I was reading Lin Carter’s
extraordinary little book on the history of fantasy literature, Imaginary
Worlds (1973), and came across an impassioned defense of “Sword &
Sorcery” literature, by which he means the subgenre of fantasy dedicated to
Conan-like exploits in antideluvian worlds. Responding to charges that Carter and other
practitioners of Sword & Sorcery are merely writing the same thing over and
over again, he writes: "Must a school of writing
evolve? I wonder why. Evolution implies a change into something
else. But mere change for the sake of
change, experiment for the sake of experiment—the apparent aesthetic of the New
Wave school of science fiction writing...seems to a rather backwards looking
conservative like myself a pointless exercise in futility. Must the sonnet sequence evolve into some
form other than that of the sonnet sequence, or opera into something that is
not opera? Must Sword & Sorcery turn
itself into something radically different?" (146)
