Black Powder Fantasy

I’m a bit miffed by the lack of early modern settings in fantasy. Since most of the “medieval” tropes in your standard western fantasy series actually come from the Renaissance, you would expect gunpowder and other technological innovations to follow. Yet while shipbuilding technology tends to go the opposite direction, jumping far ahead, we’re often left with a noticeable absence of guns. For those, you’d best look to steampunk or gaslight romance; secondary-world fantasy often remains pre-modern in character in at least one aspect, an inability to discover gunpowder, even if early modern in others.

Crusading without a Cross

“Revisionist” theories of the crusades go a long way to secularize the whole affair; but at this point, the revisionist explanations for the origin of the First Crusade (or any Crusade, really) have become the dominant discourse in the western world.  What was once taught as noble now reduced to social and economic factors with religion as only the catalyst or enabler for a movement with far different aims.  Later movements: colonialism, Imperialism, racial discourse and so forth get reflected back in time.  While we can see the dim origin of the mechanisms for these later movements lying in the Crusades, these sorts of reductionist narratives necessarily deny the complexity of the crusading movement.

Slavic Fairy Tales

One reason I haven’t bought an e-reader is my fascination with the book as a physical object. That, and because I buy nearly all my books used. Each one has a story separate from what’s contained within its pages. A book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with a note from 1915 inked on the inside cover. A 1919 edition of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. My copy of Howard Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (probably the single most important book in my life) has pencilled scribbles in the early chapters—my dad’s Polish translations of various words from back when he was learning English; he remembered the Polish translation of the novel so well he thought it would carry over. He still has his Polish copy somewhere.

I’ve kept Klechdy Domowe (Domestic Fairy Tales) on my shelf, a collection of Polish fairy tales and legends. The book was a present for my sister in 1989, though I’m the one who ended up with it. Most notable are Zbigniew Rychlicki’s handsome illustrations, which have an oddly Slavic air about them.

Becoming the High King

While The Lord of the Rings is a more complex and serious work, I’ve found Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain more personally affecting.  A recent re-read of The High King reinforced my love for Alexander’s vision (and I was delighted to find that my map holds true!).  Plenty of “traditional” fantasy lies caught in concepts of noble birth: the farm boy is nearly always of a far more august lineage than once assumed.  We can chalk this to medieval romances, since tales of hidden ancestry were common enough.  Worth was tied almost exclusively to ancestry within feudal societies.

Lloyd Alexander’s message was quite different.

(The following discussion necessarily involves spoilers, so consider yourself warned.)

Farewell to 2011

The year ends. Some reflection is in order. Mostly concerning writing and literature, because that’s just what I do.

A Map of Prydain

I was never happy with the maps included in the hardcover editions of Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain.  Evaline Wells is a fine artist, but the Prydain maps were rough affairs that changed from book to book, reshuffling locations while erasing others.  My own paperback editions don’t include maps, and newer editions drop them as well.

The only other Prydain map I know of lies in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.  While the descriptive text is excellent, as are all the entries in the Dictionary, the actual map is beyond awful.  The cartographer places the Marshes of Morva directly west of Caer Dallben, sticks Annuvin south of the Great Avren River, and plunks the Forest of Idris there as well.  These placements are completely out of whack, and it seems James Cook hadn’t even paid attention to the entry itself.  The map is also, unfortunately, a full-page spread, so there really isn’t an excuse for such sloppiness.

In light of my disappointment with the Dictionary I went searching for a complete map of Prydain.  Eventually I stumbled across a post concerning Prydain geography.  Lotesse created a composite map from the four extent maps of Prydain to help get a better grasp on the place.  After seeing that, I thought: why not draw my own map of Prydain based on Eveline Wells’s maps, Lotesse’s work and my own knowledge of the novels?

Not Quite Art Nouveau

I realized I haven’t posted a sketch for two months!  This must be rectified immediately.

I tried to do something vaguely art nouveau-ish with her hair, but didn’t go far enough.  Ah well, still happy with the result.

 

Some Issues with The Dreams Our Stuff is Made of

Thomas Disch’s The Dreams Our Stuff is Made of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (1998) might have received praise from the likes of Harold Bloom and John Clute, but other scholars have been far less kind. Carl Freedman’s review “Lies, Damned Lies, and Science Fiction: Thomas M. Disch and the Culture of Mendacity” (Science Fiction Studies #78) voices many of my problems with Disch’s study, though not all of them. For one, the title is misleading; Disch never even mentions Stanislaw Lem and the Brothers Strugatsky, and thus ignores their large influence on western science fiction, nor does he pay any attention to authors outside of the United States and England except for Jules Verne and Capek. This is not about how science fiction conquered the world, just the Anglo-Saxon one, and the United States in particular.

A Notice to Would-be Poets

A poem

Is not a sentence

Composed by

Pressing the “Enter” key

At random intervals.

Please

Remember this.

Flippant Reviews: Guy Gavriel Kay

I did it. I found and finished every single novel by Guy Gavriel Kay. A Song for Arbonne was a difficult one to locate, but I got my hands on it and this particular reading project concluded a few months ago.

I’ve talked plenty about Mr. Kay on this blog before, and it’s no secret that I think he’s one of the finest Canadian fantasy authors writing today. There’s no doubt Kay cares deeply for language and knows how to craft a sentence, and his historical bent immediately puts him in line with my own interests. However, instead of deep analysis, I thought the best way to mark the occasion was a flippant survey of Kay’s various books done with something less than literary rigour. This time, it’s all about what I thought about these books, just to make things clearer if I reference Kay’s novels in the future.

So without further ado…