Year of the Unicorn

[ecosophia]

 I was feeling nostalgic the other day, and pulled an old Andre Norton novel out of the bookshelf, a slender little Ace paperback with typically garish cover art, the sort of thing I read by the shovelful in my insufficiently misspent youth. It was a good reminder of just how much really good fantasy got written back in the day, and how much of it did all the things that the current highly politicized SF/fantasy scene insisted that nobody did back then. I spent a very pleasant few hours with Gillan, the tough, resourceful, interesting female protagonist of Year of the Unicorn, and the other characters of the tale. Is it great literature? No, but it's a very solid and lively read, one I'll go back to again. 

The irony is that my wife Sara was wading through a recent fantasy novel at the same time. I'll skip the details, as I haven't read the book yet (and may well not), but it's one of those huge paperback volumes, thick as a brick, with the usual bestseller glurge splattered all over the cover. To judge by her comments, there's more actual story in the 224 not particularly crammed-with-print pages of the Andre Norton novel than the recent author got to in nearly three times as many pages. 

Yeah, I know, I may just be grumbling "You kids get off my lawn!" in the language of the Witch World, but it fairly often seems to me that fantasy fiction has lost its way in an endless rehashing of Tolkienesque cliches and the like.

Comments

Woo Hoo for pulp fiction!

[ferngladefarm.blogspot.com.au]

Hi John Michael,

You are definitely a bad influence as a copy of the book is wending its way here from the other side of town. I'm always up for good pulp fiction. Some of the cover art is as good as the stories too. My Jack Vance collection is a treasure trove of pulp fiction. They re-released all of those books recently too, but I wonder... I'm unsure how long the paper will last on those old pulp novels as they are already browning, but they have been well used and appreciated and who can ask for more than that?

Cheers

Chris

Shelf Life

[(Anonymous)]

My Andre Nortons are 50 years old. Yes, the pages are yellow and getting brittle, but I expect they will still outlive me.

Yes, Andre Norton is still a jewel of a writer, but there's plenty of good stuff being published today.

Sophie Gale

Re: Shelf Life

[ecosophia]

Sophie, can you recommend anything recent that's actually good? The recent stuff I've seen is basically one cliche stacked on top of another, and could generally use being cut by 60% or so.

Re: Shelf Life

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not Sophie, and will be interested to see what she recommends as well, but I actually came here to wonder if you've read any of N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth work?

It may or may not be to your taste, but there's quite a lot in it that resonates very with the themes of your writing, both the resource depletion and the magical, and it's certainly no Tolkien rehash.

Best,
Jim Simons

Re: Shelf Life

[ecosophia]

Jim, no, I haven't. I've read a few of her essays, and liked them -- and she had a piece about how to handle nonwhite characters intelligently, which I found extremely useful in my own writing -- so I'll see what the local library has. (I tend to read an author's work first via public library or cheap used book store, and then buy stuff new if I want to read more.)

Fantasy

[(Anonymous)]

(Sorry to be an anonymous coward, but I don't have a Dreamwidth account yet.)

You're not wrong to tell the fantasy kids to get off your lawn. I'm a slightly less old man and I've had the same reaction. It's kind of a bummer how little effort is put in to disguising the Tolkien impressions these days. It's like being in a room full of comedians, all of whom are doing a barely passable Jimmy Stewart. Maybe a little funny at first, then horrifying, then you get mad and look for the door. Any door. Please, where is that door?!

Re: Fantasy

[ecosophia]

Yeah, that's pretty much my impression. Rehashing Tolkien was already old when I graduated from high school, and that was a few years back...

[kayr]

I discovered Andre Norton in when I was 14 or so. Loved her stories and made a real effort to collect them all, especially the Witch World stories. Great stuff. One of my other favorites of her stories was Judgement on Janus.

I gave up on modern fantasy some time ago. I couldn't make it through the Harry Potter stories either.

Some recommendations

[(Anonymous)]

Hi - no Dreamwidth account for me either. I have really made an effort to find some decent recent fantasy and I propose the following possibles for your reading lists (for context, I am a 55 year old British man who grew up on Norton, Peake, Tolkien ...):

* The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (Tor Books 2014) - great world-building; a bit of steampunk; nicely-done tweak on ideas of goblins, humans, etc.; palace intrigue; and a lovely, lovely central character.

* The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle (Tor Books 2016) - apparently (I haven't read the original) a riff on Lovecraft's 'Horror at Red Hook' written by a black New Yorker. Lovely evocation of place and time, beautiful writing and nameless horrors, only some of whom come From Beyond ...

(Everyone seems to be writing out of Lovecraft at the moment, not just you Mr Greer. I enjoyed Kij Johnson's 'The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe' but need to read it again before I know whether I want to run round recommending it.)

* The Sorceror of the Wildeeps (Tor/St. Martins Press 2015) and A Taste of Honey (Tor/St. Martins Press 2016), both by Kai Ashante Wilson - two long novellas set in the same world, a delicious mash-up of African history, African geography, cybermagic and street talk - beautifully-told gay romances in the foreground, all kinds of filigree world-building going on in the background, no end of interesting ideas. The later story might be slightly better constructed but the earlier one has amazing energy, especially in the dialogue.

I think there is a lot of good writing not quite as outstanding as the books I mentioned above, as well - and I haven't really tried to get into stuff not originally in English. However not much of what I have found and enjoyed is much like the thick-as-a-brick stuff mentioned in the post.

A significant contribution to my reading pleasure has come from The Coode Street Podcast (which you can find on Podbean etc. etc.) where Gary K Wolfe, US critic and SF/F academic, and Jonathan Strahan, Australian editor and anthologist, talk to each other and lots of other interesting people. They've done hundreds of episodes and it's a pleasure to listen to.

Thanks again for your work John Michael and good wishes for 2018 to you all.

Cheers, Andi