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.

Further Goodkind

A follow-up to yesterday’s post. I have read (rapidly, I confess) a few more instalments of Goodkind’s lengthy Fantasy series The Sword of Truth. Here, for instance, is The Pillars of Creation: Sword of Truth #7 (2002).

In this lengthy volume we get Richard-the-hero’s sister Jennsen, who spends much of the story being pursued by the evil Dark Lord Darken Rahl. Jennsen (and also another hitherto unmentioned sibling of Richard's, called Oba) are ‘immune’ to magic, ‘pristines’ as they are called, which makes them tremendously useful in the ongoing magical war. The writing however is not, to deploy the literary-critical technical term, ‘good’.

Of course he wasn't watching her. He was no longer watching anything. With his head turned to the side, toward her, though, it almost seemed as if he might be looking at her. [11]

I annotate this passage:—???

Her eyes glided carefully over the remarkable knife sheathed at his belt. [14]

It’s like that scene in Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou! I annotate this passage: ouch.

Jennsen smiled, but shook her head firmly to decline. As the woman in the horse-drawn cart returned a disappointed smile and started to move away Jennsen saw a sign on the cart proclaiming sausages for sale. [143]

Credit to Goodkind for the knight’s-move unexpected conclusion to the second sentence here. I didn’t see the sausage coming, I confess.

The eyes of the voice opened to look at him. [404]

Perfectly normal, comprehensible sentence, this. The kind of thing people say all the time. Ah, but I see you’re curious as to how Goodkind handles sex in this volume. Well let me enlighten you:

[Oba] reached out and grabbed her left breast. Oba reached out with his other hand and grabbed her other breast. He gave them a both a firm squeeze as he grinned at her … Oba liked her breasts. They were as nice as any he had ever held. Still, she was quite the unusual woman. [400]

I annotate this: phwoah! There’s a struggle, but it’s alright, because when a woman says no she doesn’t actually mean no, and Oba speaks the universal language of love: ‘he caught her arm, twisted it around until she cried out … before she could get her breath, he slammed a good punch into her middle.’ [402]. She tries to return the punch, but he catches her hand in his. Luckily, he has another: ‘that left him a hand to feel the delights of her feminine form. Oba slipped his hand down the front of her skintight leather pants.’ Anything else?

He licked the side of her neck, back behind her ear where the fine little hairs felt soft on his tongue. His teeth raked their way back down. Her neck tasted delightful … She moaned as she urgently collected his sac together in her greedy hand. [403]

Is there a sexier sentence in literature than ‘she urgently collected his sac together in her greedy hand’? Jane Austen eat your heart out. To quote Sense and Sensibility:

His hand glided up the mound of her breast. He fondled it gently in his big hand, just to show her that he could be gentle. He reached over and squeezed her other breast, but still she refused to acknowledge how excited she was by his gentle, tantalizing touch. [528]

Alright, enough of that. What else? Well, how about ‘Terry Goodkind, master of simile’?

Sebastian stood out like a swan among maggots. [418]

It’s an enduring image. Meanwhile:

The horses kicked up a shower of sod as they suddenly broke past a wide opening in a wall to find themselves charging up the expansive lawns of the Confessors’ Palace ... Jennsen rode beside Sebastian, between widespread flanks of howling men, straight up the wide promenade lined with mature maple trees. [450]

In other news, ‘Shower of Sod and the Howling Men’ is the name of my new band. Which brings us to:

Naked Empire: Sword of Truth #8 (2003). The focus is back on Richard and Kahlan for this instalment.

Kahlan had known various people in the Midlands, from simple people living in the wilds to nobles living in great cities, who hunted with falcons. [11]

That about covers it, social-diversity-wise, I think we can agree.

“Hot as it is, it seems to me we could do without any more heat.” Richard set the bedrolls atop a sack of oats already unloaded. [18]

Let me share with you a rule out of the Professional Writers’ Handbook: the number of usages of the word ‘atop’ that are permissible in any given novel is: zero. Atop his throne, the evil socialist/ communist/ liberal/ woke/etc dark lord villain Darken Rahl is still trying to take over the world. One thing about Darken Rahl: he does not approve of people eating meat.

He spotted a cavalry man atop his horse eating a meat pie. Darken Rahl lashed out with a flash of conjured lightning, beheading the man’s horse in an instant-——thump, it dropped into the hedge. The man managed to land on his feet as the rest of his horse crashed to the ground. Darken Rahl reached out, drew the man’s sword, and in a fit of anger slashed the belly of the horse open. Then he seized the soldier by the scruff of his neck and shoved his face into the horse’s innards, screaming at him to eat. The man tried his best, but ended up suffocated in the horse’s warm viscera. [91]

Vegetarians, eh? So, yes: you know what I said about the use of ‘atop’? A word literally nobody ever uses in ordinary communication? Well, Goodkind loves that word. There’s much ‘atopitude’ in this novel. A lot of atop. Atopness abounds.

Rikka folded her bare arms atop her nearly bare bosom. [198]

Harder to do than it looks, that. As for the accuracy with which the basically medieval-level world is developed, I offer you this scrupulously researched 14th-century-appropriate tin-can:

Scorn hurriedly pulled the tin off the shelf and opened the lid. The tin contained a yellowish powder. It was the right color. [703]

And finally, for now, Phantom: Sword of Truth #10 (2006).

In this volume the Sisters of the Dark, minions of the Keeper of the Underworld, have cast a spell that compels everyone in the world to forget Kahlan. Only Richard, because of the true-love connection he has with his wife, is unaffected, so he’s the only person in the world to remember her. Cue: questing, adventures, fighting, capture, torture, blah, blah. The main villain here is Emperor Jagang, a wicked tyrant with a Nightmare on Elm Street-y power: ‘the Emperor is a dream walker, a man with powers handed down to him through ancient magic. He uses that ability to invade the minds of others not only to gain knowledge, but to control them.’

The story is a long build-up, with lots of torturous and sadistic asides, all heading towards the ‘last battle’ between Richard’s troops and the vast army of the evil Jagang. The book ends before we get there, but not before Jagang, wearing one assumes his jagang pants, captures Kahlan and spends scores and scores of pages tormenting her, harassing her, making her strip naked in front of him so he can ogle her and so on.

Jagang folded his husky arms across his massive chest. [436]

His husky arms? (husky adj: ‘in relation to voice, hoarse and rough-sounding.’) Or does he have, instead of arms, the forelegs of a sled-dog? Is that what is meant? Kahlan plots with another captive woman to escape without raising the alarm. She will steal a knife and stab the guard, very specifically, in his kidney. But won’t his cries of pain alert the other guards?

Kahlan shook her head. “The pain is so great when you’re stabbed in the kidney that your throat clamps shut. The scream is locked in your lungs.” [410]

I must say, I doubt the physiological accuracy of this assessment. Meanwhile Jagang’s troops inflict horrors on the people of Ebyssinia, a country presumably four along from Abyssinia.

Kahlan didn't know what the name of the city had been, but it was no more. There hadn't been a single person left alive. From the number of corpses, as vast as they had been, she knew that many of the city's inhabitants had been taken as slaves. [78]

You need a special degree of ineptness to write From the number of corpses, as vast as they had been…: Goodkind must have meant ‘vast’ to modify ‘number’, but the plural means that it can only modify ‘corpses’. Big old corpses. Some several miles long.

Kahlan noticed a small cluster of men in the distance riding at breakneck speed … at every checkpoint, the men brought their horses to a skidding halt. [554]

A skidding halt? I guess that’s the danger when you oil your horseshoes, especially on a glass road. Or perhaps Goodkind believes horses ride exactly the same way motorcycles do? There’s plenty of atopness in this novel, too.

She was lying on thick furs that were atop something slightly elevated. [434]

Such a ludicrous, ungainly phrase! Please don’t do it. Stop the Atop.

Jagang scooped a handful of pecans from a silver bowl and popped a few in his mouth. [457]

Thoroughly medieval nut, the pecan. Lots of them in Chaucer. What else? Well, Richard is told that his mother was not alone when she died in a housefire. ‘Everything he had known for nearly his whole life seemed to be vaporized in an instant by the lightning strike of those words.’ How does Goodkind indicate the shock Richard is feeling?

Richard felt goose bumps race up his legs. [212]

I too feel goose bumps hurrying uplegward. They're currently at my knees. I’d better stop before they get any higher.

In sum: Goodkind is a terrible writer.

Terry Goodkind, ‘Soul of the Fire’ (‘The Sword of Truth: 5’ [1999])

Terry Goodkind’s The Sword of Truth was one of the better-selling Fantasy series of the 1990s and 2000s: twenty-one lengthy novels in which the improbably omnicompetent, handsome and upstanding forest ranger Richard Cypher, wielding the magic sword of the series’ title, fights the evil tyrant Darken Rahl to prevent him and his evil minions from taking over the world. Richard is in love with the beautiful female magician Kahlan Amnell, and she with him, but a magic curse means men who have sex with Kahlan die immediately, so the two lovers cannot be together.

I read the first volume, Wizard’s First Rule (1994) soon after it came out, and it did not make me want to read the subsequent instalments—a stew of Fantasy clichés rendered into dreary, flabby prose: a quest, monsters, wizards, fights, this and that, plus the element that Goodkind adds, to make his book stand-out from the rest of the Fat Fantasy crowd: a great deal of sexualised torture and violence. Partway on his quest Richard is captured by a wicked ‘Mord-Sith’ called Denna. She is a sexual sadist and tortures him for what felt like hundreds and hundreds of pages all described in painstaking and indeed painsgiving detail. Months of story-time is given over to it. The torture is designed to break Richard. Richard is unbroken. Later in the story another Mord-Sith tries to rape Kahlan. She overcomes him with her magic, then cuts off his testicles and makes him eat them.

We might call this ‘grimdark’, but that’s not really the flavour of the novel: the world of the text is otherwise entirely derivative of lighter, more brightly-coloured prior Fantasy writing, Richard and Kahlan are utterly upstanding, righteous, uncynical; ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are distinct, exteriorised qualities in this world: there’s none of grimdark’s moral grey areas, none of its realpolitik, or moral pragmatism. The violence in this novel is its own thing, the novel’s kink, the fetish of a writer at once excited and revolted by the sadistic drives he believes to be universals. Goodkind’s hard right-wing political views, his Ayn Rand-inspired beliefs, directly inform the novel: the titular ‘Wizard's First Rule’ (each volume has a different one) is ‘people are stupid’. That's not a summary: it's a verbatim quote of the First Rule. This contempt for humanity, a Randian disdain for the vulgar herd, the mass, the ordinary folk—you and me, that is—licences the intimately-described horrors the novelist inflicts upon the ‘people’, and therefore the ‘good’ violence of men like Richard that counters it.

Anyway: writing a Short History of Fantasy, as I am, I’m going to have to at least mention Goodkind: he sold millions and accrued a huge fanbase. But I’ll be honest, I have neither the time nor the inclination to read each of the twenty-one chunky volumes in turn. So I figured, having read the first, I’d read one from the middle of the series and another from the end, to get at least a sense of how things develop. Since I happen to have vol 5 to hand (I can’t remember when or why I bought it: from Oxfam, according to the price sticker on the cover) I read that.

So where are we? Evil still threatens the three kingdoms of Goodkindlandia, or whatever the realm of these novels is called. But the magical barrier preventing Richard and Kahlan from getting jiggy with it has been overcome, for the novel opens with them newly married and honeymooning in the village of the mud-people (‘his breathing quickened as he clutched her in his powerful arms. She slid her hands across the sweat-slick muscles of his broad shoulders to run her fingers through the thick tangle of his hair as she moaned against his mouth’ etc etc). There’s some business with an evil chicken—a ‘chicken that is not a chicken’ because it is possessed by ‘the chimes’, souls from the realm of the evil dead—and then more questing-about and fighting, building up to a lovingly-described violent massacre of an entire country by the Evil. But what struck me, as I worked through, was not the violence, or the padding, or the weird ungainly structure of the whole. What struck me was the hair. This novel is always mentioning hair, always having its characters playing with their hair or tossing it back or ‘raking’ their fingers through it. It is extremely repetitive, right down to the specific phrasing used. Here’s Richard, our Randian hero:

[19] ‘He took a purging breath as he wiped back his wet hair.’

[48] ‘“The chimes are from the world of the dead,” Richard muttered as he raked his fingers back through his hair.’

[63] ‘Richard paused, combing his fingers back through his thick hair.’

[96] ‘Richard raked his fingers back through his hair.’

[110] ‘He wiped hair off his forehead as he peered up.’

[237] ‘Richard raked his fingers back through his hair.’

[260] ‘Richard raked back his hair.’

[481] ‘Richard raked his fingers back through his hair.’

[511] ‘Richard swiped his hair back from his forehead.’

[563] ‘Richard wiped his wet hair back from his forehead.’

[596] ‘Richard ran his fingers back into his hair.’

[615] ‘Richard pushed his fingers back into his hair.’

[635] ‘Richard raked his fingers back through his hair.’

It’s extraordinarily lazy writing, quite apart from being cumulatively just immensely irritating: just leave your sodding hair alone, you berk. Kahlan’s long hair always seems to be wet, for some reason:

[6] ‘Kahlan tossed her cloak around her shoulders and then pulled the tangle of her long hair out from under the collar.’

[21] ‘Kahlan dropped to her knees beside Richard, pushing her wet hair back out of her eyes.’

[24] ‘Kahlan gathered her hair in one hand to keep the gusts from whipping it against her face.’

[26] ‘Wind whipped Kahlan’s hair across her face.’

[66] ‘Kahlan hooked a strand of damp hair behind her ear.’

[69] ‘Kahlan wiped wet hair from her face.’

[76] ‘Kahlan … pulled back wet strands of hair.’

[87] ‘Kahlan wiped her hair from her eyes.’

[231] ‘Kahlan pushed her damp hair back over her shoulder.’

[243] ‘Kahlan wound a long lock of damp hair on a finger as she turned her mind to the question … “Right.” Kahlan let the hair go and held up the finger.’

[247] ‘In frustration, Kahlan ran her fingers back into her hair.’

[255] ‘Sighing in frustration, Kahlan pushed her long hair back over her shoulder.’

[296] ‘Wearily, Kahlan gripped a handful of her long hair hanging down over her shoulder.’

[482] ‘Kahlan ran her fingers back into her hair, seeming unable to express her reservations and frustrations.’

It’s more than a writerly tic; it’s a kink: ‘sitting close to Kahlan, seeing the lamplight reflect in her green eyes, off her hair, seeing the way her thick tresses nestled in the curve of her neck, [Richard] was beginning to think about weeks before, in the spirit house — the last time he had made love to her: remembering her lush naked body. It was an impossible mental image to forget’ [474]. The last sentence there is ambiguous between: ‘it was a mental image that was impossible to forget’ and ‘it was an impossible mental image, and ought to be forgotten’. Goodkind presumably means the former, but I like the implications of the latter. Lush naked body indeed. 

It's not just Richard and Kahlan: it’s all the characters: ‘Tess, my darling. Your hair looks grand”’ [141]; ‘“Tess, darling, your hair is growing beautifully”’ [146]; ‘“Ah, my dear Teresa, have I yet told you that you look especially divine this evening. And your hair is wondrous.” Teresa fussed with the glittering sequins tied in her hair, aware of envious eyes watching her’ [190].

‘Franca wore her black, nearly shoulder length hair loose, yet it swept back somewhat from her face, as if it had been frozen stiff by an icy wind’ [218]

Magic? Hairspray? That scene from There’s Something About Mary? We may never know.

‘In the dim light, Zedd peered with one eye at his grandson. “But,” he whispered, “were the magic of the gambit moth to fail, for all we know it could very well begin a cascade of events that would result in the end of life as we know it.”’ [48]

The novel does not disclose to us the specific hair-do of the Magic Gambit Moth, which I daresay is a mercy.

Zodiacal Alice

 

[from Lewis Carroll, Symbolic Logic (1896)]

We know Carroll loved games, puns, diversions and cleverness of all kinds: the Alice books are shot through with these things, wordplay, equivalences, ludic strategems and patterns. And there has certainly been no shortage of critical and fannish interpretations of the books. So it's surprising to me that nobody has made the following suggestion: Alice in Wonderland is a zodiacal book, and Through the Looking-Glass is a gloss upon its zodiacal logic.

The zodiac consists of twelve stations or zones (Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces) that comprise eight animals—fish, ram, bull, scorpion, lion, crab, centaur and goat—and four other things: ‘water’, twins, the virgin and the scales of justice. The twelve chapters of the first Alice book are disposed between eight predominant animals and four other qualities (in what follows I notate the animals in lower case and the other qualities in capital letters):

I. Down the Rabbit-Hole [rabbit]
II. The Pool of Tears [WATER]
III. A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale [mouse]
IV. The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill [lizard]
V. Advice from a Caterpillar [caterpillar]
VI. Pig and Pepper [pig]
VII. A Mad Tea-Party [hare]
VIII. The Queen’s Croquet-Ground [flamingo]
IX. The Mock Turtle’s Story [fish]
X. The Lobster Quadrille [lobster]
XI. Who Stole the Tarts? [SCALES OF JUSTICE]
XII. Alice’s Evidence [VIRGO]

This doesn’t look, in itself, wholly zodiacal. Where, for instance, are the twins? The lion? Well, obviously, they are in Looking-Glass:

I. Looking-Glass House [?]
II. The Garden of Live Flowers [flowers]
III. Looking-Glass Insects [insects]
IV. Tweedledum And Tweedledee [TWINS]
V. Wool and Water [sheep/ram]
VI. Humpty Dumpty [shell]
VII. The Lion and the Unicorn [lion]
VIII. “It’s my own Invention” [man + horse = centaur]
IX. Queen Alice [?]
X. Shaking [?]
XI. Waking [?]
XII. Which Dreamed it? [?]

In other words, the true zodiacal Alice emerges when we superpose the latter design upon the former, thus:

I Down the Rabbit-Hole [Alice = VIRGO]
II. The Pool of Tears [WATER]
III. Looking-Glass Insects [goat and scorpion]
IV. Tweedledum And Tweedledee [TWINS]
V. Wool and Water [ram]
VI. Humpty Dumpty [bull]
VII. The Lion and the Unicorn [lion]
VIII. “It’s my own Invention” [centaur]
IX. The Mock Turtle’s Story [fish]
X. The Lobster Quadrille [crab (= lobster)]
XI. Who Stole the Tarts? [SCALES OF JUSTICE]
XII. Alice’s Evidence/Which Dreamed it? [Alice = VIRGO]

The doubling of signs in the third chapter, there, follows from the fact that (in Looking-Glass) this chapter leaps two squares on the chessboard instead of one, which is to say moves at double speed. It is the chapter containing both the actual goat (‘a Goat, that was sitting next to the gentleman in white, shut his eyes and said in a loud voice, “She ought to know her way to the ticket-office, even if she doesn’t know her alphabet!”’) whose beard Alice actually grasps in fright when the railway carriage ‘rises up’ suddenly—and then, in a new, unrelated episode, all the insects. A scorpion, as entomologists will tell you, is not actually an insect: it’s an arachnid of the order scorpiones. But the ancients did not make this distinction (that is, they considered it an insect): and the lack of actual scorpions in the landscapes of England—upon which Wonderland riffs—necessitates its replacement with the gnat and other insects of this episode. Humpty Dumpty, though bullish, is not actually a bull. But he is (with his mouth and therefore, we must suppose, alimentary canal) not a sphere or ovoid but a torus; a taurus; exactly the kind of pun in which the mathematically expert Carroll would delight. It is also relevant that Alice herself (born 4th May 1852) was herself a taurus.

The starsign ‘cancer’, though conventionally a crab today, was indifferently a crab or a lobster in medieval and ancient understanding (καρκίνος, whence the Latin cancer, comes from the pincers or claws of the beast. Of either beast.)

What is so appealing about this superposed Alice pattern is that it starts with ‘virgo’, Alice herself, and ends there again, in twelve chapters moving through the various animal and other signs in a celestial, wondrous (‘wonderland’) circle to return again home.


++++++++++++

Do I genuinely believe that Lewis Carroll sat down and plotted out a complex zodiacal patterning, to run across his two twelve-chapter volumes of Alice’s adventures? No, I don’t. It’s extremely unlikely anything like this was ever in Carroll’s mind. 

I lay this out here as an exercise in interpretation as such. In an earlier blogpost I did something similar with C S Lewis’s Narnia and Mithraism: that post being an oblique engagement with Ward's Planet Narnia book, and a way of thinking aloud, in a performative way, about what counts as ‘evidence’ in literary criticism. This is what strikes me: though the premise of this post is, in a sense, arbitrary—the coincidence of there being twelve zodiac signs and the fact that each Alice book has twelve chapters—and although there is no evidence that Carroll himself thought zodiacally about his creation, or anything else, as I worked-out the comparison I found myself strangely compelled by it, almost convinced. After all: Tweedledum and Tweedledee! The Twins! Gemini! The lion and the unicorn! Once you start looking, you find these things everywhere.

Even elements that, manifestly, don’t fit the schema—most obviously the lack of any bull in either story (an animal Carroll could very easily have included if he’d wanted to)—become nodes of significance. Alice’s own star-sign was taurus: perhaps that is why ‘taurus’ is represented not by an actual bull, but by an egg, that ovoid symbol of origins and birth (the egg from which Helen was hatched, to which all the mighty legends of Troy and Odysseus’s wanderings can be traced back). It’s nonsense, but by locating it, and writing it out, it starts to acquire strange power over you. 

This is a dangerous path, I’m well aware. It’s how people end up believing the measurements of the Great Pyramid at Giza encode the Hebrew Bible (or is it the other way around?) or that Shakespeare’s plays contain elaborate codes proving Baconian authorship: evidence, howsoever tenuous, is presented as evidence and absence of evidence is also presented as evidence. It locks itself around the mind, like the circle (cancer) made by the connected claws of the lobster.

Fantasy As History

:1:

I am presently working on a History of Fantasy, and one thesis I'm looking to argue is that contemporary Fantasy is, amongst other things, a mode of historical fiction:—that genre Fantasy is one of the ways the historical novel has evolved as a form, out of the fiction of Walter Scott and his nineteenth-century imitators (Scott’s own novels were sometimes actually fantastical, more usually borderline or ‘Scooby-Doo’ fantastical and more usually still purely mimetic). So we might say that Lord of the Rings is ‘about’ medieval and Anglo-Saxon Europe as well as being about an inexistent imaginary realm with wizards and dragons and so on; that A Song of Ice and Fire is about the Wars of the Roses, the Campbells and MacDonalds, about nascent Early Modern European imperialism and so on.

So that's what I'm going to try to argue in this post: Fantasy is one of the ways we ‘do’ history, nowadays. Sometimes this fact is, I suppose, deplored: lecturers complaining that students' sense of the Middle Ages derives not from historical studies but from watching Game of Thrones let's say. Then again, this is actually sometimes actively celebrated: in this 2021 paper on pedagogy Sarah Spalding endorses using Game of Thrones to ‘game the classroom’ by way of overcoming student resistance to a topic perceived as boring (it ‘can serve as a solution to the issue of engaging majors and non-majors alike in courses where students feel as though they are “forced” to enroll’) and a Boston University professor called Phillip Haberkern uses examples from George R R Martin’s Fantasy realm to focus his history student’s minds on actual questions of European history.

Presumably the logic here is: students are assumed to be able to differentiate between those elements in the TV show that illuminate actual medieval history—power battles between great houses, say—and ignore those elements (dragons, magic, ice-zombies) that don’t. But presumably the reason students are familiar with this TV show, and not with regular historical novels, is at least in part because of the magic and dragons and zombies. These things are where history (dull, factual, fixed) is enlivened, enchanted, made more exciting and thrilling. Likewise, we read A Song of Ice and Fire uncertain as to who will win the civil war in Westeros, where we study the Wars of the Roses already know how it ends. Actual history, in other words, exists under the rubric of spoilers. And today’s fandoms absolutely hate spoilers.

But of course there are problems with this. A stark way of putting it would be to say that Fantasy inevitably falsifies history. But of course it does, because Fantasy (like SF) aims not at mimesis but imaginative recreation; its relation to reality is creative, ironic, differential. But a more nuanced position would note that all the ways we view history distort it—or, if we prefer less aggressive language, frame and contextualise it. Fantasy has the advantage of up-fronting its bias.

This is a basic point about history and the historical imagination: all the way back in 1961 (itself now, ironically, a historical period) E L Carr’s What Is History elegantly argues that history is not simply the accumulation of facts about the past—that the selection of facts, their arrangement into narratives (of incident, of causation, of might-have-beens) is never neutral. We are all products of our own time; we read historical data through various lenses, political, cultural, personal. George R R Martin writes in reaction to Tolkien, moved in part by a sense that Tolkien misrepresents medieval history by omitting the realpolitik, the money, the material practicalities of mustering armies and negotiating treaties and so on. Tolkien might, were he willing to move the upturned glass around the Ouija-board of Fantasy fandom, object that Martin himself omits crucial aspects of the medieval worldview. That those eminently modern aspects of international politic-ing say nothing about more fundamental ways in which medieval men and women related to their world.

But yes: let’s say Fantasy as a modern genre is in some sense ‘about’ the past (and ‘science fiction’ in some sense is ‘about’ the future—either set in the future, or else about the forces in the now that are dragging us into the avenir—often technological, sometimes social). The distinction is more complex than that, for SF can sometimes be about the past. But let’s go with this for now.

For a conservative like Tolkien there’s an important sense in which the past is ‘better’ than the now. For him, modernity is a decline, and his art is amongst other things a reaction against progress, against social change, industrialisation, the deracination of culture and society—it is a nostalgia for how things used to be, and a desire to retreat into such a world: the bourgeois world of eighteenth-century provincial living in the shire, the chivalric world of medieval Europe in Gondor, the heroic world of Anglo-Saxon warrior society in Rohan. It was on these grounds that Moorcock attacked Tolkien as merely reactionary. But this view of history is not uniquely right-wing. Tolkien was conservative, yes, but William Morris was a revolutionary socialist and he too believed the past better than the present: his fantasy-utopia News From Nowhere is notionally set in the future but substantively set in the past, an idealised small-scale rural England of Morris’s dreams.

It seems to me that both Left and Right are good at spotting the mote in the other’s eye and bad at the beam in their own. Perhaps you see modernity in terms of a fragmentation of the values of community, faith, family, those hearths in which human flourishing is best achieved, replacing traditional world of respect, honour, fidelity, gratitude and love with a homo hominis lupus wasteland of individuated profitmongering and competition and the dissolution of all values of human respect and self-respect.

But you might be a radical Leftist who believes, essentially, the same thing: that the communitarian possibilities of cooperation, productive labour, freedom, dignity and human flourishing have been replaced by Capitalist (or as people say nowadays, Neoliberal) expropriation, wage-enslavement, corporatisation, commodification, a homo hominis lupo dystopia striated by misogyny, racism, and so on. Climate change activists talk of ‘the anthropocene’. Some date the emergence of this new epoch from the industrial revolution, when human technological and mechanical developments began directly to affect the larger human environment. Alternately, the ‘Orbis Spike’ (a thesis argued by Lewis and Maslin) dates the emergence of the anthropocene not to the industrial revolution but to the first colonial settlers arriving in North America, and see the woes of today less as a feature of industrialised neoliberalism and more as a function of imperial expropriation and enslavement. Both right and left may deplore the depredations (environmental and social) of anthropocene, though one group may locate the origins of this new epoch in the industrial revolution and the saturation of new technologies, where the other might talk of the ‘Orbis Spike’ (a thesis adopted from Lewis and Maslin) and see the Anthropocene as a catastrophe of imperialism, slavery, genocide and global expropriation.

I mentioned Carr, a few paragraphs up. Here’s what he says about the myth of, and objections to, ‘progress’:

In ordinary life we are more often involved than we sometimes care to admit in the necessity of preferring the lesser evil, or of doing evil that good may come. In history the question is sometimes discussed under the rubric ‘the cost of progress’ or ‘the price of revolution.’ This is misleading. As Bacon says in the essay On Innovations, ‘the forward retention of custom is as turbulent a thing as an innovation.’ The cost of conservation falls just as heavily on the under-privileged as the cost of innovation on those who are deprived of their privileges. The thesis that the good of some justifies the sufferings of others is implicit in all government, and is just as much a conservative as a radical doctrine.

What these views—left and right—have in common is a belief that something foundational has changed in the passage from the past into the present. That there is a substantive difference between the past and the present, such that the recreation of a past world entails the recuperation of the loss. It's possible to think that the change has been entirely positive, of course. Indeed, if you sat me down and grilled me, I might make argue exactly that. Neveretheless it's striking how rarely Fantasy novels (or Historical novels, for that matter) recreate their past lives as only nasty, brutish and short. Even when a novel engages the myriad discomforts and terrors that (I’m going to use the word: brace yourselves) actually characterised human existence for most of human history—the starvation and the cold, the terrors and the deprivations, the violence and misery—it will generally balance material deprivation with something else. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Shaman: a Novel of the Ice Age (2013) is a powerful recreation of life in prehistoric Europe. Sometimes Robinson’s tribe has enough to eat, more often they starve, sometimes becoming so thin they can feel their spines through the front of their bellies. They sometimes predate and are sometimes predated upon by animals and other humans; they wander and endure and continue. But they also have access to a shamanic dimension which casts numinous glory through their hardscrabble lives. This, the novel implies, is something that has been lost by Modernity. And the truth is Fantasy and Historical fiction is almost never as unremitting in its portrait of past hardships as Robinson is, here. Mostly the inconveniences of the past are glossed over—in Fantasy they are often replaced by magical alternatives, palantírs instead of phones, ‘healing charms’ instead of modern medicines and so on—and in many cases inconveniences are omitted altogether.

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This is the key thing: not just that the past is different to the present, but that this difference is understood as a declination. Of course there are continuities: the human body is essentially the same in the 2020s as it was in the 1020s (though it is better supported now by medical and practical prostheses); many human needs and desires, we can intuit, carry through: hunger and sex, love and community, ambition and despair—although even here, we have to accept that these are not simple universals, and that the cultural and social contexts in which we love or despair inflects the reality of those things: that courtly love is different to the experience of love filtered-through soap operas and three-minute pop songs, that accidie is not the same as clinical depression and so on. But these continuities are also construed by major differences. I'm going to identify four in particular.

One is to note that the pre-modern society was differently structured, and involved different immanent assumptions and premises, than is the modern: more strictly hierarchical, feudal, churched, informed by a warrior ethos, whose values were such things as courage, loyalty, glory. All this contrasts with the more disseminated world of bourgeois modernity, where personal loyalty has been replaced by, let's say, values of duty, honesty, reliability, hard-work and law-abiding conformism. The former might seem to us more romantic and glorious, but the latter has the advantages of civilisation, material comfort, certitude, equality.

Related to this—it is, perhaps, another way of saying the same thing—is Henry Sumner Maine’s thesis that the move from the pre-modern to the modern is a shift from a logic of status to a logic of contract. For Maine, himself a jurist and a believer in the civilising and liberatory power of universal systems of law, this change was a good thing: in a world structured by status, the high status individual might, or might not, feel bound by their word, and had leeway to do as they wished, but the low status individuals (most of society—and certainly you and me) did not, and lived at the pleasure of sometimes capricious overlords. Maine believed that contracts, by binding both parties, levelled this inequality: actual contracts (of employment, purchase, political manifestoes and so on), but also contractual relations like money and in a broader sense a belief that communities and nations were determined by a Rousseauian contract sociale. 

But it is easy to see the ways in which this change can be seen as a net loss, especially under the aegis of imaginative freedom. Contracts, it might be thought, have burgeoned like the red weed H G Wells’s invading aliens bring from Mars, and are now choking life and dreams and possibility. Charles Dickens’s masterpiece Bleak House (1853) is, amongst other things, a dystopia of the hypertrophy of the contractual. Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1984) is another, though Gilliam balances the entangling contractualism of his world with the protagonist’s dreams in which he flies free on silver wings over a green and pleasant land, in which he can break through all the pettifogging contractual restrictions of his life to enjoy adventure, slaying monsters and having sex with beautiful damsels.

There are two other ways of framing the difference between pre-modern and modern that are, if anything, more important to Fantasy than these, and—insofar as they inform the desire of genre Fantasy as such—they will play a larger part in my history of Fantasy as a mode. The first of these is the shift from a shame to a guilt culture. The second is what Weber called disenchantment, and what Charles Taylor describes as the move from an unbuffered to a buffered sensibility—to use his terms, pre-modern sensibilities were porous, open to the wonders but also the terrors of a cosmos interpenetrated by supernatural forces and beings. Modern has ‘buffered’ our apprehensions of the world, science has banished the monsters and fairies and bogies from the woods, the universe is mapped and pinned-down and explained. Alan Jacobs’s superb essay ‘Fantasy and the Buffered Self’ (2014) uses Taylor’s thesis to explain the appeal of Fantasy: a kind of safe unbuffering, a textual space in which we can enjoy the marvellous and thrill to the dangerous that once actually interpenetrated human lives


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To say that Fantasy is a kind of historical novel—a specialised kind, predicated upon enchantment rather than mimesis, upon unbuffering and liberating the buffered, contractual limitations of modern existence—is to situate the mode in the tradition of Scott. It is also implicitly to set-up grounds of discriminating ‘good’ from weaker or feeble Fantasy writing, but we’ll come back to that. I will have much to say, in what follows, about the influence of Walter Scott. The modern historical novel derives fundamentally from Scott, and so far as that is concerned I think Lukacs has it right, that Scott’s praxis is dialectical: he sets the romantic, feudal, thrilling but antiquated and outmoded past (Highlanders, Cavaliers, Saxons) against an inevitable, bourgeois, respectable, dull but civilised present (Hanoverians, Puritans, Normans)—in order to stage a synthesis: a coming-future in which the wrong-but-wromantic past still lives in the breast and imagination of the right-but-repulsive Edinburgh bourgeois lawyer and man of business. Lukacs doesn’t exactly say this—the last part, I mean—because he wants to identify Scott’s value in the extent to which he intuited what Marx later codified out of his Hegel: the dialectical materialist dynamic of history as such. What Lukacs likes about Scott is that he embodies this logic of history in his fiction (that is to say: he doesn't endorse Scott’s Toryism, and he is perfectly aware of the limitations of Scott's art: his melodrama, his schematic plotting and other things). And indeed, although on a formal level I agree that Scott is a dialectical writer, on the level of the content of his stories—the way the plots work themselves through, his characters—it seems to me that what emerges at the end of a Scott novel is more like a compromise than a synthesis.

My point is: in many contemporary historical novels—and especially Fantasy novels (where this is a very common trope)—Scottian dialectics gets replaced by a more linear Bildungsroman narrative. The pig-boy becomes a warrior or prince; the neglected village girl becomes a mighty sorceress; the character whose life is ordinary (like ours) quests through dangers and marvels that reveal him to be extraordinary. This can be satisfying, but also flattening, and it dilutes the historical imagination.

And that's the really important thing, I think. Fantasy as a mode of the historical imagination needs fully to engage with history: not just the superficial details of dress and materiel, but history in its larger dynamic, its shifts and alterations, and therefore its estrangement and potency. 

A recent example: Canadian author Miles Cameron’s Against All Gods (2022). This is the first volume in a sequence of Fantasy epics, set in a version of the Bronze Age Middle East. The story of this particular volume is a revenge plot that burgeons into a whole war between gods and mortals, and which brings a large number of characters, laying before the reader its worldbuilding. And the Bronze Age is a very different place to now. As Cameron says in his author’s note: ‘there is no money. This is a barter economy, and the relative value of gold, silver, grain or any other commodity varies from place to place and from transaction to transaction … There are no maps or charts. Most people cannot read; the ability to read is almost a magic power. Scribes hold that power … Book-keeping and accounting, like reading, are near-magical powers.’ Of course, Cameron’s note also slyly flatters us—for we can read (we are in fact reading these very words!) which aligns us with the magical powers of the word. We, you and I, the book is saying, are special.

The novel itself, however, does not actualise these differences. Or to be more precise, its itinerary of difference marks only a surface patina over a core story of familiarity; and it is that familiarity—familiarity with genre conventions, familiarity with recognisable modern characters—that is the ground of its working. This novel is like many other grimdark-esque Fantasy novels. Structurally it is linear: scenes of dialogue; scenes of fighting with swords and spears and lots of grisly bloodletting; scenes of sex; occasional chunks of exposition. Since what I say might be thought merely disobliging, I should add that this is a novel, and Cameron is a writer, with a large and enthusiastic fanbase. To check the Goodreads page for the novel is to see that people love this kind of thing, and love this specific thing in particular.

I did not like this novel. It seemed to me extruded genre product, thin and unengaging. Some of my bounce-off reaction was the rather smug way the author paraded his ‘this isn’t your regular fantasy! It’s the Bronze Age and there’s no money and only scribes can write and I’ve done lots of research!’ and then perpetrated howler after howler: ‘His brain was spinning like a chariot wheel’—but Bronze Age people located consciousness in the chest and torso, not the brain;—a scribe has a seal with a hippogriff carved on it, even though hippogriffs were invented by Ariosto in the 16th century—the ships have heavier, later-period tackle than was the case with bronze-age skiffs (‘a mainmast amidships’ ‘Aanat went back aft to one of the main hawsers’ etc) or—

—But of course it’s daft of me to object to this: this is Bronze Age cosplay, the characters’ sensibilities (gods and mortals) are all modern—as is the case in most Fantasy writing—and so far as the author and his fanbase are concerned, that’s a feature not a bug. The gods utter such resonant-transcendent Homeric sentiments as ‘Fucking idiots. We gave them too much power. They have no idea what they’re doing with it.’ The mortals are all: ‘Zos was lying, naked and oiled, on his sleeping pallet, and he had a good buzz on from the wine.’ A good buzz on. Hmm. The sex is depressingly unimaginative and all hetero—again, a very un-Bronze-Age notion, this.

And actually my problem is not that the novel gets this or that specific historical detail or mood wrong; it’s that it doesn’t really engage with ‘history’ at all, despite pretending to do so. Its characters’ sensibilities are modern, its gods agents in the imagined world much as its mortals are—the gods are more powerful, though ‘power’ is rendered here only in terms of the ability to overbear, with violence or words—all potestas, nothing of auctoritas. There’s nothing in these gods of the numinous, the transcendent, nothing of the strange, the awe-inspiring, transcendent or resplendent. This is not a dimension that Cameron reproduces in his imagined Bronze Age; although for ‘actual’ Bronze Age human beings, in their porosity of subjectivity, it was a crucial and wondrous and terrifying aspect of existence. The characters go about their various plot-driven actions, and the storylines are punctuated by interludes of purely somatic intensity (the violence, the fighting, the sex) that do nothing to estrange, to capture or embody the wonder and difference of the past as such.