Discussion about this post

User's avatar
John Skipp's avatar

Dear Alec --

God DAMN, this is an excellent piece! I don't even have a horse in this race. But everything you say about the differences that make all the difference rings 100% true for ANY genre that doesn't want to disappear up its own ass, inbred and tedious, its true glories forgotten.

Once again, I applaud you. This is the kind of thoughtful, razor-sharp kickass writing that might actually get me to pick up a sword-and-sorcery book again. But only if it was this fucking good.

Yer happy pal in the trenches,

Skipp

Expand full comment
Rawle Nyanzi's avatar

A lot of the “gatekeeper complaints” are an answer to an attitude that older stories or IP are not merely old-hat or full of now-overdone tropes, but so problematic that they should be buried (it gets even more toxic when it’s tied to demographics, such as treating a work as trash because a straight white male wrote it.) You see it with classic IP in particular; many new installments are deliberately made to upset older fans and “fix” an IP the new owners consider “broken.”

**That said,** I agree with your post. Genres do need to change to stay fresh; we can’t be writing the same thing all day every day. I do not oppose publications that seek to evolve beyond the foundations established by Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber; rather, I don’t think that older work and classic authors should be treated as problematic poison, even if you’re not fond of them and believe them to fall short. You did well to make a case for the older work, and I do believe that there is room for everyone since it’s not like Sword & Sorcery is tied to any one publication.

Expand full comment
74 more comments...

No posts