A Look at Charles R. Saunders and "Sword & Soul"

So, I've been reading lately about Charles R. Saunders, the black author of sword-and-sorcery fiction, and man .... poor guy. If there's been ever a case of someone being born about 30 years too soon, it's Saunders.

Usually, when people mention about black S&S authors, they mean Samuel R. Delany. This makes sense. As a queer, Marxist deconstructionist, Delany established his street cred first by writing SF before wading into the "gutters" (ahem) of S&S fantasy. (Sidenote: are there any black fantasy writers except maybe Jemisin who didn't first establish their street cred by writing SF?). Although I personally never much cared for Delany's writing style or Nevèrÿon books, which are basically what happens when someone who holds a subgenre in contempt decides to write in that subgenre, it is true that academic critics love Delany .... especially critics who hate S&S themselves. So if they mention Saunders at all, which is rare, it's usually just as a brief aside in some history of the fantasy genre.

But I'm adding some "sword and soul" to my course module on S&S, and I'm so glad I did. For one thing, it's enlightening to read why Saunders considers Robert E. Howard, despite his flaws, as his favorite writer -- pure action, plain and simple. But Saunders also has a fascinating (if sad) relationship to the fantasy publishing industry of the 1980s. My information comes primarily from a few sources:

• "Adding To The Gumbo Mix: Charles R. Saunders" (interview by Amy Harlib)
• "A Sword and Soul Primer" (article by Milton Davis)
• "The Father of Sword and Soul" (article by Sverre C.O. Tidemand)
• "The Cimmerian Interview" (interview with Steve Tompkins)
• "Revisiting Die, Black Dog" (a famous fanzine article by Saunders on black characters in S&S)

There's a few others, but I've forgotten their links. Anyway, long story short, Saunders started writing stories about Imaro -- "a brother who could kick Tarzan's ass" -- in the 1970s, and actually got published relatively quickly. Then Lin Carter included an Amaro story in a Year's Best Fantasy, and DAW Books quickly offered Saunders a book contract. 

A storybook start to a fantasy writing career, right? You betcha ... and that's what Saunders thought, at least until he saw the Ken Kelly cover that DAW commissioned for the first Imaro novel:

This is basically "Tarzan with a sun tan," as Saunders says, and he's right. Imaro is barely black, has long flowing hair, and his face looks a bit like Pennywise the Clown. Worse, that tagline "The Epic Novel of a Jungle Hero" wasn't DAW's first proposed tagline. The original was The Epic Novel of a Black Tarzan, which irritated Saunders because Imaro is explicitly an anti-Tarzan. And guess who else that tagline irritated? The Edgar Rice Burroughs estate, who threatened to sue DAW if they used "Tarzan" on their marketing.

So that caused delays, and the book sold poorly. Saunders's next two Imaro novels didn't sell well either, and eventually DAW pulled the plug. In due time, Saunders came to have a mature view of the situation:

I can't really hold a grudge against DAW for dropping me back in 1985. They took a chance on publishing an unknown writer with a new idea, and it just didn't pan out commercially. It took me a long time to realise that, but now I have, and I'm moving on.

That seems fair enough to me, and it's a situation all too frequent with good, original authors. In the mid-2000s, moreover, Night Shade Books reissued revised versions of the Imaro novels, but that didn't pan out either. The fantasy world, it seems, just wasn't ready for a black fantasy hero, and Saunders notes that black-owned bookstores were just as bad at stocking his books as white-owned bookstores. 

However, it is the covers for Saunders's other two mid-1980s DAW books that I really want to talk about. As we saw, their first cover sucked hardcore, but illustrator James Gurney did the next two, and Saunders loved them both. The cover for The Quest for Cush (1984) is thoroughly bad-ass. Check this one out:

Holy shit, right? Here you got Imaro, looking like you done gone pissed off Idris Elba, and the whole set-up just paves the way for some crazy S&S shenanigans. 

But wait ... did I say that cover was bad-ass? Sorry, I spoke too soon .... here's the cover for The Trail of Bohu (1985):

Daaamn. This is awesome and hilarious. Now, granted, I have my doubts that anybody, however heroic, can ride zebras or rhinoceroses, two of the most aggressive animals on the African savannah (although apparently rhinos in captivity are somewhat like docile puppy dogs), but how can anyone consider this cover as anything other than Grade A fun? 

Alas, these covers sadly failed into catapult Saunders to prominence, but the whole situation is an illuminating one. In a previous post, I noted how Del Rey Books dominated the 1980s fantasy publishing landscape, and DAW Books was one of those publishers being left in their dust. In their defense, DAW did carve out a comfortable niche for themselves by issuing series character books, and it took some progressive cojones to take a risk on "sword-and-soul". It's interesting, too, that they explicitly tried marketing these books as Black Tarzan novels, at least until the Burroughs Estate threatened lawyers. Perhaps it was the right idea, but the wrong moment. One wonders, though, what the del Reys could have done with Saunders, and for him.