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]

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.