, and sword & sorcery fiction found, via the highly resilient U.S. postal service, the voices of other aspirant wordsmiths. These exchanges of letters not only took place in relatively public venues, such as featured letters in magazines, but also private correspondences. H. P. Lovecraft found himself as a kind of epistolary super-nexus, writing thousands of pages to dozens of organizations and individuals, often laudably with a spirit of attentiveness, generosity, and earnestness. S. T. Joshi, a leading Lovecraft…

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How ‘A Knight’s Tale’ Helped Me See My Own Journey

Some stories stay with you not because they are historically accurate or perfectly crafted, but because they remind you of something you believe about yourself. For me, Brian Helgeland’s 2001 film, A Knight’s Tale, is one of those stories. Beneath its mixture of medieval jousting in the subtle English countryside surrounded by castles, and rock-and-roll anachronisms (and everybody loves a bit of Queen, don’t they?) lies a narrative about identity, ambition, and the people who shape us along the way, not necessarily family but those close groups of friends that you wish were family. When I rewatch the film (oh,…