Toward Ecosophy

 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.