Last Year and This Year

This past year was a haphazard one here at Swords & Sorcery: A Blog. First I tried to review all of Chaosium's Cthluhu Mythos anthologies, but Lin Carter killed that for me. Really, it was just too much of too much of the same stuff over and over again. To get to the really good stories I had to wade through lots of meh, to lousy, to hair-torn-out-at-the-roots bad stories. So after only a few volumes that whole business crashed and burned.

Then, in reaction to reading nothing but fantasy and being driven nuts by the state of the nation and the world, I turned to the Long 19th Century Project. While it crashed and burned as well, I will still go back to it. 

The rise of Western Imperialism and its attendant wars is one of the most compelling and interesting periods of world history. The great powers of today, save China, were forged into their modern versions during this era: industrialized America and Japan, Germany and Italy both united, Russia's completion of its southward and westward expansion, England and France chopping up Africa. 

My problem was I went overboard, trying to cram a vast stack of of books into my brain too quickly. I will definitely return to this in the coming year, just not with as concentrated attention, probably no more than a book or two at a time, but I will return.

Finally, there was, and still is, EPIC. It's going to be around at least until I finish the several series I've already started reviewing: First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Riddle-Master of Hed, and Fionavar. I need to read the next Kencyrath book from P.C. Hodgell, To Ride A Rathorn. Heck, I might even throw another Shanarra book in just for the heck of it. If I can think of anymore good stand-alones like Red Moon and Black Mountain I read/review them as well.

Then there are the reviews I've been asked to do (or will be shortly). The next Charles Saunders book should show up soon (oh, yeah!), a Gonji collection. Some other things I don't even know what they are yet.

And, as I've been doing for several years now, my short story reviews. I really don't read much new fantasy except in bite-size form, which suits me just fine. I get to read a wider array of authors, styles, and encounter dozens more ideas in a stack of doorstoppers. 

I do read a few books, mostly by people I know now, but very little of the popular stuff the kids are digging. With their terrible photo-realistic covers and their monstrous thickness and endless sequels, they just don't catch my eye. I need to read from people whose taste run similar to mine that a new book's good for me to chance it. I'm turning fifty this year, so I'm allowed to be crotchety.

And, of course, other posts about things that catch my fancy. Genre related things just not necessarily about a specific book or story, though they could be. You know, whatever.

I hope nobody got too bored or frustrated with my rapidly changing interests here during the last year. I like to believe I'm providing decent value (or amusement) for your dollar. I hope everyone sticks with me for the next twelve months. I don't know what it'll really bring, but I'm still having fun here and at Black Gate, so I with any luck that'll be apparent in what I write. Here's hoping, and a Happy New Year to everybody!

EPIC

So I'm taking a break from the long 19th century and swords & sorcery and diving into epic high fantasy for a little while. I can't help myself. Rereading The Sword of Shannara sparked a renewed interest in big, sprawling struggles against evil. Right now I'm plunging into Stephen Donaldson's First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. So far, it's pretty wild.

Remember, big fantasy wasn't alway bad. It only got bad when fans and writers got lazy. The fans where happy with more of the same old dark lords and plucky farm boys crap and the writers were happy enough to provide them. And the publishers discovered that the fans were even happier when the series piled book on top of book. 

But there's good, good stuff out in the fields epic high fantasy. Over the next couple of months I'm hoping to work my way through some classic books, a few newer ones, and maybe even a few written as critiques of the genre.

Northwestern Middle-earth

The Lord of the Rings remains my first, and truest love of epic high fantasy. Prof. Tolkien turned me on to thick appendices, detailed maps of fictional realms, and invented languages and histories.

He also elevated fantasy to an operatic scale with a deep moral underpinning, things that weren't especially important to the tales writers like Howard, Smith, and Moore told. Or at least the moral issues were grayer. They wrote darker ambiguous tales that focused on one or two characters with less clear cut relationships to good and evil.

Instead of mighty thewed warriors or cagey wizards, in LotR Tolkien threw small, average men (well, hobbits) into the struggle against utter darkness. Part of the purpose of that was to depict the need for everyone to confront evil. Another was to illustrate the costs such a conflict imposes on even the victors.

Like the great body of myths that underlay German culture, Tolkien wanted to create something similar for the English. To do this he famously developed entire languages and a history that covers thousands upon thousands of years. In The Silmarillion he wrote stories akin to Beowulf and Sigfried and the wars between the Icelandic eddas. These stories would be the deep history that set the stage for the War of the Ring.

from the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

I have a great love for history and I'm sure the faux history of LotR is a big part of what made it so appealing. Discovering the appendices when I finished The Return of the King was like finding a diamond at the bottom of a gold mine. It contained just enough about great and terrible events to conjure potent images in my head: the War of Dwarves and Orcs fought in the dark tunnels below the Misty Mountains, Ar-Pharazôn's rebellion against the Valar for example. It was easy to, and I did, lose oneself in LotR.

All those things are good and great, but it's the struggle between good and evil that effects me the most. As many people effect a supposedly worldly cynicism and talk about how there's no such thing as clear cut good and evil, most of them don't really believe it. In the 20th century humanity got a good view of what evil of the blackest: witness Stalinism, Hitlerism, Maoism, etc. (Hell, talk about evil dark lords. They really do exist) 

from the Fionavar Tapestry

Sometimes the forces arrayed against villainy aren't pure and noble, but they still fight. I'm all for bringing nuance into fantasy but to posit, as some authors seem to be doing, that the whole world is really only gray, strikes me as simpleminded. There is indeed evil in the world and I enjoy stories about the fight against it. In these malignant times, when women are enslaved, men routinely beheaded, and millions driven from their homes, I think we're well served to be reminded that such forces can be fought and defeated.

All of that goes into my definition of high fantasy, a term coined by Lloyd Alexander in an essay titled "High Fantasy and Heroic Romance." It is set in an imaginary world and there is at its heart a struggle against the forces of evil that are set to overwhelm it. Right now, investigating some of the genre's works I have read as well as some I haven't yet is what interests me right now.

It's a genre that's taken hits over the past decade. It's been criticized for reducing the world to a simply Manichean struggle, racism when it creates "evil" races liked orcs, endlessly reusing now-tattered props like the simple hero, wise sorcerer, and dark lord. There's some truth to all these claims. Often, though, the failures came from the pens of authors who picked up the trappings of LotR but neglected to look at its deeper themes and construction. 

from the Earthsea Cycle

Even today, when the genre has supposedly passed by such stories of good vs. evil told on a massive scale, its impact is still evident. In a 2009 essay, Richard K. Morgan disparaged Tolkien claiming his heroes were "Irritatingly Radiant Good" and his villains "Towering Archetypal Evil." So when I read his novel, The Steel Remains, I was more than surprised at the essential heroism and willingness to fight evil of his trio of heroes and the blithely evil villains. No doubt he thought by making his characters cynical and brooding he was somehow bettering Tolkien but there's still no doubting they're the good guys. 

George R. R. Martin has made clear he is a fan of Tolkien and wanted to combine big fantasy with what he sees as more realism. R. Scott Bakker's bleak (by which I mean like the blackest night when the stars, moon, and sun have all been snuffed out) Second Apocalypse series is heavily influenced by LotR, including its own versions of orcs, dragons, and trolls (sranc, wracu, and bashrags if you care to know), and has a map that looks like it might have come from the pen of JRRT himself. 

In case those of you who remember how I've long railed about all those thick books and endless series of fantasy novels, let me say I don't hate them all. I hate the ones that can't justify their length by the strength of their prose or storytelling. And that's most of them.  

Epic is a question of scale, not length. Worlds at stake and struggles against the forces of evil are what matter. In five short books, Lloyd Alexander's wonderful Chronicles of Prydain put the whole known world at risk. Joy Chant's Red Moon and Black Mountain does the same thing in a single volume. Glen Cook's original Black Company trilogy is monstrously epic and under a thousand pages. More recently John Fultz did epic in his three Books of the Shaper.

So that's what I'm working on these days. And I am still reading the long 19th century stuff, but this is going to take up lots of my reading and writing time so I figured why not give the site a new look to herald that? Enjoy!

Why The Sword of Shannara You Ask

Some folks might have noticed the gold hued Hildebrandt Bros. cover of the original The Sword of Shannara over there on the top left corner. Yeah, I've reread it for my next Black Gate review. And I don't hate it. There, I've said. You can burn my membership card in the guild of swords & sorcery aficionados, but I sort of like the poor thing.

For those uninitiated in the history of The Sword of Shannara, legendary Ballantine editors Lester and Judy Del Rey were looking for something to echo the success of The Lord of the Rings (and kick off their new Del Rey imprint). They discovered young Terry Brooks, and worked with him to turn his manuscript into a novel that would do just that.

And it did. According to Wikipedia, it sold 125,000 copies its first month in print. The Sword of Shannara was one of the first fantasy books to climb the New York Times Bestseller list and awakened the publishing industry to the potential of fantasy fiction. It also set the stage for scads of other Tolkien pastiches to appear. Like GRRM paving the way for a host of other grimdark authors, Terry Brooks and Sword showed there was profit to be made in a certain direction.

While we've all had it up to here with secret heirs, bands of diverse heroes bound together on a quest, and evil dark lords and their monstrous hordes and henchdemons, there was a time when we didn't. An innocent time when not everyone and his brother and sister were writing that exact same story, again, and again, and again. When the only big fantasy novel you had read was LotR because that's all there was.

I can't stress how important and mind-blowing it was when The Sword of Shannara first appeared. My fantasy reading friends (all guys I must admit) and I went nuts. The original hardcover was over seven hundred pages long and I know two guys who read it straight through in a day. It took me at least three or four. It was the longest book I had ever read at that point in my life.

Even though we were young, I was only eleven, we all saw the blatant Tolkien rip-offs homages. The whole basic plot: determined band sets off to the big villain's kingdom for some magical folderol that will defeat him. We didn't care. Sure the Siege of Tyrsis equals the Siege of Minas Tirith, Stenmin equals Womrtongue, and a host of other people, places and things in Sword mimic or echo things in LotR. And we still didn't care.

Tolkien's heroes

Brooks' heroes

We were so hungry for new fantasy that satisfied the same things LotR had done for us; good triumphing over evil, adventure and excitement, and cool characters. There was other fantasy out there, Moorcock, Philip Jose Farmer, Ursula K. LeGuin, among others, but they were not offering the same things as Tolkien (and I'm sure all of them would be proud to admit that). Brooks and the Del Reys knew exactly what the hordes of young fantasy fans were hungering for and they gave it to them. They took Tolkien, made it simpler and easier to read, and WHAM!, took us for a roller coaster ride.

I came up with the idea of revisiting The Sword of Shannara last year. It's been a decade or so since I last read it and it seemed like something ripe for examination. To gain a little added insight into the book's history, I sprang for the 35th Anniversary Annotated Edition. Brooks towers over the history of fantasy because of the vast numbers of books he's sold and the fact he served as a gateway for so many readers into fantasy. I'm curious how much he matters anymore. I hope to generate a little discussion about this come Tuesday.

Here's my Black Gate article from 2015: You Can't Go Home Again.