From 1973 to 1981, SAGA produced five anthologies, edited by Carter and featuring the contributions of their members, under the series title Flashing Swords! The year 1974 saw the debut of Charles R. Saunders’s Imaro tales, which appeared first in the fanzine Dark Fantasy but, by way of Lin Carter’s Year’s Best Fantasy Stories (DAW Books, 1975), eventually found their way to publisher Donald A. Wolheim, who urged Saunders to publish them as a novel in 1981. Imaro was followed by The Quest for Cush (1984) and The Trail of Bohu (1985).

Then, in 1984, Marion Zimmer Bradley made a significant contribution to the field with her Sword and Sorceress anthology series. Feeling that, C. L. Moore excepted, the subgenre was dominated by men and typified by some fairly reprehensible attitudes toward and depictions of women, she produced twenty volumes (two published posthumously) of adventure tales featuring strong female protagonists and promoting such notable authors as Bradley herself, Glen Cook, Emma Bull, Charles R. Saunders, Charles de Lint, Pat Murphy, C. J. Cherryh, Jennifer Roberson, Mercedes Lackey, and many more. After Bradley’s death in 1999, the anthology series continued in a new volume edited by Diana L. Paxson (Sword and Sorceress XXI, DAW, 2004) and, recently, in two volumes from editor Elisabeth Waters (Norilana Books, 2007).

But, generally speaking, the last few decades was a time when sword and sorcery fiction was once again out of favor. The 1982 film Conan the Barbarian, which made Arnold Schwarzenegger a household name, spawned a sea of poorly executed sequels and imitations that had the effect of stigmatizing the subgenre’s image. Though its practitioners never entirely went away, the fantasy genre came to be dominated by the post-Tolkien variety of epic fantasy. At the short form, sword and sorcery fiction fell out of favor with the larger magazine venues, and the type of adventure fantasy that Robert E.