Black Gate

Ten thousand gallons of virtual ink have already been spent on the subject of cliché elves’n’dwarves’n’rogues’n’rangers fantasy.  But here’s a few droplets that I think are worth noting.

Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, for those not fully assimilated into the etherium of the web, is a popular reviewer of games and maker of funny videos.  He’s also the author of Mogworld, which I haven’t read.  Anyway, in his recent video review of the fantasy RPG Kingdoms of Amalur, he introduces a point which he expands on in the first few paragraphs of this essay.  Why does fantasy, theoretically the genre of limitless possibilities, so often fall back on the same stock elements (elves, dwarves, pseudo-Europe, fireballs, etc.)?

Now, here’s the thing: I think Yahtzee is largely arguing against a historical problem, at least when it comes to books.  Gaming may be different, with Dragon Age, Skyrim, and World of Warcraft riding high on a post-Tolkien wave of their own.  But when it comes to books, I’m honestly not seeing much of the cliché elf and dwarf pie being produced.

There are certainly shared universes, whether they be roleplaying settings like Pathfinder or Eberron, or the enormous line of Black Library titles for Warhammer and Warhammer 40K, but they don’t make any claims to originality of setting or trapping.  Many of those books tell great stories with memorable characters, but they do so with familiar elements and surroundings, and pretend to do more.  There’s something comforting about that, actually, and I rather enjoyed the only Pathfinder novel I read.

But in the wider world of fantasy, I’m just not seeing a glut of elves and dwarves or anything that’s recognizably derived from D&D.  I’m seeing Brandon Sanderson, Jim Butcher, Brent Weeks, and  Harry Conolly, James Enge and John C. Wright and Scott Lynch.  Well, okay, Enge has dragons and dwarves, but no one would mistake Morlock’s world for Forgotten Realms.

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I’m planning a more lengthy post on the role of religion and spirituality in fantasy (expanding on some things I hinted at in my last post, which involved orc samurai), but the last couple weeks have been so crammed with lounging on beaches, jujitsu, and job hunting that I haven’t had the opportunity to give it the work it deserves.  So, instead, I present:

10 Ways Conan the Barbarian (2011 Edition) Could Have Been a Great Movie

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Matthew Surridge’s fascinating post on specificity in setting got the various gears, levers, in pistons in my head working.  I’m currently writing this in a cloud of steam gushing out both ears, and hopefully I’ll be able to finish before the gnomes who power the mechanisms of my consciousness go on strike.

The short version: Matthew, I agree completely.  There is a certain charm to what I think of as the typical D&D setting, in which castles are built out of clichés mortared together with anachronisms, and the world is a playground of exotic sights for the mismatched band of adventurers to wander among and slay monsters in.  It’s a lot of fun in a game–and sometimes fun in a D&D novel–but it lacks the kind of verisimilitude that makes a story really engrossing.

I tend to think that the richness of real-world Medieval civilization is masked by a series of misconceptions and broad generalizations, beginning with the tendency to see them as one long Dark Age spanning from the Fall of Rome to the Protestant Reformation.  But the so-called Dark Ages were home to the kingdoms of Charlemagne and Alfred, the flourishing of Irish and Italian monasticism, and the first sparks of the most vibrant intellectual life the world had yet seen.  Likewise, the High Middle Ages were an age of soaring cathedrals, vibrant art and music, and universities that studied everything from Roman law to medicine.

At the same time, the European Middle Ages were anything but homogenous.  The time period covers over a thousand years, which contain literally hundreds of distinct peoples and cultures.  The Vikings who besieged Paris later became the Normans who conquered England and ruled Sicily.  The balance between monarchs, emperor, and papacy was constantly shifting, sometimes responding to new threats or influences, as when the Mongols crashed against the armies of the Holy Roman Emperor.

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I have a confession to make.

Barnes and Noble and I are old friends.  We go way back, went on some double dates back in the day, you know?  So I try to stop in pretty frequently to see how the old boy’s doing.  He’s such a welcoming host I usually don’t leave without a new book or two in hand, even though my To-Be-Read pile is starting to resemble a fortress made of paper bricks and dusty mortar.

My confession is that, when I’m deciding exactly which books are going to accompany me home, I look at all the usual factors: Blurb, cover art, quality of the first page or two, and any positive or negative vibes about book or author I’ve absorbed from the aether.  But I also weigh the book, and surreptitiously pull out a tape measure to check how many inches separate the covers.

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