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1977: All roads to nowhere

2 March 2007 by 2 Comments

Review: Circle of Light, by Niel Hancock

 

Not long ago, Tor Books released a new edition of the Circle of Light tetralogy, but Niel Hancock continues to be a rather obscure author. It is difficult to understand, or even to remember, the fanfare that attended the series’ first publication. These were perhaps the first books ever to proclaim their author a new Tolkien on the frontcovers: ‘A magnificent saga for all who love THE LORD OF THE RINGS!’ In fact the resemblances are few and feeble, but it was a portent of worse things to come. [Read more…]

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1977: Hero and fool

24 February 2007 by 3 Comments

Review: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson

J. R. R. Tolkien perfectly summed up the critical reaction to his fiction in a clerihew:

The Lord of the Rings
is one of those things:
if you like you do:
if you don’t, then you boo!

You could say the same for the most ambitious of his early imitators, Stephen R. Donaldson, and his first Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. Readers and critics are just as divided in their opinions of this trilogy as of Tolkien’s masterwork, though the division is on wholly different lines. Tolkien is dismissed out of hand by critics who sneer at fantasy in general, loathed by the Moorcock-Miéville school of fantasy nihilists, and of course praised to the skies by a third group. The dispute about Donaldson cuts right across these divisions, and is unusually acrimonious even by the standards of the genre ghetto. By a curious kind of foresight, one of Donaldson’s own verses aptly describes the critical reaction to his work:

And he who wields white wild magic gold is a paradox—
for he is everything and nothing,
hero and fool,
potent, helpless—
and with the one word of truth or treachery,
he will save or damn the Earth
because he is mad and sane,
cold and passionate,
lost and found.

It is, I think, worth taking a moment to examine the battle lines, for that may tell us something about the fantasy field itself as well as Donaldson’s place in it. [Read more…]

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The road mistaken

4 February 2007 by Leave a Comment

Dearest, this is not the end:
Death received us long ago.
Where two roads crossed in the snow,
we looked round each deceiving bend;
where others trod we feared to go.
It was then we chose to die:
This is not the end. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Verses

1977: Lord of the Rinky-dink

22 January 2007 by 2 Comments

Review: The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks

 

As I have said before, I have a high opinion of Tom Shippey as a literary critic, but that does not exempt him from criticism in turn. At one point in J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, he makes what may be the single most fatuous remark I have ever had the misfortune to read on the subject of Tolkien’s imitators. He is discussing The Sword of Shannara, and after giving a long list of the obvious borrowings or plagiarisms of Tolkien in that work, he adds:

The similarity is so close that in a way it is hard to tell how good or bad the result is.

And yet in the very same paragraph he recovers his usual perspicacity, and puts his finger on the secret of Terry Brooks’s commercial success:

What The Sword of Shannara seems to show is that many readers had developed the taste (the addiction) for heroic fantasy so strongly that if they could not get the real thing they would take any substitute, no matter how diluted. [Read more…]

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1977: From Zeus’s brow

19 January 2007 by 1 Comment

This is the first in a five-part series on the ‘Fantasy Big Bang’ of 1977. You can find the other parts of the series here:

2. Lord of the Rinky-dink
3. Hero and fool
4. All roads to nowhere
5. Lost tales, unattained vistas

 

Somewhere or other, I suppose, there are people who would claim that some fundamental change or progress has overtaken the field of ‘high’ or ‘epic’ fantasy in the last thirty years. I suppose they must exist, because nowadays there is no claim so foolish that somebody cannot be found who will make it. In the same way, a century ago, there were those who claimed that England was not ruled by an oligarchy, and it was to these that G. K. Chesterton made his inimitable answer:

It is quite enough for me to know that a man might have gone to sleep some thirty years ago over the day’s newspaper and woke up last week over the later newspaper, and fancied he was reading about the same people. In one paper he would have found a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Acland. In the other paper he would find a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Acland. If this is not being governed by families I cannot imagine what it is. I suppose it is being governed by extraordinary democratic coincidences. —What’s Wrong with the World [Read more…]

Filed Under: Essays, Reviews Tagged With: , ,
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