Let Me Tell You About My Fantasies…

First published Phlogiston Five, May 1985.

I’ve been reading quite a bit of fantasy recently, and I’ve had a few thoughts about it which I’d like to share with you, if I may.

There’s always been fantasy, of course. All the way back to Gilgamesh the Sumerian, and probably further if we only knew it. (Incidentally, Robert Silverberg has just rewritten the story of Gilgamesh, and the reviews say it’s a very good book—keep an eye out for it.) There was a brief resurgence of what you might call Romantic Fantasy in the Nineteenth century; largely inspired by William Morris, but it never really led anywhere significant. Meanwhile, Poe, the great American hack, was producing his classic psychotic delusions, but failing to make any money at it. Morris never made any money either, but he didn’t need it—he had a wallpaper factory and influential friends.

In the early twentieth century, we had Dunsany, E. R. Eddison, the jokes of Thorne Smith, the moody fin du siecle novels of James Branch Cabell, the inspired lunacy of Robert E. Howard. But really they were all minor writers, known to only a small audience. Essentially, they were writing in a cul de sac, and very few people came down it to investigate, because it was quite well hidden and you couldn’t see it from the road. Perhaps they were carrying on the great tradition (though in the case of Howard this is open to question, he didn’t operate by the same rules as other people and every time he counted his marbles he got a different total) but it began to seem more and more as if the tradition had little or no life left in it. The stories became tired and derivative. They all seemed to be about Conan, under a variety of different names. Boredom set in.

And then there was Tolkien. Any discussion of fantasy has to divide itself into two parts. Before Tolkien and After Tolkien. He built a six lane motorway right through the cul de sac, and things have never been the same since. I’m not going to talk about Tolkien, you all know that tale far too well. Let us instead consider what happened after Tolkien.

It soon began to seem as if you couldn’t go into a bookshop without finding the shelves sprawling with books with swords and elves on the covers. The blurb writers had a special key built into their electronic typewriters, and when they pressed it, it typed “Not since Tolkien’s Middle Earth…” (add your own ending). This fantasy thing was easy. All you had to do was take a bunch of goblins and dwarves, add a few elves and walk slowly from one end of a crude hand drawn map to the other. Simple.

The stories stopped sounding like they were about Conan, and they all started sounding like Frodo instead. There was a William Morris revival, and the bookshelves began to groan under Morris pastiches. Now while you walked across your map you talked in thees and thous. It added atmosphere (and unintentional humour. Very few of these new wave fantasists knew that the phrase “Get thou to a nunnery” was grammatically incorrect, and we got some beautiful infelicities of phrasing. My English teacher would probably have called them horror stories!).

In many ways it began to appear as if the Tolkien books were the worst thing to happen to fantasy in the last six thousand years. When there had only been a small trickle of works being produced, you could usually find something, somewhere that was half way decent—and most of it was written for love, dedication and a knowledge of the traditions on which the work was built.

In short it was often worthy even if flawed. But now everyone was getting on the bandwagon and now it was flawed and very seldom worthy. Tolkien was the standard against which everything had to measure, and nobody measured up. It seemed that the six lane motorway didn’t really go to any interesting places. Even the journey wasn’t worth making. The road was littered with broken swords that punctured your tyres, and weeds grew through the cracks in the concrete.

Then there were three novels published which changed everything. You have already been told about the wonders of The Belgariad—the five volume novel by David Eddings. The Belgariad is the most significant work of fantasy to be published since Tolkien; it took the corpse of the genre and breathed life into back into it. Buy this book and treasure it—and when you have absorbed it, keep your eyes open for The Magician by Raymond E. Feist and The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett.

The former is a straight fantasy novel, equally as enthralling as The Belgariad and the latter is the funniest thing since the custard pie got Sauron.

The Magician has a lot in common with The Belgariad in the sense that it shows a boy growing up to the knowledge of the hazards of the world. And like The Belgariad it is a pleasure to read, because you are taking part, in a very real sense, with the characters in the events of the book. Both books have an old and threadbare plot as their basis. The Belgariad is a traditional quest novel. The Magician is the traditional world in peril novel. Both themes have been done to death and beyond by a myriad of writers. But there are probably no new fantasy plots. Eddings and Feist demonstrate again that there is no idea so hoary and covered in whiskers that a good writer cannot use it in his book.

Eddings and Feist are masterful writers and their books are a joy. Only the vagaries of the alphabet puts Eddings first.

And what of Terry Pratchett? This is the wizard Rincewind describing the character of the tourist Twoflower:

Let’s just say that if complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he’d be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting “All Gods are bastards”.