Three points make a post: Good and not-good fantasy novels

[womzilla]

Point one:
Take it arguendo that there is a meaningful category of "Extruded Fantasy Product". (The least judgmental description I can think of would be papersky's coinage, "[a] long fantasy series that you haven't read but you already know just what they're going to be about."

What would be the earliest example? I'm very tempted to go with the obvious, Terry Brooks's dreadful creamed-chipped-Tolkien-on-toast The Sword of Shannara--a novel so dreadfully unoriginal that I could tell when I was twelve years old that I had already read it--but it has one possible disqualifier: it was written as a single novel. (The first sequel didn't appear for five years.) EFP seems almost unavoidably to be a phenomenon of series. If we disqualify Sha-na-na on those grounds, what becomes the first EFP? And try to be polite.

(Before anyone says "Donaldson", I'm going to rule it out of bounds. Well, the first trilogy, anyway. Whatever flaws it might clench within its covers, that first series was not like the fantasies before it, nor even much like those which followed. There might be a sustainable argument that the second trilogy was EFP, even though I liked it a great deal.)

Point two:
On a related issue, what was the first novel or novel series which was obviously based on a fantasy RPG campaign? I disqualify Andre Norton's abominable Quag Keep, because it was clearly written by someone who had never actually played an RPG. Ray Feist's Magician was 1982, and even beyond the rank plagiarism of M. A. R. Barker's brilliant RPG world of Tekumel, the plot is a pure by-the-numbers first-level-character-goes-and-makes-his-way-to-18th-level story. I have a hard time believing there wasn't something earlier.

Point three:
This post grew out of a congeries of thoughts in response to a james_nicoll post about plot coupons, to which I left a couple of comments, including this:

Some time ago, someone (baldanders, iirc) commented in a discussion of bad comics art that comics artists almost never try to draw beautiful women who look beautiful in the way that, say, Nastassja Kinski is beautiful. I responded that drawing a woman like Michael Turner's doe-eyed helium-filled mannequins just takes the willingness to exaggerate, but drawing a woman who looks beautiful like Kinski requires really understanding what makes a human beautiful.

It's (relatively) easy to write a story which catches you up in its emotional drive if the characters get steadily more powerful to save the world. To write an emotionally affecting story about characters who save the world by actively taking part in its disassembly--by driving out good magic as well as bad--requires a much greater level of skill.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That was a very peculiar era, the mid-to-late 70s, because up until that time, with a few odd exceptions (Katherine Kurtz, lesser Michael Moorcock), bad fantasy basically did not exist, and those were at least interestingly bad. The advent of fantasy novels that were simply not worth reading was bewildering.

To my mind, the characteristic of Extruded Fantasy Product is not so much that it's predictable as that it's not worth predicting: acres of prose with no life that feels as if it was squeezed out of a tube. So tedious to read that it's hard to credit how anyone could have had the stamina actually to write it.

The first such series actually predates Terry Brooks: the Circle of Light quartet by Niel Hancock. I remember the utterly unprecedented feeling of bafflement that there could be a fantasy series of so much prose with so little content. Today, of couse, that phenomenon is so commonplace as not to be worth noting.

The Sword of Shannara, which you mention, was the first and is often considered the worst Tolclone, a useful synonym for EFP meaning "a book you've read before because it's a paint-by-numbers kit of The Lord of the Rings," and Brooks's opus is proof that it doesn't have to be a series at all - indeed, report is that later Shannara books got a little more original.

The ultimate of that category, and certainly an early example, was the Iron Tower Trilogy of Dennis McKiernan, a set that, if you don't know its secret history which explains all, simply beggars description.

When Donaldson came along, it was still worth arguing whether such works were of any value. The point when I realized that the fantasy field was no longer worth following in its entirety was the arrival of, and the widespread acclaim for, the Extruded Product (again, by my definition: not so much predictable as consisting of acres of tedious sludge) of David Eddings and Robert Jordan.

And it's only gotten worse from there.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I can't accept the "bad fantasy basically did not exist before the 1970s" position (though you're hardly the first person I've heard make that claim. In the 1960s, there were such stinkers as Lin Carter, David Mason's The Sorcerer's Skull, Andre Norton, Gardner Fox, Björn Nyberg, and of course John Norman.

Before the mid-1970s, *fantasy* basically did not exist as a publishing category, except for a lot of swords and sorcery, thin streams of light fantasy and children's fantasy. There was a small handful of uncategorizable things, many of them brilliant, but only a few every decade. Betty Ballantine and Carter's "Ballantine Adult Fantasy" line (BAF), which mostly eschewed sword and sorcery and largely defined the canon of "high fantasy", drew from over two centuries of writing; of the seventy or so single-author volumes in the two BAF series, only 35 authors are represented. (Thirteen authors are represented by a single book each.) That's not a tradition--that's a rivulet.

Please note that I don't think that the BAF is an exhaustive collection of pre-Del Rey high fantasy. But the fact is that Carter kept returning to a bunch of authors--Clark Ashton Smith, Morris, Cabell, Eddison, Walton--who in the years following the rise of commercial fantasy have faded completely from the scene, definitely proven to be an acquired taste. (Smith in particular has gone through at least three major revival attempts in my lifetime.)

One could say that before the mid-1970s, with few exceptions "high" fantasy could only get published if it *was* exceptionally well-written. (Betty Ballantine certainly seems to like the prose stylists, and more power to her for it.) What Del Rey did, using Brooks, is prove that there were readers who liked the form and content of "high" fantasy even without the prose markers. (I think that I'm accurately quoting PNH, who referred to the days when people were so starved for fantasy that they would read anything no matter how well-written.) That, basically, one could publish "Tolkienic" fiction for the Robert Howard knock-off audience.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

All right, then, change "fantasy" in "bad fantasy" to "high fantasy" or "fantasy that aspires to goodness" and the point's still valid, because the obscure hack fantasy of the Gardner Fox sort (I read some of him) never pretended to be other than it was. But the preview copies of The Sword of Shannara and Lord Foul's Bane came with letters from Lester del Rey testifying to how great they were! These were the novels, he said, that everyone who loved LOTR had been waiting to read. And we read them and said, WTF?

I don't know how many authors you think you need for a tradition, but 35 sounds like more than enough for a literary tradition to me. What it's not enough for is a publishing genre, and of course fantasy was not one up to the 1970s. But the awareness of the tradition far predates the BAF. Tolkien, for instance, was quite aware that he was in the tradition of William Morris, Lord Dunsany, and Eddison.

Even a conscious naming of the tradition predates the BAF: critical sorting out of a high fantasy tradition began in the early 60s when Sprague de Camp was looking for prestigious forebears to beef up sword & sorcery's pedigree, the same way SF had annexed Mary Shelley, Kepler, and Lucian of Samosata to beef up its pedigree. Carter, who worked with de Camp, carried that on: though there's not much sword & sorcery in the BAF, that's mostly because he didn't need to unearth it. In his book Imaginary Worlds he mixes the two quite indiscriminately.

If you insist on a usage of "high fantasy" quite distinct from "sword & sorcery", that didn't come along until later. Boyer & Zahorski in their Fantastic Imagination books (1977+, several years after the BAF folded) were the first to clearly exclude sword & sorcery from their coverage. As late as 1979, there was an DAW anthology called Heroic Fantasy (which had been used as a broader term to include both s&s and high fantasy) whose contents were pure sword & sorcery. I can certainly testify that I reacted very differently to the two areas, but until Boyer & Zahorski came along I could find no critical commentary that pulled them apart.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

If you insist on a usage of "high fantasy" quite distinct from "sword & sorcery", that didn't come along until later.

I would say exactly the opposite--that I am not the person drawing the distinction between "good fantasy" and "swords and sorcery fantasy". I grew up preferring Moorcock and Kane to Aragorn, and as such I have always resisted the "high" label for Tolkien (who I long thought was vastly overrated) because I perceived it as privileging not a prose style (or concern with prose) but an entire approach to fantasy that I don't consider worthy of such privileging.

This isn't to say that I don't care about prose--though that was probably true of me-at-age-fifteen--but that I don't see that there's anything about the content or form of "the high fantasy tradition" that makes it inherently worthy of elevation above the "low fantasy" tradition of Howard. So, when you say that "bad fantasy did not exist", that's true only if tautologically exclude "bad fantasy" from the category of fantasy. (And, again, you're not the only person I've seen who takes this rhetorical stance, so I'm not arguing solely against you.)

In addition to the swords-and-sorcery (a clear "type" even if that term did not really exist yet), there was a lot of fantasy published in the form of contemporary horror before the mid-1970s. There wasn't really a publishing category of horror until somewhat later, but the works were there. I can't imagine you want to make the claim that all of that was well-written, too.

As to tradition versus rivulet: the editors of the BAF included such disparate authors as Lovecraft, C. A. Smith, Lindsay, Brahmah, and Mirlees in their attempt to find books that would appeal to audiences hungry for another Lord of the Rings. The BAF published great works and hoped they would find an audience despite the fact that they mostly weren't like Tolkien. Lester Del Rey turned this on its head--he commissioned a work slavishly like Tolkien in form, in the belief that many people would respond to it even without the elegant prose, depth of invention, or complexity of theme that J. R. R. brought to his work. And he was, demonstrably, absolutely correct.

And, as a side note, I continue to resist treating Brooks and Donaldson as the same thing. Whatever its failings, Donaldson's first novel was not a slavish imitation of anything. Lester Del Rey took the gigantic single novel and split it into three volumes in order to market it as "just like Tolkien", thus proving that people would buy "fantasy trilogies". Artistically, however, it is its own thing, a claim one can't make about The Sword of Sha-na-na.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. You're jumping me to several conclusions I did not mean to make. Most importantly, there's no opposition between "good fantasy" and "sword and sorcery". The opposite of "good fantasy" is "bad fantasy", and the opposite of "sword and sorcery" (in this context) is "high fantasy", which is not a term of approbation but a name for a style or sub-genre. There is good and bad in both styles.

The problem is that the term "fantasy" itself is so vague and used to mean totally different things. Todorov uses it to mean psychological fantasy of the Turn of the Screw sort, and would put the whole high fantasy/sword-and-sorcery milieu in the obscurest, least significant corner. And there's horror, which I consider a quite different genre as SF is, however much it may be combined with fantasy as SF can also be combined, and what about children's fantasy, by far the richest form of all?

So when I said that bad fantasy did not exist, I was using a specific definition of fantasy: specifically, genre fantasy as it exists today, extrapolated backwards in time. The kind of honest trash that existed then (Gardner Fox and the like) was so clearly separable from good works (and I'm including good sword-and-sorcery among the good work) that it could be ignored if you didn't want it. It's been excluded not tautologically but because it's forgettable and hence forgotten.

The big difference is: you can't make that kind of separation now. Anything with the goals and aspirations of today's genre fantasy would have been good (by the standards by which LOTR is good) up until Lester mucked things up in 1977. Afterwards, not.

Not necessarily good in the same way, however. In fact, the whole point of the old high fantasy tradition is that the works were distinct, individual, characteristic of their authors' voice and nobody else. They shared the general framework of high fantasy, but within that their similarity lay in their each being similarly unique.

That may seen counter-intuitive, but I find the metaphor of a town to be useful here. High fantasy was a small old town with various scattered buildings: each different, each unique, but making a pleasing whole. The genre fantasy of today is what happened after the developers moved in and built their cookie-cutter suburbs.

But I'm not treating Brooks and Donaldson as the same thing. Both were sold by Lester as being what LOTR readers were looking for, but neither was what LOTR readers who admired the prose, invention, etc. was looking for. But for different reasons. Brooks was the first ever high fantasy that was a slavish copy of somebody else. And Donaldson, while he had his own voice in the tradition of good high fantasy, was one of the first to do that while being not very good. (Niel Hancock also had his own voice, and was also not very good.)

As to tradition vs. rivulet, you're making the point I made earlier. By trying to find a mass audience for the BAF books, the Ballantines were attempting to turn a literary tradition (high fantasy) into a publishing genre. And failing, for two reasons: one is that a tradition of uniqueness is not a publishing genre, which needs formula; and second, there weren't enough important books in that tradition to make a genre. A tradition, yes; a genre, no. Maybe we can just say that a steady rivulet is enough to make a tradition.

[washa-way.livejournal.com]

"Terry Brooks's dreadful creamed-chipped-Tolkien-on-toast The Sword of Shannara"

I am so, so deeply pleased that the universe contains a mind able to devise such a perfect metaphor.

[drelmo.livejournal.com]

I would suggest the Belgariad as the first Extruded Fantasy Product in your terms. It's a five book series. If its execution isn't deliberately clicheedly commercial, it's an extraordinary accident of execution. It is supposedly based on a heavily left-brained notion (such as I myself might have come up with), but doesn't actually manage to say anything surprising or innovative about the notion (of dueling Big Fat World-Changing Prophecies). Its main characters exemplify their backgrounds (e.g., the nordic barbarian isn't just from the nordic barbarian lands, he's the nordickest barbarianest) in lieu of individuation.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

When I read The Belgariad--shortly after its conclusion in the mid-1980s--I viewed it, in part, as a deliberate exploration of the catalog of fantasy cliches. But I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be so generous if I read it now.

[drelmo.livejournal.com]

Magician appears to have beaten Jhereg by about a year.

1982 may have been the earliest practical RPG spinoff. D&D didn't take off until the first basic set in 1978, plus a few years of the writer's foundational campaign, plus a few years of growing up and becoming a publishable writer (possibly contemporaneous), plus a year from acceptance to actual publication.

[dhole.livejournal.com]

There's Lin Carter's Thongor series. It qualifies by Jo's definition, though it isn't regurgitated Tolkien; it's regurgitated Conan. And then there's the Howard fix-ups and the Carter and De Camp original Conan stories. There are endless numbers of them, and you don't have to know much about the barbarian hero genre to know what to expect from them.

I suppose the uncharitable might point to the later Tarzan, or Oz books. Part of a long series, with very little new in them. And even if you haven't read Tarzan and the Leopard Men, you sort of have.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

And even if you haven't read Tarzan and the Leopard Men, you sort of have.

Oh, well said.

I actually think the last couple of Baum's Oz novels are among the best--he did improve both as a plotter and as a stylist in the course of the series--but there's a lot of filler between the first three novels and the last. At his worst, Baum degenerated into twee travelogues, and while I don't think there's an Oz novel as bad on that score as The Sea Faeries, some of it's pretty pointless. I know that Ruth Plumly Thompson has her supporters, but those are very much EFP avant la lettre in every way except length.

[drelmo.livejournal.com]

I don't know that I'm going to defend RPT on any basis other than books like Kabumpo or Giant Horse generally having more (and more exciting) plot than Baum's books, so they appealed to me as a young boy. Today, thirty years or more more cynical, I probably couldn't dispute their proto-EFP-ness.