Is this the real life...
Dec. 12th, 2005 11:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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britgeekgrrl was posting the other day that she didn't really care for Fantasy, which surprised me, since she seems to channel a bunch of classic Fantasy archetypes without too much effort. So I asked her what she'd read, and was very surprised when we had almost exactly no overlap (or maybe not so surprised, since I rather like a lot of Fantasy, but care almost not at all for a lot of the formula fantasy published in the last decade and a half or so). So I went to my bookshelf and took down a list of all the fantasy, to find out what I expect people to have read, or at least encourage them to read. Some of this you'll probably like, some of it is barely readable canon. Fritz Lieber - The Lankhmar stories (Swords and Deviltry, Swords against Death, Swords in the Midst, Swords against Wizardry, The Dwords of Lankhmar, Swords and Ice Magic, and The Knight and Knave of Swords) - The Grey Mouser is the point source for modern fantasy gaming's notion of the Thief class, and Fafhrd contributed almost as much as Conan to our notion of the Barbarian. The books are really two or three combined novellas each, and the stories are also wonderful. Oh, and White Wolf put out a reissued set of these in 1995 that are quite a nice edition.
Edgar Allan Poe - Ok, arguably not Fantasy. However, he is a point source for both the modern Horror genre and the modern Murder Mystery (although he has to share that honor with Arthur Conan Doyle, properly the father of Victorian Adventure fiction)
Terry Pratchett - Discworld, both Adult and Juvenile books - Arguably the Juveniles are better, although all of them are working quite respectably to make the jump from Comic Fantasy to simply Literature.
Bob Asprin - Myth Adventures et al - This infamous set of Comic Fantasy stories are also a basic grounding in a raft of business principles and, frankly, good career advice. Oh, and you should read them if you plan to play a spellcaster in any fantasy role-playing game. Your DM will thank you.
Bob Asprin and Lynn Abbey - Sanctuary and Thieves World et al. Well, maybe only the first four or so books, but these stories, published in the early eighties, are both good reads with a variety of fantasy story styles, but very good inspiration for fantasy gamers and DMs.
Emma Bull - War for the Oaks - Modern fantasy, also the point-source for all of the Elves, Motorcycles, and
Rock'n'Roll books of the late '80s. Emma Bull is excellent anyway.
Steven Brust - Jhereg, et al. Brust liberally liberated Hungarian folk tales and mythology in writing these, but they're still wonderful, and why we have psuedo-dragons. Brust is on something of a historical romances kick at the moment, which makes my teeth itch some days, but the core Jhereg books are all delightful, beginning as somewhat comic thieve's tales and graduating to more court intrigue and high fantasy.
CS Friedman - Black Sun Rising, When True Night Falls, and Crown of Shadows (also called The Coldfire Trilogy) - an alternative take on science fantasy and the classic high fantasy themes, these books have elements of both Bradley's Darkover and Moorcock's Eternal Champion.
Michael Moorcock - Count Brass, The Champion of Garathorm, The Quest for Tanelorn - these form the shortest complete Eternal Champion story, introducing you to almost all of the elements of Moorcock's milieu. Oh, and you'll find some of my own personal mythology in here. I lifted Tanelorn fair and square.
Michael Moorcock - The Elric stories - this is a harder stretch. There are lots of them, they're really all excerpts from his Eternal Champion saga, and really if you've read the Castle Brass books then you've got all of the important bits, although you won't know about any of the Elric-specific mythos.
Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett - Good Omens. Definitely comic fantasy, and comic fantasy in a modern setting at that, but even non-f&sf readers will love this book. Mel Brooks does the Apocalypse. You know you want to read it.
Neil Gaiman - Neverwhere - One of the few pieces of modern setting fantasy on this list (well, I suppose you can make a case for His Dark Materials being modern fantasy as well, but... ish), Neverwhere is an excellent way to get a sense of the map of London. Well, a fantastic map of London that is more than a touch incorrect, but still. Work with me on this one...
Phillip Pullman - His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass) - Pullman wanted to counterbalance, or even refute, Narnia, some readers can't deal with Pullman because it's too rabidly anti-religion. I think they're quite good, however. Hopefully they won't break the story too badly in the current attempt to adapt it to film.
Lord Dunsany - The King of Elfland's Daughter, The Hashish Man - another one of the point sources of modern fantasy, Dunsany was an inspiration to both Lovecraft and Poe, and is absolutely amazing. I've got a rather large Dunsany collection, actually, but the only things that are still in print are these two books. The Hashish Man is more accessible, because its all short stories. When I read stories to adults, I often read from Dunsany.
Ursula K Leguin - A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore - some of LeGuin's oldest work, these books are still some of the best. In some ways they verge on Juveniles, but they're quite good. Recently Sci-Fi made a miniseries of the same name, which LeGuin has disavowed almost all knowledge of.
Barry Hughart - Bridge of Birds, The Story of the Stone, Eight Skilled Gentlemen - Best faux Chinese mythology ever. Another one of my preferred stories to read aloud to adults.
John Barnes - One For The Morning Glory - my absolute favorite fantasy story. I still buy copies of this in hardcover for friends. I've not read it to children, I'm fairly confident it works.
JK Rowling - Harry Potter et al - You knew I wasn't going to leave these out, right? I'll just assume that you haven't been living under a rock over the last decade, and I don't need to tell you what these are.
Sherri Tepper - The True Game - These books from early in Ms Tepper's career have sadly long been out of print until quite recently. They initially made her career, but she sadly turned away from her original fantasy work, which was both original and engaging, to feminist science fiction, which I'm sad to say has never spoken to me nearly as much.
Randall Garrett - The Lord Darcy stories - bridging the world of locked-room murder mystery, fantasy, and victorian adventure, it's quite sad that we only have two volumes of Mr Garrett's work before he came down with brain cancer in the mid eighties.
PC Hodgell - The Kencyr stories - These are very good and very unlike most high fantasy. In particular, the Kencyr stories describe a world that is absolutely permeated by magic and the power of time and the gods, but it is a magic that is wildly unpredictable and gods that act with their own logic and their own reasons. It has at times a feel that is quite similar to Thieves World or the Lankhmar books (though its quite possible that Hodgell inspired Asprin and Abbey, come to think of it). It also features a Lawful Good Thief. Top that.
CS Lewis - Narnia. Ok, so its Christian allegory, but if you're a munchkin you don't know and you may not care. I hold The Magicians Nephew and A Horse and His Boy in the highest regard; in addition to the movie just released, the BBC did productions of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, The Silver Chair, and Prince Caspian and the Voyage of the Dawn Treader in the late eighties, starring Tom Baker as Puddleglum in the middle film.
JRR Tolkein - The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion - Another point source for modern fantasy roleplaying games, in particular where we get our notions of Elves, Dwarves, and
Eric Nylund - A Game of Universe - This is a stretch, because its really science fantasy, but it's a romp with a lot of fantasy conceits that I'd love to see played out further. I also wish his wife, Syne Mitchell, would write some fantasy, just to see how it would turn out. More on Eric Nylund in the SF post.
Larry Niven - The Magic Goes Away - This story inspired a magic card, and is also interesting because he poses some of the more interesting magic-as-tech questions, and plays with the fall from a high-magic world to a low-magic one. A nice read, and quite interesting as a gamer.
Marion Zimmer Bradley - Darkover, in particular Two to Conquer and Stormqueen. Because High Fantasy needed rabid feminist warrior paladins. Oh, and I class Darkover Landfall as straight up SF, albeit with a magic twist.
Katherine Kurtz - The Deryni novels - More point source for modern high fantasy, all of these books have been written since the seventies, and they contributed heavily to the noblewomen in furs side of the genre. You might expect this to be where a lot of modern fantasy gaming's notion of Clerics came from, but I'd almost argue that the Deryni books are really Church Fantasy. On the other hand, if you need to whip up a neo-pagan ritual in a hurry and you're not going to rip off the Catholic Church directly, she's a great place to start, complete with Too Many Candles To Count. I will now go into the neo-pagan basher's witness protection program, maybe Roland will let me hide out at his place.
Anne McCaffrey - Pern - Relatively friendly telepathic sentient riding dragons. 'nuff said. Stop after the original three or four and maybe the first Harper's trilogy because then they just started getting silly. Ms McCaffrey's paid for her house, now, I'm pretty certain that Misty Lackey has too, and you'll only be encouraging them. Besides, if they write any more of these things, Scotland might run out of the index cards McCaffrey allegedly scatters around the floor to keep track of characters and plot.
Larry Niven - Dream Park - Sure, its modern science fantasy and a murder mystery, but it's
Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Barsoom Novels - arguably not fantasy, but still part of the classic canon, and deserving of at least honorable mention. And, my god.. Burroughs.. I mean, this is part of where epic sword and sorcery came from! Oh, and reading at least one Tarzan book probably wouldn't kill you either.
Piers Anthony - Incarnations of Immortality - No longer on my Recommended shelf, these are modern fantasy and only a couple of them are really noteworthy. That said, On A Pale Horse, With A Tangled Skein, and For Love of Evil are all three a romp
Terry Brooks - Sword of Shannara - How can you not love the original Tolkein ripoff? Terry Brooks was the author who made ripping off Tolkein Cool. (Although apparently he swears a blue streak that he didn't). For what its worth,
generalist pulled the name for his rogue character from these books. William Goldman - The Princess Bride - Ok, maybe you think this isn't fantasy, but Del Rey thought it was fantasy when they published it. And where else do you want me to put it?
I'm strongly tempted to put all of Robert Heinlein's Lazarus Long stories into the 'fantasy' category, but that's just too easy a cheap shot, even for me.
Dishonorable Mention -
Stephen Donaldson - Thomas Covenant - Because whining about how bad your life is just never seems to go out of style. Every fifteen years or so I try to make it through these, and I just can't stomach them. Apparently a lot of other people's mileage varies, though, because these books have sold an absolutely stupid number of copies.
Things I've somewhat surprisingly never read -
Mervyn Peake - The Gormenghast trilogy - I've never read these, they're properly anti-fantasy, because where fantasy aspires to affirm the status quo, Gormenghast is widely regarded to be an industrial rejoinder to traditional fantasy, in that it deals with the tearing down of the established High Fantasy order. There's also a quite good BBC production of the first book, Titus Groan starring Christopher Lee and others.
Gene Wolfe - The Book of the New Sun - really future fantasy, but I've still not read it. I just never quite got off on the whole 'bad d00d with sword' part of the genre, and post-apocalyptic fantasy mostly didn't do it for me either (I liked the John Christoper The Prince in Waiting Juveniles, but that was really the limit).
Roger Zelazny - The Chronicles of Amber - This is the inspiration for the original D&D magic system. Loathe spell slots and having to prepare spells beforehand? It's all Zelazny's fault. (More about Zelazny in the SF post, by the way)
Robert Howard and L Sprague De Camp- Conan - the classic point source for modern low-magic fantasy milieu. And Barbarians. And Cerebus. Don't forget Cerebus. Jaka won't dance for you if you forget Cerebus. (Of course, Jaka won't dance for you if you help Cerebus find Jaka, but that's another story)
H Rider Haggard - She - this is also a classic, and the fact that I've never read it is, well, appalling. I've also never read King Solomon's Mines or any of the other Allan Quartermain stories, and had not really encountered them until I started looking around more after reading Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Bad Me. Luckily its not like I didn't read Burroughs Mars books until Heinlein hacked them in Number of the Beast. Oops. Out loud fingers.
Bram Stoker - Dracula - Ok, so its technically Horror, and Gothic Horror at that, but its still part of our formative canon. I'll go hide in my library now.
Mary Shelly - Frankenstein - Properly on the edge between Science Fiction and Fantasy, I really ought to read this too. Meh.
I'll do Science Fiction in another post.
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How do you correct opinions?
Date: 2005-12-13 10:53 am (UTC)Zelazny and Amber is *not* the source of AD&D magic system -- Jack Vance is. Read any bit of the stories from The Dying Earth and you'll find the Excellent Prismatic Sphere, along with being only able to hold certain spells in your head at a time, certain amounts of power, etc. Zelazny's Dilvish, however, *is* the source of Boots of Elvenkind, i.e. Boots of Springing and Striding and Boots of Walking on Anything, tho both owe a strong nod to Aragorn and all his elf-made gear.
I can't find my Thieves' World books, but I'm morally certain that they copyright well before the Kencyr novels. I suspect you have the order backwards, there. These books are on my 'love them long time' list.
Deryni novels also post-date AD&D, but since you specifically mentioned 'modern gaming' I'll take that to mean the last 5-10 years; since I've pretty much ignored AD&Drev2 (*spit*), RQ3+, and only lightly touched on the whole White Wolf variant branch, I'll leave it at that with one last quip: Where is Kosher Camber?
I am disappointed that you've read no Andre Norton, most especially anything prior to the eighties. I'd argue that the characters from the Jargoon Pard and its related novels are the source of Druids as Shapeshifters in AD&D. (I'm ignoring, for now, 3.0+) Serious canon fodder; start at Witch World and go onward, and beware of branches. They got lots better for decades, and then they got heart-tearingly worse as she suddenly seemed to age badly in her style.
The CS Friedman you listed is, IMO, her weakest. On the other hand, it's her only fantasy, and I'll get behind anything that sings her praises. Read this author!!!!1111!!!eleventyone!
My own recommendations, canon or no:
Bujold's Fantasy -- hte stories of Chalion. Two novels so far: The Curse of Chalion and The Paladin of Souls. Excellent books, wonderful take on a created religion and how it can really interact with people without being stupid.
Misty Lackey annoys the pants off of me (and not in a good way), but I give major props to her Vanyel series for putting an obviously gay male into situations of positive merit. If ONLY he would stop whining...
Lin Carter, Jack Vance, Leigh Brackett -- seriously seminal fantasy stuff, of the 'looks high fantasy but is really not' end of things. All this stuff still has its serial numbers, but you'll recognize the knock-offs as soon as you see them.
Zelazy -- not just Amber. Dilvish the Damned is the anti-hero, but his snark-tastic demon horse has all the best lines. Ignore the last one -- the one with a castle and dice on the cover. Ick Blech 'oooh, gamers buy this stuff, let's write something riffing off D&D, yeah!' I don't know enough to know if this one should be blamed on a contract or editor, but oh gods I want to.
Elizabeth Moon's "The Deed of Paksennarion" trilogy -- It *is* a D&D adventure, but *I* didn't figure it out till the second or maybe the third book. VERY VERY VERY well written, very intent. Altogether better than her ?Harris Seranon? series. (the one where the main char is a captain who's ship is the personal ship of a rich old lady who goes aroudn to various planets racing horses. No, really.)
Elizabeth Lynn: The Dancers of Arun trilogy. The Woman who Loved the Moon anthology. Read This Woman's Writing. Get copies of the original printing of the Dancers of Arun -- the recent reprint is mangling the covers in ways that people probably think is bowdlerizing, and it just makes me sad. After decades of not seeing her stuff around, she's got something out recently I think called The Dragon Winter or soemthing like that -- two books, so far. And she has a very powerful scary piece in the SF area...
I'm sure there's more. Did I go over the comment limit?
Re: How do you correct opinions?
Date: 2005-12-13 05:14 pm (UTC)The Deed of Paksennarion. I can't say enough. It wasn't until that book that I understood just WHY D+D Paladins had to have high charisma, since every depiction I had seen were sanctimonious, self-righteous, fanatical pricks. Not very charismatic at all. I loved that book (I had a three-in-one so it's all one book to me)
Re: How do you correct opinions?
Date: 2005-12-13 08:51 pm (UTC)And yeah, it was obvious the paladin-ness of it, but it wasn't obvious to me that it was D&D until Paks hit the druid.
Found it!
Date: 2005-12-13 08:55 pm (UTC)http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060574623/qid=1134507241/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-9469141-3489600?n=507846&s=books&v=glance
Re: How do you correct opinions?
Date: 2005-12-13 05:40 pm (UTC)Checking, I thought that was well documented... Drat, you're right, there's a time order problem The original dates on Jhereg are only 1983. Fire Lizards are 1976, McCaffrey wins on the first fall. Now I'll have to go looking, because I'm pretty certain I know that psuedodragons aren't just based on Fire Lizards.
Amber, Dying Earth - D'oh. Yes, you're right, and that is well documented (Arneson fessed up to it in public).
PC Hodgell - God Stalk is copyright '82, Thieves World begins in '78, but the first Kencyr story was written and sold at Clarion '77. She cites Lieber as a primary influence, and she and Asprin/Abbey are clearly contemporaneous.
Deryni - No, the original Camber of Culdi books are copyright '76 and '78, when we were still playing with booklets from a white box. Although since the AD&D Player's Handbook was first available in '78, and all of the rest of the Deryni books are after that, I can understand the confusion.
I have read Norton, but only her SF.
I also left off Tanith Lee for essentially the same reason.
Lin Carter and Leigh Brackett - Oh, very definitely. Although I'm really tempted to give Lin Carter more ink as a fantasy editor than as a fantasy author. I just couldn't find anything really accessible by Carter on my bookshelf (half of my library is in storage, and another eighth is out print, therefore challenging to recommend), and the only Leigh Brackett I have is SF (I think).
If you only had to pick one or two Lin Carter, which would you pick?
Re: How do you correct opinions?
Date: 2005-12-13 06:33 pm (UTC)Re: How do you correct opinions?
Date: 2005-12-13 08:21 pm (UTC)Re: How do you correct opinions?
Date: 2005-12-13 09:55 pm (UTC)Re: How do you correct opinions?
Date: 2005-12-13 11:01 pm (UTC)Re: How do you correct opinions?
Date: 2005-12-13 10:27 pm (UTC)I didn't have much exposure to Carter, other than the fact that he edited the Swords and Sorcery books, at least the attempt at the start of a collection of the genre, whihc was first coming out when I was in the SFBook Club, and I went nuts for them. There was a Fafhrd and Mouser story -- which might have been the start of the end-sequence, where they've gone to the island and met the girls; there was a Carter sequence in them, that I really liked, but I don't remember much beyond that.
I've been spending money lately getting the older books -- spent a pile getting ancient Ellison, this weekend, and some Dick -- and trying to find roots. Carter is on my list, as I did like what I read of his stuff.