Bump
Just finished up Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman. A D&D tie in from the mid 80s and it shows, reading it again as an adult. But this was never a decision by the authors and instead a mandate from TSR, who wanted their fiction to cleave to the sensibilities and expectations of their core audience: tabletop gamers.
And it grew beyond those expectations to global success. Amazing how things can turn out when you just do the best you can.
It is very derivative of Tolkien's works as well, something I didn't notice when I read them as a teenager because when my friends were reading LotR and Forgotten Realms novels, I was reading Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber. But for all the similarities, I still appreciated it. in a sense, this kind of fiction can't be divorced from Tolkien because traditional fantasy is essentialluy timeless and its echoes will be heard all the way back to the source. While the child in me will always want new things, the adult appreciates the consistency and stability of things that I know have always worked and will always worked.
I'm now reading Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson, the first in a series of, as I understand it, loosely connected stories called 'A Tale of the Malazan Book of the Fallen'. It's dark fantasy, a genre I love (obviously), and comes with a lot of praise, acclaim and recommendation from people who know me and thought I'd like it. I'm just getting started with it. Reminds me a lot of Glen Cook's Black Company series so far, and I wouldn't be surprised to discover that Erikson was directly inspired by Cook.
There is a great passage where a grizzled veteran is remarking internally about the folly of youth, especially in war time. About how they not only get gaslit by their governments to go to war, but how they essentially gaslight themselves into doing it because they think they have to 'do something' to save the world:
'It was the eigth day of recruiting and staff sergeant Aregan sat bleary eyed behind his desk as yet another whelp was prodded forward by the corporal. They'd had some luck here in camp. 'Fishing's best in the backwaters,' Caansfist had said. 'All they get around here are stories. Stories don't make you bleed. Stories don't make you go hungry. Don't give you sore feet. When you're young and smelling of pigshit and convinced there ain't a weapon in all the damn world that's going to hurt you, all stories do is make you want to be part of them.'
Yeah, I fuck with this.
