Really Getting in on the Ground Floor - Heroic Fantasy

[OSJ]

Okay, having just been shocked by a seemingly well-read member's ignorance of Jack Vance and Fritz Leiber it is time for your favorite cool uncle who isn't really your uncle to bring everyone up to speed as best I can. I forget that they don't teach this stuff in school (at least not until college, and even then it's not that through.) For anyone that loves heroic (or anti-heroic) fantasy, I shall do my best to give you a brief history of the genre and a suggested reading list. Here goes:

 

The very first novel we want to look at is Vathek by William Beckford. It's an Arabian nights type of deal written by a wealthy Englishman who happened to be as crazy as a shithouse rat. The language is ornate, beautiful and worth plodding through slowly.

Jump about 100 years in the future to the late Victorian era. William Morris wrote a bunch of fantasies, none of which in my opinion are worth reading today. I might be unfair here as it's been over forty years since I read them, but teenage me found them dry as dust.

 

Jump to the roaring twenties and we have two writers of note, E.R. Eddison and James Branch Cabell. Eddison's masterpiece is The Worm Ouroborus, which once you get past the silly beginning and the lame nomenclature for his warring races (he calls his various races Demons, Witches, Goblins and so on though they have none of the characteristics associated with such things.) It's a great book of war and intrigue, with the Goblin Lord Gro being one of the greatest characters in fantasy.

 

Cabell's main work ties into a colossal effort called The Biography of Manuel. It starts out in medieval times and progresses to the present. for the purposes of this discussion, Figures of Earth, The Silver Stallion, Jurgen, and The Way of Ecben are comfortably within the genre. However, you will be cheating yourself if you don't delve into the whole enchilada. Makes for a great summer project.

 

Now we get to the roots of modern heroic fantasy and the pulps... If you don't know who Robert E. Howard was, than shame on you. If you think all he wrote was Conan, than double shame because his best work is probably the Solomon Kane series. Howard was successful, way successful and thus spawned a few imitators, the first of which were Henry Kuttner (Elak of Atlantis) and Clifford Ball (Duar the Accursed). Neither comes up to Howard-level, but both are enjoyable enough.

 

Now we get to Fritz Leiber... He created Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and their sorcerous mentors Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes for Unknown Worlds (a rival of Weird Tales). Where Howard's barbarians are pretty much bone from the neck up, F & GM are witty, philosophical, and age as the series progresses over the next fifty years. Yes, I did say fifty years, however it's only like seven or eight books and every one of them a genuine pleasure. Leiber was very good at filling in gaps, so it isn't at all unusual to pick up a book that has a story from 1981 followed by one from 1958. Great, great stuff.

 

At the same time over in Weird Tales, Clark Ashton Smith created not one, but two milieus that are of great interest here, the pre-historic world of Hyperborea and post-historic world of Zothique. (There's also a medieval setting called Averoigne and a handful of stories set in Atlantis, but these pale compared to the former.) Smith's work is heavy on sorcery light on the sword play, but amazingly written. I think most of Smith's work is still hosted on-line. Read The Seven Geases or The Dark Eidolon and return with your mind blown. Yes, he's that good.

 

Now we come to Jack Vance, my all-time favorite author... His first book is a collection of inter-connected stories called The Dying Earth. As with Smith, the sun is slowly going out, magic has replaced science... This led to a number of sequels by Vance and two other authors, Michael Shea and Matthew Hughes. There's also a massive tribute antho called Songs of the Dying Earth.

 

This all brings us up to the 1960s and Michael Moorcock, whom I'll cover after I have lunch...

[OSJ]

As you've no doubt noticed, I haven't discussed JRRT, nor am I going to, y'all have read the books and seen the movies... We get to the 1960s and there's a mini-boom in the genre, thanks in large part to several volumes of Leiber and Vance  being issued in paperback. Joining them were new novels by L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter and Michael Moorcock. Of the three, Moorcock is perhaps the most interesting as his work ranges from the worst in imitative hackery to practically transcendent. There was a ton of this stuff being churned out by other stalwarts from the pulps such as Gardner F. Fox and John Jakes. Most of this stuff is quick, easy reading and about as substantial as cotton candy. The most notable material to come out of this glut was Roger Zelazny's  foray into the genre, Dilvish the Damned.

 

The last year of the decade saw the advent of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, which reprinted tons of classic material and introduced a few new writers such as Katherine Kurtz, whose Deryni novels were profoundly influential on the genre as we know it today.

[Matt D]

Elric isn't among the least of Moorcock's work but it's far closer to the least than the best. If you've (general you) only read that and not Gloriana or Von Bek or Dancers at the End of Time, you're missing out. I have Mother London to read at some point, personally.

[OSJ]

What Matt said with emphasis on Gloriana.

[OSJ]

Oh, for all those who need to check out Clark Ashton Smith, the site you want is The Eldritch Dark, it has all of his short stories posted, start with "The Dark Eidolon" or "The Isle of the Torturers" and if those don't rock your world, you're probably too jaded for any of my other suggestions...

[J.H.]

Of Moorcock I love Elric for the cheap disposable fantasy it is but Von Bek is my favorite. He has combined the 2 with mixed results.

 

Robert E. Howard remains my favorite and I agree with OSJ, Solomon Kane is amazing. "Solomon Kane's Homecoming" is an amazing poem about what happens to those left t home when the hero goes out on his merry way to adventure. I also recommend "The Sword Woman" and El Borak, 2 other fun REH creations but they are more "Historical Fiction" than Fantasy. Bran Mak Morn doesn't get enough love, it might be Howard's most tragic fantasy character as it is about a King who knows the people he leads and is trying to elevate, are doomed to extinction.

 

I'm interested right now in reading some of the Chinese Wu Xia books, if there are any in English, because those are supposed to be great fun, fantasy novels.

 

James

[OSJ]

James: Thanks for mentioning "Solomon Kane's Homecoming"! It doesn't fully explain the events that caused Kane to become a Puritan and start wandering the world, but it sure does hint at things. You're absolutely correct about Bran Mak Morn, despite Howard having some rather peculiar ideas about the Celtic race, the Bran Mak Morn stories are great, perhaps the best being "Worms of the Earth", which might just be the best combo of heroic fantasy and bloodcurdling horror that anyone has ever written. And that's praise directed at a guy who excelled at that particular blend.

 

REH Properties has of course licensed the shit out of things with varying results, some of the worst stuff is the de Camp/Carter fix-ups of original REH outlines or fragments (by himself or with Fletcher Pratt, de Camp is perfectly fine, he didn't have the dark side that makes REH so great and the work suffers as a result, (to steal a line from Breaking Bad, one is classical, the other is jazz); (Lin Carter is pretty much the epitome of fanfic getting published professionally, pretty much terrible except for one collection of short stories that he actually wrote in his own voice as opposed to trying to imitate any of a score of other authors.),  the Conan novels by Robert Jordan, Poul Anderson, and anyone not named Karl Edward Wagner are pretty forgettable. A pleasant surprise are the Cormac Mac Art books by Andrew Offutt, a writer known for mediocre porn and sf, something clicked when he took on the character and while they aren't REH, they are pretty damn good. Avoid anything that has "Red Sonya" in the title, you want a female lead, check out the "Raven" series by Russell Kirk (a pen-name for World Fantasy Award winner Robert Holdstock).

 

Allow me to do a last update on the chronology as I pretty much assume that everyone's hip to anything post-2000...

 

The 1970s saw a horrible boom in "light fantasy", most of which consists of a group of disparate beings banding together to look for something. This reached a zenith with the popularity of Elfquest and similar shite. Other than a small amount of material from Ballantine, the brightest spots were a maturing Moorcock and Karl Edward Wagner who launched his series of anti-heroic fantasy concerning Kane.

 

Then, in 1978 we get Robert Asprin and Lynn Abbey's Thieves World, the first shared-world series... It started out great and due to the restrictions of the editors became more and more awkward as time went on. I saw the "handbook" for potential contributors and it was like the phone book for a small city filled with what you could and couldn't do. Needless to say, I wanted no part of it...

 

Finally, in 1984 a ex-reporter named David Gemmell had a book entitled Legend published and everything changed for the better...

[J.H.]

Well remember that Howard had a recurring thing about the "Celts" throughout the timeline of his works. They are present in Atlantis during Kull, again they are in The Hyborean age and by the time we get to Bran Mak Morn and the Romans he had just taken the 2 previous versions of the Celts and basically said "forget history, the true Celts have been here since the Kull the Conqueror and now his descendant leads them to their own doom despite his better intentions"

 

The Bran Mak Morn collection from a few years back had the excerpt from a paly Howard was wrting about the last King of The Celts and I ha these grand visions of this most epic stage play ever, with blood flowing on the stage like the Hamlet duel from Addams Family Values.

 

James

[OSJ]

Absolutely! It's also important to remember that REH was as crazy as a shithouse rat, and his odd ideas weren't just world-building, but things that he had convinced himself were true. Yes, a REH play would be all kinds of Grand Guignol fun...

 

Well remember that Howard had a recurring thing about the "Celts" throughout the timeline of his works. They are present in Atlantis during Kull, again they are in The Hyborean age and by the time we get to Bran Mak Morn and the Romans he had just taken the 2 previous versions of the Celts and basically said "forget history, the true Celts have been here since the Kull the Conqueror and now his descendant leads them to their own doom despite his better intentions"

 

The Bran Mak Morn collection from a few years back had the excerpt from a paly Howard was wrting about the last King of The Celts and I ha these grand visions of this most epic stage play ever, with blood flowing on the stage like the Hamlet duel from Addams Family Values.

 

James