Falling for the allegory trap: Why J.R.R. Tolkien was not a technophobe

It’s a curious but real phenomenon that the very mention of J.R.R. Tolkien causes the Black Gate to open and the critics to issue forth, wielding blunt instruments against a black and white facsimile of The Lord of the Rings that must exist in some alternative universe from the one I inhabit. Scenting a whiff of something they don’t like, these axe-grinders turn the waters of measured Tolkien criticism into a bloody feeding frenzy where the victim, sadly, is nuance.

A few examples of these blunt criticisms include:

• Aragorn on the throne: Tolkien is a monarchist!
  
• Orcs are evil: Tolkien is a racist!

Here’s the latest: Tolkien criticized the factories of Saruman and Sauron? He’s a technophobe, and an enemy of progress!

Tolkien is often accused of having a black and white view of the world in his fiction. The irony is that his critics are quite often screamingly guilty of the real McCoy, taking up the argument that you have to be either “for” unbridled progress or “against” it. This line of reasoning was crystallized by David Brin in his 2002 essay “J.R.R Tolkien: Enemy of Progress” and recently given second life in a poorly-written fan fiction treatment: Kirill Yeskov’s The Last Ringbearer. Because Tolkien is not 100% behind modernism—that he actually dared to evince an equivocal view of “progress”— in the minds of Brin and Yeskov he’s a full-blown Luddite worthy of dismissal by the adult reader.

There’s a grain of truth here, of course. But like much of the other Tolkien criticism you encounter on the web it’s a grossly allegorized reading and a rather despicable simplification of the truth of the matter. By truth, I mean the facts of Tolkien’s life, and, more apropos to the discussion, the text of Tolkien’s fictions.

Tolkien was not anti-industry. He didn’t particularly like it, he thought industrialization and urbanization wrought as much harm as good, but he did not advocate that the world remain in some quasi-medieval stasis. He recognized progress as inevitable, but he thought it was as much cause for weeping as joy (see pollution, and urban decay, and global warming). He evinced nostalgia for his home and its mill by a steam, swept aside by progress. He expressed a calm, mature, adult dislike of some forms of progress, but not a blanket reactionary dismissal of it. That certainly does not make him an enemy of progress, like Brin famously and wrong-headedly declared.

There are plenty of examples of Tolkien’s nuanced, lukewarm views of technology. For example, he actually welcomed the idea of a movie made out of LOTR (imagine that—he liked moving pictures on a screen as a medium for stories, not just ancient scrolls read by the light of a candle!) He wanted to see his books published and distributed (not locked up in monasteries and preserved by monks for a privileged minority ruling class—wow! I didn’t know that! He saw the value of publishing companies and publishing and distribution technology! Shocking!) He was in many ways an enlightened thinker: a college professor whose prime years were spent as a philologist, seeking out the objective truths of words, their derivations and meanings, in a hard, lonely search for truth and objective meaning that the great figures of the enlightenment (perhaps even Brin) would have appreciated.

This viewpoint is also to be found in the books. The Rings of Power, if you consider them a form of “technology,” had their good and useful purposes--until corrupted by the One Ring, which you might call absolute power/unbridled technology (whose altars right-thinkers like Brin and Yeskov prostrate themselves before). The creations of the Noldor Elves in The Silmarillion were wonderful and beautiful, an elevation of civilization. Tolkien himself believed that sub-creation was an exalted right of mankind. But his beliefs were tempered with the apparently audacious notion that innovation should be coupled with restraint.

At the end of The Lord of the Rings the Third Age draws to an end. A time of magic and wonder passes from the world, and the Fourth Age is heralded in. Middle-earth passes to a time of men, and systematized education, and modern conveniences, and beneficial science. Tolkien, even in his fantasy world of Middle-Earth, knew that life went on, and must go on, for better or worse. But just like life, he also believed that change is not always for the better. In Tolkien’s time mechanized warfare, industrial pollution, and the threat of atomic annihilation offered compelling proof.

But apparently this nuanced view is not enough for some of his critics. A sad glance over his shoulder at the receding past? Reactionary! His mates and best friends mowed down by machine guns and choking on mustard gas and blown up by high explosive and shrapnel? That’s reality, deal with it! A dislike for mechanized warfare and the minds and factories that think up and churn out infernal weapons? How dare he! A preference for horses instead of the belching smoke and noise and stink of motor cars? Technophobe!

I’d like to ask Brin and Yeskov: Is this viewpoint really so hard to understand? Is nuanced discussion dead? Must we throw wide our arms and unequivocally embrace every aspect of technology and urbanization? Must we kneel before the altar of progress instead of expressing a simple preference for fields instead of parking lots, or trees instead of skyscrapers? Do we have to “pick a side,” or can a middle ground exist, like we find in Tolkien?

Apparently not. History is “written by the victors” (what a tired, galling cliché) says Laura Miller in her fawning "review" of The Last Ringbearer on Salon.com, and so Tolkien’s mistaken views apparently require “correction” for a modern audience.

The Desert of Souls, a review

“We should talk more, you and I,” he said, “about storytelling.”

–Howard Andrew Jones, The Desert of Souls

The Desert of Souls is the debut novel of Black Gate magazine managing editor Howard Andrew Jones. About ¼ of the way into it, I thought aloud: You’ve got to be kidding me. A debut novel? Jones’ Arabian Nights-style adventure has the polish of a cut diamond, and the finish of a veteran author.

The Desert of Souls is a proper fantasy, albeit placed in a historical setting, so there’s magic, undead monsters, god-like snakes, and more. I haven’t encountered a djinn on the printed page since my old AD&D days, and was pleasantly flooded with memories of Oasis of the White Palm as I read. The Desert of Souls features two heroes, Dabir and Asim, who spend large part of the book in near-death situations in pursuit of the wizard Fifouz, who plots to visit an ancient curse on a modern city.

Jones has an excellent sense of pace and an affinity for a tale properly told. Not rushed, but told as a story should be told, as though novelist and the reader were drawn up around a campfire with the whole night ahead for stories. A lot happens in The Desert of Souls but it’s not told breathlessly; the pace is languid at times, quick at others in Asim’s first person narrative. It’s also unabashedly optimistic, a welcome relief in these often dark times of current fantasy offerings.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

Ten years of Dungeons and Dragons, Mach II

This May will mark the 10th anniversary of my return to Dungeons and Dragons, all with the same group. I’m not sure how we’ll celebrate the occasion, though we were joking at our last session that we might do something crazy and … play a game of Dungeons and Dragons or something. Maybe we’ll show up in hooded cloaks or armor.

I haven’t posted about RPGs in a long time here on The Silver Key, mainly because I haven’t had a whole lot to say. I never got embroiled in the 4E controversy because our group never made the shift. These days I’m a player, not a DM, and I generally just go with the flow. But this recent article on Salon.com and our impending 10 year anniversary has prompted a few thoughts on why I continue to play and enjoy this uncommon pastime.

This is my second go-round with D&D and the longest unbroken stretch I’ve ever played. Like most folks of my age (37) I started with the Tom Moldvay Basic boxed set, which in 1982 I begged as a gift from my parents. I would have been nine or 10 years old at the time. While the cardboard box is long-gone I still have the tattered red rulebook and my original copy of B2 Keep on the Borderlands, from which I will not be parted even unto death.

Back in those grade school days I played a heavy rotation of games, peaking in middle school. I played mostly D&D with a group of friends but we also occasionally branched out into games like Car Wars, Runequest, Middle Earth Role Playing, Star Frontiers, and Top Secret. Our gaming wasn’t limited to after school sessions and late nights on the weekend, either. My middle school offered Dungeons and Dragons as a Friday afternoon seventh-period elective, for which I eagerly signed up. Yes, we got to play D&D in school! I was typically the DM, refereeing up to 10 rambunctious players at a time. We ran through modules like Pharaoh and In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords and White Plume Mountain with gusto. I remember another group next to us in which everyone was an assassin and they spent the whole game rolling on the assassination tables and killing each other off. It was glorious.

I continued playing into high school but my gaming soon tailed off. Sports, drinking beer, heavy metal concerts, etc. took priority, and I shelved my books. I can recall another aborted 2E session later in high school that didn’t last long.

I dabbled in D&D a little bit in college, playing a few sessions with a gaming club and attending my first con, Total Confusion in Worcester, MA. That would have been 1993 or so. But when I graduated college and got married I shelved my books, possibly for good.

But around 2000 or so my interest in the game was rekindled by the issuance of 3.0, which promised a “back to the dungeon” approach. Around that time I also discovered EnWorld and its “Gamers Seeking Gamers” webpage. Via messageboard and e-mail I arranged to meet with my future DM and another eventual co-player on neutral turf, an interview over beer to ensure we had compatible interests and were not complete lunatic freaks (aside from the fact that we played D&D, of course). When I told my wife I was going off to a smoky local bar to meet up with a strange man to talk D&D she thrust her cell phone into my coat pocket (at the time I didn’t own one) in the event I got abducted. I wasn’t.

With our mutual fears allayed we arranged and played our first game in May of 2001. We’ve been gaming ever since. We’re happily plugging away with 3.5 edition, three book core with a few house rules thrown in, in a long-term home-brew campaign in which our characters recently reached eighth level. We also have another 3.5 game going in the Forgotten Realms, though it’s been a couple years since our last session in the FR. In between we’ve had few one-shots of D20 modern, a couple boardgaming sessions, and even a romp through a 3.5 version of The Tomb of Horrors (which I had to miss, sadly). In general I prefer the older versions of the game because they have far more flavor and are better reads, as I spend more time reading rule books than actually playing. But 3.5 works fine.

I’ve had a lot of fun these past 10 years. Our original plan was to game every other Saturday, but commitments and life in general got in the way. Now we’re good for maybe one Sunday a month.

Like most other role players I’ve given a lot of consideration to the question: why play? If you can get the same experience reading, watching movies, or playing computer games, why play D&D and other tabletop RPGs? What’s the appeal? Why am I still interested in the hobby after all these years?

Here’s my take: What makes RPGs unique is the aspect of collaborative storytelling, entering into a shared space of the unscripted unknown. You’re not reading a novel, you’re creating a story as you play. The tale you spin can run the gamut from brilliant to low brow, from serious to the comically ridiculous. The vagaries of the DM, player decision, and random die-rolls make every game unpredictable.

D&D is rarely boring. I don’t take it too seriously—some prefer earnest, immersive characterization and shrewd tactical play. Me, I like laughing and poking a little fun at fantasy tropes. I enjoy rolling critical hits and also failing saving throws at the worst possible time.

Some of my favorite times are those in which we had to extricate ourselves from our own messes. Carelessly walking into ambushes. Getting swallowed by a purple worm and having to cut myself free. Getting shoved off a bridge by a hill giant and falling onto a rock outcropping surrounded by lava. And so on. At other times we’ve smashed the DM’s big bad evil guy in a round or two and laid waste to his plans, too. Again, you never know what will happen, only that it’s rare to have anything go according to plan.

The other appeal of playing D&D is the out of game camaraderie. Getting together for a session gets me out of the house and among the company of like-minded individuals. We drink a few cold ones, eat good food, talk about books or films, and laugh a lot.

So yeah, once a month I play an Elf. But it’s been a lot of fun.

Happy anniversary guys (and gals).

Forth now, and fear no darkness! Tolkien in his own words

Courtesy of Miguel, former co-blogger on The Cimmerian, this amazing find from HarperAudio: Four audio clips of J.R.R. Tolkien reading selections from The Lord of the Rings.

I've never heard these before, and did not expect I'd ever have the opportunity to listen to Tolkien thundering out Theoden's speech before the charge on the Pelennor Fields.

Arise, arise, Riders of Theoden!
Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter!
spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered,
a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!
Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!

Awesome stuff. Thanks Miguel.

Drinking in the demonic energy of Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun

If you like the sound and rhythm of words — and if you’re a hopeless J.R.R. Tolkien junkie — you’ll like The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun (2009, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Lacking either of these prerequisites, you probably won’t. And there’s not much more to say than that.

Casual Tolkien fans likely won’t buy The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, and even semi-serious fans who have tackled The Silmarillion may lack the appetite for it. It consists of two long poems, around which are sandwiched an exhaustive introduction and a pair of lengthy explications/footnotes, the latter written by Tolkien’s son Christopher. Added together, this additional material is longer than the poems themselves.

The real reward of The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun is its wonderful language. The poems—“The Lay of the Volsungs” and “The Lay of Gudrun”—are composed in eight line alliterative stanzaic metre. Reading them makes me wish I knew the native Old Norse Tolkien of which Tolkien spoke so admiringly; the modern English is pretty darned powerful already.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

Tor.com releases poll results for best SFF novels of the decade

Tor.com recently polled its readers on the best SFF novels of the decade. The results are in (analysis here) and the top ten include:

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
Blindsight by Peter Watts
Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey
A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

I’ve only read three of these, two of which I liked (A Storm of Swords, American Gods), and one I’m rather indifferent about (Perdido Street Station). I’ve heard a lot of good things about Anathem and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and intend to read them one day. But unfortunately as I’ve said before there’s so much fantasy on the market, both new and old titles, and not enough time to read them all. I know I’ll never get to all these titles, sadly enough.

Tor.com is featuring essays about the novels on their blog. The first is up: An appreciation of American Gods by novelist Patrick Rothfuss. Rothfuss had the same reaction to American Gods as I did: He can’t quite explain why it works, only that it does, and it’s pretty brilliant. A couple recent commenters on The Silver Key expressed their dislike for AG but I’m glad to see it get some love over on Tor.com. I enjoyed it a lot.

George R.R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords is a bloodbath of a book with perhaps the most painful scene I’ve read in a fantasy novel. It made me not want to continue (though I did manage to finish it). It’s extremely well-done gritty fantasy, if you like that sort of thing.

I freely admit that I don’t get the appeal of Perdido Street Station. It’s dark and byzantine … and, well, dark and byzantine. I found the characters unappealing and the plot meandering. The slake-moths were kind of cool and New Crobuzon was well-done, though.

What are your thoughts? Have you read any of these? Any you’d recommend? Any head scratchers/notable absentees that didn't make the list?

Me want

Here's some ultimate nerdity that I would nevertheless gladly wear (look closely/zoom in on thumbnails below): http://www.threadless.com/product/2293/There_and_Back_Again.

I wonder if the Tolkien Estate will be putting the smack down on this, though.

Chewing over realism in fantasy: A few morsels more

Fantasy literature is rife with pour souls being fed to hungry beasts. A hungry crowd watches as weaponless prisoners are forced into the Arena of Tokalet where the monstrous, half-intelligent ape Nji awaits (L. Sprague de Camp’s The Tritonian Ring). In George R.R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords the unarmored female warrior Brienne is thrown into a bear pit for the sport of onlookers. The tentacled demon-god Thog devours drugged, defenseless denizens of an ancient city in Robert E. Howard’s “Xuthal of the Dusk.”

It’s all pretty awful (albeit suspenseful, and gruesomely entertaining) stuff, but the way in which one author handles this familiar scenario vs. another I think sheds a little more light on my discussions of realism in fantasy literature.

Here’s how J.R.R. Tolkien handles anthropomorphs as monster food in The Two Towers (Chapter 7: “Shelob’s Lair”):

And sometimes as a man may cast a dainty to his cat (his cat he calls her, but she owns him not) Sauron would send her prisoners that he had no better uses for: he would have them driven to her hole, and report brought back to him of the play she made.

That to me is a great piece of writing. It tells you plenty about the cruelty and maliciousness of Sauron and his relationship with the giant she-spider (which he half-hates and half-fears, but tolerates as a valuable guardian into Mordor).

As for the gory details, it allows my mind to fill in the rest. Tolkien goes on to explain that Shelob cares not for wealth or power, but spends all her time brooding on her next feast. "For all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness," he writes. That's about as nasty and explicit as Tolkien gets.

Now compare that passage with this preview of Richard Morgan’s forthcoming novel The Cold Commands:

In the wild, a Hanliagh black octopus would have wrapped tentacles around surface prey this large and dragged it deep, where it could be drowned and dealt with at leisure. Defeated by the bobbing wood and the manacles, the creatures settled for swarming the boards, tearing at the chained bodies with frenzied, suckered force, biting awkwardly with their beaks. So skin came off wholesale, gobbets and chunks of flesh came with it, finally down to the bone. Blood vessels tore – in the case of a lucky few, fatally. And occasionally, a victim might smother to death with tentacles or body mass across the face. But for most, it was a long, slow death by haphazard flaying and flensing – none of the creatures was bigger than a court-bred hound, they could not otherwise have squeezed in through the chamber’s vents, and even their combined efforts were rarely enough to make a merciful end of things.

Jhiral was watching her.

She forced herself not to look away – the spray of blood, the up-and-down flail of tentacles like thick black whips, the soft, mobbing purple-black shapes hanging off the wood and flesh, crawling across it. Her gaze snagged on a wild, wide-open human eye and a screaming mouth, briefly blocked by a thick crawling tentacle, then uncovered again to shriek to shriek, to shriek……

As for that passage, man, it’s brutal. It’s effective, and horrifying, and well-done. But it’s not why I read fantasy. It jerked me back into reality with its clinical descriptions of flensing and tearing blood vessels. Perhaps Morgan intended this scene as a condemnation of torture. It vaguely reminded me of the real-life practice of waterboarding, albeit turned up to 11. I don’t know. I read it and it just felt — too much.

Perhaps what I object to in some modern fantasy literature is the degree to which it emphasizes violence—graphic carnage is shown in vivid, sometimes nauseating color, vs. implied in the older forms. Because in the end, being the plaything of a monstrous, reeking, millennia old spider, paralyzed with poison, and eaten alive, isn’t any more comforting than being consumed piece by piece by a swarm of ravenous octopi. But I know which one I’d rather read. And it does not involve cephalopods.

I’ve said my piece on this a few times and have little else to add; I happened to see that Morgan posted that excerpt at his website and thought it provided a timely example of what I was trying to convey in my couple of previous posts on the subject.

Just more food for thought (no pun intended) and a rather lighthearted example in the ongoing realism debate.

Internal, external conflict ignite Cornwell’s The Burning Land

“Our gods prefer feasting. They live, Uhtred. They live and laugh and enjoy, and what does their god do? He broods, he’s vengeful, he scowls, he plots. He’s a dark and lonely god, Uhtred, and our gods ignore him. They’re wrong.”

–Bernard Cornwell, The Burning Land

Conflict — internal to fictional protagonist Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and external to blood-soaked, fire-ravaged Britain — burns brightly in The Burning Land, the fifth and latest entry in Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories, a partially fictionalized chronicle of the real-life Viking invasions that swept Dark Ages Britain.

A Saxon-raised-Dane, Uhtred is a microcosm of the rough mixing of Christianity and pagan culture that occurred in war-torn ninth century Britain. Uhtred is a Saxon whose father was killed in a Danish raid. Taken prisoner as a thrall to the Dane Earl Ragnar and raised hard, he nevertheless grows to love the Danes. Although they’re ferocious raiders, the Danes drink deep of life, scorn Christian virtues of humility and pity, and worship the pagan gods of Thor and Odin (they expect less of their followers than the one God, and leave more leeway for fun).

But Uhtred’s loyalties are torn. His hereditary home is the Northern kingdom of Bebbanburg and his peoples are Saxon. Over the course of the series he comes to respect the coldly pious and serious, but brilliant and fair King Alfred of Wessex (Alfred the Great) and at times reject the occasionally murderous habits of the Danish warlords.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

A few thoughts on The Bankrupt Nihilism of our Fallen Fantasists

In joining with it seems everyone else on the internet I thought I would weigh in on Leo Grin’s The Bankrupt Nihilism of our Fallen Fantasists . I felt reluctant to do so at first and I still feel that way to some degree, since I respect Grin and the wonderful work he’s done at The Cimmerian, and I much prefer to comment on art and not the man (or woman) behind the works. But that’s what I’m doing here, commenting on the essay itself. So here goes.

Leo seems to be drawing most of his flak for the political commentary in his post. He would have been better served (in my opinion) to keep his post to a critique of art. But in his defense Big Hollywood is a political website and he feels passionately about that stuff. He's a big man and been at this for a long time; like it or hate it he said his piece.

I am not as adamantly opposed to grimly realistic fantasy literature as Grin, even if its terminus is “nihilism.” I’m on record as liking A Song of Ice and Fire. I have had Joe Abercrombie on my to be read list for quite some time. I enjoy some of this stuff as a palate cleanser.

That said, I don’t prefer a steady diet of realism in my fantasy (one Red Wedding is enough, thanks). As I’ve said before the new wave of shock and awe/ grim and dark/whatever you want to call it fantasy literature is not inherently better or more adult than stuff like Tolkien and Howard. In fact, I think it’s the work of an adult to try to make something of this life, not revel and roll about in the muck. Fantasy literature can shock, surprise, and provide edge-of-your-seat storytelling. It can strive to present an accurate depiction of the squalor of Medieval life and the terrible carnage of the battlefields of the era. That’s all fine. But it can also aspire to something more, and at its best it does.

I often ask myself: Why do I like fantasy? I like swords and armor and medieval settings. I like wizards, as long as their magic is dark and mysterious and unpredictable. Monsters are cool. In other words, I like the trappings of the genre. Although, like Grin, I also don’t have the patience anymore for multi-tome epic fantasy, which is why I studiously avoid series like The Wheel of Time. Tolkien gets some flak for starting this trend, but the hardbound The Lord of the Rings I have sitting on my bookshelf checks in at a slim 1,008 pages--all three "books" (Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King) combined. To put that in perspective, Martin’s A Storm of Swords, alone, is nearly as long as LOTR.

I also like books that have something to say about the human condition. Tolkien does, and Howard and Poul Anderson do to some degree. I just finished listening to the audio book of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men: While not fantasy, that book certainly does. While it has many other fine qualities, I’m not so sure I can say the same (yet) about A Song of Ice and Fire. Then again maybe I'm being too hard on Martin; I think what he's doing with the character of Jaime Lannister for example is pretty amazing.

I also like fantasy works that are mythic. This is much harder to explain or quantify. It’s what draws me to Anderson, to E.R. Eddison, to Tolkien, and also to newer works like Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Perhaps a better question to ask is, why do I like myths? Maybe because they provide a framework for how the world works, other than everything is crap. I already know that politicians are corrupt and war is hell; what else do you got?

In the end I have a hard time explaining this stuff, but I do know that works like The Steel Remains don't feel particularly mythic to me. They feel ordinary and de-mythologized, and not very, well, fantas-tic.

We've got singing dwarves...

So Peter Jackson's The Hobbit is retaining a part of Tolkien's novel that I thought would surely be left on the cutting room floor: The singing. Courtesy of The One Ring.net: "Thirteen Singing Dwarves and a Very Funny Hobbit".

From the article:

Many fans have been wondering whether 13 dwarves would become a generic mass in the film, or whether they would be fleshed out in the script to have individual personalities.

Dwarf actors William Kirchner and Peter Hambleton spoke on that: “We are thirteen distinct and strong personalities – but we are an ensemble as well”.

Speaking of ensemble, the dwarves confirmed they’d be doing their own singing. “It’s all staying very close to the book – yes, there WILL be singing.”

I've got to say that this is rather heartening after the less than stellar news I'd heard about this "Itaril" character. Although it morphs into a rather serious tale by the end, The Hobbit is much more lighthearted and whimsical than The Lord of the Rings. As such I'm glad they're keeping the singing, even if it's just "Far over the misty mountains cold; To dungeons deep and caverns cold." The deep-throated dwarven song in the dark of Bag End is one of my favorite scenes in the novel.

As I've said before I’ll be there on the opening night of The Hobbit, hoping that everyone involved in its making has the sense to hew closely to Tolkien’s story. It’s a simple formula, and therein lies success.

Grails: Quests of the Dawn: Or, where’s my knights, dude?

In John Boorman’s Excalibur there’s a scene in which an ailing, aging King Arthur prepares to send his knights on the quest for the holy grail. With his warriors assembled about him, faces grim at his pain-wracked appearance (or perhaps the prospect of not returning from said quest), Arthur whispers a final, cryptic order: "Only the grail can restore leaf and flower. Search the land, the labyrinths of the forest, to the edge of … within.”

The holy grail is as much a concept as a cup. We assume the knights are looking for an actual, physical vessel, but Arthur’s hint suggests that the quest is a search within the individual—the voyage of a soul seeking spiritual perfection. Excalibur is a film steeped in Arthurian lore and it practically demands at least some cursory knowledge of the myths in order to make complete sense of it. That’s one reason why I like it so much. The other is that it’s got knights riding around in armor fighting, jousting, and in general causing a ruckus. It’s smart and delivers on the battle scenes, too.

It was with images of armor-plated knights riding out on a great quest that I eagerly dug into Grails: Quests for the Dawn (Roc, 1994), a collection of 25 short stories and a handful of poems by such greats as Orson Scott Card, Gene Wolfe, Mercedes Lackey, and Neil Gaiman, as well as many other lesser literary lights. Alas, my anticipation did not live up to reality. Grails: Quests of the Dawn gets it half right, delivering stories about broken characters in search of healing. But it comes at the expense of, well, knights. There are precious few in the book and as I recall only a single sword is drawn in anger (Brad Strickland’s “The Gift of Gilthaliad”). Most of the stories in fact don’t even take place during the Middle Ages but instead opt for modern or in some cases pre-medieval settings.

Now, lest I be accused of being a literary lowbrow, as I said previously I get the symbolism of the Grail Quest. But couldn’t we get the literary bits after Launcelot whips up on a half-dozen would-be robbers in the Forest Sauvage? Too much to ask, I guess. You won’t find the clash of sword and lance or the quickening heartbeat that betokens impending battle in Grails: Quests of the Dawn.

Despite my complaints about its lack of blood and thunder there are a few worthy stories in this collection. Neil Gaiman’s “Chivalry”, a story about a kindly old woman who finds the grail in a second-hand shop but doesn’t want to relinquish her prize so quickly to a handsome young knight, is very good. So is “Atlantis” by Orson Scott Card. The latter does not feature the grail, though it does include a famous (waterborne) vessel. It’s a clever retelling of the Noah’s Ark/flood story and how that begat the myth of Atlantis. There are a few other decent entries too. “Greggie’s Cup,” though a bit telegraphed, is a heartwarming story about a child with special needs who befriends a ghostly Launcelot in the ruins of an old castle, as the latter rejoices to find a trusting, non-judgmental spirit in whom he can confide. Alan Dean Foster’s “What You See … ” would fit nicely into a Year’s Best Horror anthology with its E.C. Comics’ “you reap what you sew” harsh morality tale of an ending.

Unfortunately there are an equal number of stinkers, too. “The Awful Truth in Arthur’s Barrow” is 25 pages of mildly interesting buildup to a bad punchline, the world’s worst pun. A few other stories felt like cloying Hallmark Channel fare.

I was eagerly looking forward to Gene Wolfe’s entry “The Sailor Who Sailed After the Sun” but I must admit I was left scratching my head at this (symbolic? lunatic?) story about a farm boy who leaves his drab home life to seek adventure on a whaling ship out of New Bedford. When the crew lands on an uninhabited island he decides to remain and a talking ape named Jacko (not making this up) takes his place among the crew. Wolfe is a great writer but has a tendency to veer off into rather strange territory at times. If anyone has read “The Sailor Who Sailed After the Sun” and has a theory of what it’s supposed to mean, drop me a line.

Grails: Quests of the Dawn has a companion volume that I have sitting on my shelf: Grails: Visitations of the Night, though I’ll admit after volume one I’m not so keen on starting. Karl Edward Wagner (author of the savage Kane stories) is one of the contributors, so I may take up the quest yet, hopeful that it may satisfy my less than noble spirit, which yearns for a little action in its fantastic tales, too.

Final verdict: Three out of five stars.

Realism does not equal adult: A followup

My Thursday post generated a lot of comments here and on Black Gate and some personal e-mails, which was great, but at least one person didn’t seem to understand my argument or feel I made it clearly. I’ve also had a few additional thoughts on the subject. So here goes.

My main point was (and remains) that realistic fiction does not equal adult fiction. If someone writes a story about elves and dragons in which violence is de-emphasized, and another writes about humans killing each other graphically with swords in a faux-medieval/historical setting, the latter is not inherently more adult. I define adult in this context as a work that appeals to mature, adult sensibilities. As I stated in the article The Lord of the Rings grapples with very adult issues, as does The Once and Future King and Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea series. In contrast, The Steel Remains struck me as rather shallow and without any insights on the human condition. In fact it seemed purely reactionary, written as a grimy, alternative viewpoint to traditional stories of heroism. It certainly features a much higher degree of graphic violence and sex and shades of gray morality, but these elements alone do not make it a superior book for adults.

Some enjoy this style of fantasy fiction, obviously. Others don’t like to have their noses mashed in suffering, to be immersed in cities that resemble the worst of our own urban decay, and stories where (almost) everyone dies. This type of writing is certainly realistic, but is it more adult, is it a more serous form of literature? What do these works seek to accomplish? Unlike the three works of traditional fantasy I mentioned above, reading The Steel Remains did not cause me rethink my life, the nature of my humanity (providing examples of what it could be, instead of the depths life frequently descends into), or my place in the universe. It merely reminded me of the worst life has to offer. There are no heroes: A hero is just someone who is stronger or better with a sword than another. Concepts like honor and principled stands are meaningless. Materialism is king and all else is relativism.

To reiterate, I’m not opposed to realism. As I said in my first post I like A Song of Ice and Fire quite a bit. I plan to finish it (if and when Martin gets around to it). Although I will add that I found A Feast for Crows to be a marked drop in quality, in part due to page bloat and a weakened narrative thrust, but perhaps also because many of the characters I cared about were killed off. I lost interest in reading POV chapters of characters with whom I did not identify and in whose fates I was indifferent (we all know what happened to the lone principled hero of ASOIAF).

It’s also worth noting that my argument is partly a matter of taste. I’m not fond of extremely graphic sex and violence in my casual reading. I’m certainly not a prude; I love reading about historical combat and my interest is piqued by weaponry and armor and tactics and the like. But I have a problem with books that revel in gore, either for shock value, as deliberate reaction against traditional fantasy, or as some ham-fisted metaphor for how the world “really works.” I wrote a post a while back for The Cimmerian about my disturbing venture into the dark recesses of horror films, and while I’m not equating The Steel Remains with Cannibal Holocaust the theory is the same.

Right now I’m reading Bernard Cornwell’s The Burning Land and there’s a scene in which the Dane Harald tries to force Uhtred to give back his captured wife Skade. When Uhtred refuses, Harald orders a line of Saxon women and children out of the forest and nods to one of his men, who splits the first woman’s head in half with a war-axe. Blood gouts like a fountain and soaks her screaming daughter. The killer moves to the next in line. Uhtred gives up Skade, and the Saxons are whisked offscreen.

Yes, events like these really happened (and still occur in some parts of the world, sadly). This is the ugliness of the Dark Ages and Cornwell doesn’t whitewash it, which is a good thing. Reading Cornwell wakes you up to reality circa 800 A.D. Of course, Cornwell is writing historical fiction, and as such has some obligation to historical accuracy. In another example I rated Flags of our Fathers as a five-star (highest rated) book and that includes first-hand accounts of soldiers who witnessed real atrocities, graphically recounted. I have no problem reading this stuff. I don’t agree with whitewashing history.

But I think fantasy can aspire to something different than historical realism. That’s why I ended my essay with an examination of fantasy and the element of escape, which I think is part of the appeal of fantasy and a quality to be embraced, not shunned. I happen to like this aspect of fantasy. I know realism has been around since the days of REH and Clark Ashton Smith and Glen Cook, but while these earlier authors may be of kind with George R.R. Martin or Richard Morgan, they are often very far apart in degree. I wonder at what point grim, brutal, realistic fantasy ceases to become fantastic, and becomes something else altogether.

Am I off-base here? Do people understand my argument? I’m interested in your thoughts and comments, pro and con.

Why realism does not equate to adult (or even good) fantasy

That foul smell in the air? There’s something rotten in the realm of fantasy fiction, and its name is realism.

Two of the blogs I frequent and another one I’ve recently stumbled across have all recently commented on (and lamented about) a new trend gripping fantasy these days: Realism, and the corresponding claim that it somehow makes fantasy more adult and serious.

Lagomorph Rex of Dweomera Lagomorpha says that the new trend leaves him cold: It’s no secret that I dislike the current trend in Fantasy. It’s almost as if every author has decided they will up the misery and muck quotient and see who can make the nastiest world in which to force their characters to try and survive in.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

The Sword of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett—a review

The Sword of Rhiannon (1949) was my first experience reading Leigh Brackett, one of the grand dames of science fiction along with C.L. Moore, and I must say I was quite impressed. Although it may sound like heresy to the Edgar Rice Burroughs fans Brackett’s depiction of Mars might be the best I’ve read. While not as action-packed, I thought it created a more convincing alien atmosphere than A Princess of Mars, although it certainly owes a huge debt in terms of form and genre elements to Burroughs' earlier work.

The Sword of Rhiannon tells the story of Matthew Carse, an archeologist from Earth who’s spent 30 of his 35 years on the red planet, an arid, dying world that at one time was home to a vibrant environment and an advanced alien culture. One day a wealth-seeking Martian leads Carse to the tomb of Rhiannon, in which a cursed, godlike figure from Mars’ ancient past is rumored to lie in deathless sleep. Carse enters the tomb and is swept back via some form of wormhole into Mars’ ancient past, before its seas dried up and when all was green and beautiful. Carse takes with him the jeweled-hilted sword of Rhiannon as well as a dark sentience from the tomb. He soon finds himself emeshed in an ancient conflict between the militaristic nation of Sark and their evil serpent-like allies, the Caer Dhu, who are at war with the Martian free peoples under the Sea Kings.

Despite its fantasy trappings, The Sword of Rhiannon is firmly in the sword and planet genre. While the protagonist wields a sword and ancient Mars is decidedly low-tech (transportation is by sail or rowed ships; combat is with medieval-style weapons), Mars was once home to a race of advanced beings called the Quiru. The Quiru abandoned the planet but left behind relics of their advanced civilization, incredibly powerful technology that includes time-travel devices. There is no overt magic in the story, save perhaps for a form of telepathy. The Quiru’s artifacts are sufficiently advanced to seem like magic though Brackett does describe them as working according to scientific laws.

More than its fun story (which rigorously follows Burroughs’ sword and planet formula), The Sword of Rhiannon succeeds due to its style and atmosphere. Bracketts’ writing makes Mars feel, well, otherwordly. She succeeds in creating a vivid contrast between the arid waste of the new Mars and the beauty of the old, and we as the reader feel the pang of loss of a great civilization that once was. Here’s an example, a scene in which Carse, chained to the oars of a Sark ship, awakes at his post and looks upon a sunrise on the sea that makes him momentarily forget his enslavement, so different is it from the dry wastes of Mars that he previously knew:

Through the oar port he watched the sea change color with the sunrise. He had never seen anything so ironically beautiful. The water caught the pale tints of the first light and warmed them with its own phosphorescent fire—amethyst and pearl and rose and saffron. Then, as the sun rose higher, the sea changed to one sheet of burning gold.

Whenever I finish a book I typically scour the web to see what others think about it. In my travels I was pleased to find a nice essay on Brackett by Michael Moorcock, “Queen of the Martian Mysteries: An Appreciation of Leigh Brackett."

As readers of this blog may know I don’t have a lot of love for Mr. Moorcock for his harsh and rather personal criticisms of J.R.R. Tolkien. But I freely admit that Moorcock’s piece was a nice read, informative and infused with some illuminating personal anecdotes about Brackett the person and the writer. It also manages to steer entirely clear of the spite-filled tangents into which Moorcock’s criticisms frequently seem to veer. I was surprised to find that many of his observations of Brackett were the same as mine, formed during my limited exposure to Brackett (which consist of The Sword of Rhiannon only).

I must say however that some of Moorcock’s commentary caused me to do a positive double-take. In particular I was flummoxed to find that some of the very characteristics he finds most admirable in Brackett’s romanticism-infused science fiction are the selfsame qualities that imbue his most hated of books, The Lord of the Rings. From his essay:

Yet Brackett has less in common with Mervyn Peake than she has with Graham Greene, Raymond Chandler and other superior writers of popular fiction. Yet common to all these writers is the sense of yearning loss, as of innocence, a nobler, irredeemable past and an uncertain future. Her heroes are often deeply aware of some moral transgression which everyone forgives them for except themselves. At the time these stories were written we had seen our sense of our history, of our progress towards real civilisation, blasted to bits before our eyes. By the time these stories were appearing in the pulps, Germany’s Nazi armies seemed unchallenged in their conquest of Europe. All those idealistic aspirations for world peace and the rule of civil law had collapsed before the cheap rhetoric of a bad journalist like Mussolini or a mediocre painter of postcards like Hitler.

Wow, where to start…at last check The Lord of the Rings is infused with a sense of “yearning loss, as of innocence.” It certainly draws the readers’ attention (even without benefit of The Silmarillion) to a “nobler, irredeemable past,” and transitions the reader with its heartbreaking, equivocal ending, to an “uncertain future.” When LOTR was written progress was being “blasted to bits” before Tolkien’s eyes, which he witnessed first-hand in the trenches of WWI and later in the rise of Nazi Germany. Yet Moorcock somehow finds these traits admirable in Brackett and execrable (no exaggeration on my part) in Tolkien. Is it because Tolkien’s hobbits are too British and countrified for his tastes, or perhaps because Tolkien offers the possibility (not the guarantee) of consolation/salvation?

Moorcock even comments that the hard science fiction in vogue during Brackett’s time (her stuff shares more in common with science fantasy) fails as lasting literature because of its lack of humanism and inability to portray technology as anything less than progressive. Writes Moorcock, "We were beginning to realise that controlling [the world] might not produce the effects we desired."

Hmm, sounds conspicuously like the point Tolkien made with that whole One Ring bit.

But enough Tolkien digression. In short, The Sword of Rhiannon=highly recommended.

Robert E. Howard in his own words

In honor of what would be his 105th birthday, I thought I’d let Robert E. Howard’s own words do the talking.

Here’s a few of my favorites culled from his Conan, Kull, and Solomon Kane stories. There’s so many to pull from but I chose these because they capture the ferocity, humor, and poetic qualities of Howard’s writing.

If you got any favorite passages to share, post ‘em here.

There comes, even to kings, the time of great weariness. Then the gold of the throne is brass, the silk of the palace becomes drab. The gems in the diadem and upon the fingers of the women sparkle drearily like the ice of the white seas; the speech of men is as the empty rattle of a jester’s bell and the feel comes of things unreal; even the sun is copper in the sky and the breath of the green ocean is no longer fresh.

–"The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune”

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

Gemmell’s Legend remains a rousing call to arms

I love pre-battle speeches. Arnold’s “Than to hell with you!” prayer to Crom before the battle of the mounds, and Theoden’s exhortation to the Rohirrim just before their charge on the Pelennor Fields (“spears shall be shaken, shields shall be splintered!”), to name two, make me want to pick up spear and shield and wade into the fray (of course Kenneth Branagh’s Band of Brothers/St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V remains the best). Even though I’d never want to fight in a real shield wall, the power of these speeches admittedly give me second thoughts.

That’s probably why I loved reading David Gemmell’s Legend (1984) so much. Gemmell’s debut novel is more or less a buildup to (and execution of) a monumental battle scene, and its rousing, inspirational speeches don’t disappoint. In terms of the printed page Legend ranks right up alongside Steven Pressfield’s spectacular Gates of Fire for galvanizing battle-speeches.

Here’s one sample as delivered by Druss, the eponymous “legend” from whom the novel derives its name. Druss is an aging warrior and a veteran of innumerable battles who dusts off his axe Snaga and treks to the defense of the fortress Dros Delnoch, like an aging athlete coming out of retirement to prove he can still play. On the eve of the final battle, he rouses the outnumbered Drenai to stand with him, one last time:

“Some of you are probably thinking that you may panic and run. You won’t! Others are worried about dying. Some of you will. But all men die. No ever gets out of this life alive.

I fought at Skeln Pass when everyone said we were finished. They said the odds were too great, but I said be damned to them! For I am Druss, and I have never been beaten, not by Nadir, Sathuli, Ventrian, Vagrian, or Drenai.

By all the gods and demons of this world, I will tell you now—I do not intend to be beaten here, either!” Druss was bellowing at the top of his voice as he dragged Snaga into the air. The ax blade caught the sun and the chant began.

“Druss the Legend! Druss the Legend!”
If you like the above monologue, you’ll probably love Legend. If not, well, there’s always Magic Kingdom for Sale: Sold.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website .

Donnie Darko

As I noted in my last post, some of the unfortunate elements/scenes in The Lord of the Rings films appear to be financially driven. In contrast, Donnie Darko (2001) never "plays to the gallery." That's one of its many endearing (although some might argue maddening) elements.

I'd be curious to hear what others think of this film (like it? hate it? indifferent?) I watched it a second time last night and while I still haven't grasped everything going on the movie, it's one of those rare pictures you can return to again and again and take something from it each time. It's a haunting film that resists easy analysis (there's a web site dedicated to its explanation, but I've resisted looking at it in depth, as I would prefer not to atomize the film). Normally films featuring time travel and the implications of such give me a headache; for some reason this one worked.

Also, thanks to Donnie Darko I can't listen to Duran Duran's "Notorious" anymore without thinking of Sparkle Motion.

(The geek in me was proud to immediately recognize the identity of the unnamed "linguist" who noted that"cellar door" is the most beautiful pair of matched words in the English language, per Drew Barrymore's conversation with Donnie. Readers of this blog should be able figure it out).

Roots and Branches by Tom Shippey: A review

Unlike like a lot of literature that you read in school—the kind that requires you to pinch your nose to swallow—you don’t have to be told to enjoy The Lord of the Rings. You can love its sheer storytelling and that of works like The Silmarillion first, and perhaps only for that reason. But The Lord of the Rings is also a deep work worthy of study, and waiting behind the tales is a wealth of literary criticism for the further explorer.

Tom Shippey’s Roots and Branches (Walking Tree Publishers, 2007) ranks among the best Tolkien criticism I’ve read, which should come as no surprise, given that the author is the pre-eminent Tolkien scholar of our age. While I wouldn’t rate it as highly as Shippey's The Road to Middle-Earth or J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Roots and Branches is a similarly illuminating and engaging read.

Roots and Branches collects 23 of Shippey’s essays and includes some previously published as well as newer/updated material. It takes a much broader focus than just Middle-earth: The essays include analyses not just of Tolkien’s fiction, but also his love for Old English poetry and Northern myth, his academic reputation then and now, and his lesser known works like “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth.”

In particular I enjoyed “Tolkien and the Beowulf-Poet,” which sheds a tremendous light on Tolkien’s love and fascination with that poem (in many ways he considered himself a reincarnation of the anonymous writer of Beowulf). “Tolkien and Iceland: The Philology of Envy,” is a wonderful summation of the influence of the Northern myths on Middle-earth and is another favorite.

Like Tolkien Shippey is a philologist, so there’s a lot of discourse about the roots of words and how Tolkien derived his inspiration by extrapolating words like the variant forms of “elf” in Germanic. It may sound dry but it’s not: Shippey writes his essays like he speaks. They’re lively and he injects humor and personal commentary throughout, especially into the footnotes.

My favorite essay was “Orcs, Wraiths, Wights: Tolkien’s Images of Evil.” Fantasy has often been labeled as lightweight escapism by its critics, but Shippey demonstrates how fantasy actively grapples with real evil in ways that works of “serious” literature avoid or fail to address. “Tolkien, Lewis, and Wolfe demonstrate between them that one of the major advantages of fantasy in the modern world is that it effectively addresses the major threats of the modern world, like work, tedium, despair, and bureaucracy,” Shippey writes.

For example, Shippey lays out a convincing case that orcs reflect our own characteristics of selfishness and self-centeredness. Orcs know what’s fair and unfair (they use the term “regular elvish trick” to describe Sam’s “abandonment” of Frodo, after Sam mistakes him for dead), and they exhibit a loyalty to their mates. But they refuse to apply morality evenly and lay it aside when it interferes with their own self-interests. “Orcish behavior is human behavior, and their inability to judge their own actions by their own moral criteria is a problem all too sadly familiar,” writes Shippey.

What about the Ringwraiths; are they pure evil? No, says Shippey. They’re an absence, a twisted thing, which Shippey demonstrates by showing us the philological roots of the word wraith (which derives from wreath, and writhe). Modern-day analogues can be found inside corporations or big government, Shippey says, in the soulless behavior of executives or the shuffling figures of cubicle workers who sacrifice their humanity for advancement or material gain. “No one is secure from the prospect of being a wraith,” Shippey writes. I myself have seen wraiths walking the halls in the (half) flesh in corporate America (and sadly at times feel like one myself).

Overall the essay is a brilliant refutation of critics like Richard Morgan who label The Lord of the Rings as a simplistic struggle of stainless good vs. irredeemable evil: it demonstrates that evil is not just some abstract presence or created by Sauron on some factory-line, but is “an element of goodness perverted, of evil as a mistake, something insidious,” to quote Shippey.

Shippey also wades into the Lord of the Rings films with “Another Road to Middle-Earth: Jackson’s Movie Trilogy.” As some may know Shippey was a consultant for the screenplay of the Jackson films (assisting with the proper pronunciation of Elvish, primarily) and was interviewed for the extras on all three discs.

Overall Shippey has a mixed but, in the main, a positive opinion of the films. He does lament some of the changes and notes in places how they strip The Lord of the Rings (the book) of some of its complexities. Shippey describes some of the cruder alterations as financially driven: Tolkien, working on his spare time, had no-one to consider but himself, while Jackson had a budget of hundreds of millions and had to consider popular appeal. He describes elements like Legolas’ shield-surfing, Gimli’s dwarf-tossing, and Arwen’s transformation into warrior princess as “playing to the gallery.” He says Jackson is guilty of “democratization” and “emotionalisation,” meaning he succumbs to a need to inflate the roles of minor characters, and also needlessly inserts a triangle situation into the journey of Gollum, Sam, and Frodo, in which Gollum competes with Sam for Frodo’s love. He has other criticisms as well, including the films' removal of Tolkien's conception of the workings of divine providence.

But Shippey says Jackson and his screenwriters were well-versed in the material and gives them credit for taking bits of Tolkien and using them in different places than they appear in the book to great effect (for example, moving parts of “The Shadow of the Past” and “The Council of Elrond” into the arresting prologue). He also thinks the film gets much of the broader themes and narrative core of the book right, including “the differing styles of heroism, the need for pity as well as courage, the vulnerability of the good, [and] the true cost of evil.”

Godspeed, Major Dick Winters

When people asked whether he was a hero, [Winters] echoed the words of his World War II buddy, Mike Ranney: "No, but I served in a company of heroes."

I love to read about fantasy heroes, but last week a real one (despite his self-effacing comment above) passed from the earth.

From USA Today: "Band of Brothers" inspiration Dick Winters dies at 92.

I can't recommend Stephen Ambrose's "Band of Brothers" highly enough, nor the HBO miniseries of the same name. A member of the 101st Airborne Division, Winters and his unit were in the first wave of soldiers into Normandy via parachute, bailing out of low-flying planes over occupied territory and through flak and small-arms fire. I can't even imagine what was going through their minds (it's one of the most harrowing and well-done scenes in the miniseries). "Thus did 13,400 of America's finest youth, who had been training for this moment for two years, hurl themselves against Hitler's Fortress Europe," wrote Ambrose.

They then fought their way across Europe through the Battle of the Bulge and the end of the war.

Winters was a leader in every sense of the word, a role model, a brave man, a tough SOB, and a member of a generation that saved the world from tyranny. May he rest in peace.

Tolkien and Howard still The Two Towers of fantasy

Not to beat the subject, like Fingon, to death, but neither writer is trod into the mire by a comparison to the other. The shortest distance between these two towers is the straight line they draw and defend against the dulling of our sense of wonder, the deadening of our sense of loss, and the slow death of imagination denied.

–Steve Tompkins, “The Shortest Distance Between Two Towers”

With my first Black Gate/Silver Key post of 2011 I thought I’d kick off the New Year with one of those big, bold, declarative, prediction type posts. So here it is: J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard are firmly ensconced as the two towers of fantasy, and as the years pass they will not only remain such, but perhaps will never be dethroned.

Although they arguably did not blaze the trail, Tolkien and Howard set the standard for two sub-genres of fantasy—high fantasy and swords and sorcery, respectively—and no one has done either better before or since.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website .

Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay—a review

A common criticism leveled at fantasy is that it’s all about monsters and magic and plot and fails to address the human condition, and therefore fails as “serious” literature. I think that’s a lot of rot and that fantasy is no worse or better than mainstream fiction (some of it's great, some is awful, and most indifferent). But if there is any merit to this argument—and there is some—one can point the blame at the J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard clones, writers who churn out multi-volume paint-by-numbers epic quests or rote stories of bad-ass, brawling heroes in formulaic stories bereft of thought or complexity.

About the highest praise I can give for Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana (1990) is that, with more novels like it, fantasy would garner a lot more respect as a genre worthy of serious study and discussion. This observation doesn’t imply that Tigana is now among my favorite fantasy novels (it’s not, though it is quite good), only that it makes use of the conventions of what most academics consider serious literature.

Kay is an author with whom I have little acquaintance. I’ve read his Fionavar Tapestry, which I thought was okay but nothing too unique or exceptional. But over the years I’ve heard that Tigana, a 1991 nominee for the World Fantasy Award, was a must-read. Now that I read it my summation is that it's very good, but not great, checking at a solid four stars in my scientific five-star rating system.

Tigana takes place on a peninsula called the Palm, whose nine small provinces have fallen under the rule of two invading armies from Ygrath and Barbadior, each led by a powerful sorcerer-king. Although conquered, the nine provinces are more or less left intact, paying tax and tribute to their respective new rulers (who maintain an uneasy truce, though behind the scenes they seek to oust the other and take the Palm for themselves). The exception is the province of Tigana. A fierce battle waged by Tigana’s defenders resulted in the death of Stevan, son of the tyrant king Brandin of Ygrath. Grief-stricken and blinded by vengeance, Brandin ordered Tigana—a place of art and culture and beautiful spires—to be razed to the ground. Using powerful magic, Brandin also expunged its very memory from the residents of the Palm. As the novel opens only a few remember its existence; most know of it only as Lower Corte. The remainder of the novel follows a small band of freedom fighters determined to cast off Brandin’s yoke and restore Tigana to memory and its former glory.

Tigana is high fantasy, so you get the standard trappings that come with the territory (a map, detailed geography and history of the Palm, epic, world-altering events, etc.). Kay does a nice job casually inserting magic and myth and religion into the novel, which makes these elements feel real. There’s no long dissertations on how they operate, which is typically the case in high fantasy (incidentally this is one of the reasons why I largely avoid high fantasy—I get bored with long explanations and backstory). I wish more authors took a cue from GKK.

Being high fantasy there’s not much “blood and thunder” in the pages of Tigana, but Kay does a good job of keeping the reader on edge with political maneuvering and backstabbing and harsh torture and punishments meted out by tyrannical rulers. Think George R.R. Martin lite.

Where Tigana shines is in its presentation of complex characters conflicted with self-doubt and warring emotions. In particular Tigana contains some wonderful depictions of women. They’re all beautiful, of course, but as a male reader that works for me. There’s the red-haired Catarina, who bears a heavy burden of disgrace inherited from her father, who fled Tigana with her and her mother instead of taking up his sword in its defense. Dianora is perhaps the book’s most convincing character. A woman of Tigana whose father was slain in its defense, Dianora works her way into Brandin’s harem and eventually into his heart in a lengthy, complex plot to assassinate him.

Tigana also shines in its clever inversions of the standard devices associated with high fantasy. Brandin is portrayed as no mere monster, and despite her thirst for vengeance Dianora realizes she’s fallen in love with him. Some of the rebels of Tigana meanwhile adhere to the belief that ends justify the means, making them little better than their barbarian invaders.

But I did have some problems that Tigana that knock the book down a few notches (and if you’ve read Tigana, your mileage may vary, of course).

I felt that Kay was guilty a few times of telling instead of showing, a writing no-no. There are a few instances in which he tries to evoke sympathy for the despotic sorcerer-king Brandin by telling us that freedom fighters Devin and Alessan now saw him as a man, and not a monster. But that’s not effective. We should instinctively come to realize this in the text through observing his actions, and I never did. Kay wants the reader to feel some degree of sympathy for Brandin and I couldn’t muster any. What he did to Tigana and its ruler, Prince Valentin, was too despicable. I wanted him dead at every turn.

I also thought Tigana had some extraneous page-padding side plots that could have been effectively excised. Also, the ending felt rushed. Right around page 610 or so (Tigana checks in at a hefty 672 pages) I was actively worrying whether Kay could adequately wrap things up, or whether he was setting me up for a cleverly hidden sequel. Tigana does have a conclusive ending, but it didn’t occur to my satisfaction and felt rather abrupt.

Tigana also contained a few too many characters for my liking and despite Kay’s best efforts, some of its personages are rather one dimensional. For example, the sorcerer-king Alberico never breaks the mold of a transparent bad guy, something that the rest of the novel seeks to avoid (and generally does).

But in the end Tigana succeeds not as a character-driven novel, nor as a compelling plot-driven page-turner, but rather as an exploration of themes like memory and identity, and love and vengeance, and their opposition. Memory is integral to self-identification, but Tigana also teaches us that an inability to break with the past is a dangerous thing. Without revealing any spoilers, there’s a horrific twist at the end of Tigana, that, revealed in full, could have resulted in a further continuation of a bitter, destructive war. But the one man who knows the truth keeps it in his heart in order to spare the future.

Likewise love, often portrayed simplistically as something we all need and the great healer, has its limitations. Dianora's love for Brandin for instance can be seen as corruptive and a cause of betrayal to the larger good:

She knew Brandin better than anyone alive; it had been necessary, in order to survive, especially in the beginning, in order to say and do the right things in a mortally dangerous place. Then as the years slipped by necessity had somehow been alchemized into something else. Into love, actually, bitterly hard as that had been to acknowledge. She had come here to kill, with the twin snakes of memory and hatred in her heart. Instead, she had ended up understanding him better than anyone in the world because there was no one else who mattered half so much.

Says Kay in an afterward:

These are ambitious elements for what was always meant to be a romantic adventure. They intimidated me as they began to emerge, even recording them now I find myself shaking my head. But beneath them all lies the idea of using the fantasy genre in just this way: letting the universality of fantasy - of once upon a time - allow escapist fiction to be more than just that, to also bring us home.

Some of these ambitious elements work and some fail, but I credit GKK for attempting them. They make Tigana an important touchstone in fantasy literature, a novel that’s dares to stretch its boundaries. Overall Tigana was a nice change of pace for me; I wouldn’t want to read a steady stream of similar works, but it is nice to see an example of what a skilled writer can accomplish in a too-frequently dismissed genre.

My top five reads of 2010

For my final post of 2010 I thought I would revisit something from my days as a writer for the now-defunct Cimmerian blog: My top 5 reads of the year. Not super-original, I know, but the New Year always seems to bring out the list-maker in me.

Some of these books were new to me and some were old favorites that I revisited, but all are highly recommended.

The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien

As 2010 began I returned to J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium after a span of several years. While reading I wrote a series of blog posts about it over on The Cimmerian (they start here if you’re interested). I was excited at the prospect of revisiting Middle-Earth’s back stories and foundational myths and hoped that The Silmarillion would reward a return voyage.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website .

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond—a review

Guns, Germs, and Steel is one of those books I’ve heard so much about—mostly in the positive—that it was only a matter of time before I got around to reading it. Published in 1997, it won a Pulitzer Prize. I’ve frequently seen it cited around the internet as a must-read book on the origins of the human species. Today I was able to finish it up.

Guns, Germs, and Steel is certainly well-worth reading. One of my petty complaints is that it more accurately should have been called Latitude, Longitude, and the Development of Human Society (I guess Guns, Germs, and Steel was catchier). That’s because Diamond postulates that all our development, including current inequities among continents like South America and Africa vs. North America or the countries of western Europe, can be traced to geography. “Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots: between peoples with farmer power and those without it, or between those who acquired it at different times,” Diamond writes. He then sets out in Guns, Germs, and Steel to explain how this unequal distribution of wealth and power occurred.

In short, Diamond argues that the topography and east-west alignment of Eurasia set the stage for its success. It was more conducive to farming, was populated with native, domesticable livestock and plant life that facilitated mass food production, and allowed for trading between various peoples and dispersal of scientific invention. This in turn led to sedentary populations able to devote time and brainpower to the invention of writing and the development of technology. Australia, North America, and Africa, with their north-south axes and corresponding extremes of climate, were late to the starting line of development. Their slower diffusion of cultivatable crops caused them to become history’s “have-nots,” leading to their subjugation or outright extermination and repopulation by foreign invaders, or their place as a third-world nation.

“The peoples of areas with a head start on food production thereby gained a head start on the path leading toward guns, germs, and steel,” Diamond writes. “The result was a long series of collisions between the haves and the have-nots of history.”

First, what I liked. Guns, Germs, and Steel is well-written. It has an incredible scope, summarizing human development from our start as a divergent strain of chimpanzee up to the modern age. It’s very thought and opinion provoking as well.

Contrary to its title Guns, Germs, and Steel contains disappointingly little discussion on guns. I was hoping for some good debate on the effectiveness of the blunderbuss vs. the musket, for example. But Diamond does lay out a convincing case that germs, not guns, were the primary reason smaller groups of Europeans were able to dominate far more populous indigenous races. He shows how the introduction of germs derived from domesticated animals, introduced to native populaces with no immunities, resulted in catastrophic epidemics which in some cases resulted in a 99% mortality rate among the infected. It’s all very interesting, and it strikes me as true.

Now some negatives. Some of the arguments Diamond spends considerable time building feel rehashed and/or self-evident. However, this may be because Diamond’s book has been assimilated into mainstream thought. After all it was published 13 years ago.

But my main problem with Guns, Germs, and Steel is in the degree of importance Diamond attaches to geography. In Diamond’s view geography is the overwhelming factor in the “success or failure” of a nation (meaning its ability to produce food and thereby develop a complex culture). Diamond’s book takes no account—and I mean none—of the influence of different political systems, or religion, or even individual initiative. For him, human history is purely scientific, the result of geographic determinism. He argues that even the biggest individuals—the Alexander the Greats and the Adolf Hitlers of the world—are scarcely relevant in the grand sweep of history. In the epilogue Diamond anticipates arguments to the contrary with a half-hearted apology:

“The label [geographic determinism] seems to have unpleasant connotations, such as that human creativity counts for nothing, or that we humans are passive robots hopelessly programmed by climate, flora, and fauna. Of course these fears are misplaced,” Diamond writes.

Yet to me Diamond’s equivocating rings hollow. There’s seemingly little to no place in his intellectual universe for things like free will and personal responsibility. I felt personally diminished reading the book. That’s not a value judgment of Diamond’s book, just my personal reaction upon reading it.

Another area in which Guns, Germs, and Steel can be criticized is some of the petty biases that Diamond allows to creep into the book. His occasional forays into editorializing are simply out of place in a book that purports to exalt science. For instance, he flat-out calls modern native New Guinean hunter gatherers not equal, but smarter than your average educated, sedentary resident of Europe or North America. He relays another story about a noble Native American corrupted by coarse Montana farmers into adopting their hard drinking, wasteful lifestyle. Both of these observations are purely anecdotal, not the result of any scientific inquiry. I detected a slight undercurrent of disdain for modern life and a romanticized (albeit very faint) view of the hunter-gather lifestyle. Their presence diminishes the work.

In the end my opinion of Guns, Germs, and Steel is that it is no more a true version of human history than a book about capitalism/communism or Christianity/Islam as the sole shapers of mankind’s destiny. It’s an important but incomplete piece of the truth.

AMC’s The Walking Dead: Devouring six million viewers, and me

Confession: I watch almost no TV. Well, that’s not quite true: NFL football, an occasional news program, and the odd episode of The Simpsons aside, I watch no TV. Lost is lost on me. There aren’t enough hours in the day for 24. The Sopranos? Fuggedaboutit. There are too many good books to be read in the world and not enough time for television.

Another reason I avoid TV, particularly serialized programming, is the “that guy” phenomenon. When it comes to shows like Lost, there’s always one person in the office who insists on telling you how much you’re missing, or describing the minutiae of a cast of fictional characters’ lives for whom you know and care absolutely nothing about. It just ends up making me hate the boob tube even more.

So now that I’ve set the stage for why I avoid TV, let me tell you all about AMC’s The Walking Dead! I’m a huge fan of the zombie genre and the temptation to watch a TV program about the undead was too great not to tune in. After an excellent episode one I was hooked. I’m mortified that I have to wait until the fall for episode 2.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

Lansdale and Keene: Two tastes that taste great together

Over the last couple weeks I’ve managed to plow through two of Joe Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard series of novels and Brian Keene’s City of the Dead. I enjoyed the heck out of all of them and thought I’d write a combined review here.

(As an aside, my posting has recently suffered quite a bit, and that’s because the high school team I’ve been covering for the local paper is playing in the Super Bowl today. From Thankgiving through the playoffs, Massachusetts high school football is crazy. I plan to get back to posting on a more regular schedule).

As I’ve said before, Joe Lansdale tells a story as well as any author writing today. Reading one of his books is like listening to a weathered Texan grandfather who saw time in the South Pacific in the Big One spinning raw war stories seasoned with equal parts humor and horror.

The two books I read were The Two-Bear Mambo and Bad Chili. In The Two-Bear Mambo Hap and Leonard set out to find Florida Grange, Leonard’s gorgeous ex-girlfriend. Florida disappeared while investigating the suspicious suicide of a black criminal, found dead in his jail cell in the Ku Klux Klan infested town of Grovetown.

Hap and Leonard are both martial arts experts and The Two-Bear Mambo features a memorable fight in a Grovetown diner that Lansdale describes as an episode of The Andy Griffith Show by way of Deliverance. Lansdale’s fights aren’t the stylized, dramatized stuff of Quentin Tarantino films, but short, fast, ugly, and dirty.

Lansdale always kicks off his books with a gripping action scene that combines drama with comedy. In The Two-Bear Mambo Leonard has just set fire to a crack house across the street, spilling a motley assortment of low-lifes into the East Texas night. Bad Chili features the two men attacked by a rabid squirrel while taking target practice in the woods with a pistol. Yes, I’m serious.

Bad Chili took a while to heat up (pardon the pun) but I very much enjoyed the slow, deliberate pace with which Lansdale sets up its frenetic payoff of a finish. In this one, Leonard’s boyfriend Raul leaves him for a biker and when both turn up dead the police point the finger at Leonard. He and Hap begin an investigation into the death that exposes an underground crime ring of violent gay pornography and larceny.

You have experience to fully appreciate Lansdale’s always-entertaining writing style. Here’s a description of a barber-shop owner from Bad Chili that I found hilarious and also brilliant in its details, immediately sketching a believable, real character:

Finally a man came over to help us. He was short and pale-skinned and had his dark hair combed back tight and plastered with something so shiny you could almost see your reflection in it. He had one of those pencil-thin mustaches like forties movie stars wore, ones make you look like you had a drink of chocolate milk and forgot to wipe your mouth. He had his colorful shirt open almost to his navel, and let me tell you, that was no treat to view. He had a chest like a bird and a little potbelly and a thin straight line of hair that ran from chest to navel and looked as if it had been provided by the nose hairs the blonde had clipped. He was wearing a gold medallion on a chain around his neck. The medallion reminded me of those aluminum-foil coins you unwrap and find chocolate inside. He must have been on the bad side of forty. A face, a body like that, you’re not born with it. It takes some real abuse and neglect to create.

As with all the two other Hap and Leonard novels I’ve read to date (Savage Season and Mucho Mojo), The Two-Bear Mambo and Bad Chili are highly recommended. I’m looking forward to picking up Rumble Tumble next.

City of the Dead is an absolutely gonzo novel. Graphic gore and sex, morbid humor, religious issues, cosmic tragedy, and more are splashed all over its pages in an entertaining package, albeit not one for the easily offended or the faint of heart.

Keene takes the familiar trope of zombie apocalypse but instead of attributing the cause to biochemical spill or ancient curse or interstellar plague Keene’s zombies are possessed by the souls of demons from the void. When they inhabit the bodies of the dead they take on the deceased person’s memories, which them doubly dangerous. In City of the Dead zombies can speak, use guns, drive cars, communicate and coordinate their tactics, etc. Animals, including dogs, birds, alligators, are zombified, too. Humans don’t stand a chance in this scenario.

A small group of humans manages to fight their way into New York to take refuge in Ramsey Tower, a reportedly indestructible skyscraper where a few hundred human survivors have holed up. The tower is a fortress, but the humans have underestimated the zombies’ intelligence and force they ultimately bring to bear to force an entry.

Keene’s book is full of morbidly funny humor: A zombie sings “the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire” after setting fire to a home with human defenders on the second floor. A zombie, ready to throw a grenade, has his hand shot off, and the grenade falls at his feet and explodes, blowing him to bits. “Now that’s what I call a hand grenade!” another zombie quips. Think of Army of Darkness level of humor.

At the same time the book takes seriously the existence of God and the demons that inhabit the bodies of the zombies. Called the Sissquim, they once walked the Earth but were banished to the outer spheres by God millennia ago. As a result they despise God and kill and eat humans out of that spite. They want to see His most beloved creation and the planet itself utterly destroyed.

City of the Dead is marred by a few lapses in logic. The zombies at times are portrayed as attacking in mindless waves, like Romero-style zombies; at other times they operate with a sense of self-preservation and shy away from shotgun blasts and so forth. The humans defending Ramsey Tower—some of which are hard-bitten military veterans with combat experience—woefully overestimate the building’s defenses, holes that are obvious to any half-attentive reader (the damn building has windows—even though they’re reinforced glass, how can they stand up to a zombie-driven truck at full speed, let alone explosives?)

If City of the Dead sounds a little like a mess, well, it is. I’m not sure how Keene intended the book to be read, as farce or serious fiction. It’s both (probably a little more of the former), but if you’re looking for a book that tells a rip-roaring, entertaining story, City of the Dead succeeds. I listened to the Audio Realms production while driving to work and I can honestly say it made my commute a much more enjoyable experience.

The Lion of Cairo by Scott Oden, a review

I think it’s totally cool that the dedication page of Scott Oden’s forthcoming novel The Lion of Cairo (U.S. publication date Dec. 7) pays homage to a sword and sorcery legend:

To Robert E. Howard
whose tales of swordplay and sorcery
gave inspiration to a kid from Alabama
and caused him to take up the pen
in his own time

After the Howard name-drop you pretty much know what you’re in for: Pulse-pounding sword play, leagues of warring assassins, political intrigue, a hint of evil sorcery, and the clash of armies on a grand stage. On all these elements Oden delivers.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.