Fantasy Books in Parents' Attics Update

Another find from the loft of my dad's house: a copy of The Silmarillion that I picked up at a library stock sale for what must have been less than a quid or so. I can only have been about 14 years old. It's never been read (I have a paperback copy) and is a beautifully constructed book; it is a First Edition, fourth impression, from 1977. Gaze on it in awe.

1977. When fantasy books didn't have pictures of people striking cool poses on the cover. 

1977. When fantasy books had beautiful maps actually within the text where you needed to look at them.

1977. When fantasy books had sub-headings. 

1977. When fantasy books had beautiful fold-out maps in the back.

Good Dragonlance Sentences: Introduction

A few days ago, I took a bet that I couldn't find any good sentences in the Dragonlance books. I don't welch on bets, so it's time to see what I can find.

My proposal is this: once a week I will read a chapter from a Dragonlance book and put up some examples of what might be "good" sentences in it. I will begin with the "Legends" trilogy, primarily because it's the only one I have to hand at the moment (I picked it up at a secondhand book shop a few months ago), but also because it's better than the "Chronicles" - let's face it. I will continue to do this until Zak agrees that there are good sentences.

We also need to define what a "good sentence" is, because undoubtedly Weis & Hickman are better writers than you or I. (If you disagree, then where's your novel?) The context in which the bet was made was in comparison to Michael Moorcock and HP Lovecraft, so we'll say that a good Dragonlance sentence is one which would also be deemed "good" if written by either of those two writers.

Here goes. From the Introduction to Time of the Twins:

[Describing Astinus, the historian who sees, knows, and records everything] "The historian's face might have been reckoned handsome in a timeless, ageless fashion. But none who saw his face ever remembered it. They simply remembered the eyes - dark, intent, aware, constantly moving, seeing everything. Those eyes could communicate vast worlds of impatience, reminding Bertrem that time was passing. Even as the two spoke, whole minutes of history were ticking by, unrecorded." 

[Describing the first time we see Raistlin] "All she could see before her were two golden eyes shining from the depths of darkness. The eyes were like a gilt mirror, flat, reflective, revealing nothing of the soul within. The pupils - Crysania stared at the dark pupils in rapt horror. The pupils within the golden eyes were the shape of hourglasses! And the face - drawn with suffering, marked with the pain of the tortured existence the young man had led for seven years, ever since the cruel Tests in the Tower of High Sorcery left his body shattered and his skin tinged gold. The mage's face was a metallic mask, impenetrable, unfeeling as the golden dragon's claw upon his staff."

Not great literature, no. But we're not judging them against Proust, remember. This will do for the Introduction.

On Clearing Books Out of the Loft and Ramblings on Appendix N

This holiday I've spent clearing out my parents' old house. Part of this process has involved me appraising my old books (of which there are hundreds and hundreds) and trying to decide which can be thrown out and which can go to the local library or charity shop or whatever. I came across Leiber's Ill Met at Lankhmar, a collection from the early 2000s which brings together, I think, "Swords and Deviltry" and "Swords Against Death".

Re-reading these old stories, it occurs to me that you may as well not read any high fantasy series published in the last 30 years or so if you've read Leiber. I use the words "high fantasy" advisedly, because although the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories are more sword & sorcery than high fantasy, almost all high fantasy stuff that was published in the 80s, 90s and 00s was a footnote on what Leiber was writing in the 70s - from the back-story to both men (every main character in every epic fantasy series has a tragic origin story like Grey Mouser) to the sassy, just-as-good-as-you female leads who are just dim reflections of Vlana, to the innocent-girl-turned-unlikely-heroine female leads who are just dim reflections of Ivrian, to the strong themes of revenge, to the very un-Tolkienesque prevalence of magic (divided, as so often the case, into 'good magic' and 'bad magic')... It makes the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories seem like old hat, until you remember that no, it's just that most modern fantasy series were old hat before they were even conceived.

A while ago, because I felt like being controversial, I made the statement on some forum or other that I though that the Dragonlance books are probably just as good as most of the things in Appendix N. Although I said that with mischievous intentions, I also think it's true. The Dragonlance books are not great, but for a 13 year old boy they are good entertainment, and that is really the most you can say for most of the Michael Moorcock books, most of Lovecraft's fiction, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Phillip Jose Farmer, etc. People in the D&D blogosphere might not like to admit it, but the best you can say about a lot of the writings of a lot of those writers is that they pass the time and have some interesting ideas in. Admittedly there are a number books/authors on Appendix N that I've never read, but even if those works were all hidden masterpieces it would still place Weis & Hickman somewhere in the middle-to-lower rung. In a weird sort of a way, they probably deserve more credit; I know this doesn't apply universally, but I generally think of great books as being those which have moved me emotionally - and I have to confess that I was very moved emotionally as an adolescent reading about the death of Sturm or Caramon's efforts to stop his mad brother destroying the universe. Much more so, indeed, than I ever was reading about Elric's exploits, fun though they are.

Which fantasy books are really worth reading? Given that you have a finite amount of time in your life and there are so many other books out there? There's a novel by Jonathan Franzen called Strong Motion, which like all of Franzen's books is beautifully and sensitively written, if somewhat appalling at the same time; in it there is fairly extended section which describes the evolution of the music collection of one of the characters, Dr. Reneé Seitchek. She starts off with a large collection of punk music on old cassettes, but as time goes by and she gets older and older and more jaded her collection starts to dwindle and she starts just compiling mix tapes with some of her favourite tracks on...but as time goes by and she gets older still she starts to grow tired even of them, and she ends up just taking segments of single tracks that she likes and running them together, so that she finishes off compressing all of the music in the world that she likes into a single cassette or two. I sometimes feel like that about fantasy fiction. Give me a single 1000 page volume containing the distilled essence of Vance, Wolfe, and Tolkien and that may very well do me for the rest of my days.

Failure of Imagination

Like a lot of BBC Magazine articles, this one is only of the mildest interest and coherence, but I found a certain aspect of it intriguing because it's indicative of a tendency I've sometimes noticed for people to attribute works of highly imaginative fantasy and SF to the author's use of narcotics. Usually, as in the case of Lewis Carroll, this is based on no evidence other than, "Well, he must have been on drugs, because that book is really weird!"

I think that sort of assumption says more about the person making it than it does the author. If you lack a good imagination of your own, I suppose it is natural to assume that everybody is that way, and could only possibly create amazing works of imagination under the influence. It doesn't seem to occur to them that, yes, some people just are that creative.

Not that I'm against trying to be the next Philip K Dick if that's your thing. Just don't diminish the creative power of the human brain by pretending everything weird is down to artificial stimulation.

Thoughts on Lyonesse

I've recently finished reading Jack Vance's Lyonesse Trilogy. It was something of a Herculean task for me; I started reading it at least six months ago, probably longer. My experience with the books became an epic saga akin to that contained in the series itself, with ups and downs, twists and turns, and sudden surprises. There were big gaps here and there where I didn't read any of it for weeks at a time. At other times I would devour a hundred pages in a day or two. Gradually I forced myself to the finish.

It's safe to say I liked it. Not as much as the Cugel books, which are Vance's most extraordinary masterpiece and I think probably the best written fantasy work in the canon (if you don't include anything by Gene Wolfe, to whom no comparison is really fair). But still, it is a stunning achievement, which Vance, as always, makes look incredibly easy: above everything else, it is just incredibly entertaining in the truest sense of the word. As well as making it look easy, Vance gives every impression he was having a whale of a time writing it, which almost certainly wasn't true - it must have taken far too much energy and craftsmanship - but the sense of fun that pervades the books is indisputable. It also has more emotional depth than the Dying Earth works; while Vance's voice is as objective and detached as ever, affection for the characters and concern for their fate seeps through.

There are flaws, of course. Aillas is a bit of a Mary Sue who you never feel is likely to fail at any stage in his adventures. The sub-plot (or overarching plot, depending on your view) of the struggle between the mages Tamurello and Murgen and the fate of Melancthe is consistently less interesting than the other goings-on. It doesn't particularly matter, because the charm of the characters, the gloriously understated narrative, the joy of the exclamation mark-riddled Vancian dialogue sweeps you along.

For somebody who isn't particularly renowned for his progressive sexual politics, Vance also manages to pull off, in Madouc and Suldrun, what almost no modern fantasist has ever done: written convincing, strong female leads - main characters who drive the plot, have great lines, and don't need men - without ever once falling prey to the idiotic notion so prevalent in fantasy fiction that in order to make women characters interesting you have to make them ass-kicking badasses.

As a D&D fan, what I took most from Lyonesse, though, was that it feels far more like D&D even than Vance's earlier work. If Lyonesse hadn't been written in the 80s, you'd swear it was more of an influence on Gygax and Arneson than the Dying Earth books. It has everything - the early, low level picaresque, the mid-game of establishing a career, the kingdom-building end-game. At times it has the random feel of a hex crawl; the sense that at any moment Vance will roll the random encounter dice and come up with a new event or encounter to change, willy-nilly, the course of the plot. And it has the fluctuating and sometimes startling changes in tone that are present in every game session: on one page the feel will be that of a light hearted fairy tale; on the next a brutal torture scene will be narrated with Vance's customary detachment; on the next characters will be engaging in the pulpiest of pulp fantasy adventure. Those tonal shifts are never jarring because Vance handles them so well, just as they are never jarring in a game session because it's just the way things are.

Give it a try if you can find it. I picked up a single-volume anthology on Kindle, and it provided me with a heck of a lot of reading. It's certainly better than 99% of the fantasy books I could have been reading for the first half of this year.

Noisms' Verfremdungseffekt

I was going to post about druids, but then got sidetracked by other things. I'm all creativity-ed out every day at the moment due to working on my thesis (yeah, I know, "first world problems" - I despise that meme, but there is a grain of deep Truth in it), so that will have to wait for the time being. Fortunately, although I am creativity-ed out, that doesn't stop me pontificating in a meandering fashion about whatever happens to wander across my field of vision.

Today, it's this, a thread about prep. The basic gist of the original post is the realisation the poster has come across that prep isn't really for him; I identify strongly with this, in that - as I've posted on several occasions - I like to blitz preparation before the start of a campaign and set it up in such a way that it more-or-less runs itself once it has started. It is helpful to imagine a campaign as being a large, circular rock sitting on the edge of a somewhat steep slope, with me, Wily Coyote-like, fashioning a lever out of a large tree branch (the prep) which I then use to shove the rock into movement and let it be carried by its own momentum to a messy, destructive and unexpected end.

But shortly into the thread there is this post, which set me thinking:

The 'Illusion of Preparedness' is critical for immersion; allowing the players to see where things are improvised or changed reminds them to think outside the setting, removing them forcibly from immersion. Whenever the players can see the hand of the GM, even when the GM needs to change things in their favor; it removes them from the immersed position. The ability to keep the information flow even and consistent to the players, and to keep the divide between prepared information and newly created information invisible is a critical GM ability.

I've thought about it a lot, and the less I think I agree with it. Or, perhaps to put it more accurately, the less I think I can envisage it.

First, I don't know about you other DMs out there reading this, but I'm surely not alone in that I make mistakes all the fucking time, which just means that, sometimes, I have to backtrack to make changes. Example: in last week's session my group were walking from a village to the nearby city, and they said something like "when we're an hour from the town, we'll send X ahead to let them know we're coming" and for some reason I interpreted that to mean an hour after leaving the village, rather than an hour before arriving at the city, which it turned out was what they'd meant - and they let me know this with howls of indignation and anguish when it became important later on. This forced me to retcon things a bit and fiddle around with what was happening. So DMs are only human, and we make errors of judgement; expecting the players to never see any seams is more than a little unrealistic.

Secondly, I'm not entirely sure how well a DM can mask "newly created information" and keep it indistinguishable from prepared information in reality - unless we're talking about Al Pacino. A game in which players have real agency is always going to throw up a billion situations in which the DM just doesn't have a ready-made answer, and while he can makes guesses and riff on his setting if he knows it well enough, it's difficult to do that and fool the players with any consistency.

And thirdly, I'm dubious about lying to the players anyway. Maybe my DMing style is incredibly Brechtian without me really realising it, but I'm going behind the fourth wall all the time when I run a game. I leaf through rulebooks and my folders, I roll all my dice in the open, I have NPCs make tongue-in-cheek and self-aware remarks, I involve my players in decision-making, I sometimes ask them their opinions on what would happen in the situation at hand. I think this adds to the fun of playing a game, even if it isn't immersive and probably actively works against immersion. It might not make the players feel invested in what is going on at a personal level, but I think it makes them feel invested in the game as a game.

Which isn't to say that developing a very deep, detailed setting isn't its own reward, and nor is it to say that players get much more out of a campaign if the setting seems coherent, interesting, and alive. It's just to say that a lot of what gets talked about in game forums often sounds idealistic and quixotic to me, and I'm intrigued to know how close to those ideals other DMs' games become.

The Hickman Revolution and the Frustrated Novelist

There's a post today on The Mule Abides about "the Hickman Revolution", or, as James Maliszewski put it in the Golden Age of his blog, How Dragonlance Ruined Everything. The theory here, for those who are unwilling to follow links for some reason, is that the Dragonlance series, and Tracy Hickman in particular, are in no small part responsible for the general slide in gaming style and gaming design from 'traditional' sandbox-style play towards GM-plot-driven obsession with 'story' and, basically, railroaded narrative. The 'smoking gun' is the introduction to Pharoah, in which Hickman sets out a manifesto of sorts for his own design philosophy:

1. A player objective more worthwhile than simply pillaging and killing. 
2. An intriguing story that is intricately woven into play itself. 
3. Dungeons with an architectural sense. 
4. An attainable and honorable end within one to two sessions playing time.

The Mule Abides and Grognardia deal with these issues eloquently, and how they are indicative of the (lamentable, to me) shift in RPG design philosophy which occurred during the 80s, so I won't cover them here - I provide all this by way of background.

What I would like to add is the missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to the shift towards GM-driven story - Hickman is not just a game designer. He is also a novelist. Indeed, I think that it's safe to say that he is primarily a novelist. And the four elements of his design manifesto are exactly the kind of thing that somebody who wants to be a novelist would want in a game: objectives (to drive the plot), and intriguing story, a world that makes sense, and closure/a happy ending.

They are not the kind of things that somebody who just wants to create role playing games would want in a game, which would be more like: objectives (to keep score), freedom (for players to pursue their own goals), challenging settings, and open-ended design. 

There is a reason why Hickman's approach chimed with many gamers, and why ultimately it came to dominate the hobby during the 80s, 90s and 00s before story/hipster/forge games and the OSR began to slay the beast: many, I would say perhaps the majority, of GMs are frustrated novelists, just like Tracy Hickman was. To them, there was an allure in the idea that they could create games which were not mere games (a frivolous pursuit) but which were also stories - it was an outlet for their desire to be writers, which they could not fulfil due to lack of talent, time, dedication or all three.

Tracy Hickman turned out to be a decent story teller and writer, in actual fact (despite Dragonlance, the Death Gate Cycle, and so forth being terribly cliched and lightweight, the guy knows how to write). But the impact of his ideas, and those of others like him, on the hobby, have been rather negative, because all those frustrated-novelist GMs can't become writers too. Their desire to be novelists can only be channelled into their other imaginative activity - gaming - where they have a captive audience (their players) and a blank canvas (a 4 hour gaming session on a Saturday afternoon). This is the perfect storm for railroad-y, GM-led, story-obsessed play.

I feel bad for Tracy Hickman, as in our corner of the blogosphere his name seems to have become synonymous for "where it all went wrong". This is harsh, because he's obviously a very nice guy, and talented with it. This post is not to impugn him or his reputation. It's to lament the way in which D&D in particular has become a vehicle for so many people who really want to be doing something else than playing games: writing fantasy novels for a living. There is little that could be more detrimental to good gaming.

HP Lovecraft and the BBC

Somebody discerning seems to have taken over the BBC news magazine - which is usually an unbearably banal thing airing the most pathetic lightweight stories you can possibly imagine. (Stuff like "Is cheese good for you?") Last week it was rather sympathetically talking about Warhammer 40,000. Today, it's paying tribute to HP Lovecraft on the 75th anniversary of his death. (The piece is written by Ramsay Campbell, who by coincidence is the father of a childhood friend of mine, as well as being possibly the best living British horror writer.) The conclusion is very nice, and bears reprinting:

In striving to write fiction which would make positive use both of his talents and of his limitations, in particular his difficulties with creating characters, Lovecraft developed near-perfect structures for the horror story.  

His determination to convey awe gives his tales a quality too seldom found. His work unites the British and American traditions of horror fiction - it unites the realistic and the fantastic, the personal and the cosmic, the occult and the scientific.

I wonder what anniversaries are coming up that the BBC news magazine can cover. They've done the 25th year of 40k, they've done 75 years since Lovecraft's death... What next? 25 years since Iain M Banks published Consider Phlebas? 25 years since the release of Cyborg Commando? I notice that next year is the 25th anniversary of Cyberpunk 2020. I hope you're paying attention, BBC news magazine editors.

On MAR Barker

I've been re-listening to some Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcasts at the gym, and the one I had on today featured Orson Scott Card holding forth on a wide variety of things. (If you've never heard Orson Scott Card giving an interview I recommend you do so: he's good value.)

One of the things he said was that for a very long time fantasy literature was crap, because too many people simply aped Tolkien without understanding Tolkien's genius, or his message - which was not "do what I do" in the sense of creating fantasy worlds full of elves, orcs, hobbits and world-saving quests, but "do what I do" in the sense of creating fantasy worlds that feel real. People looked at The Lord of the Rings and took from it exactly the wrong things - the window dressing - without understanding that the real magic of Tolkien's work was the creation of a genuine secondary world. Instead of providing carbon copies of Middle Earth, they should have done what he had done, which was to create something of their own.

Likewise, when William Gibson was in his pomp around the time his first loose trilogy was being published, Bruce Sterling made a plea for science fiction writers to follow him. What Sterling had meant was that he wanted writers to follow Gibson in creating well thought-out, fleshed out, deep-feeling settings and stories. Instead, loads of people just started writing stories with Gibson window dressing - mirror shades and cyberspace and noir. This resulted in what Card calls one of the most pathetic literary movements ever, Cyberpunk, and I'm inclined to agree. As fantasy writers had done with Tolkien, 'cyberpunk' writers just skimmed the surface and missed the point. They just produced cheap knock-offs of Gibson's work, when they should have been finding their own voice.

The same is true of 99% of RPG setting design, I would say. Where it isn't simply stealing Tolkien's furniture, it's stealing Greyhawk's. People don't really create their own secondary worlds - they create Middle Earth with the serial numbers filed off, over and over again, all around the Western world, day after day, month after month, year after year.

MAR Barker was different. Der Spiegel called him The Forgotten Tolkien, but that was because (whether subconsciously or consciously) he is one of the few fantasists who has ever really understood what Tolkien was getting at: he created his own secondary world, and it was like nothing else that had come before or since. Like Tolkien, in Tekumel he created something genuine, from his own mind: his own consistent, living, breathing thing. He took the real message of Tolkien's legendarium and ran with it. In this, he was different to, and greater than, any other creator of imaginary worlds since Tolkien himself.

People like MAR Barker and JRR Tolkien are extremely rare. One is rightly viewed as a titan (although he is only just now beginning to be recognised as such by the literati), whereas the other is barely known, but it is hard to think of any other fantasy writers that come close in terms of their achievements of imagination. The death of MAR Barker is an extremely sad event and it can only be hoped that whatever small publicity that comes from it is enough to generate some level of elevated interest in his world.

On My Bookshelf

Are the following unread books:

• On, by Adam Roberts.
• Swiftly, by Adam Roberts. 
• Embassytown, by China Mieville (both this and Swiftly are signed copies I got at Q&A/readings events at my local Waterstone's last summer, organised by a guy I play Call of Cthulu with on an irregular basis).
• House of Chains, by Steven Erikson, which is half-read; one of those rare occasions I started a book and couldn't bear finishing it.
• Acacia, by David Anthony Durham... which, I dunno, I bought because I suppose I thought it looked interesting - but obviously not interesting enough to actually sit down and read.
• To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis.
• Sacred Games, by Vikram Chandra, which I've tried reading three times and never got past the first few chapters.
• The Behaviour of Moths, by Poppy Adams - I try to make a point of not reading anything written by anybody called 'Poppy', so I don't really have any idea where this one has come from, but there it is, anyway.

From which we can only conclude that my pace of book-buying is not commensurate with my pace of book-reading.

I happen to be coming to the end of my most recent purchase (The Dervish House), so let's hear it: which of these unread books should I read next?

The Further You Get from the Sun

I've recently discovered a podcast called The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy, which I can't recommend highly enough. With reasonably lengthy interviews with the likes of William Gibson, George R. R. Martin, Richard Dawkins, Simon Pegg, Neal Stephenson, and Chuck Palahniuk, and always-thoughtful-and-entertaining discussions on topics as varied as "Africa in Fantasy & Science Fiction", "Satan", and "Dungeons & Dragons", it's pretty much guaranteed to appeal to readers of this blog.

I'm slowly working my way through their back catalogue, and tonight ended up listening to to this episode. Once you get past the Catherynne M. Valante bit (which I confess did not particularly interest me; if there is one criticism of the show I would make, it's that there are too many interviews with Young Adult Urban Fantasy We're All Faeries in the City-type writers, who are not to my taste) the discussion moves on to the topic of "pulp era Venus and Mars". One of the presenters makes the interesting point that, to pulp writers, it was as if the further one got from the sun, the more ancient, advanced, and decadent things became. Venus, close to the sun, was a world of dinosaurs, oceans, and primordial wonder. Mars, far from the sun, was a place of antique, decaying civilizations almost given over to barbarity and scattered with ruins and remnants of forgotten societies.

This got me thinking: what if you were to take this further and expand it to include all the 9 planets for a solar system-spanning Sword & Planet setting? (If you feel yourself about to butt in along the lines that Pluto is no longer a planet - go to the nearest mirror and take a long hard look at yourself and ask yourself whether you have made all the correct life choices.)

If the further you get from the sun, the older things get, Mercury would be the most primordial place of all, right? I picture it as a world of magic, thaumaturgy, elementals, and spiritual entities who are barely distinguishable from the stuff from which the universe is created - the phlogiston, if you will.

On Pluto there would naturally be nothing left alive, but deep, deep below the ice which covered it there would be buried the ruins of impossibly old cities with forgotten technologies.

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are where it gets harder. But you get the idea. What do you want, something coherent on a Sunday night at 8pm?

I Got Some Lovely Fantasies

Because I've spent a lot of time on story-games recently, let's throw some love to the Big Purple. An interesting thread came up entitled The older I get, the less I want fantasy (in which the poster feels that his liking for the fantasy genre has declined with age, and he now prefers historical or modern-era gaming).

This struck a bit of a chord with me, though my feelings aren't quite the same as him. For me, what I can definitely say is that fantasy fiction has lost its lustre as I've got older. From the age of 11 or so, when I first read The Lord of the Rings, to the age of about 25, I read absolute shit-tons of fantasy novels. (And most of it was shit.) You name the series, I'd probably read at least one volume and probably the lot.

Nowadays, I barely read any, and to be frank, while the Fantasy & SF section is the first one I go to when I go to a bookshop, whenever I pick up a new fantasy book and flick through to see what it's like, it usually makes me cringe. Boring, samey writing; banal dialogue; by-the-numbers plots; awful unimaginative world-building dressed up as "unique" settings; inside-front-cover maps covered with place names like 'Franconia' and 'L'k'xhklhaj'... It's a veritable hell-on-earth of literary bollocks, only a step removed from Mills & Boon, and without the compensating factor of sex (unless it's GRRM, who only writes The Most Stupid Sex Scenes Ever^TM anyway).

There are nowadays only a handful of fantasy authors who I can really stand to read: Tolkien, Dunsany, Howard, M. John Harrison, China Mieville, Wolfe, Vance, and, okay, GRRM, because I have to finish off that bloody series if it kills me. The rest of the genre can go hang, quite frankly.

But this is why, I think, I'm still very much into fantasy gaming: a function of finding modern fantasy literature so soul-destroyingly awful that I can't bear to read it is that I have to get my imaginative kicks elsewhere.

Moreover, I'd say that if what you're interested in is expanding your mind, imagining weird shit, dreaming up half-crazed nonsense, escaping somewhat humdrum reality, and many of the other things that fantasy lit is supposed to do, I'd argue that fantasy gaming does it much better. Your imagination is constrained far less if you and your friends are the ones coming up with the entire thing - if you are not letting some third-rate author do your imagining for you - so why have cotton when you can have silk?

In fact, maybe that's what my rule of thumb for fantasy literature is: from now on I'll look at the blurb on the back of the book, and if the whole thing sounds like I could imagine something better in a session of D&D, the author isn't trying hard enough and the book gets binned. If I can't imagine something better in a session of D&D, it's worth a try.

"Doing" Vance

I came across a link to this Forge thread while on my ramblings through Google reader this morning. Long story short, it's a a game designer who I respect (Vincent Baker) saying a lot of weird things, and then a whole load of very very pretentious people literally talking gobbledegook. But! It contains an interesting line (to me, anyway):

Then I remembered how much I love Vance, of course, and how much I'd enjoy trying to channel him, and just how much fun his ironic, cynical relativism is. So now it's great.

And it got me thinking about games that set out to "do" Jack Vance. It turns out, from a little bit of Googling, that not only is there already a Dying Earth RPG, it was written by no less than Robin D. Laws and John Snead, two of the least Cugel-like people in the entire world. Curiouser and curiouser!

I'm just perusing the quick start rules on my lunch break. No time for an in-depth analysis now, but suffice to say there's stuff in here that's likeable (spell titles like "The Astonishing Oral Projection"). I'm a bit more dubious about this:

In [this] game we're not always rooting unreservedly for the characters to succeed. They are often selfish, greedy or overconfident... What matters is not victory or defeat, but how well the story entertains us... We reward you, the player, for making the game entertaining.

It might just be my nautral prejudices, but when I read stuff like that it sets alarm bells ringing: there's nothing less entertaining than people trying too hard to be entertaining. If I was designing a Dying Earth RPG my main focus would be on getting the players to be interested in self-advancement and self-aggrandization, rather than on being entertaining - which, it strikes me, is more of a by-product.

But we'll see. I might be tempted to make a purchase all the same.

I Take It Back

A while ago I complained that, on re-reading, George R R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire was not quite as good as I remembered it, probably because I read too much Gene Wolfe. But you know what? I'm half way through A Dance with Dragons, and it's good. It's flawed in so many ways (bland prose, Dan Brown School of Chapter Endings cliffhangers, silly names, a vastly unwieldy cast of characters that makes you go "who's that again?" every single damn page) but I've not been this hooked on a book for quite a long while.

Recommended Reading

I'm mentally and physically exhausted by work at the moment, so apologies for the "light blogging" nature of my posting for the near future. Anyway, in the comments on yesterday's post, Martin asked be for some recommended reading, and that seems a good place to go when you don't have a great deal of time for an entry and are lacking energy for reading other blogs for inspiration. So, a list of fantasy and SF books which meet with noisms' approval:

• Anything by Gene Wolfe, but I strongly recommend The Wizard Knight; everybody (rightly) praises The Book of the New Sun, but The Wizard Knight contains some simply stunning passages, and has much more of a "human" feel. Perhaps Wolfe has mellowed in his old age.
• M. John Harrison's Viriconium saga, natch. Nowadays you can get them all, three novellas and about a dozen short stories, in a single volume. A must for anybody who is interested in proper fantasy for grownups. 
• I'm not really into "young adult" books (the phrase "young adult" actually makes me want to vomit) but you can't go wrong with the Legends of Lone Wolf series by John Grant. These are essentially a novelisation of the gamebook line of the same name, but they're surprisingly good reads, and pretty well-written for what they are. (John Grant got pretty avant-garde for an author of books aimed at teenagers; one of the books contains an entire chapter written in the 2nd person.)
• Glen Cook's Black Company novels are a rollicking read.
• If you can get it, I'd say Jack Vance's best work is Cugel's Saga. If you read that book and don't immediately recognise the man for being one of the top 10 living prose stylists in the English language, you literally do not know what you are talking about. The prequel, The Eyes of the Overworld, is almost as good but not quite.
• I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Julian May's Saga of Pliocene Exile, because it's utterly insane but so po-faced it just works. And it goes on for volume after volume, so if you're into that sort of thing...
• Moving onto SF, The Forever War by Joe Haldeman has to be up there.
• It seems crass to recommend anything by William Gibson, because I'd be amazed that anyone reading this blog hasn't been through all his books anyway, but Burning Chrome, a selection of his early short stories, is excellent. "Red Star, Winter Orbit", "Dogfight", "New Rose Hotel", and the title piece are bona fide classics, and the rest are consistently great (although oddly, I never quite understood the appeal of "Johnny Mnemomic").
• Clive Barker's Galilee is not often read or talked about, but I loved it. It's as weird and all-over-the-place as you'd expect with a Barker book, but you won't read anything else like it anywhere.
• If you like animal fantasy or just fancy something different, check out William Horwood's Duncton Wood and sequels. Don't expect it to be like Redwall: features a pregnant mole having her belly ripped open by rooks, for example.
• Weis and Hickman write complete balderdash, but it can be a lot of fun. The Death Gate Cycle is an example of this. Completely throwaway and superficial, but you know what? It's entertaining, and sometimes that's all that matters.
• Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt is great alt-history, which imagines what would have happened to the world if everybody in Europe had died from the Black Death. The politics are a bit questionable, but it's an interesting idea, well-executed.
• Finally, China Mieville is a bit hit-and-miss, but The Scar and Iron Council are must-reads, in my opinion.

And some fantasy and SF books which noisms thinks are over-rated or plain duds:

• Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen is based on a GURPS fantasy campaign, and reads like it too. 
• Anything by David Eddings is just awful, but I especially recommend steering clear of the Sparhawk books. I read all of them and even at the age of 14 I spotted them for the sheer rubbish they are.
• John Crowley's Little, Big is raved about, but I found it an excruciating read. Turgid, florid, and boring.
• Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Arabesk trilogy threatened to be interesting with a fun setting (cyberpunk future based on an alternative history scenario in which the Ottoman Empire never collapsed). But it never gelled for me and I gave up after about 200 pages.
• Lord spare us from Anne McCaffrey.
• I actively despised Mary Gentle's White Crow novels. Boring, self-important, and arch. There is nothing worse than somebody self-consciously trying to be literary when they're writing pulp. Compare her approach to that of Vance. Or, on second thoughts, don't, because it'll only encourage her if you buy a copy.
• I tried to get interested in Kate Elliot's Crown of Stars series, but it just seemed like a poor man's ASOIAF, and the "it's like Europe but not quite Europe" motif is really unimaginative. Avoid.

Anyway, nowadays my visits to the Fantasy & SF section in the book shop usually leads to profound dismay at all the crappy trilogies purporting to be "a must for Tolkien fans everywhere" (or whatever) and the proliferation of "Dark Fantasy" (a psuedonym for "Twilight with the serial numbers filed off"), so I tend not to bother any more. I may be missing out on all kinds of wonders. Somehow I doubt it, though.

Ruined

I'm re-reading A Song of Ice and Fire to refamiliarise myself with the story in preparation for settling down with A Dance with Dragons (it's been 6 years after all), and I think I have a problem: reading too much Vance, Wolfe, and Harrison in recent years has ruined fantasy literature for me forever. Not because these guys are bad, but because they're too damn good. Going from Wolfe to Martin is a bit like switching from cocaine to coffee. Okay, so you like coffee, but the effect just isn't the same.

A List of Books

I'm taking a break from dog variants to do something else: rant about literature.


Brian and Lord Gwydion have both recently blogged about the USA National Public Radio's Listener Poll of the Top 100 SF/F Books of All Time.


These polls are always a bit silly. They never actually represent public opinion, because the shortlist is always decided upon by 'experts' who get to tell you which 100 books you are allowed to like and in what order. And they are always dictated by fashion: A Song of Ice and Fire is in there mostly, I think, because it has become a popular TV series. (I loved the first 3 volumes, but it's gone awry since then, and more importantly it hasn't even been finished yet.)


Some absolute greats are conspicuous in their absence. There is no Jack Vance, for one, which seems like a horrific omission: Jack Vance is easily in the top half of the best 100 writers of all time, full stop, let alone the best 100 SF/F writers. And although it is churlish to dispute the order of the list, given that it was decided by popular vote, are we seriously saying that R. A. Salvatore is a better writer than Gene Wolfe or Kim Stanley Robinson?


There are also some plain head scratchers. Animal Farm just isn't science fiction or fantasy, unless you're also going to include Aesop's Fables in the list. And the Outlander series (setting aside the fact that it's awful) is surely a series of historical novels. As for Wicked... the 80th best science fiction or fantasy book of all time?

Ass Goblins of Auschwitz

In a land where black snow falls in the shape of swastikas, there exists a nightmarish prison camp known as Auschwitz. It is run by a fascist, flatulent race of aliens called the Ass Goblins, who travel in apple-shaped spaceships to abduct children from the neighboring world of Kidland. Prisoners 999 and 1001 are conjoined twin brothers forced to endure the sadistic tortures of these ass-shaped monsters. To survive, they must eat kid skin and work all day constructing bicycles and sex dolls out of dead children.

While the Ass Goblins become drunk on cider made from fermented children, the twins plot their escape. But it won't be easy. They must overcome toilet toads, cockrats, ass dolls, and the surgical experiments that are slowly mutating them into goblin-child hybrids.

Forget everything you know about Auschwitz...you're about to be Shit Slaughtered.

Do I want to download this for my kindle or not? I'm torn in two minds as to whether or not I admire the ingenuity or despise the obvious flirtation with controversy. (Perhaps "slutting up to controversy" would be more apt...)

d100 FTW!

I went to see China Mieville do a reading from his new book, Embassytown, along with a Q&A session, at a local bookshop on Friday evening. And a nice and interesting guy he was too. I was particularly impressed that he openly and merrily sang the praises of roleplaying games; even though I should have been expecting this, as it is something he is wont to do, it bears repeating just how rare and precious a thing this is: a respected writer on his way to becoming a giant in the field, and a genuine crossover success, who has absolutely no shame saying he likes D&D and RuneQuest.

Anyway, I duly queued up with the herd (which also included local fantasy/horror luminary Ramsay Campbell) and got my copy of Embassytown signed. I think this just about says it all:

Me me me

I couldn't partake in the 15 games in 15 minutes thing because, really, I don't think I could actually even think of 15 games off the top of my head. But Scott has started a newer and more relevant-to-my-interests meme (10 fantasy books you would take to a desert island, no more than one by a single author) so hey, why not? Mine would be, in no particular order:

• Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber omnibus edition.
• Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun omnibus edition.
• Vance's Tales of the Dying Earth omnibus edition.
• Tolkien's Lord of the Rings omnibus edition (noticing a trend here?).
• China Mieville's The Scar (not an omnibus edition).
• M. John Harrison's Viriconium omnibus edition.
• George R. R. Martin's A Clash of Kings. (I can't go with the entire Song of Ice and Fire to date, and I think the second one was probably my favourite volume so far...)
• John Grant's The Sacrifice of Ruanon. (Probably my favourite "young adult" fantasy book.
• Terry Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule. (People complain about this series but I've only read the first volume and thought it was rather good, actually.)
• C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia omnibus edition.

What? Including omnibuses (omnibi?) is cheating? Well I'm fucked if I'm going to decide which single volume from each one I'd take - you think I have all day?