Over on The Pulp.Net I just gave Bill Lampkin the okay to put up an article I did back in 2014 for his zine The Pulpster — a good one, if I say so myself (hell, even definitive), on the creation of the Sword-and-Sorcery characters Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by Fritz Leiber (and Harry Otto Fischer).
Bill has one of those new-fangled estimated time counts to read it in, at 19 minutes. Come on. Doesn’t anyone stop to think Deep Thoughts when going through something like this piece any more?
The only point of information to note is that Bill steadfastly employs “sword-and-sorcery” — lower case S’s — when referring to that genre created by Robert E. Howard.
And that was the usage when Fritz Leiber initially coined the term.
But back in the days when Leo Grin’s The Cimmerian ruled the Howardian roost, we decided to standardize the usage as Sword-and-Sorcery, capping those S’s.
Showier.
Makes for a better visual transition to the short form S&S.
I told Bill he could do as he liked, but expect me to correct it whenever the article appears in a collected essays.
Now, whenever you have 19 minutes to spare. . . .
