JACK VANCE: VISIONS OF A DYING EARTH
After the last few S&S works of the early 1940s, such as “Dragon Moon” by Henry Kuttner and the short-lived Unknown, Sword & Sorcery lost steam. With Robert E. Howard dead for five or more […]
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NORVELL W. PAGE: WAN TENGRI – PRESTER JOHN
While Fritz Leiber was creating a boisterous style of Sword & Sorcery based upon E. R. Eddison and James Branch Cabell, Norvell W. Page wrote two novels that seem on the surface to be closer […]
FRITZ LEIBER: SWORD & SORCERY GROWS UP
In 1939 Farnsworth Wright began a move away from Sword & Sorcery. With Robert E. Howard dead, he no longer championed the dark fantasy tale, publishing Henry Kuttner’s Elak as the last. This meant that […]
SWORD & SORCERY BECOMES A SUB-GENRE: HENRY KUTTNER’S ELAK AND PRINCE RAYNOR
Henry Kuttner deserves our thanks. If things had been left to Clifford Ball, Sword & Sorcery would have fizzled out in the pages of Weird Tales. Ball, who we know very little about, was the […]
Moonlight and Manners: A Review of Goblin Moon by Teresa Edgerton
There was already awareness that a new strain of fantasy had developed when Donald G. Keller first labeled it “fantasy of manners” in his article “The Manner of Fantasy,” published in the April 1991 issue […]
NOT QUITE SWORD & SORCERY: EARLY FANTASY
Robert E. Howard may have invented Sword & Sorcery with the first King Kull tale, but he was not the only author working with the raw materials of heroic fantasy. We have already mentioned C. […]
The James Allison Stories: Dreaming of the Past
Robert E. Howard produced several series: Solomon Kane, Kull of Valusia, Bran Mak Morn, and finally Conan the Cimmerian, all existing more or less in the same world at different times. In “Kings of the […]
The History of Fantasy, Part II: Barbarians and Elves and Jesus Figures and D20s
The nineteenth century closes with two books that will be imitated constantly for the next hundred years or so: Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. To a […]
Judging A Book By Its Cover (Art)
The old axiom about not judging a book by its cover notwithstanding, I am going to judge the merits of various book covers that wrapped editions of heroic fiction. This is not a scholarly article, […]
About Author
M. D. Jackson has been drawing since he could first hold a pencil. He has been writing for so long that he has, in fact, developed an alternate personality named Jack to handle the fiction.
His work has appeared in numerous magazines and on the front covers of many books as well as in the pages of Amazing Stories Magazine. You can also see a lot of it at his gallery.
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