A Sword-Fighting Lesson With Neal Stephenson

Throughout movie history, cinematic swordsmen have flung their weapons and flipped their bodies around during combat, all to create an exciting visual spectacle. Consider the somersaulting Jedis in Star Wars, for example, or the jousting warriors in Gladiator. As difficult as it is to believe, much of what we see on screen is technically bad form, according to the past thousand years or so of sword-fighting historical practice. “Turning your back on a man with a four-foot long steel bar who is trying to murder you is generally not viewed as a wise strategy,” says science fiction author Neal Stephenson.

Stephenson, the droll writer of seminal novels such as Snowcrash and The Diamond Age, is talking about his passion for sword fighting to promote an unusual new project. Subutai, a startup he co-founded and named after Genghis Khan’s chief military strategist, aims to create video games and other media that accurately depict sword fighting as it was practiced hundreds of years ago by skilled warriors in battle—and these days by geeks in parking lots. Earlier this week, Subutai posted a video on the fundraising site Kickstarter, soliciting contributions to develop a game called Clang, a “Guitar Hero with swords” exercise that mines knowledge from the community of scholars and enthusiasts who are recreating the long-dormant martial art. Folks seem to like the idea and have already donated about $250,000. “It turns out what actually makes sense in this kind of combat was figured out a long time ago, in extreme detail, by people who lived and died this way,” says Stephenson.