Interview with Christopher Ruocchio

Conducted by Alex Beecher

in Issue 160, May 2025

Christopher Ruocchio is mostly known as the author of the best-selling space opera series, Sun Eater. He has, however, also published two sword-and-sorcery short stories, with more to come. The Barrow King is available in Galaxy Magazine #263 and at https://parkersfiction.substack.com/p/the-barrow-king-guest-story-by-christopher, and The Pilgrim Road is available on Ruocchio’s Patreon. 

I found both to be evocative, with mellifluous prose that doesn’t compromise pace, a profound sense of Weird in the classic pulp tradition, and a hero, Adaman, about whom I wanted to learn more. So, I asked.

1. Who is Adaman, and why tell his stories? Conan famously approached Howard in a kind of vision; did Adaman make similar demands of you?

CR: Adaman is the hero of my little sword-and-sorcery side-project (it is also, for now at least, the name of the series as a whole). Thus far, I’ve written three short stories—two of which are really novelettes—and I plan to write at least two more before the end of the year, after I finish work on the final Sun Eater novel. Adaman is a wanderer, a hunter, a man alone—a man at war: with the world, with the gods, with his own history. By the time we meet him, he’s been wandering his world—it’s called Rök—for the better part of a century. His past is very obscure. He was a slave-soldier for the massive Qorin Empire. He was a famous cavalier in the fight against that same empire. He wields a famous blade (one so famous he dares not draw it for fear of calling too much attention to himself). He has a set of superhuman abilities—relics of a brutal childhood spent in the house of a sorceress—and a private quest. 

As for demands, Adaman made none! I regret that I am not gripped by visions like Howard was. Writing is straight craft for me. I wanted to write this sort of fantasy because I love it very much, because no one is really writing it anymore (in traditional publishing, at least), and because a couple people in publishing told me it was a bad idea and not commercial. I am a deeply contrarian person, and that last bit sealed it for me. I love proving people wrong. 

2. Sword and sorcery often inhabits a pseudo-historic setting—either by design or necessity. The world of your stories appears stranger, though, with hints of sword and planet. What does that choice do for you, and why make it?

CR: I think being free of our world’s cosmology and history grants me a certain freedom to be a bit weirder and more out there, and to focus on other things than the fantasy world’s connection to our own. Sun Eater is a text deeply in conversation not just with earlier sci-fi, but with our world and its ideas, philosophies, and themes. That connectedness gave me a lot of fun options and opportunities, but divorcing myself from our reality has a different set of challenges and rewards. Of course, no fantasy is ever really divorced from our world and age—not entirely—but this time I can’t rely our world to deepen my worldbuilding. I have to do a lot more heavy lifting for myself, and that’s exciting!

Rök is a very different world from ours, with a different cosmology, a different sky. There are no stars, as we learn in the second story. Why are there no stars? What does their absence mean for the culture of Rök itself? How does that inform daily life? What does it mean? Rök’s gods are not just real, but present—though a number of them are dead. 

If I’ve been criticized for anything in the past, it’s been for cleaving too close to my sources of inspiration. I had my reasons for doing that, but fair enough. I wanted to go a bit further afield this time, and push the weirdness up a bit—which in a way is also a return to fantasy’s weird roots. The distinctions between what we now think of as genres and subgenres just didn’t exist 100 years ago. 

Time to be weird again, I think.

3. You have boxed and fenced. Does that experience bring anything to your writing? Does sword and sorcery specifically benefit from that real, lived physicality?

CR: I don’t know about specifically, but familiarity with armed combat, even if only marginally, is a useful benefit for any writer of fantasy or science fiction—and indeed is a positive good for any person. After all, each and every one of us can benefit from a good punch to the face. I know I did. 

But joking aside, I do think too many of us—and here I include myself—live way too much in our own heads these days. So much of life is virtual, lived in screens and on calls with people we can’t even see (and increasingly can’t even trust to be real). Combat is the opposite of that. You’re forced to recognize the embodied nature of existence, and that makes you a whole person, and healthier, in a way that the abstract virtual reality of life online does the opposite.

I guess I am just saying “touch grass,” but it does go a bit deeper. Obviously, if you’re going to be writing any kind of action story, some familiarity with the mechanics of action can help. I can instantly tell when a writer has picked up a sword, the same as a lawyer can instantly tell when a writer has been in a courtroom (although I am perhaps more like someone who has watched a lot of courtroom dramas than a lawyer, but this analogy is starting to break down). 

Maybe that’s where S&S uniquely benefits from the writer’s having some experience with combat or combat sports: S&S tends to have more of an action focus than other variants of fantasy.

4. Sword and sorcery and epic fantasy are often portrayed as distinct — maybe even opposed, per Moorcock — genres. And yet Tolkien and Howard shared a love for much of the same adventure fiction, and felt their feigned history needed a high degree of verisimilitude. Later, the most epic of epic fantasists, Robert Jordan and Steven Erikson, would tie their enormous series to the s&s tradition. How do you see this dichotomy, if such exists?

CR: I think this kind of hairsplitting is a distraction, frankly. The difference between Moorcock and Tolkien isn’t a theoretical, disembodied thing, it’s embodied in the differences between the two men. Both were anarchists in a sense, but Tolkien was also a monarchist (these things can be reconciled—a subject for another time), a Catholic, an Oxford don. Moorcock is an anarchist in the leftist sense, an atheist, and an artist who came up through the counterculture (though it should be noted what was counterculture in the 60s and 70s is now mainstream, whether or not those of that generation can see or admit it). They are different men, different artists, possess different ideas and ideals. Fantasy and science fiction are really all part of one big literary tradition, albeit one with competing veins and schools. I don’t think sci-fi and fantasy are different genres, frankly, and so I certainly don’t think epic fantasy and S&S are different genres at all, just different attitudes embodied in different authors. I have been told Adaman resembles certain of Moorcock’s characters—but I have never read any of Moorcock’s work, and identify more with Tolkien than I do with either Howard or Moorcock, even if my work seems superficially quite different.

I guess what I am saying is that I don’t believe in genre at all. I believe in authors, and that it is authors who drive the distinctions between texts, not some sort of Platonic category. S&S means fantasy after the fashion of Howard, in the same way that grimdark means fantasy after the fashion of Joe Abercrombie (I know, I know, he wasn’t the first, but literary criticism is rife with anachronism). These things we call genres and subgenres seem to me to be an collection of tropes and attitudes employed by writers following in the mold of some other, greater writer. We talk about things being Tolkienesque, or Lovecraftian, etc. 

5. To stick with Howard and Tolkien, the latter is considered quintessentially English — by design! — while the former is a product of Texas. Do you think therefore that there is something uniquely American about s&s? Something of rugged individualism, the frontier, etc?

CR: I got into this a bit above, but I tend to view art less in sort of the sense of genre as conventionally understood and more as the product of individual artists or schools. Cyberpunk, for example, has come to be a genre, but before there was cyberpunk there were the cyberpunks, being the actual group of writers that shared a set of ideas (with differences in implementation or focus). I’m talking about Gibson and Sterling, etc. So too steampunk was not a genre, but a reactionary school of individual writers: Powers, Blaylock, Jeter, etc, who saw themselves as counter to the cyberpunks. There is certainly a vein of fantasy—we call it sword-and-sorcery—that is writing in this American mode after the fashion, in the shadow of, Robert E. Howard. But everything we call sword-and-sorcery isn’t in that American vein. Moorcock is a Texan now, but he is an Englishman, and distinctly himself. I don’t think sword-and-sorcery must necessarily be American, even if its greatest exemplar is distinctly so. I don’t dismiss that there is something of each author’s national character in his or her work, but I do think the personal idiosyncracies of the artist can override that. George R.R. Martin is primarily thought of as an epic fantasist in the Tolkien mode, but his epic fantasy is deeply tinged with the flavors of Weird Tales in a very American way. These categories are a lot more porous and delicate, and I think the best thing we can do is take each author one at a time, with a mind his or her individual context. 

6. You edited numerous anthologies for Baen books, including one of Sword and Planet fiction. Had you done a Sword and Sorcery edition, what would you have wanted in that work? How does new s&s converse with the tradition without being mere pastiche?

CR: I intended to do one, actually! But Sword & Planet came very near the end of my editorial career, and before I could edit a Sword & Sorcery (which really I ought to have started with), I had quit my job. I don’t know precisely what I would have included, except that that very likely would have proved Adaman’s first appearance in that version of events. It was all original fiction, so I would have had to go poking around. It might have been nice to try and induce Moorcock or Erikson to write for the collection, but alas—it was not meant to be. Perhaps one day. 

As for the question of pastiche, man, that is sort of the question of my career. Sun Eater started as pastiche, probably, in that I wasn’t thinking that deeply about it at the start, just trying to write my Star Wars, my (Arrakis, my) Dune. The notion that I should say something emerged later, or rather, the notion that I was saying something and that I should figure out what that something is emerged later. With sword-and-sorcery, I don’t know. I have this sense with Adaman that what I want to be doing is less conversing with early S&S stories, but dialoguing instead with fantasy as a whole. I am against modern magic systems, for example. That way of thinking about the supernatural is too scientific and mundane. It makes for lame fantasy. Terribly dull. I also miss the days when sorcerers and dragons were evil. I miss the wonder and terror of the weird and unknown. It feels symbolically—even spiritually—significant to go back and underscore these things. Maybe choosing sword-and-sorcery is a way for me to turn the clock back to a fantasy that predates these noxious modern trends. Sword-and-sorcery seems like an atavism to a lot of people (especially people in publishing). To that I say: “Good.” 

7. How do you think newer modes and genres of action-oriented fantasy might compete with that traditional model? Are “kids these days” reading lit-RPG and manga instead? (Even if one might say manga, like Berserk, can be part of the s&s tradition).

CR: Second question first, I do think print literature has lost a lot of readers—especially male readers—to manga and to videogames. There are a number of reasons for this, not least the fact that manga and videogames are great. That said, I don’t see literature as necessarily in competition with these media. What we’re in competition for is time. I love video games and manga. But I love books as well. The question is: Why choose books over these alternatives? The issue isn’t the medium, it’s the content and the marketing. Fewer young men read because books aren’t aimed at them. They aren’t raised loving reading, and they perhaps see the spaces around books as hostile to them—and indeed, many of those spaces are and have been. I myself largely fell out of so-called Fandom in high school and college in no small part because of the perceived hostility. That, and because there was just so, so little coming out that I wanted to read. That was why I wrote Sun Eater, why I started Adaman, why I’m about to write…what I’m about to write. No one else was writing books for me. I sort of hit on this above, but I’ve always sort of followed my creative instincts and desires on the hope that enough people felt like I did for it to work out. 

As for competition, we need new ideas in publishing, especially in traditional publishing. Forget new writers for a minute—everyone wants to be a writer, it seems—what we really need are new editors, new publishers, new companies going in new directions. I would strongly encourage anyone reading—especially younger guys who love this stuff—to figure out how to get involved. I’m not suggesting you go work for Penguin Random House. New York is an expensive place to live. But someone, somewhere, has what it takes to make a great new company. 

8. Taking a step back to said tradition, why does Howard endure? What about his storytelling and prose was and remains good? Who are some other authors the tradition would do well to remember and elevate?

CR: So I actually came to Howard himself rather late. After college, for sure. I knew Conan, obviously, but from the films, and so I had built up a lot of impressions about what Howard was like that were mostly defeated by the man himself. I always say, the first thing we see Conan doing is lamenting the fact that he must kill a poet, for said poet has brought much that was good and beautiful into the world. There was an element, almost, of ubi sunt to that moment that recalled Tolkien for me, and no writer has more strongly recalled Tolkien for me than Howard has, both in terms of his vision and especially his writing. His prose is rougher than Tolkien’s, less Victorian, less precise, but there’s a quality to it—it’s hard for me to pin down—but when I first read of Kull’s return to Atlantis in “The Shadow Kingdom,” I felt almost that I was in Gondor in a way I had never felt before. Now, obviously, Howard predates Tolkien, so it isn’t fair to say Howard recalls Tolkien, but I read Tolkien first. 

But it is his storytelling which most impresses me, though it feels condescending to talk like that. He’s Howard! Who am I? More happens in a Howard novelette than happens in most modern novels. There’s a sense of scope to “Black Colossus” or “The Tower of the Elephant” that shames many works ten times its size. This is ultimately a function of prose, as all writing is. Howard is able to suggest an entire action sequence in a few sentences, where most writers, myself included, take pages…or more.

As far as other authors, I’d be remiss not to mention Howard Andrew Jones—whom I knew a little bit, and who very recently passed away. I did not know him as well as I’d have liked, but his Hanuvar stories are excellent, even if Howard harbored Punic sympathies and I am nothing if not a Roman partisan. For an obscurer and less recent choice, I really enjoyed Michael Shea’s Nifft stories. Some really wild ideas and evocative imagery in those. And C.L. Moore will always be a legend. Those Jirel stories are still so, so great. 

 © May 2025, Alex Beecher

Alex Beecher is a reader, writer, and genre/craft nerd. He’s fascinated by the workings of stories, and how authors make them work. His fiction has appeared previously in Swords & Sorcery Magazine.