Griots
A Sword And Soul Anthology
Edited by
Milton J. Davis
And
Charles R. Saunders
MVmedia, LLC
Fayetteville, Georgia
Copyright © 2012 by MVmedia, LLC.
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MVmedia/Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology
Contents
The Soul In the Sword By Charles R. Saunders
A Gathering At The Meeting Tree By Milton J. Davis
Mrembo Aliyenaswa By Milton J. Davis
Awakening By Valjeanne Jeffers
Lost Son By Maurice Broaddus
In the Wake of Mist By Kirk A. Johnson
Skin Magic By Djeli A. Griot
The Demon in the Wall By Stafford L. Battle
The Belly of the Crocodile By Minister Faust
Changeling By Carole McDonnell
The General’s Daughter By Anthony Nana Kwamu
Sekadi's Koan by Geoffrey Thorne
The Queen, the Demon, and the Mercenary By Ronald T. Jones
Icewitch By Rebecca McFarland Kyle
The Leopard Walks Alone By Melvin Carter
The Three-Faced One By Charles R. Saunders
Griots Bios
To The Ancestors
A man alone cannot push a dhow into the sea.
―Swahili Proverb
The Soul In the Sword
By
Charles R. Saunders
A horizon, not a box. A frontier, not a niche. A wide space, not a narrow one. Those are some of the aspects of the branch of fantasy fiction that is coming to be known as “sword-and-soul.” The term has only been in existence for a few years. Full disclosure: I started the genre nearly forty years ago; and, much later, I coined its name.
I began writing for publication in an attempt to come up with a positive response to a problem I found troublesome. At that time, I was in my mid-20s, coming of age with my fellow members of the much-maligned baby-boom generation. A boom of another kind was going on then as well – or, more descriptively, a deluge of books either written by or derivative of Robert E. Howard, a pulp-magazine writer of the 1930s who had died during that decade.
Howard was the creator of the iconic character Conan of Cimmeria, and in the process he spawned a new kind of fantasy story, which was eventually dubbed “sword-and-sorcery.” Howard’s tales of Conan and other stalwarts such as Kull of Atlantis provided a heady brew of magic and mayhem, horror and heroism, warfare and wizardry. During his heyday, Howard’s readers couldn’t get enough of his output, which was prodigious. Catching the wave, others began to write similar stories, with varying degrees of success.
When the pulp era ended after World War II, Howard’s work and the genre he founded slipped into obscurity. It took a while for publishers of the paperback books that succeeded the pulps to pick up on the potential of sword-and-sorcery. When they finally did, Howard’s work received more attention after his death than it ever had during his short lifetime (He committed suicide at the age of 30 in 1936).
Enhanced through irresistibly eye-catching cover paintings by the great artist Frank Frazetta, paperbacks that were either “Conan” or “In the Tradition of Conan” became ubiquitous in bookstores and newsstands. I was in my late teens and early 20s when this publishing phenomenon occurred, and I was hooked from the get-go. I read all the sword-and-sorcery I could get my hands on. And my visits to the authors’ imaginary worlds were enjoyable – for the most part.
That lesser part, however, grated like a stone in my shoe. That stone was racism.
Robert E. Howard and his contemporaries were products of their time. Racism, in the form of white supremacy, was an integral part of the popular culture of the early decades of the twentieth century, and as such it pervaded pulp fiction. As a product of a later time during which the tenets of racism came under vigorous challenge, my enjoyment of fiction from past decades was often compromised by the racial attitudes I encountered in my reading. On some occasions, I simply let it slide. On others, I wrestled with resentment.
Then I discovered a way to resolve my dilemma.
Interest in African history and culture surged during the 1960s, and at the same time I was reading sword-and-sorcery and fantasy fiction, I was also absorbing heretofore-unknown information about a continent that was not as “dark” as its detractors made it out to be. And I realized that this non-stereotypical Africa of history and legend was just as valid a setting for fantasy stories as was the ancient and medieval Europe that served as the common default setting for everything from Conan to Lord of the Rings.
A character came into my head then: Imaro, a black man who could stand alongside mythical warrior-heroes like Beowulf and Hercules, as well as fictional creations such as Conan and Kull. Through determination of delusion – or perhaps both – I began to write stories about Imaro’s adventures in an alternate-Africa I called “Nyumbani,” from the Swahili word for “home.”
Though I didn’t know it at the time, my Imaro stories of the 1970s and novels of the 1980s were forming the foundation for sword-and-soul.
* * *
For a long time, I felt that I was alone in what I was doing ... kind of like a voice howling in the wilderness, only to hear Tarzan howl back. A few other writers, such as Mary C. Aldridge and Robert D. San Souci, placed African-themed fantasy stories in the same small-press magazines that published my work.
