Imaginary Worlds - The Father of Sword and Soul

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

Charles R. Saunders loved Tarzan as a kid, but he was also repulsed by the racism in those books since Charles was Black. So he created a counter narrative about a warrior named Imaro who lived in a fictionalized version of precolonial Africa. Charles had invented a new subgenre of sword and sorcery that he called sword and soul. His books were groundbreaking in the 1980s, but he was also way ahead of his time. I talk with Milton Davis, Sheree Renée Thomas and Troy Wiggins about a movement among Black fantasy writers today to reclaim Charles and his work. I also talk with journalist Jon Tattrie, who wrote a biography about Charles called To Leave a Warrior Behind.   This episode is sponsored by IngramSpark. Get 15% off your first order of 15 more books at IngramSpark using the code IMAGINARY15. This offer expires at the end of the year. To support the show, you can donate on Patreon where you get access to the ad-free version and our companion show Between Imaginary Worlds.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Before we begin, I want to mention that this episode contains discussion of a suicide attempt, so please be advised. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinski. John Tatri is a listener to this podcast, and he emailed me with a story. He used to work at a newspaper called The Halifax Daily News. He started working there in 2006. And when I got there for my first shift, I was introduced to the team, and the most famous face by far was Charles Saunders. He was sitting right in the center of the newsroom, we called it, the big desk with all the editors on it.

He had written a column for the paper for years and wrote the editorial when I worked there. So that was when I first encountered him was as this legendary local legend of nonfiction, suddenly my boss. So then when did you find out that he was a fiction writer? I first turned out he was a fiction writer when I was writing my own first novel. Charles overheard me planning my big first novel, a historical fiction novel, and one day I came into work and he had brought a copy of Amaro for me. And he handed me this orange, brilliant novel with a warrior of some sort over a pile of fallen foes. I didn't know what to make of it, but I read it and I loved it and I look forward to reading the rest of the Amaro saga.

But as far as I knew at that time, this was just some little passion project Charles had done to write this novel as a lot of journalists do. I missed most of the importance of it that first time through. Was he kind of self-deprecating or did he kind of undersell it? Was he like, well, yeah, I wrote this novel. Or was he very proud? Or how did he introduce the books to you? I would say he mostly introduced it in what I would come to discover as a very typical Charles way. and he introduced it to me as though he was making me appear already,

because at that point I hadn't published any books at all. And so the way he gave it to me was like, welcome to the club, you're one of us now. And for me, that meant a huge amount to have his sort of confidence in me. Looking back, I think he'd probably run into so much confusion and uncomfortableness from people about the type of writing he was doing, just sort of bafflement, I guess, that he kept it pretty separate from his journalism. Charles R. Saunders was living in Canada, but he was African American.

And that warrior character, called Imaro, is considered to be the first black sword and sorcery hero. Sword and sorcery is a classic genre of fantasy that takes place in a mythic past, where heroes fight with swords and magic exists. Many of these stories take place in a mystical version of medieval Europe or early European civilization, But the Amaro books took place in a fantastical version of ancient Africa. A lot of elements in the Amaro books are familiar to readers of sword and sorcery. There's a dark wizard who destroys Amaro's childhood. Amaro goes on a quest to a kingdom so he can find answers about his past.

Along the way he meets allies and fights enemies who are human and supernatural. He eventually gets married and has a family, but the forces of darkness, darkness will not let him rest. He basically created a new subgenre of sword and sorcery. Milton Davis is a fantasy writer and publisher. He was a fan of Charles's work and eventually became his friend. By, you know, creating the character, he was the first person to ever have a black main character in sword and sorcery.

And the fact that his character was a hero, that he wasn't a sidekick. He was the center of attention, I guess you can put it that way. And that's something that we hadn't seen. scene not only in sword and sorcery, but in fantasy in general, something that you rarely saw, you know. And even today, you don't, you don't see it that much, you know. Charles called his new subgenre, sword and soul. After Charles passed away in 2020, his former colleague at the newspaper, John Tatry, started to learn more about Charles's life. And John was so surprised and intrigued by what he

found, he ended up writing a biography about Charles called to leave a warrior behind. Charles Saunders was born in 1946, and he grew up in Pennsylvania. John says, From a young age, he loved fantasy writing, absolutely fell in love with those worlds. You know, the joy of escaping into them, it just took them away. He had a decent childhood from what I can tell, but his father was not present, and that was very difficult for him, and especially when he was about five, and his mom left him to go work in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia. He had a very hard time being alone with his grandparents there,

so he escaped into fantasy. And for Charles, the first hero he ever sort of won his heart was Tarzan. But Charles had very conflicted feelings about Tarzan. The author of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, was a strong believer in the racist pseudoscience of eugenics. His Tarzan Tarzan stories were full of racist depictions of Black Africans. In the movies, Tarzan was played by the white Olympic swimmer, Johnny Weissmuller. As he said, when he was watching the movies, he wanted to create a black hero that could kick Johnny Westmuller's ass. That was the main sticking point for Charles. He's like, what's this white guy doing, being king of Africa, of all places? He loved the adventures. He loved the action. He loved the setting. But he called the racism, the stone.

in his shoe, the part of it that he just encountered over and over again. In the 1960s, Charles went to college and got a degree in psychology, and then came the draft. He knew his number would be up soon, and he'd have to fight in Vietnam. But instead, in 1969, he moved to Canada. And by sending himself into exile, an exile, he chose to renew, as it were, he could have returned to the States, but he decided to stay in exile. that's where he first wrote Amaro, who also is in exile. At first, Charles had a lot of difficulty settling in.

He thought he would have a better start in Canada. He thought, you know, this is the end of the Underground Railroad. Surely it's better up here. But he was often, almost always the only black man in his world. And facing that discrimination in a kind of silent Canadian way, as Charles would say, in America, they say, you can't sit here. And in Canada, they say, sorry, you can't sit here. Charles started teaching at a university, but after he lost his job, he also lost hope and his sense of confidence in his fiction writing, which he was doing on the side. At one point, he tried to take his own life.

And he would have too, but he woke up, not where he had left himself, but being rescued by firefighters. And I actually later talked to someone who knew one of the firefighters, but what Charles credited with saving him was Imaro, from Charles's telling of it, he, Charles Saunders, was ready to leave, ready to die, but he credited Amaro with lifting him up and putting him to a place where he could be rescued. And he told people about his attempt on his own life because he wanted them to see that he hadn't failed. You know, at first he thought, oh, I failed at one more thing. You know, what are you going to do about that? But he came to see it as not a failure but as a triumph.

When a writer creates a character that they care deeply about, I always suspect that the character is a version of them or the character embodies qualities that they wish they had. Charles was a very private person. It's hard to say how much of Amaro was a reflection of him. He used to say there wasn't very much. But Milton Davis says there is one thing you can point to. Amaro didn't know his father.

Charles' mother and father got divorced early in his life and he never really had a relationship with his father. A lot of what Immaro was kind of came from that. And when we first meet Amaro in Naim Bani, that's Charles' name for his other Africa, Amaro in the very first scene is five years old, and he is mocked ruthlessly as the son of no father in this amongst his Iliasai people. And we see his mother on his fifth birthday, abandon him to her people and say she has to, for various reasons, she has to leave him there.

John mentioned Nyambani, the fantastical world where the Amaro books take place. Nyambani is a Swahili word, which means home. Now, authors like J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin did a lot of research

into English history to craft their fantasy worlds. Charles took a similar approach to make his fantastical version of Africa feel authentic. Troy Wiggins is a fantasy writer and a fan of Charles's work. Even though he's a different generation than Charles, Troy had a similar experience in that he loved reading books like Tarzan when he was a kid,

and then he tried to reread them as an adult. I was like, yo, these books were racist as hell. Were they racist like this back in the day? Because I was a kid, right? I wasn't like, I knew what racism looked like in real, you know what I mean, but not on the page. Then he discovered the Amaro books. I had already had a lot of, done a lot of my own historical research.

I was an African-American Studies major, African-African-American Studies major, and I had read a lot of work from African authors by that time. So the way it felt authentic to me was because it drew directly from the histories and mythologies that African people were sharing about themselves. He was writing in response to viewpoints that were not from the perspective of folks from those places, right, folks from Africa. So he researched first person, you know, historical accounts. And I think that was vitally important because without the perspective of colonization, without the eye of racism tainting, the true depiction of those histories, that's what brought the authenticity to Charles' work.

he was taking those first-hand first-person accounts and use a net to create his world. Charles also wrote books about a female character named Des Soyei, who lives in the world of Nyambani. She was a soldier in an army of women. She saves her people from destruction, but like Amaro, she has to go into exile. Sheree Renee Thomas is a fantasy author and editor. She's also written for Marvel Comics. She says the first time that she saw Desoie and Amaro, in a bookstore, she felt an immediate connection, even before she opened the books. I mean, and it was the covers that got me at first.

And the names, and I'm thinking, huh, this is a black writer. These are African names. This is a black woman character. And at that time, when I was reading the work, I imagined it, the characters like, I don't know, like Grace Jones. And I just thought, wow, the world opened up for me in a way that it hadn't quite before. Now, granted, this was, you know, work that was published a long time ago. And we have a lot more people creating African-centered works from the continent itself, right? But for the time that he was writing it, I thought it was just extremely revolutionary and extraordinary.

So Charles did find an audience, or his audience found him. But that took a long time. In fact, his writing career was almost like an epic quest in its own right. If Charles Saunders was writing the Amaro series today, he could bypass traditional publishing houses and publish his books himself. And the best option for him would be to use the website, Ingram Spark. Ingram Spark is an award-winning publishing platform that provides everything you need to successfully self-publish. They make it free to publish and edit your book as needed.

That means you can focus on what you do best, the craft of writing, while they make it possible to share your work with millions of readers. When you self-publish with Ingram Spark, you are plugged into one of the publishing industry's largest global book networks. They give you access to over 45,000 retailers, including independent bookstores and libraries. They also have the most advanced print-on-demand technology, which prints high-quality books in a wide variety of formats at an affordable price. And they have printing facilities around the world, so they can get your books to your readers faster. Get 15% off your first order of 15 books using the code Imaginary 15. This offer expires at the end of the year. Get started today. In 1981, Charles finally made a deal with a publishing company called Da Books.

There was a delay at first because Daugh was going to advertise Amaro as the Black Tarzan on the cover. The estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs threatened to sue, so Da had to come up with new covers. They published a trilogy of Amaro Books between 1981 and 19801. In 1985, sales started out weak and got worse over time. The publisher killed the series after the third book. Milton Davis is skeptical. Being a publisher now, I know that there was no reason they wouldn't have, they wouldn't even considered publishing his books unless they knew that there was an audience out.

I think they kind of dropped the ball when they marketed it and they start trying to reach the broader audience. I think that's where you had to issue at. They were trying to find a way to introduce this character without, I guess, upsetting people or getting the broadest application. And I think that's where the problem was. Charles was entering a very white cultural space. That's why he wanted to write the Amaro books as a counter-narrative.

And given the time period, you can imagine that the publisher might have assumed that white fans of sword and sorcery were not interested in a black hero, and there weren't enough black fans of the genre. Cherie says that's not true, and she thinks the publisher didn't make an effort to reach black fans of books like Lord of the Rings. They may not always show up at your readings or at the conventions,

but they are absolutely by the books. To me, it's a no-brainer, but at the time, I can totally understand why it might have been considered a risk just because of the perception that people had about the genre in the first place. Charles did get a movie deal for the character of Desailles, but according to John, the movie people said, listen, Charles, we love to shoot this great story. However, a couple of things.

We're going to shoot in Argentina. We couldn't find any black people. Do you mind if everybody's white? So could you rewrite it so De Soie is white? The movie came out in 19. It was called Amazon's. It was hilarious because, you know, you had these white women running around African names. Again, Milton Davis.

De Soye has a bull, a war bull named Gabo, and that's her, you know, war companion. But in the movie, they made it a horse. But he said, hey, I got paid more for this script than anything I've ever been paid for in my life up to that point. Charles' career as a fiction writer seemed to have come to an end, and this is where he shifted his career to journalism. He wrote a lot about the historic black community in Nova Scotia, and as we heard earlier, he got a job at the Halifax Daily News. But Charles had actually planted the seeds for Amarro's comeback. He just didn't know it yet. In the late 90s, Sheree Renee Thomas was putting together an anthology. book called Dark Matter, a century of speculative fiction from the African diaspora.

Charles ended up contributing to the book. I asked her, how did she think of contacting him? How did I think of contacting him? He was on my shelf. So my house is full of books. And so if I'm writing or working on an anthology that is looking to put into one volume at least, many. short fiction stories by black writers, I'm obviously going to have them already, a lot of them. The thing that was new to me was the ideal, and I know this is going to sound very, very strange, but I didn't know he was still alive because people didn't discuss him as if he was a living

writing person contributing to the genre. So when I start looking around, I realize this man is in Canada. It's not dead. He's in Canada. That's how I was able to find him in Nova Scotia. And when we were talking about the project, he was very supportive. He sent her a short story he wrote in 1984 about De Soye. It's called Gamil Songs. He also sent her an essay that he wrote in 1977 called Why Blacks Don't Read Science Fiction. I said, but this is not then.

And there are a lot of people who are writing the genre, and they don't get published as widely in some of the major publications, but they're being published. more often in literary journals and literary magazines, or they're just self-publishing the work themselves. I said, I think you should write a different essay that speaks to now versus then. And so he wrote the essay that ended up being in the collection. The new essay was called Why Blacks Should Read and Write Science Fiction. Having two pieces published in Dark Matter brought newfound attention to Charles.

He made a deal with a publishing company called Nighting. Shade books to release an updated edition of the Amaro series. I was so excited to see it happen. And the men like kind of swept him up. You know, so he was mentoring people and everything. And I was just happy to see that he was publishing and that he was, you know, going to be doing a new novel. To me, he was like, okay, my work is done.

You know, it was terrific, you know. Yeah, when he said the men swept him up, what did you mean by that? Milton and a lot of other blackmail writers began seeking him out and, you know, corresponding or, you know, calling and talking with him. Obviously, that kind of very masculine, active adventure work is work that a lot of brothers are going to be excited about and interested in. When she said Milton, she was referring to Milton Davis. When Dark Matter came out, Milton had been writing. his own African-based sword and sorcery. I had done research, and at the time, Charles wasn't popping up into research.

But as I was working on, I was like, somebody has had to do this before because it's just too obvious. Somebody wouldn't have done this. But I kept doing searches. I never came up with anything about him. But when they re-released his books, that's when I discovered him, because then his stuff was everywhere online. He got in touch with Charles, and they discovered that they had a lot of the story.

lot in common from their very mixed feelings about the original Conan stories to how they develop their fantasy worlds. We talked about the fact that we both were inspired by the same sources. He created the Soye and I created my career of Satatina and they came from the same source, you know, that kind of thing. So he was telling me about how he had written this book in the 90s and he sent it around and trying to get it published and nobody would publish it. And I said, well, can I read the manuscript? He said, yeah, you know, so he sent me the manuscript, and I read it, and I really loved it.

And so I said, you know, I was kind of timid about it because I was still, you know, indie publishing stuff. That said, well, Charles, you know, can I publish this? He's like, you're like, yeah, you can publish it. And I'm like, oh, cool, you know, so that's when that boss started. I'm like, Charles said, let me publish this book. That was good timing because a year after Nightshade published the Amaro series, they cancelled the books.

Charles wrote to a friend that they told him the books weren't selling very well because, quote, fantasy is a white realm. Charles was furious. He said he felt like he was in a time warp because it was the same reason

his other publisher dropped him in the 1980s. Troy Wiggin says Charles may have been too far ahead of his time, but the zeitgeist was catching up with him by the 2010s. after Game of Thrones became a huge hit. The culture was starting to realize how important fantasy was to our collective well-being. And I recall early social media seeing people discover Charles Saarlander's work in real time.

And being flabbergasted in the midst of all of our diversity movements and all of our belonging movements, that there was somebody already writing the kind of work we were wanting to read or the fight had already fought for the space that we wanted to fight for in the 1980s, before a lot of us were born. Charles may have felt like he was in a time warp when the Amaro series got canceled again. But he now knew that his work was being appreciated. He was also making friends and finding a new community. Although Milton says even though we talked with Charles fairly often,

he didn't know much about his personal life. We would talk about stuff, but we talked about a lot of small talk. You know, we were both born in July, two days. Our birthdays were two days apart. We both were Pittsburgh Steelers fans, you know. So we talked a lot about stuff like that most of the time. And then we talk about writing a little bit and stuff like that. But yeah, I knew nothing about his family.

He rarely talked about his family at all. Matter of fact, he didn't talk about his family, period. Charles had family in the U.S. that he kept in touch with, but less and less over the years. He had also been married and divorced. By the time the pandemic hit, Charles was single and living alone. John Tatry says he hadn't talked with Charles after the Halifax Daily News shut down. I wouldn't have expected anything else because in the two years I worked with him,

I never heard tell of him going out with anyone or having any sort of social life. It just seemed to be working home. So no one was surprised when after work closed he ended up just staying home. But then I got an email in 2020 from a stranger saying he'd gone missing. and they hadn't heard from him in a while, and they didn't know anybody in the world who knew Charles. And so I just started at first, assuming all was well and tried to find out what was going on with Charles,

check in and see if he was doing okay. But John's worst fears were confirmed. He learned that Charles had died. And not only that, Charles was buried in an unmarked grave. It took months for John to find it. It was just one of the worst days of my life, just standing there in the rain, looking at this patch of grass that my friend was under. So for me, that's when it became very personal to find someone to claim his remains. And that's really why I keep talking about Charles, because I want more people to claim him.

John Tatry, Milton Davis, and others launched a fundraiser to create a grave marker for Charles and a monument that has an illustration of Amaro on it. So many people dream of being fiction writers. They might wish to have a career that's similar to the writers that inspired them. They hope their work will be successful to the point where it could live beyond them in popular culture. I imagine that on his better days, Charles may have felt confident that he was leaving an artistic legacy. But I imagine he must have also had moments of doubt, where he wondered if his work would end up being just a drop in an ocean of content. That's why John isn't the only one

who wants to make sure that more people claim Charles Saunders. A new edition of Amaro was published in 2025, and it featured a new cover with a quote from Nydia Corifor, describing Charles as a trailblazer. That quote should carry some weight if you know Nettia Corifor. She's a trailblazing writer in her own right,

who coined the term African futurism. But Charles' legacy is not dependent on the publication of his books. He had an influence on younger writers and acted as a mentor. After Troy Wiggins discovered the Amaro books, he got in contact with Charles and asked if he would give editorial feedback

on one of his stories. He says Charles's notes were invaluable. He very much censored what the story needs, especially with short fiction. You don't have a lot of real estate to do world building, to do characterization. You have to really get it down on the page as quickly as possible. His notes to me were very much to the point, you don't have space for this. This doesn't serve the story. You need to expand this for the sake of the story. And like, just those interactions again went on to impact my career is an editor, you know, five or ten years later.

says he also felt inspired by the fact that Charles was a black writer in the diaspora who set his fantasy world in Africa. Because I'm not from Africa, you know what I mean? You know, my folks have been in the U.S. South for generations upon generations. And so for me, even being black, I still did not feel like those, that mythology was always mine to, you know, try to tell storage from. Then you also inspire people like me to create our own work. And I think to validate that black people and African people do have fantasy mythology that is worthy of craft and fantasy stories from that our histories are not all, you know, regressive. They're not all pain that we have deep cultural mythology, the historical basis for mythology, also inspiring

writers to write their own fantasy from their black cultural experience, but maybe from a fantasy New Orleans in the 1930s, or maybe from, you know, to take my example, of fantasy Memphis in the 2010, you know what I mean? Troy also co-founded a magazine called Faya, which launched in 2017. I would say there's probably a direct, at least for me, a direct rule line from the work of Charles Saunders to the inception of Fire Magazine. The primary purpose when we found it was the published short fiction from black and African authors because we had some data that showed that the publication rates for

black authors in those markets were extremely low, almost laughably low when you think about comparison to other groups. And so we decided, hey, if nobody else will publishes, we will. And Charles was generous in passing along opportunities to other writers like Milton Davis. got in contact with me one day and said, hey, this company got in contact with me. They want me to develop a character for this role playing game. They said, if I do this, they would also publish any books that I write about this character. And, you know, they offered them a certain amount of money to do that. And I was like, well, Charles, you know, you need to jump on that. You know,

this is like a good opportunity and stuff like that. He said, well, I told him to get in contact with you. you could probably write something for him. I'm like, Charles. Boy, why would he do that? Well, we had the discussion, and sometimes he would lose his temper with me because I was always been, and he, you know, he got upset.

He said, I don't care about that. He said, I just care about my legacy. So he didn't want anything that was going to take his focus off of doing that. His own characters and his own. Exactly. And he didn't want to do that. He didn't want to deal with it.

He was like, I don't want to do that. That's how serious he was about that, you know, because the situation that he was in, that would have been really helpful. But he was like, it wasn't about the money at that point. It was about, you know, completing these stories and getting this stuff out there and seen it the way that he wants to see it. And I can't say one bit of satisfaction I do have is that before he passed away, that was starting to happen.

People were starting to find this stuff again. but he's concerned that might slow down over time. As time passes, you know, publishers are doing less and less marketing. They're putting more and more onus on the authors themselves. You've got some publishers now that won't even pick you up unless you've got a certain amount of social media following. The fact that he doesn't know, he's not here with us anymore, but the fact that he doesn't have that means that whoever wants to promote his work is going to be, is going to have to put the energy in the effort behind promoting it and marketing it.

And I don't think that that's happening. And I don't even know if it's going to happen. And there wasn't a lot of money in publishing his work to begin with. Sheree Renee Thomas says another problem is that time is moving on culturally. After an author passes away, their work is frozen in time. And Charles was ahead of his time to begin with. You know, there's a whole lot of writing that's taking place since he first published those stories. he might have been somebody that could have created new characters or who could have

guessed written some comics for Marvel or other comics companies because he already had that sensibility. But just in the time that I've known Charles and the conversation that we had earlier about the things that were already on our shelves that definitely were science fiction are definitely speculative fiction, that conversation has gotten even larger. And the thing is interesting to me is that at the time when I was doing the research for dark matter, it wasn't a time when a lot of African writers

were interested in pursuing science fiction and fantasy, at least the ones that were being published, right? In fact, there was a resistance because it wasn't considered literary at the time. Those days have changed quite significantly. Yeah, so it sounds like in one way, you know, honoring his legacy is not just celebrating his work, but finding the next Charles Saunders to make sure that the next Charles Saunders gets the support that they need. And they're out there. There are people who are publishing now. I'm just very conscious now of looking in places, you're not going to always find them in the mainstream and getting their work out there to a larger audience. And I feel like if, you know, had Charles live,

he would have loved it, would have loved it. And it might have been a whole other, another renaissance for his work at that time. One thing that hasn't changed is the need for voices like Charles Saunders. And given the backlash in recent years to cultural diversity, we need to hear those voices more than ever. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to John Tatry, Milton Davis, Sheree, Renee Thomas, and Troy Wiggins.

I put a link to John's book about Charles Saunders in the show notes. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. If you like this episode, you should check out my 2024 episode, African sci-fi looks to a climate future. It's about how African writers of speculative fiction are depicting climate change. We have another show called Between Imaginary Worlds.

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