Helllooo!

This week I’ve been contacted about a Kickstarter regards New Edge Sword and Sorcery Magazine which closes this weekend and intrigued Womble that I am I asked Oliver from New Edge to tell us more

How do you want to tempt us to read New Edge Sword and Sorcery?

Well, you can check out issue #0 for free in digital formats! Just head over to the website for links to that, as well as soft & hardcover formats sold at cost (aka cheap as possible). It’s a very affordable magazine to try out. But what about what’s inside?

Each issue features new S&S tales by contemporary authors, non-fiction articles including in-depth interviews, essays, historical literary profiles, and book reviews, and we pair just about all of it with new B&W illustrations, as well as our original painted covers! Everything is made entirely by humans, guaranteed.

New Edge Sword & Sorcery takes the genre’s virtues of its outsider protagonists, thrilling energy, wondrous weirdness, and a large body of classic tales, then alloys inclusivity, mutual creator support, a positive fan community, and enthusiastic promotion of new works into the mix.

What makes you love sword and sorcery?

I love everything S&S scholar Brian Murphy lists as common qualities of the genre, so I may as well share my own condensed version of his definition:

Sword & Sorcery tells short, episodic tales with historical and horror genre influences, of proactive, outsider protagonists with personal motivations, often facing dark and dangerous magic.

Already, I want to expand, or argue with, this definition! The discussions of such things never truly end, as no definition can encompass every aspect or please every reader. However, I think this helps get across how Sword & Sorcery is more specific than most of us think.

I should mention that a big part of why Brian’s definition is my favourite is because he’s not saying you have to have all seven of these things in your story or it doesn’t count. Oh lord, save me from the tediousness of gatekeeping!

What Brian says in his book, and I feel the same way, is that these are very common aspects of Sword & Sorcery stories and that if there’s enough of them in a story for you the reader to feel like you’re reading S&S then….congrats, you’re reading S&S!

Which brings me back to another big part of why I love S&S, it’s far more flexible than you think. The grand-daddy of it all, Robert E. Howard, draped S&S like a cloak around other genres, telling locked room mysteries, Western frontier style tales, pirate tales, and more all while making them feel cut from the cloth of this distinct fantasy sub-genre. You can just do so much with Sword & Sorcery and still have it feel like S&S! This is a big motivation behind my own writing in the genre, and creating the possibility space that is New Edge Sword & Sorcery.

Is Sword and Sorcery still relevant in 2023? How does it now deal with issues of diversity and inclusiveness?

Is it relevant? Sword & Sorcery was born in the 1930’s, an era of gross financial inequality and rising fascism, so uhhhhh…

Joking aside, the genre deals in timeless themes so I’d say it never stops being relevant, only its popularity fluctuates.

There’s no one central S&S authority dictating to all the authors, artists, and editors what to do – thank goodness! – so I can’t say how it deals with issues of diversity and inclusiveness, only how I do. Even there, there’s no One Perfect Way. Every editor and author I speak with has their own particular, evolving methods to address this side of publishing.

I feel it ultimately comes down to being thoughtful, staying open-minded, staying willing to change, listening to people from other backgrounds than yourself, and being intentional. If you don’t want your characters in your story, or your table of contents in your magazine, to be homogenous then you need to take a note from S&S protagonists and be proactive about it.

It is all too easy to say “Well, I’m a good person, I won’t mess up.”, then accidentally slide into what feels most comfortable, leaving your ingrained biases unexamined, and then hey oops it’s all or mostly the same kind of people on the page, behind the keyboard, and in the fandom that have been dominating genre writing in general for over a hundred years.

Meanwhile S&S in particular has so much potential for expansion in this regard. I often say it’s a genre where the protagonists say to the world “You don’t tell me who I am, I tell you who I am!”. Just look at the original S&S fella himself, Conan the Cimmerian. An outsider from a far northern country who is branded a barbarian by all he encounters, he evolves as a character and even goes on to become kind of the most “civilized” nation in the known world, yet never assimilates, never sacrifices his identity, and is even saved at times by being true to who he is.

To me, that all feels terribly relevant when it comes to the issues of diversity and inclusiveness in genre writing.

What would future issues have to offer potential readers? What is the magazine voice you’re aiming for?

Well, some cool stuff about the two issues we're trying to fund includes:

• A commitment for a new, original story from S&S legend Michael Moorcock! Gosh, it still feels wild to say that.. We also have Canadian horror master Gemma Files, Margaret Killjoy, and Prashanth Srivatsa, in our roster of 14 fiction authors.

• One of our stories comes to us from the vibrant Spanish language S&S scene south of the border - the U.S. border, that is (I'm a Canuck). It'll be translated into English, and if we hit our top stretch goal then we'll be translating all of our English stories for a Spanish ePub edition of our magazine's new issues.

As far as I know, we're the only S&S magazine publishing translated fiction.

• Also as far as I know, we're the only S&S magazine with an intentional approach to inclusion, trying to make the genre's fandom and pool of published creators not only larger, but more diverse.

• Most of our stretch goals are pay raises for contributors. We believe strongly in paying creatives!

• We are the only S&S magazine publishing in luxurious hardcover format, as well as softcover and digital.

• We're spoiled for high quality artists. Here's samples from just a few of the artists who've committed to the project(see below for sone examples) :

As I write this we’re working toward our first stretch goal, which will DOUBLE the amount of interior illustrations!

Where can we find out more?

The Kickstarter! I mean, there’s also the website, and our socials (Twitter, Insta, Facebook), but really people should hit up the Kickstarter campaign.
Hi to the link below for ghe Kickstarter campaign

https://youtu.be/hLbLTnNdebg

If there was one book, not your own, that you wish you could get everyone to read what woud it be and why?

I would recommend Brian Murphy’s Flame & Crimson: A History of Sword & Sorcery. It’s a great way to learn about the genre, discover new-to-you authors, and just explode your to-be-read pile!