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NEWS AND VIEWS - JUNE 2019
WRITING NEWS Still working on the flintlock fantasy I mentioned last month (it doesn't have a title yet). I've been hitting it pretty hard, since I started work on it back in mid-April; I've already got it up to 40,000 words. If this was a Signalverse novel, or a Sam Fortune adventure, I'd be pretty close to finished with it by now -- those books tend to run about 50,000-60,000 words -- but this is an epic fantasy, with multiple POV's; I'm guessing it's probably going to hit 90,000-100,000 words. So I've still got quite a bit of work ahead of me. Apart from that, I don't really have any writing news here. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M PLAYING In between those long writing sessions, I've been playing video games. I fired up the NES version of Tetris a few weeks ago, on a whim (I'd never played it before), and got myself addicted to it; I've been sneaking in about thirty minutes a day. It's kind of a waste of time, but apparently it's good for your brain, so there's that. I've also been playing the Resident Evil 2 remake. I'm liking it -- I was a big fan of the original -- but I'm not really wild about Mr. X being able to chase me all over the damn police station while I'm trying to solve puzzles and whatnot. Seems kind of unreasonable. But the game I've really been having fun with this month is 428: Shibuya Scramble, a visual novel featuring live-action stills of real actors and actresses. The famous Japanese video game magazine Famitsu gave this game a rare perfect score when it came out back in 2009, for the Wii, and I'd been curious about it ever since. Japanese video-novels of this sort tend not get localized, so I wasn't holding out much hope that this game would ever be released here, but it was, finally, last year. And it's easily one of the best visual novels I've ever played, if not the best. The story is snappy, the characters are interesting, the gameplay mechanic (of being able to jump from one character to another) is unique, and the live-action stills really bring the story to life. It really does feel something like a TV drama. 
* * * * * * * * WHAT I'M READING My parents bought me a bunch of books for my birthday this month: The League of Regrettable Superheroes (a nice coffee table book by Jon Morris), All Around the Town (a series of essays about crime and weirdness in old New York, by Herbert Asbury), and the latest Astro City trade, Aftermaths. So far I've only browsed through The League of Regrettable Superheroes and read a few chapters of All Around the Town, but I'm looking forward to absorbing these. Greg Keyes's sequel to The Reign of the Departed, called Kingdoms of the Cursed, is also out this month; I wasn't completely sold on the first book, but I want to see where he goes with this one. Meanwhile I've been reading Richmond Lattimore's very accessible translation of The Iliad. I've been taking my time with it, reading a few pages before bed each night; this isn't something you want to rush through. * * * * * * * * FANTASY FANDOM Here's a series of blog posts I wrote for my old website, about some of the fantasy I got into when I was a kid. This feels kind of apropos, now that I've finally gotten around to writing an epic fantasy of my own. Part 1: The Magic Kingdom of Landover Novels I don’t think he knows it, but it was my cousin Jacob who introduced me to the fantasy genre. I was always a voracious reader, but before discovering fantasy, around the age of eleven or so, I mostly read Choose Your Own Adventure novels, books about Fortean mysteries (my favorite being Brad Steiger’s ridiculous but extremely entertaining Beyond Belief), and novelizations of recent movies (I had a big collection of these books — novelizations of Back to the Future Part III, Gremlins 2, and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, to name a few). I picked up the novelization of the movie Hook around the time that movie came out, and Jacob, spotting it in my backpack one day, excitedly noted that it had been written by Terry Brooks — who, I was given to understand, was one of his favorite authors. I remembered the name, and a few weeks later, on a trip to K-Mart, I saw another of his books for sale in the book section (this was back when they actually sold books in department stores). The book’s title was Magic Kingdom For Sale…Sold! Intrigued, I bugged my parents to buy it for me. 
I was a little put off by the first few chapters, which introduce a protagonist, Ben Holiday, who is struggling to come to grips with the recent death of his wife — all this stuff seemed a little too grown-up for me — but as soon as the action moved to the magical world of Landover, I was hooked. Dragons, witches, knights, magic, strange settings, bizarre allies…I loved it. Brooks has written six Landover novels so far, and according to Wikipedia he plans to eventually write a seventh, final book as well. I got my hands on the first two sequels, The Black Unicorn and Wizard At Large, in pretty short order after finishing up Magic Kingdom, and enjoyed them both. By the time The Tangle Box came out in 1994, however, I’d read a lot of fantasy, including The Lord of the Rings, and Brooks’s lightweight novels were beginning to lose their appeal. It’s hard to say exactly what turned me off of Brooks’s books (the last one I read was The Ilse Witch, all the way back in 2000), but I think it may have had something to with his relatively sparse settings — part of the fun of reading a fantasy novel is losing yourself in the book’s world, and Brooks’s novels have always been more about the swashbuckling adventure than the worldbuilding. The Landover novels are fun, though, and very suitable for younger readers. MTV would’ve been much better off adapting this series for television rather than Brooks’s more convoluted Shannara series (which turned out awful). It’s more episodic, for one thing, especially the first book — Ben Holiday’s appeals to the various peoples of Landover could’ve been covered episode by episode. Would’ve been neat. Part 2: Shannara After devouring the first three Magic Kingdom of Landover novels in the early 90’s, and thereafter developing a real hankering for epic fantasy, I started reading Terry Brooks’s more well-known Shannara series. For some reason I found The Sword of Shannara to be too intimidating, however, maybe because of its length, so I started the series with The Elfstones of Shannara instead. I was a little lost at first, having not read Sword, but it didn’t take long for me to get into it. I eventually fell out of love with Terry Brooks’s fantasy novels (I haven’t read a book of his in years), and the fact that his Sword of Shannara is an undoubted Lord of the Rings rip-off isn’t lost on me, but Elfstones is still one of my favorite books. It’s a solid adventure story, with likable characters, formidable villains, a handful of exciting set-pieces, and a melancholic ending. MTV’s decision to use Elfstones as the basis for their Shannara Chronicles TV series, rather than Sword, was a wise one (unfortunately it was the only wise decision they made; that show sucked hard). 
I did eventually manage to finish Sword, but I confess I never liked it all that much, and I didn’t really care for the sequel to Elfstones, The Wishsong of Shannara, either. Brooks’s later Shannara series, The Heritage of Shannara, which began with The Scions of Shannara in 1990, was a slight improvement; Scions was pretty good and Druid of Shannara is probably my favorite book in the series, after Elfstones (I read the whole thing in a day). Elf Queen of Shannara was rather grim and claustrophobic, though, and Talismans of Shannara felt sort of…I don’t know, anticlimactic. The prequel First King of Shannara came next; I think it was pretty good. Can’t remember much about it. After wrapping up his Word & Void series in the late 90’s, Brooks returned to Shannara in 2000 with the first book of his Voyage of the Jerle Shannara series, Ilse Witch. This is where he lost me; I finished Ilse Witch but never bothered with the rest of the series. It wasn’t that the book was bad, exactly, but by this point I’d just sort of outgrown (or maybe just become bored with) Brooks’s style of fantasy. But overall I’m not as down on the guy as some more snobbish fantasy readers seem to be; Brooks is a competent writer and his stuff can serve as a good introduction to the genre. (Legend Entertainment released an adventure game based on the series, simply called Shannara, in 1995. I bought it through some catalogue or other, and, after waiting months and months for the dang thing to arrive, I managed to get it running, barely, on my family’s rickety old PC, a Packard-Bell running Windows 3.1. It was okay, I guess. As for the recent MTV series, well, the less said about it, the better.) Part 3: Ethshar After discovering the genre in the early 90’s with Terry Brooks’s novels, I started reading all the fantasy I could get my hands on. I basically had three places I could go to get these kinds of books: the school library, the local bookstore (which didn’t have much of a selection in those days), and my friend Anthony, whose dad, a sci-fi and fantasy fan, had an enormous collection of paperbacks. My school library actually had a decent selection of genre stuff: Terry Brooks’s Shannara books could be found here, along with Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, Piers Anthony’s Xanth books and Incarnations of Immortality series, and Stephen Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I got into the Xanth books (I’ll write more about them later), but Thomas Covenant was way too boring/difficult for a seventh grader and I never managed to get anywhere with Lord Foul’s Bane, despite several attempts. The bookstore, and the various racks at the various department stores that my parents used to shop at, occasionally had new Xanth books and Terry Brooks novels for sale, but that was about it. So I wound up getting most of my fantasy from Anthony, who was always loaning me his dad’s books. He had Raymond Feist’s Magician; Jack Chalker’s River of Dancing Gods; a couple of Robert Asprin’s Myth books; and tons of other fantasy novels from the boom period of the late 70’s and early 80’s. Anthony’s dad also had three of Lawrence Watt-Evans’s Ethshar books: The Misenchanted Sword, With A Single Spell, and The Unwilling Warlord. I loved these three more than any of the others in the collection, and I was constantly nagging Ant to bring them to school so I could borrow them (again) and read them (again). 
Watt-Evans’s Ethshar books aren’t typical fantasy stories. They take place in another world, sure, and there’s magic there (lots of magic!), and a few dragons and such, but these aren’t world-spanning epics — the typical Ethshar novel is a relatively small story, featuring an ordinary, relatable protagonist, who is usually just trying to find his or her way in the world. I think that’s part of the reason why I loved these books so much: Watt-Evans’s characters weren’t supermen, caught up in a maelstrom of events; they were people, ordinary people, who just happened to live in an amazing fantasy world. It’s easy to put yourself in the shoes of these protagonists. The first book in the series is The Misenchanted Sword, and it’s the only Del Rey-edition paperback I managed to get ahold of back in the day (although the cover’s starting to come off now, from being read too much). I bought it at an OnCue store (later to become Sam Goody, later to become defunct) back around 1997. It’s probably my favorite of the series, but the charming and good-hearted Taking Flight, released in 1993, is a very close second. Part 4: The Elenium, The Belgariad I encountered the three books of David Eddings’s Tamuli series in a department store somewhere back in the eighth or ninth grade, and, because they had wizards and monsters and stuff on their covers, I bought them. The Tamuli trilogy is a direct sequel to Eddings’s Elenium trilogy, which I hadn’t read, but I forged ahead anyway, probably because I didn’t have anything else to read at the time, and although I barely understood what was going on, I thought it was decent, and years later I decided to go back and read his Elenium series, as well his earlier Belgariad. 
David Eddings’s books are readable and his characters are well-drawn…but I’ve always found them to be sort of soulless and strangely lacking. This Amazon review (of the Belgariad) by one Shambalagala, is a little harsh, but it captures something of what I mean: “…The group of adventurers is made up of 2-3 all-powerful wizards, an all-powerful assassin and trickster, some all-powerful warriors, and various others. They face off against regular people for the most part, with a few tougher foes thrown in, but after the first few encounters, it became clear that they had not been and would not be in any danger at all. After dispatching foe after foe with a single sword thrust or single word, without any harm coming to them, it began to resemble a PG-rated made-for-kids adventure. There was simply no drama, no danger. In the first half of the book, the only thing that hurt any of them was a mishap with a tree. The Elenium and Tamuli series are similar. In fact, these series are basically just retellings of the Belgariad, with a different MacGuffin and a different set of characters. After catching on to the fact that Eddings was basically just recycling his plots, I gave up on his books and didn’t bother with the Malloreon. All that said, these books aren’t bad; in fact, as I said, they’re weirdly readable. Comfort food for fantasy fans. Part 5: Robert Aspirin's Myth Series Another Fine Myth, the first book in Robert Asprin’s Myth series, was one of my friend Anthony’s favorite books and one which he strongly recommended to me. I had greatly enjoyed Lawrence Watt-Evans’s Ethshar series, which had introduced me to this “lighter” style of fantasy, and I liked the Myth series, too…but like the Xanth novels, which I’ll be writing about later, it’s more of a comedy series, really, and it never took itself as seriously as I wanted it to. Also, unlike LWE’s Ethshar books, which are consistently excellent, the later books in the Myth series were pretty dang lousy, particularly Something M.Y.T.H. Inc., a contractually-obligated mess full of embarrassing typos. 
Another Fine Myth is a good book, though, as are the first five or so sequels. Anthony’s dad only had the first two or three novels in his big collection of paperbacks, but I eventually managed to buy the rest of the series through Amazon in the early 2000’s. Part 6: Xanth One of the novels I stumbled across, while scouring my high school library for fantasy novels back in the early 90’s, was A Spell For Chameleon, the first book in Piers Anthony’s incredibly long-running Xanth series. I liked it a lot; I liked the world, I liked the characters, and, although I probably never would have admitted it at the time, I liked the sexy risque stuff (I was only twelve or thirteen when I was reading these books, mind). I went on to read every Xanth book that had been written up to that point (The Color of Her Panties, which came out in 1992, was the last one I read, but that was only the fifteenth in the series; there’s almost forty books in this series now). I think I had my library’s entire collection of Xanth books checked out at one point. 
For my money, the first five books are the best the series has to offer (the third book, Castle Roogna, is probably my favorite). Unfortunately, by the seventh or eighth book, the series, which had always been jokey but which had always managed to maintain some basic maturity, descended completely into outright comedy and cheesy, punnish nonsense, and as with Terry Brooks’s Shannara series, I basically outgrew it. Haven’t read a Xanth book in years. I did buy the first ten or so novels on Amazon many years ago, though, mainly out of nostalgia. |