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

[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.