Current mood:	jubilant
Entry tags:	military fiction, neopulp manifesto, writing

Toys R Us - Military Sword & Sorcery is coming ("#### Harry Potter! Daddy, where's my axe?")
Xmas hurtles at us like a skateboarding troll trundling downhill - it's big, impressive, but to be viewed with a certain trepidation by those in its path. Everybody over 16 is impossible to buy for, so the entire Western world starts with the easy shopping, and descends on the toy shops.

Thus it was that this Sunday found me, like an alternate Odysseus with Penelope at the helm rather than back home doing needlepoint, negotiating the human currents of Toys R Us.

The adventure was perilous, but - for the would-be Sword and Sorcery author - the rewards of paternal and avuncular virtue were great. Look what I found...



This is what today's older children are playing with. If it's not Viking longships, it's violent siege warfare:


Even the Early Learning Centre, which would burn itself to the ground before offering toy modern soldiers, or guns, offers an awesome arsenal of Medieval heavy weaponry. A few £20 notes will buy your child a grim set-piece siege:


Blame the PC movement. Boys like violence. But guns are nasty, militarist phallo-centric totems of capitalist imperialism. Toy guns may be safer to play with than wooden swords - "Bang bang you're dead," rather than Whack! "Ouch! Waaaaa! My eye my eye" - but they're banned from the fashionable playroom and nursery, along with all the other modern war toys.

Swords, on the other hand... swords, axes, flails, maxes, catapults... are Romantic. Never mind that they are tools for up-close, blood-in-your face killing, to the doting parent they savour of a safe Fairy Tale world where everything is cosy and OK, and blades only ever clash, and never cleave through flesh, cracking bone and splitting internal organs like so much offal.

But, I was not overmuch concerned with the origins of this strange eruption of retro-violence in nursery. I was too busy rejoicing because, to my genre-sensitive eye, these toys are all Military Sword and Sorcery playsets.

The setting is definitely Fantasy, but you'll note a certain lack of bucolic woodland scenery, Wise Mentors, Young Boys With Special Powers Hampered Only By Their Angst, Mary Sue Princesses, and the pernicious Real Moral Conflicts Resolved by Playing Nicely Together.

What you do see is rampant exoticism - dragons and pirate ships - combined with swords and magic, all rolled into overt physical conflict.

In my culture we call this "Sword and Sorcery".

The twist is that it's not "Hero & Intrepid Band of Quirkily Mismatched Followers sneaking into Dark Lord's Mountain Fastness"; instead, it's "Heavy Metal Knights/Warriors/Vikings kick Dark Lord ass". One of the Playmobile castles even has a built in breach for those storming actions.


This is action on the unit and even operational level, a long way from Conan or Fafhrd & Grey Mouser. Sure, those one-man killing machines sometimes lead troops - or entire armies - but at heart they're footloose individualist warriors a zillion miles from The Plastic Knights of the Order of the Heavy Metal Imagery.

Really, this is Tolkien-the-military bits; all the stuff which looked good in the film, but in which the main characters had little agency. I think of this as "Sharpe's Ringwar".

So, when the cute kid turns 11 and tires of moulded plastic mayhem, what's he (let's be honest here, we're talking boys toys until the makers get around to adding some Amazon characters) going to read?

Warhammer books.

It's a shame. Not that there's anything wrong with tie-in novels - heck, I'd love to write some. But it would be nice to think that the main SF shelves had something to offer as well.

Modern Fantasy - with the exception of some Baen volumes - just doesn't often live up to those half-remembered childhood battles. Of the bestselling writers, only Mary Gentle and George RR Martin really have the hang of battles, or seem to understand their atavistic attraction.

Most other Fantasy writers use plenty of soldier characters, but we rarely see them leading troops; the author falls over themselves to whisk the soldier out of context and off on an solitary or small group adventure - it's almost a genre convention. The military background becomes a character trait, an excuse for being a good fighter, or - worse - a source of angst.

This will change. We've had - what? - 30 years of Fantasy authors contriving situations where a single hero, or motley party of mismatched comrades can Make a Difference and topple the Dark Lord. The One Fatal Weakness teeters on a knife edge between trope and cliche(http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html).

The genre will never be anything but individualistic, individuals will still make a difference - who the ##### wants to read about a character who has no agency, or ability to affect the story? But making a difference in a dangerous fantasy world requires leverage. Increasingly, that leverage will be several score doughty warriors at the hero's back.

You have been warned.

Watch this space.