Here's the cleanest distinction anyone has drawn in fantasy: epic fantasy is about saving the world. Sword and sorcery is about making rent.
The heroes are mercenaries, thieves, and people between jobs. The stakes are personal — a debt, a grudge, a score, getting out of a city alive. Nobody is prophesied. The magic is dangerous and usually somebody else's. And the stories tend to be shorter and more episodic, because they were born in pulp magazines where a writer got paid by the story rather than the trilogy.
Fritz Leiber coined the term in 1961, when the field went looking for a name for what Robert E. Howard had been doing thirty years earlier. It's the older tradition — Conan predates Frodo by six years — and it's been quietly running underneath the epics ever since, periodically surging back when readers get tired of chosen ones.
Sixteen books, from the pulps to the current wave.
Where sword and sorcery began
The four writers who built the tradition. All of these are short, fast, and considerably better written than the genre's reputation suggests.
By
Robert E. Howard
The original Conan stories collected in the order Howard wrote them, restored to his original texts rather than the later edited versions. Howard was writing fast for pulp magazines and it shows in the best way — propulsive, atmospheric, and far more melancholy about civilization than the muscle-bound movie version suggests. He was twenty-six.
The first Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser collection, introducing the barbarian and the small-time thief who became fantasy's great double act. Leiber coined the term "sword and sorcery" and his Lankhmar is the direct ancestor of every grimy fantasy city since. Wittier and stranger than Howard, and the pair's friendship is the real subject.
By
Michael Moorcock
A sickly albino emperor sustained by drugs and a sword that devours the souls of everyone he cares about. Moorcock wrote Elric explicitly as an anti-Conan in the 1960s, and the modern appetite for compromised protagonists starts here. Short, strange, and genuinely nasty.
Andre Norton was the first woman to win the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America, and Witch World is her most influential creation — a world of feuding powers, border wars, and witches whose magic depends on what they're willing to give up. Norton published under a male-sounding name for the same reason C.L. Moore used initials, and outsold nearly all of them anyway. Her books run in loose cycles rather than one strict sequence, so this works as an entry point despite the number on the spine.
Fantasy heists and criminal enterprises
The subgenre's most commercially successful modern branch — crews, cons, and jobs that go wrong. If you like caper films, start here rather than with the pulps.
A gang of con artists work an elaborate long game against the nobility of a Venice-like city, and then something considerably worse than the nobility takes an interest in them. Sharp, funny, and the best pure heist novel in fantasy. The flashback structure does real work.
Six criminals, one impossible break-in, and a crew you're attached to before the job even starts. The most purely entertaining fantasy novel of the last decade and the most reliable book on this page for converting someone who claims not to like fantasy.
By
Megan Whalen Turner
A thief is hauled out of a royal prison to steal a legendary object for a king's scholar. Deceptively simple, written for younger readers, and the setup for one of the most quietly brilliant series in fantasy — the sequels reframe everything. Do not read anything about the ending.
A thief deep in debt to his guild is press-ganged into escorting a knight across a country wrecked by a war with goblins. Narrated in a voice good enough to carry the whole book, and much funnier than the premise promises. Buehlman performed on stage before he wrote novels and you can hear it in every line.
Mercenaries and swords for hire
People who fight for money and the trouble that follows. Grimmer than the heists, and closest in spirit to what Howard and Leiber were actually doing.
By
Nicholas Eames
A retired mercenary band reunites for one last job, in a world where mercenary companies are treated exactly like touring rock bands — managers, groupies, arena bookings, the lot. The joke sustains an entire novel without thinning, and the material about aging friendships underneath is genuinely moving.
By
Jonathan French
A company of half-orcs riding war hogs and patrolling a wasteland nobody else wants. Crude and violent on the surface, and considerably smarter about loyalty, belonging, and who gets treated as disposable than its opening chapters let on. Won the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off on its way into print.
A war hero, now unwelcome at home because he's gay, is dragged out of retirement for a family errand that turns into something far worse. Morgan came from science fiction and brought a noir sensibility with him — brutal, angry, and pointed about who gets celebrated and who gets tolerated.
Published in 1954, the same year as The Fellowship of the Ring, and the road fantasy didn't take: Norse, fatalistic, and utterly without comfort. A changeling, a cursed blade, and a doom nobody escapes. Anderson was twenty-eight and writing in the grim register that took the rest of the genre fifty years to catch up to.
The modern wave
Sword and sorcery is having a revival, and this is the current end of it — shorter books, personal stakes, and a lot more range in who gets to carry the sword.
A princess sets out to kill her sister's abusive husband, accompanied by a dog built from bones, a reluctant fairy godmother, and a demon-possessed hen. Won the Hugo for Best Novel. A quest narrative with an entirely unglamorous heroine, and Kingfisher makes genuinely grim material read like a comfort book.
A practical widow inherits a sword containing a bound warrior who appears whenever it's drawn, and the two set off across country to sort out a legal dispute. Funnier and lighter than Nettle & Bone, and one of the most purely likeable books on this page.
A girl is taken into a convent that trains assassins, poisoners, and fighters alongside its nuns. Lawrence in a much more disciplined register than his early work, and the training-school structure is used properly — the friendships are the point.
A swordswoman and the necromancer she despises are summoned to a decaying palace where the heirs of eight houses are being tested, and then people start dying. Technically science fiction, entirely sword-and-sorcery in spirit, and written in a voice unlike anything else in the genre. Divisive and fanatically loved.
Where to go from here
For the full spread, our 50 best fantasy books of all time is sorted by subgenre. If the mercenary end is what appeals, the best grimdark fantasy books takes the same material considerably further into the dark.
And since sword and sorcery is fundamentally about people operating outside the law, our list of the best pirate books covers the same impulse with more salt water.
