Janny Wurts, ‘The Curse of the Mistwraith’ (1993)

 So, lately I’ve been catching-up on some big-hitting Fantasy that I didn’t get around to reading (or only dipped into) when it first came out, 1970s-1990s. I’m doing so because I’m writing a Short History of Fantasy and though I’m pretty well-read when it comes to 19th- and earlier 20th-century Fantasy, I'm less familiar with the last decades of the century, a period which saw a huge boom in commercial fantasy, a great flood of often very lengthy novels, many of them units in extended series. A few of these I read at the time, many I did not. But I can hardly cover this period without at least some sense of these titles. So, in I dive. I am in-diving. Splash!

And here's Janny Wurts. Back when they came out I read—though I’ll be honest, my memory is pretty patchy—a trilogy she co-authored with Raymond Feist, one part of their (lengthy!) Midkemia sequence. I didn’t get around to reading any of her Wars of Light and Shadow novels (1993-ongoing), although I was aware of them. They were, and so far as I can see continue to be, hugely popular. The first book in the series Curse of the Mistwraith has four thousand reviews on Goodreads, heavily skewed towards 5-star assessments: an impressive number for a book published fifteen years before Goodreads was even created. None of my books have had a fraction of a fraction of that kind of response. There's clearly something here.

So I read it, and: it’s fine. Pretty good. It starts briskly, slows down for multiple hundreds of pages, and then picks up again for a big, climactic battle. We’re in a familiar-enough Fantasyland territory, a combination of Manichean and Nominalist logics. By the former I mean that, as per the overarching series name, this is a world in which ‘light’ and ‘shadow’, good and evil, compete, on the material but also the magical plane. The ‘moral’ of the stories is that these things must be in balance. They're not, for this novel, or there would be no novel, so OK. 

There are two brothers (or half-brothers) who embody these two modes and around whom the story is constructed: Arithon s'Ffalenn (possessor of elemental shadow magic, able to generate darkness, conjure cold, summon eidolons and illusion &c) and Lysaer s'Ilessid (all sunshine and smiles, dedicated to justice, possessed of elemental light magic: so, able to create brightness, heat &c &c). Both lads are more than five-hundred-years old, having drunk from a magical fountain that grants five hundred years of extra life to imbibers, and which is, by a notable does-what-it-says-on-the-tin logic, called ‘the Five Centuries Fountain’. Fons quingentorum, no less. [sings: ‘—and AYY will live five hundred years/and AYYYY will live five hundred more—’] 

This novel concerns the titular ‘Mistwraith’, which evil, magical entity has swaddled the land in fog and blotted out the sun. Lysaer and Arithon, together with seven celebrated, summoning-spell-speaking sorcerers, known as the ‘Sellowship...’ that is, ‘Fellowship of Seven’, must combat this evil. Doing so takes simply ages. This is a 700-page novel and for most of those pages little happens. People trek about the world—(there’s a map printed at the front, but it seems to have been shrunken down from poster- to postage-stamp-size, and I literally couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Couldn't make headland nor vale of it)—they talk amongst themselves, fill-in the worldbuilding and magical system for the benefit of the reader, wander some more. By Nominalist I mean that, as in Le Guin’s Earthsea, magic here is primarily a matter of naming, and knowing true-names: ‘since the effectiveness of any arcane defense stemmed from Name, no spell could perfectly thwart what lay outside of the grasp of true seeing; to balk an essence wrought of mist and multifaceted sentience posed a nearly impossible task, like trying to fence darkness with sticks’ [355]. As this quotation suggests, nominalism entails a kind of essentialism, just as the ‘good versus evil’ moral superstructure entails a reductive binarism.

Wurts has acknowledged the influence of C J Cherryh’s Morgaine books on her own writing, and that’s evident in this novel, not least in the prominence of rounded, interesting female characters. But in one respect Wurts is very different kind of writer to Cherryh, whose spare, pared-down, sometimes telegraphic style achieves effects of Hemingwayesque vividness and directness (although, to be fair, sometimes it gets subordinated to over-busy plotting and narrative complication). Wurts’s prose is not like this. Hers is an expansive, centripetal, rich, sometimes pudding-y and overwrought style, plumped with description and evocation, lingering for multiple sentences on details and atmosphere and this and that. Especially that.

This is fine, insofar as it avoids blandness and avoids slipping into stylistic cliché. But it has its own problems. Sometimes Curse of the Mistwraith is overwritten and gooey, and occasionally it teeters into outright daftness. The writing can be merely pretentious—(‘the guardsmens' blows tumbled his unresisting flesh over and over before the dais, raising a counter-strophe of protest from the chain’ [47])—in a way that detracts from the immersiveness of the telling. Often, though, it is simply and umembarrassedly de trop, part of a tradition of over-writing that is, we can be honest, a glorious element of the heritage of genre. Poe’s stories are over-written in this heightened, gothic-y, melodramatic, strive-for-intensity manner. So are Marie Corelli’s novels, or, in a slightly different way, Lovercraft’s tales. It is, we might say, Bulwer-Lyttonesque:—by which I mean a sentence such as ‘it was a dark and stormy night’ can be both a bit ridiculous, and actually quite effective and atmospheric. Here, for instance, Wurts’s characters approach a particular location on the impossible-to-decipher map:

Looming in eerie outline through the mantling mist rose Ithamon, city of legend …Amid that graveyard of ravaged splendor, of artistry spoiled by war into a cataclysmic expression of hatred, arose four single towers, each as different from the other as sculpture by separate masters. They speared upward through the mist, tall, straight, perfect; their existence held wonder that made sunlight seem murky, and beauty, a blindness to be endured. Somewhere between silence and sight, they exemplified the antithesis of cruelty. The very incongruity of their wholeness against the surrounding wreckage shaped a dichotomy fit to maim the soul. [298-99]

Soul-maiming dichotomy! That's my least-favourite variety of commercially-available dichotomy!

So, yes: the style is often gnashing, overblown, but it is also often, as here, atmospheric and evocative in a garish kind of way. I mean, it’s a style that grows wearisome if overextended, and this novel is, as I say, seven hundred full pages long. Wurts is certainly capable of vivid and even poetic writing, but she also overuses adjectives and adverbs (‘Arithon looked whitely strained’ [86]; ‘his eyes showed him vistas of blank darkness.’ [32]—as opposed to what other kind of darkness, exactly?) and the writing is often over-fruity.

Wired wrists screeched across sail hanks as he toppled and crashed. [24]

Sometimes it goes further, and slips into active ridiculousness:

Brown eyes slid craftily to the Shadow Master. [184]

Could Asandir close his ears, he would have. [286]

The city apothecaries fattened their purses on profits wrung from unguents. [382]

By amazing coincidence, ‘Wrung From Unguents’ is the name of my new band. There’s a dangerous fondness for bizarre similes:

Dakar slapped the reins, swaddled like a vegetable in wet cloaks. [295]

He looked out of place as a botched carving amid violet and gold tassels and amber cushions. [471]

It’s a balance, this kind of writing. One the one hand, it’s commendable that Wurts resists mere stock-phrases and cliché, and works to make her prose more originally expressive. On the other, these things can be taken too far. One specific example: eyes. Loads of descriptions of eyes in this novel. Eyes are semi-precious and precious jewels, sometimes the sorts you’d expect (‘Lysaer raised eyes gone hard as the cut sapphires at his collar’ [26]; ‘eyes like shadowed emerald’ [486]; ‘Asandir regarded the prince with eyes like unmarked slate.’ [214]), sometimes of a more rummaging through the mineralogical textbook stylee: ‘his eyes opened, dark and hard as tourmaline.’ [77]; ‘Eyes like aventurine’ [288].

Tourmaline and Aventurine. Well I'm straight-off, noneedtogoogle familiar with both of those. Yes indeed.

That a novelist might sometimes rein it in—perhaps refer to eyes just as ‘eyes’, bare of qualifier, or indeed even not mention a character’s eyes at all—is beyond the competence of this text. Rather we get: ‘eyes the color of new spring grass’ [11]; ‘Dakar rolled sour, cinnamon eyes toward the Sorcerer’ [54]; ‘eyes light as mirror glass’ [101]; ‘Asandir's eyes hardened like cut glass’ [105]; ‘eyes of soft, unfocused turquoise’ [110]; ‘steel gray eyes’ [120]; ‘silver, imperious eyes’ [220]; ‘eyes bright and ruthless as sword steel’ [283]; ‘his eyes mild as pond water’ [380]; ‘peat-bog eyes’ [471]; ‘ tea-colored eyes’ [485]; ‘eyes, black as rivets’ [576]; ‘his black eyes inimical as shield studs’ [658] and so on.

To repeat myself, it’s to her credit that Wurz doesn’t simply repeat (as many writers of Fantasy do) eyes of cornflower blue, emerald green eyes and the like. But I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the phrase less is more? It means, in a nutshell, to boil it down, that less is sometimes more. So, yeah. That.

C J Cherryh, ‘Gate of Ivrel’ (1976)

This is Cherryh’s first published novel. In a later interview she said that, having been writing since her teens, this ‘was the first time a book really found an ending and really worked, because I had made contact with Don Wollheim at DAW, found him interested, and was able to write for a specific editor whose body of work and type of story I knew.’ The reference to an ending is a little odd, since this book, on its own, doesn’t really end—indeed two sequels followed in short-ish order, carrying on the narrative [Well of Shiuan in 1978 and Fires of Azeroth in 1979; the three books were collected as The Chronicles of Morgaine (1985)] with another installment a decade later [Exile's Gate (1988)]. Still: this is a good novel. Stark, absorbing, a fantasyland quest with real friction through a believable, immersive world, and a fascinating main character. Wollheim got Andre Norton to write a preface to the volume: ‘I do not know the author,’ said Norton, ‘but her talent is one I must envy’, adding: ‘never since reading The Lord of the Rings have I been caught up in any tale as I have been in Gate of Ivrel.’

The story is set on a planet called Andur-Kursh, a pre-medieval world of clans, warriors, horses, honour, life a hardscrabble existence in a chill, Nordic landscape of mountains and plains. Humans share the world with regular animals and also certain kinds of monster, haunting the wilderness; there is a caste of folk with supernatural powers, witches and wizards called here qujalin. There are remote places, with strange structures erected upon them, which are considered cursed.

We start with handsome young Vanye, the illegitimate son of a Nhi lord called Rijan (his mother was a bondswoman from a rival clan, the Cha). After a lifetime of bullying by Rijan’s legitimate sons, Kandrys and Erij, Vanye ends up killing the former defending himself in a fight and is banished.

So: the landscape of this planet is dotted with certain ‘gates’ and we learn right at the beginning—in a long prelude, rather infodumpishly disposed—that these are sciencefictional devices, spacetime gateways constructed by a now-vanished alien civilisation. It was through these gates that humans first came to this world, although their use is now entirely forgotten by the locals and they are all now deactivated, or at least are in what we might call sleep-mode. What the qujalin have access to is not magic but advanced technology, and the monsters that haunt the forests are actually alien lifeforms shipped-in from other planets.

Vanye, fleeing his home, the castle of Ra-Morij—so many ‘j’s and ‘q’s in this made-up language! think of the Scrabble possibilities!—passes-by one of these gates just as it activates. Out rides Morgaine: the beautiful qujalin warrior-witch-queen. She’s not any of these things, actually: she’s just a regular woman (she’s not even qujalin, in the sense that this word strictly refers to the blood of the ancient, extinct qhal who made the gates; although she has various items of Clarkean sufficiently-advanced-tech indistinguishability, like a phaser and a sophisticated medical pack and a ‘sword’ that is actually an atom-bomb, or something equivalent). It turns out—we learn this betwixt and between the ongoing story—Morgaine is the last survivor of a team sent long ago to destroy the gates, since they are dangerous and could be world-ending. The problem is they also enable unscrupulous people to extend their lives, even to achieve immortality, by using them to swap their souls (I think: it wasn’t entirely clear) into healthy young bodies. One such is Thiye of Hjemur, one of the original team who has gone rogue and now rules as a wicked king in the far north.

A hundred years before the story began, Morgaine raised an army of a thousand warriors from the land of Koris and rode north to stop Thiye, but the latter used magic to ‘raise a mighty wind’ that slew every last one of these soldiers—actually what he did, I think I’m right in saying, is open a gate onto interstellar vacuum, sucking a chunk of the atmosphere of the world out into space and dragging the army with it, which is a pretty improbable manoeuvre, I'd say. But there you go. Anyway so far as the inhabitants of Koris are concerned, Thiye is a mighty wizard who destroyed the army with magic, and Morgaine is to blame for leading them into such a doomed endeavour. Persecuted, Morgaine flees on horseback and, to escape capture, rides into a gate in the far south. No time passes for her, though a century rolls-by in Andur-Kursh. Now she rides out again, meets Vanye and puts him under an oath to serve her for a year and a day as her ilin. There are complicated honour-bound reasons why Vanye must agree to this, though he doesn't want to, for he is thereafter in effect her slave. He wants to ride south to more temperate lands, but Morgaine is determined to travel to the far north and finish what she started with Thiye.

Cherryh’s novel is under 200-pages long but feels longer, in part because of her spare, often stark style: the details of life on this gruelling world are well chosen—struggling on horseback over snow-blocked mountain passes, building fires in woodland to keep oneself warm and alive, but not too large a fire (you don't want to attract the attention of the monsters who live there). Cherryh renders landscape with brisk but vivid descriptive writing, and there’s a lot of interpersonal jockeying for duty-defined or honourbound positioning (attacked on their journey, Vanye recognisers their assailants and calls out: ‘hai, Chya! Chya! Will you put kin-slaying on your souls? We are clan-welcome with you, cousins … I am Nhi Vanye i Chya ilin to this lady, who is clan-welcome with Chya’). The blend of this highly structured formality and the often brutal, to-the-death intermissions of hard fighting, savagery, makes for a distinctive, effective vibe.

The two travel to a homestead ruled by a mad lord, then further north to Koris, where Morgaine is a fell legend and then they go still further north. Then, in the last fifty pages or so, the plotting abruptly picks up speed, loads happens in a rather blizzardy way, and the book ends. This structural ineptness is a shame: the wintry slow-build of the first two thirds gets scattered. But then again, there are the sequels, to pick-it up again.

Fundamentally this novel is what my friend Justina Robson calls ‘fit-bloke Fantasy’. An older woman (in this case literally a hundred years older, though she is still beautiful and alluring) acquires for herself a buff, handsome young feller. In the first place he agrees to serve her unwillingly, but as they adventure together he falls under her spell. She tantalises him, he adores her. All good. And I liked the twist the novel offres on what I’d identify as one of the main structural functions of Fantasy—the Walter Scott dynamic, or Lukácsian dialectic, in which romantic older worlds (feudal, heroic, shame-culture, honour, status cultures) clash with inevitable modernity (bourgeois, respectable, Whiggish guilt-culture, contract-rather-than-status worlds), the interaction dramatized by a ‘waverley’ figure who wavers between the two worlds, though he (usually a he) really belongs in the latter. In Gate of Ivrel Morgaine is literally from the former—she’s been gone a hundred years, and speaks an English full of ostentatious archaicisms—and Vanye is the ‘modern’; but actually Morgaine is the future, the coming of modernity as such, and Vanye a relict of an outmoded feudal honour-status-romantic past.

That said, though the novel starts with Vanye it seems to lose interest in him as things go along. Halfway through we discover that, despite his martial prowess and warrior-loyality and general buffness and hotness, he’s actually a coward inside (‘he was not brave. He had long ago discovered in himself that he had no courage … he feared a great many things: he feared death, he feared Morgaine …’ [87])—this seems, as the kids say, a weird flex for the character. But perhaps not: what Cherryh really loves here is Morgaine herself. And Morgaine is a fascinating, compelling piece of characterisation.

One irritant, especially given Cherryh’s reputation (quoth Wikipedia: ‘Cherryh's works depict fictional worlds with great realism supported by her strong background in languages, history, archaeology, and psychology’) are the various sunspots and errors. Horses clop along despite the fact that they’re unshod and travelling over wilderness, not metalled road. Morgaine’s archaisms, designed to show us that she’s out-of-time, are bungled: ‘thee has a place,’ Morgain tells Vanye, ‘go to it’ [95]; and later: ‘thee is an idiot’ [99]— that these should be ‘thou hast’ and ‘thou art’ respectively would not take any very strong background in languages to realise. It’s as if the mere fact of an archaic form is enough for Cherryh's purposes. In Return of the Jedi there's a scene where Darth Vader approaches the Emperor with ‘what is thy bidding, my master?’—George Lucas (who wrote the screenplay with Lawrence Kasdan) means to suggest that there’s something old-world, something formal and ‘historical’ about the two men’s relationship. But it’s bonkers to suggest that Vader would, as the French say, tutoie Palpatine! They’re simply not that matey! Ah well.

Also, the first-edition cover (up top) is egregiously bad: at no point does Morgaine swan around this chilly winter-world in a bikini top and loincloth. She'd catch her death.

Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, ‘Dragonlance Chronicles’ (1984-85)

 Three key D&D weapons: Bow, Boobs and Blade

Not having been a player of D&D in the 1970/80s (I played a fair bit of Star Fleet Battles back in the early 1980s, but not the other), nor a reader of D&D tie-in novelisations, I approach the phenomenon of Dragonlance novels with dismay. Dismay because the series really is extraordinarily popular—since 1984 some 190 titles have been published, with global sales in excess of 22 million copies, which makes it a major event in the tradition of Fantasy writing. It's clearly a phenomenon which, writing a ‘History of Fantasy’ as I am, I cannot ignore. Then again, the prospect of reading two hundred bloody novels, extruded out of the Tactical Studies Rules, Incorporated (TSR Inc) megacorps machine, fills me with a sensation approaching the heebying geebies.

Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn describe Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis, and by extension the many other D&D and Dragonlance ‘official’ authors of tie-material, as ‘hacks’, pointing to the tired shuffling and reshuffling of overfamiliar generic counters and tropes in which these many, many novels indulge, their exhaustion-by-repetition of the ‘quest narrative’ format across so very many titles. [Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James, A Short History of Fantasy (London: Middlesex University Press, 2009), 123-4]. Hack is perhaps harsh, although the novelisations, in lacking the element of individual engagement, reaction and in-story feedback of actual gameplay, are bound to be a more procrustean and limited matter. Of the first Dragonlance book, Dragons of Autumn Twilight (1984) David Langford said it was ‘inspired by an AD&D campaign full of chunks ripped bleeding from Tolkien’, and he lamented the ‘deadly predictable questing, with stock D&D characters in familiar encounters’ [‘I couldn't finish this one’ he confessed; Langford, ‘Critical Mass’, White Dwarf (Games Workshop, May 1985), 10].

Sword & Sorcery is by its nature a more playful, ludic mode than the more formal Heroic Fantasy. In the case of the game Dungeons and Dragons—developed in its first iteration by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and published in 1974 by ‘TSR Inc’—play is actualised in the social iteration of the sword-and-sorcery text. Players adopt characters, and embark upon adventures that may involve a board, pieces, dice and other gameplay paraphernalia, or may simply happen in the players' imagination. There is also a quasi-author, a ‘dungeon master’, who coordinates and narrates the adventure. Adventures can happen anywhere within a capacious and expansive imaginative realm, and players can encounter any manner of monsters, wizards, fantasy creatures, magical weapons and artefacts, but often D&D ‘campaigns’ will focus on the titular dungeons, explored at length and mapped-out in great subterranean detail. The game quickly became immensely, and globally, popular, hugely influential both on later tabletop games and, in time, video games.

D&D's success fed the format back into literature. The first tie-in novelisation was Andre Norton’s Quag Keep (1978), a book in which a group of D&D players find themselves projected into an ‘actual’ fantasy realm. Since the early 1980s TSR(Inc) and their successor corporation Wizards of the Coast have published or licensed many hundreds of D&D novelisations. In the early 1980s two D&D-licensed authors, Laura and Tracy Hickman, developed an adjunct game called ‘Dragonlance’. Reportedly the TSR(Inc) marketing department believed (in Hickman’s words) ‘that the company should do more with dragons. We had plenty of dungeons, they said, but very few dragons’. [Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, Realm of Dragons: The Worlds of Weis and Hickman (New York HarperPrism 1999), 46]. As for the main inspiration for the game and then for the novels, Hickman is upfront: ‘I remembered McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern. There it was. I wanted to create a world where fighters on dragonback fought other fighters on dragonback’. The Hickmans helped developed the game, and, as with ‘original’ D&D, its popularity swiftly led to tie-in novelisations, many of them written by Tracey Hickman and his longterm collaborator Margaret Weis.

Jared Shurin, who put his teenage years to better use than I did by reading many Dragonlance books, acknowledges the limitations of the series (derivative conceits, clunking prose) but praises them for what they innovated: viz., an ensemble cast of characters, some of whom die—the death of the virtuous and noble knight Sturm Brightblade, in volume two of the original series, caused consternation and shock amongst the books' fans—war and politics represented as, sometimes unchivalric and cruel In The War of the Lance, Shurin says, ‘the book's central conflict, touches every corner of the continent. Civilian populations are uprooted, cities are occupied and destroyed, refugees are chased from one hostile land to another, innocent people are enslaved, assaulted, the whole horrible nine yards … [a] quaint pastoral forest home is levelled by dragonfire. The noble elves are evicted by the high fantasy equivalent of nerve gas. People—innocents—are maimed, tortured, raped and killed, all because of some mysterious greater conflict, about which they know virtually nothing’, although by the same token ‘big epic battles’ are ‘never shown’). There are ‘flawed’ Elves (‘out of touch, jingoistic and arrogant; reactionary, isolationist and overtly racist’) and morally-ambiguous protagonists.

Some of this is perhaps less original than Shurin suggests. Much of this is already there is Leiber and Moorcock. Multiple ‘point-of-view’ characters, or a gang who get together and have adventures, are also in Lord of the Rings, The Worm Ouroboros, Conan and others. The spin with Dragonlance is the extra-textual premise: playing D&D is having fun with your friends: hanging out and enjoying yourselves together. The novelisations replicate that in fictional form. As for the rest, whilst they are features of the Fantasy writing here, isolating them perhaps puts too great an emphasis on just how artificial and trope-y the books are: how, as Mendlesohn and James say, they flog the ‘quest’ format to death.

The first trilogy of novels—Dragons of Autumn Twilight (1984), Dragons of Winter Night (1985) and Dragons of Spring Dawning (1985), collected in one vol in 1988—opens with a group of friends: Tanis Half-Elven, Goldmoon, Sturm Brightblade, Caramon, Raistlin, Flint, Tasslehoff Burrfoot (a hobbit in all but copyrighted name: in the story his ‘race’ is called the kender) and the beautiful Kitiara Uth Matar meeting in an inn. The group is reuniting, as they had promised they would, after all had gone off on various individual quests. Soon enough they are tangling with a puritanical religious cult called ‘The Seekers’ who, in league with the Dragon Highlords, are themselves questing for the magic Blue Crystal Staff with which they can rule the world. The friends battle lizardmen (the ‘draconians’), befriend centaurs, fight off undead zombies, fly on the back of Pegasus-y flying horses, locate the magical ‘Disks of Mishakal’, are sold into slavery, are freed by elves (the beautiful elven princess, Laurana Kanan is in love with Tanis and wants to marry him, although it turns out Tanis is in love with Kitiara). They fight dragons, ally themselves with dwarfs, encounter a mysterious figure called ‘the Everman’ who flees almost as soon as spotted, they travel to the port-city of Tarsis, watch as a dragon army entirely destroys Tarsis (Weis and Hickman claim they based this scene on documentary footage of the Luftwaffe bombing London during the Blitz), split up, come back together, encounter certain magical orbs, artifacts capable of controlling dragons, and afterwards break these, fight in a dream dimension (in which they have visions of their own deaths), get involved in an elf civil war, and take possession of some newly forged ‘dragonlances’ with which the dragonic armies can be fought and afterwards do ... well, nothing very much with them. The group goes by sea, visits an underwater city inhabited by sea elves, meets mages, encounters a rare group of ‘good’ dragons, and end-up fighting over the magical ‘crown of power’ in the ancient city of Neraka.

The books aren’t quite as hectic or pinball-jerky as this summary perhaps suggests, but it’s not far off. Insofar as the readers invest-in and identify the characters, in the intragroup interactions, the soap-y on-off love affairs, in their plans and hopes and fears, then the peripatetic to-ing and fro-ing will hold their attention. But the events are repetitive-with-minor-variations, characterisation is rudimentary and the writing bad. Writerly tics are abundant. Take Caramon, twin-brother of the wizard Raistlin, a beefy warrior. The writers, looking to characterise him, lay their collective finger upon the word clanking. His armour and weapons, and by extension his personality, all clank.

‘Trying to be silent in spite of his clanking armor, he soon stood by a slender ladder that ran up to an iron grating’ [197]; ‘But Caramon was already shoving past him eagerly, his sword clanking against his thigh’ [199]; ‘Caramon who was having trouble squeezing his body and his clanking arsenal through the shaft.’ [199]; ‘Caramon trudged through the snow, his arsenal of weapons clanking around him,’ [393]; ‘Caramon nodded reluctantly, then he walked ponderously up the stairs, his weapons clanking around him’ [405]; ‘He heard a clanking sound. Caramon was getting up’ [432]; ‘The big man ran into the room, his sword clanking at his thigh’ [476]; ‘Caramon followed clumsily, his sword and armor clanking’ [656]; ‘Now Caramon ran through the darkness, his armor clanking.’ [895]; ‘Raistlin heard Caramon clanking down the corridor’ [1007]

Clanky clanking. Clank clank clank. Caramon is occasionally capable of greater daintiness:

Sitting down at the small drop-leaf table Caramon had constructed for him, Raistlin carefully withdrew from the very innermost pocket of his robes an ordinary-looking sack, the sack that contained the dragon orb. [605]

That eminently medieval-era piece of furniture, the drop-leaf table! Excellent. 

Raistlin, the mage, undergoes a strange transformation: ‘the flesh had melted from the face, leaving the cheekbones outlined in dreadful shadows … the eyes were no longer the eyes of any living human Tanis had ever seen. The black pupils were now the shape of hourglasses!’ [21]. These physiologically improbable eyes, combined with his newly engoldified skin, mark him out:

“When I awoke,” the mage said, “my skin had turned this color—a mark of my suffering. My body and my health are irretrievably shattered. And my eyes! I see through hourglass pupils and therefore I see time. Even as I look at you now, Tanis,” the mage whispered, “‘I see you dying, slowly, by inches.”

I see the same thing every morning, when I look in the bathroom mirror. Then there’s Sturm Brightblade, the series’ archetypal noble paladin. As a name ‘Sturm’ is Germanic enough, and the reader, or at least this reader, might be struck by the fact that the bright ‘blade’ of the stormtrooper was a key Nazi symbol. The ‘Olbrecht’ sword (that is, ‘all-bright’ blade) was a piece of SS ceremonial gear, and Hitler’s paramilitary ‘Sturmabteilung’ (‘storm-division’) takes its name both from Sturm and that which a blade does (teilt, cuts, divides, hence: division). Then again: a medievalised Fantasy kingdom rigidly divided between good and evil, in which fair-skinned warriors battle monstrous evil? We could hardly call such a conception Nazi! No Nazi would be called Sturm Olbrecht. Nobody who speaks German could be an evil man. Etc.

The captain turned immediately, whipping his spyglass out of the pocket of his fur parka and placing it to his eye. [500]

Parka, first attested in English in 1924, is actually from the Tundra Nenets парка, via Russian па́рка and so, despite the word’s Quadrophenia associations, isn’t impossible in a Fantasy setting. It's not as if Weis and Hickman have their captain mount a moped and zoom away.

The wind of momentous events was starting to swirl into a huge vortex. [950]

That's the thing about history. It's basically meteorological. To quote Thucydides: “the wind of the war's momentousness was now huge-vortex-whirling.”

What remained of Riverwind no longer resembled anything human. The man’s flesh had been seared from his body. The white of bone was clearly visible where skin and muscle had melted from his arms. His eyes ran like jelly down the fleshless, cadaverous cheeks. [143]

Ugh!

Without a word, without even pausing in his stride, Lord Ariakas swung his gloved hand. The blow caught Garibanus in the ribcage. There was a whooshing sound, like a bellows deflating. [829]

Oof!

He saw the blue [dragon] open his hideous fanged mouth. Tas ducked behind the shield… grabbed hold of the dwarf’s beard and yanked his head downward, behind the shield. [810]

Nothing like a bit of climactic beard-grabbing to add to the dramatic tension.

Laurana raised her hands and her eyes to heaven. [707]

Her hands are ... holding her eyes? Eww. And whilst we're on the subject of eyes:

Raistlin nodded and melted back into the shadows. His eyes were abstracted.

Abstracted [adj] Separated or disconnected; withdrawn; removed; apart. Separated from matter, not concrete. OK then!

The elves parted, and out of their midst came an elfmaiden who walked forward to stand beside the Speaker. Her hair was honey pouring from a pitcher; it spilled over her arms and down her back, past her waist, touching her wrists as she stood with her arms at her sides. [266]

Ah, gloopy hair! Is there anything sexier? Gloopy-sticky. Clang! Clang!

“Picard” Season 3 (2023)

We (by ‘we’ I mean, my wife and I) have been rewatching Star Trek: the Next Generation—we’re up to season 3 now. I watched these shows when they were first broadcast, back in the 1980s and 1990s, although I’m realising now that my viewing of seasons 1 and 2 was quite spotty, actually: some of these episodes I remember and others I don’t. I didn’t settle into a properly regular TNG-watching habit until season 3, with ‘The Best of Both Worlds’ being the moment when I properly became a fan. After that I watched the whole run of TNG, all of Deep Space Nine and Voyager, all the movies (some of which are, we have to be honest, very bad), read tie-in novelisations and so on. My interest waned a little with Enterprise and has gone back to being spotty thereafter: I watched Discovery with less pleasure than I thought I would, and though Strange New Worlds was smoothly made it felt facile to me. (I've never watched Lower Decks, though I know folk who speak highly of it). The problem, as several people have noted, is that nowadays Trek as franchise is caught on the andorian-horns of a dilemma: do something new and alienate older fans who want everything to call-back to ‘classic’ Trek, or provide fan-service to that older demographic and leave newer audiences unengaged and nonplussed.

I (by ‘I’ I mean, myself but not my wife, who isn’t interested) am also watching Picard series 3. I was extremely, rather embarrassingly excited at the prospect of Picard series 1 back in 2020, although in the event it was rubbish. But its robo-bobbins wasn’t enough to discourage me from getting equally excited at the prospect of Picard series 2 (2022). That, though, was also rubbish, a stew of thinly-stirred timey-wimey nonsense that lead nowhere very exciting. In both series, there was some attempt to do something new, or at least new-ish, with the franchise: new characters, new vibe. But Picard series 3 has entirely jettisoned all that for Plan A: fanservice, egregious and fulsome fanservice, all callbacks all the time. This is ‘greatest hits of TNG’, all your favourite characters brought back, in some cases literally from-the-dead, with a few sprinklings of stuff from other franchises—shapeshifters from DS9, the odd Voyager character, like Tuvok, popping up. But even these revert to TNG, because it turns out Tuvok is a shapeshifter and that the shapeshifters are actually (why? I’m not sure) fronting for the Borg, who are back. Or back again.

Borg-y Porg-y, pudding and pie,
Assimilating all they find,
Wheresoe’er through space they pootle
They call out: ‘resistance is futil’

… although I noticed when the line itself occurs in Picard series 3, ep 9, they do pronounce the operant word properly, ‘futile’. So that’s something.

Now, were you to ask me ‘but are you enjoying this series Adam?’ I would have to concede—yes. Yes I am. I’m as susceptible to fanservice as the next ugly bag of mostly water, and there have been moments of this series that have made me cry-out in delight. It’s not just the specific cameos, of actors and spaceships; it’s the way these cameos are disposed into the text, positioned as rabbit-from-hat reveals, surprises. Who’s this coming up the corridor to meet Jean-Luc? Why, it’s Ensign Ro (no longer an ensign, of course)—I wasn’t expecting that! Data and Lore, back from their respective deaths? Hubbah-hubbah. Enterprise-D? That can’t make an appearance, since it was destroyed in the (execrable) Star Trek: Generations movie. But wait! It seems Geordie LaForge, without telling anyone else, has salvaged the old ship and has been, singlehandedly, restoring it to its original settings, using I don’t know, sticky-tape, cotton-buds dipped in rubbing alcohol and so on. And so, with a self-conscious flourish, the show pulls back the spacedock doors and: there she is! Hurrah!

None of it makes any sense, of course. Indeed the longer the show has gone on, the less sense it is making (I have yet to watch the series finale, which will be shown on UK TV this coming Friday). The plot is incoherent, mayfly memoried, daft. The changelings go to extraordinary lengths in the first half of the show to capture Jack Crusher, Picard's son, and the TNG crew go to extraordinary lengths to prevent Jack falling into the aliens' shifty hands. Why do the shapey-wapeys want him? Ah, well, that's the mystery, and it strings the viewer along. Until in a rush we discover: they want him so as to be able to turn him over to the Borg, who are back (did I mention that? the Borg are back)—you see, Picard has inadvertently passed on Borgified DNA to his son, and the Borg Queen needs the lad for something something—and no sooner has this been revealed, and the changeling pursuit-ship Shrike is destroyed such that Jack is now safe, Jack steals a shuttle and delivers himself to the Borg Queen anyway, just for the hell of it. Why? Who can plumb the mysteries of the human heart, or the inactivity of Star Fleet's tractor beam technology. It makes a nonsense of the plotting of the whole first half of the series though.

Rewatching TNG reminds me what it was about the show that made it work in the first place: the ensemble, the mix of characters, coming together into a ‘family’. It took the writers a while to get this right, and elements from s1 and s2 jar strangely on the rewatch (s2 TNG-Picard is, it seems, mad for fine-breed horses and equestrian exercise, which will surely be a surprise to later seasons TNG-Picard whose lifelong passions have always been archaeology and viticulture), but by TNG's third season the balance of character-types and their interactions are consistently wonderful, involving, the perfect ground against which to rehearse the specific SF storylines—some of which are good, some bad. But even the bad storylines matter less when the whole ensemble is firing on its many cylinders.

These are people we can recognise: we ‘know who they are’. And as they appear in Picard series 3 none of them make sense any more. They act in ways that belong to completely different characters than the ones with which we are familiar. Beverley Crusher, we discover, has given birth to Picard’s son, without telling Picard that she was even pregnant and then zapped away to some far-corner of the galaxy to hide. Why? There’s some half-hearted explanation that she wanted to ‘keep him safe’, but the Crusher of TNG would never do something as immoral as depriving her lover of the chance to be involved with upbringing of his son, or hiding from him the knowledge that he even was a father. She acts this way to enable a tacky-tacky soap-opera-esque ‘but who is this strange young fellow who also speaks with a posh-o English accent—why Jean-Luc, it’s the SON YOU NEVER KNEW YOU HAD!’ reveal. Likewise Geordie reconstructing the Enterprise-D. He could hardly do this without Star Fleet knowing (and indeed does it in a Star Fleet facility) and there’s no reason why they would keep the fact of it secret. Why would they? Why wouldn’t Picard, admiral of the fleet, not be the first person to know it was going on with his old command? This is so only so that the show can whisk-away the conjurer’s handkerchief and reveal the rabbit sitting on the table.

I have to admit there’s another major problem with this series: Patrick Stewart—the sublime Patrick Stewart, the marvellous Patrick Stewart—is too old to play this role. He's much too old now. He can’t do it justice. The others are also older, of course (Jonathan Frakes, a rudimentary actor in TNG, does a pretty good job here, I feel: he has certainly improved, thespianically, in the intervening years), and in the case of Brent Spiner (who was, with Stewart, the other actually competent actor amongst the TNG cast) the scriptwriters don’t even try to pretend to explain why an ageless android suddenly looks like an old codger. But that matters less than Stewart, who is saggy, slow, who can no longer put any oompf into his delivery, who reacts a fraction late on every cue, who just comes over as exhausted and frail and underpowered.

But then perhaps that’s the point. I await the fan-theory that the whole of this series is not what it seems—that Stewart’s dotage is a feature, not a bug. Perhaps none of the things that seem to be happening are really happening. Perhaps it’s all a dementia-dream of Picard’s, like Anthony Hopkins’ character in The Father. All these folk from his youth, all his greatest hits, none of them acting the way they should, none of it making any sense. And the ultimate enemy a mind-virus that only affects the young (the Borg DNA infestation cannot affect people aged over 25, for handwavey reasons) turning them into intolerant conformist monsters. Picard series 3: Old Man Yells At Oort Cloud.