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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MoogleEmpMog" data-source="post: 3315824" data-attributes="member: 22882">Some people want the literary equivalent of GURPS.  Others want the literary equivalent of Feng Shui.Mr. Anderson's comments on travel stick out as colossal examples of missing the point, IMO. Unless the horse or ship will play a role in the story, it's exactly like the dotted line in an Indiana Jones movie (and the literary equivalent in the pulp fiction on which the Indy movies were based).  I'm sure scouring the ink-scarred pages of pulp magazines would unearth a treasure trove of ships waiting in harbor for favorable winds - because the story was better served by having the hero trapped in port rather than roving the high seas.  By the same token, horses ridden to exhaustion - because the hero needed to be stranded in the wilderness to discover a grotto brimming over with prehuman deviltry, or caught by his pursuers to decide his fate in bloody constraint.If a sword and sorcery story leaves you with time and breath to consider its implausibility or inaccuracy, either you're the wrong audience for sword and sorcery, or it's a poor sword and sorcery story.  The genre is all about pacing and broad-stroke characterization, giving you a snapshot of an incident that is not realistic but hyper-real, gripping and breathless.As to the literary mertis of most such yarns, I couldn't say.  Robert E. Howard, at least, was a brilliant stylist and imbued his short stories with multiple thematic layers.  However, I would no more condemn even lesser lights for failing to share insight on the human condition than I would the filmmakers who gave us Die Hard - or Indiana Jones, for that matter.  If at the end of a sword and sorcery story I'm left mouth wide at the badassitude of the hero or the imagery of the climactic scene, I'll consider it well done.  If I'm nodding appreciatively at the level of historical detail... I'll put down the bad sword and sorcery I'm reading and pick up a Gary Jennings historical novel which is guaranteed to be more accurate, more detailed and, coming as it does from another brilliant stylist, better written.</blockquote>

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