Like you, I pretty much gave up on “High Fantasy” after dozing through the tenth or twentieth Tolkien knock-off. Similarly to their earlier cognates, the medieval romances, these books grew longer and drearier every year.
But perhaps the genre isn’t doomed. At least, Orson Scott Card, no mean judge, thinks not. Au contraire, he avers, “the creative energy of speculative fiction has been migrating from sci-fi to fantasy”. He has some particular commendations:
Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy is new but complete, so there’s no waiting to get the end of the story. The motley cast of talented misfits is trying to bring down a thousand-year empire (try to avoid thinking “reich”), but the heroes discover to their dismay that, bad as the empire was, it was holding back something even worse.
Or if you want to get in on the ground floor, look at Sanderson’s newest hardcover, Warbreaker — a whole new magic system, with graustarkian intrigue at the highest level.
Patrick Rothfuss creates a fascinating bildungsroman with his The Name of the Wind. It is extravagantly a “tale told in an inn” — each volume in the series is one night’s storytelling by a hero who insists he has retired from the business.
Lamentation, by Ken Scholes, begins with what looks like a nuclear explosion that destroys an entire city. Only one survivor walked away — a mechanical man named Isaak. He has no memory of what caused the explosion, but in the turmoil after the destruction, he becomes an observer and a participant in all the politics and warfare and magic. He begins to discover the secret behind all the magic — including his own existence.
These are merely some of the most recent. Once you realize how much excellent literature is scattered between the reefs of vampire novels in the sci-fi and fantasy section of the bookstore, you’ll enjoy prowling through the backlist.
Well, I can’t say whether these encomia are well deserved. I do, however, stand in awe of OSC’s ability to absorb vast numbers of words. What these volumes, and most of those that he recommends from the “backlist”, have in common is length. I wonder how many of them need all those words to tell their stories.
J. R. R. Tolkien had a reason – or two reasons – for taking three volumes to tell The Lord of the Rings. First, he didn’t care much whether it pleased anyone but himself. Second, he had spent his entire life “sub-creating” Middle Earth. He knew all about its lands and seas and cities and peoples, along with their myths, legends and history. What he wrote down, abundant as it was, was just a fraction of what was in his mind.
Is the same true of any contemporary trilogist? The longer the tale, the greater the proportion that runs the risk of being mere generic padding: the same old highways and inns and mountains and villages and wizards and maidens and battles that one has seen a score of times before. Will an enterprising publisher offer talented young writers this deal? Turn in a complete story 256 pages long, and we’ll double your royalties. The idea would be to distill rather than dilute. I’d like to see what Messrs. Sanderson and Rothfuss and Scholes could do under that regimen.
Tolkien did not take three volumes to tell his story. An editor at Allen & Unwin thought, or believed, that no one would pay three pounds and ten shillings ($9.80) for a book. So he broke it into three one-guinea ($2.94) volumes.
Posted by: Joseph T Major | Sunday, July 12, 2009 at 07:14 AM