Michael5000's Guide to Awesome Science Fiction, Part III

Sprawling Fantasy Epics

"But wait," the dorkier among you are even now saying, "this series is supposed to be about Science Fiction! Why are we talking about Fantasy?" To which I say, eh, it's a blurry line, there are a lot of mutual fans, and as genres I consider them very similar in terms of their strengths, liabilities, and standards of excellence. Although really, it might just boil down to the fact that they were shelved together back in the Hometown5000 Public Library and so are indelibly fused in my mind.

Why sprawling epics? Well, that just seems to be the way that the fantasy genre works. I think that writers who have lovingly imagined a whole world and its social, political, and supernatural setting are apt to want to continue working in and exploring that context. Readers too, having invested in imagining a world-system, are likely to want to learn more about its implications. Massive bloated corporate publishing juggernauts, in their turn, are pleased as punch to be able to cultivate an established brand. Everybody wins, and there's no need to invoke the genre's roots in and enduring connections to the saga forms of the premodern peoples of Northern Europe. Although, you can if you want to.


J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings -- Well, duh. Tolkien can fairly be said to have kicked off an entire genre of fiction, not to mention having deeply informed the evolution of role-playing games, computer gaming, and heavy metal music. It is equally fair to say that most minor-league fantasy fiction written before the year 2000 was more or less directly derivative of Tolkien's world-making. And, like many people and I expect most of my gentle readers, I love these books very dearly. One of the few books I have read more than twice, I have in fact read this series something like nine times.

The action of The Lord of the Rings is set within a massive historical, geographical, and linguistic setting that one can not help but admire even as its sheer scale makes you wonder if Professor Tolkien did not perhaps have a few screws loose. While this is a strength, I think it must also be said that odd intrusions of this ponderous backstory, often in the form of tedious faux folk-poems, are the most obvious flaw of the trilogy. (The second most obvious is the sudden save-the-day manifestation of an army of the dead, which is not at all well integrated into the rest of the story.) Some critics also fault Tolkien's narrative voice as being dry and wooden, but I do not agree with this; I feel that he successfully sustains a dignified heroism that integrates beautifully with the texture of his imagined world.


George R.R. Martin, Song of Ice & Fire -- The Ice & Fire books are still being written -- indeed, I have no confidence that they will ever be finished -- and yet they are already a masterful achievement. They are to contemporary fantasy what Lord of the Rings was to late 20th Century fantasy, the touchstone that all other efforts must react to and be measured against. Heavy on the swords, light on the sorcery, the Ice & Fire books are about politics and power and the role of the individual in history. In exploring these issues on a human scale, they are magnificent. They are also vividly and richly written in a way that compells a reader forward through their hundreds and hundreds of pages.

Which brings me to this observation: the reason why Ice & Fire has supplanted Lord of the Rings as the dominant paradigm in fantasy fiction is that -- painful as this may be to those of us who have Tolkien enmeshed in our hearts and in our bones -- it is better. Martin's world is a more fully realized ecology, his characters have more recognizable psychologies, and his understanding of how history works is far more sophisticated.

Summary is futile. The plot deals with the many contests for power, great and small, within the fuedal kingdom of Westeros. There is much violence and many surprises, and a kind of harsh fantasy realism -- don't get too sentimental, as some apparently key characters aren't even going to survive the first book. On a personal scale, all of the many, many characters are fully realized, complex, believeable people. On a world scale, the history of Westeros has an immediate plausibility to anyone who has looked at medieval European history. The only real issue with Ice & Fire is its sheer bulk; Martin is certainly making a handsome living off of his creation, and good for him, but I sometimes fear that the sheer vastness of its creation will overwhelm its long-term popularity.


Ursula LeGuin, The Earthsea Trilogy -- A fantasy trilogy for adolescents, Earthsea is a tale of an orphaned boy who is discovered to be a wizard and sent to a special school to develop his talents. There, he has to deal with the politics of his school peers before -- What?!? Did you think J.K. Rowling invented the adolescent fantasy novel? LeGuin was crafting Earthsea while Rowling was still in her diapers. Literally.

Earthsea is -- how can I put this? -- I much more mature sort of fantasy for adolescents than is Harry Potter. It's in a darker register, in a more dignified tone and a sparer and more elegant language than Rowling uses or likely could use -- LeGuin is a powerful writer even in her juvenile fiction. The daughter of a leading anthropologist, LeGuin ties her work always to the mythologies, folklore, and archetypes of premodern real-world cultures. Where a key strength of the Potter books is perhaps their setting more or less in the real world, Earthsea is thoroughly Elsewhere, an archipelago land of quasi-Celtic earthiness and quasi-Norse pessimism. It is not an especially merry place, but it is beautifully evoked and an enriching place to visit.

What about Harry? Well, I've only read fragments. It's the next item up on the Reading List, though, so I'll be sharing my no-doubt crankish opinions with you soon enough.


Stephen Donaldson, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever -- This series is also on the Reading List; I read it twice as a kid and once in graduate school, but not in the last fifteen years. It stands out in my reading memory, though, as an exceptionally alternative assay into the genre. Thomas Covenant isn't a sparkly-eyed child drawn into a happy wonderland, nor a quaintly virtuous hobbit drawn unwittingly but with pluck and spunk into events beyond his understanding. He is a disagreeable, disfigured grown man -- and an asshole, not to put too fine a point on it -- who is taken unwillingly into an parallel universe where he is asked to be an epic hero for a civilization under immediate threat from the forces of evil and chaos (who are led by the rather bluntly named "Lord Foul").

What I remember from my earlier readings is that the first trilogy took this unlikely concept and ran with it pretty brilliantly. Sometime in the next few years, we'll see if that still holds. My memory is also that Donaldson wrote a bunch of subsequent trilogies, and that they were decreasingly interesting. We'll see about that if the first series still works for me.