Major S&S Writers
Masters – and a mistress – of the genre

Robert E. Howard

Robert Ervin Howard, who published about 160 stories in various genres in his tragically short career, is best known for his heroic-fantasy tales, beginning with “Spear and Fang” (Weird Tales 6 1, July 1925). Howard created many of the first true S&S characters – King Kull, Bran Mak Morn, Turlogh Dubh, Cormac Mac Art of Ireland, and Solomon Kane – but the S&S character for whom he’s best remembered is Conan the Cimmerian (better, if less accurately, known as Conan the Barbarian).

Clark Ashton Smith

Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) was a poet, an illustrator, a sculptor, and one of the “big three” authors to appear in Weird Tales alongside H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. For most of his sixty-eight years, Smith lived in a small cabin in the woods near Auburn, California.

Smith’s poetry consciously continued the French traditions imported to the American West Coast by Ambrose Bierce and George Sterling.

The short stories he wrote during a brief period the 1930s, encouraged by H.P. Lovecraft, developed the Decadent style and sensibility to their furthest extreme. Smith’s vocabulary is extraordinarily rich and his stories are far removed from the mundane world.

The “Dying Earth” scenario of his Zothique tales, beginning with “The Empire of the Necromancers” (1932), allowed his imagination its most extravagant expression and his stories set there remain the ultimate examples of Decadent dark fantasy.  This was the longest of Smith’s story cycles, which consumed most of his writing time during the 1930s.

Smith’s other tales fall into several series, some of which have an S&S flavour:

• Averoigne – This fictional province in mediæval France – corresponding geographically with Auvergne (Allier, Cantal, Haute Loire, and Puy de Dôme) – provides a scene for Smith to explore several “non-fantastic” areas that the rest of his work does not: the juxtapositions of animal and man; religion and science; the divine and the mortal.
• Hyperborea – These tales are Smith’s major contribution to the Cthulhu Mythos. Hyperborea is a world where Tsathoggua still dwells and large flesh eating worms bring icy oblivion. The tales have a harder edge than Lovecraft’s own.
• Xiccarph – A brace of stories in which the omnipotent sorcerer Maal Dweb tries – but fails – to alleviate a sullen ennui by playing with lesser beings. 
• Poseidonis – A short series set in “the last isle of foundering Atlantis”.
• Mars – A setting closer to Zothique or the Mercury of Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros than Burroughs’s Barsoom.
• Light romantic fiction – Not  a cycle as such, but thematically related.

Smith’s stories were initially reprinted from the pulp magazines in the Arkham House collections Out of Space and Time (1942), Lost Worlds (1948), The Abominations of Yondo (1960), Tales of Science and Sorcery (1964), and Other Dimensions (1970).

Four series were separated out in four collections issued in Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy series: Zothique (1970), Hyperborea (1971),  Xiccarph (1972), and Poseidonis (1973). The first two were given definitive form by Necronomicon Press in Tales of Zothique (1995) and The Book of Hyperborea (1996), which used – as far as possible – unexpurgated texts.

A selection of his stories – including the Zothique tales marked † in the table above – has been recently republished in the UK in an omnibus edition, The Emperor of Dreams (Orion/Gollancz 2002). All works not currently available in print can be found online at The Eldritch Dark.

CAS Resources

C. L. Moore

Catherine Lucille Moore (1911–1987) was born in Indianapolis and became a leading author of fantasy and sf for Weird Tales in the 1930s.

After her marriage to Henry Kuttner in 1940, she concentrated on writing science fiction, usually in collaboration with Kuttner, under various pseudonyms: Lewis Padgett, and many others.

Moore’s Jirel of Joiry stories, beginning with “The Black God’s Kiss” (1934 Weird Tales), introduced the first notable S&S heroine: a yellow-eyed redhead for whom the supernatural holds no terror, who unflinchingly walks into a haunted castle, across the shifting realm of an evil sorceress, and into Hell itself…

… Jirel of Joiry!

These stories were later collected in Jirel of Joiry (Ace 1969), also published in hardback as Black God’s Shadow (Donald M. Grant 1977).

The collection has also been published in many foreign language editions; this Spanish edition (Anaya 1996; ISBN 84-207-6968-1) has a particularly fine portrait of Jirel by Pablo Torrecilla.

Jirel paved the way for many other S&S heroines who ranged from empowered feminists to (maybe too often!) male wish-fulfilling dominatrices.

All five Jirel tales, together with Moore’s Northwest Smith sf stories, have recently been republished in the UK in an omnibus edition, Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams (Orion/Gollancz 2002) (right).

CLM (and HK) Resources

Fritz Leiber

In the Swords series, beginning with “Two Sought Adventure” (1939), Fritz Leiber created two of the best-loved S&S heroes: Fafhrd – a tall broadsword-wielding barbarian (loosely based on Leiber himself) – and the Gray Mouser – a small, mercurial, dagger-toting thief (based on Leiber’s friend Harry Otto Fischer).

Poul Anderson

Poul Anderson (1926-2001) is best know as a writer of science fiction, achieving fame in the period between the end of WWII and the rise of the New Wave. Between 1947 and his death in 2001, Anderson published hundreds of stories and dozens of novels.

The Nordic fatalism of his Scandanavian descent shows in his bleak S&S tale, The Broken Sword (novel, 1954).

In 1971 Anderson revised his book and weakened it, but the original text has recently been republished in the UK – The Broken Sword (Orion/Gollancz 2002) – offset directly from the 1954 edition.

Scafloc, a human child kidnapped and raised by the elves,  wields the cursed sword Tyrfing in a Dark-Ages England racked by elf/troll wars, and dies a grim death.

Anderson’s elves are dreamy, noble creatures but – unlike Tolkien’s elves – they have a passion for battle, wine, and debauchery. Michael Moorcock ascribes to this book, “an atmosphere in common with the best 40s noir movies, themselves a reaction to the overblown romantic rhetoric of Nazism.”

His other notable “heroic-fantasy” novel – Three Hearts and Three Lions (1961) – is removed from true S&S by its modern hero’s scientific rationalization of magic.

PA Resources

Michael Moorcock

Thirty years on Michael Moorcock not only found a label for this subgenre (courtesy of Leiber) but also gently subverted it with his Elric sequence, beginning with the novelette, “The Dreaming City” (Science Fantasy #47 June 1961). The protagonist, Elric of Melniboné, is a direct parody of Howard’s Conan.

Karl Edward Wagner

Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994), although better known as a horror writer later in his life, was firmly in the S&S camp during the 1970s with his series about a moody hero called Kane.

Wagner’s Kane is a fabled warrior, without equal, a giant of a man.

It was a man, almost too large for a man, clad in mail, leather breeks and high boots, and a flapping black cloak. His long red hair was torn by the wind despite the rain. His eyes seemed to glow with cold blue fire in the burst of lightning.

― “The Gothic Touch” (1994)

The three published novels were gathered in Gods in Darkness (omnibus, Night Shade Books 2002). A companion volume, The Midnight Sun (collection, Night Shade Books 2003), includes all of the shorter Kane stories and poetry – including “The Gothic Touch” (1994, Elric: Tales of the White Wolf), in which Kane meets Elric of Melniboné – together with a fragment of In the Wake of the Night and a non-fiction essay, “The Once and Future Kane”.

Wagner also wrote one of the better Conan pastiches, The Road of Kings (novel, 1979).

KEW Resources

M. John Harrison

Mike Harrison’s major contribution to fantasy is the Viriconium sequence. The first novel, The Pastel City (1971), at least can qualify as a dying-earth S&S adventure. The novel rejoices in characters like Tomb, “the nastiest dwarf that ever hacked the hands off a priest”, whose rotten malevolence counterpoints tegeus Cromis’s lugubrious musings on the nature of reality.

Later books, however, veer between overt science fantasy, gritty “historical” fiction, and magic realism.