All fiction is fantasy, and that brainless ninny Bridget Jones no less a creature of bizarre imagination than your average dragon. But the genre called fantasy appeals because its imagined universes can suspend even more of the normal rules. The universal question of fiction is “what if?”: what if she can’t find a husband?; what if the gun-running priest has a fit of conscience? Fantasy adds magic, alternate histories and wildly different politics or physics to the options for answers.
For that reason — as well as the publisher’s desire to sell more books — fantasy writers often need more than one volume to develop and explore the worlds they have created. The middle book of these series is the tough one. Book One sets character and plot. Book Three has the climactic, thunderbolt-wielding finale. Book Two, too often, largely marks time as a bridge between.
That’s almost the case with Russell Kirkpatrick’s In the Earth Abides the Flame (Orbit). Kirkpatrick’s Fire of Heaven trilogy employs the bog-standard fantasy plot, which owes not a little to John Bunyan.
Companions travel on a quest; along the way they face temptations and challenges and discover their true nature as (usually) heroes. In this book two, the companions get within touching distance of the fabled object of their search. They also engage in long debates, signposting the book’s deeper theme: another old literary friend, predestination versus free will. But what makes In the Earth Abides the Flame thoroughly readable is Kirkpatrick’s writing. His scenes and people are vivid, his action moves at the required pace and, yes, I’ll probably buy book three.
Things happen far more slowly in Cecilia Dart-Thornton’s The Well of Tears (Tor). This is the middle book of Dart-Thornton’s second trilogy, The Crowthistle Chronicles. She’s a writer for whom no simile may go unextended, and no noun or verb walk the page unmodified. When you read that “far-off constellations were gauzy scarves of white mist sewn with the nearer stars” you know what kind of world you’ve landed in. In addition, the narrative of doomed and haunted lovers stalls at regular intervals to detail the eating habits of her world’s “seelie and unseelie wights”. The characters feel (and speak) like cardboard coat hangers on which all this Celtic tissue paper can be draped. The cover blurb compares Dart-Thornton to Mary Gentle and Jack Vance, but don’t be fooled. Her writing has neither the subversiveness of the former, nor the baroque elegance of the latter.
KJ Parker’s work is very different. Parker is a grimly witty, supremely skilled writer whose fantastic societies explore truths about our own world. Evil for Evil, second volume of The Engineer Trilogy, paints a war, started in book one, that now can’t be stopped. The engineer — an inventor harshly punished by his rule-bound homeland — plans revenge, using his skills to escalate conflict. His moves are designed meticulously to rebound on the source of his pain — but conflict engulfs the world. “All these people knew the truth about the war, but instead of trying to find some way to reverse or at least mitigate the disaster, they were cheerfully serving it, like keepers put in charge of some captive wild animal.” This is fantasy stripped of faerie; read it.
Meanwhile, the gentle melancholy of Six Feet Under and the bloody urban realism of The Wire might seem to have little in common with the world of swords, dragons and enchantments. But the United States’s Home Box Office apparently sees no incongruity. On January 18, it acquired the rights to produce a multi-series adaptation of prizewinning fantasy novelist George RR Martin’s epic, A Song of Ice and Fire.
Ice and Fire (of which four novels have so far been published — most recently A Feast for Crows) is a huge, sprawling, dazzling narrative that leavens Machiavellian politics with sorcery as it follows the fortunes of a once-great family brought low, and now dispersed. The story ranges across an icy Highland landscape whose Northern wall holds monsters at bay and a sunny distant empire of deserts, Byzantine cities and Venetian trading fleets.
Volume five wasn’t ready for Christmas, so instead publishers Gollancz rewarded fans with an equally huge (1 100-page), sprawling retrospective of Martin’s shorter works: Dreamsongs: A Retrospective (Gollancz). Starting as a fanzine kid in New Jersey, Martin has written fantasy, horror and hard science fiction, as well as many stories that bust these genre boundaries. He has worked in film and TV, and continues to juggle his various jobs precariously — one reason why Ice and Fire is taking so long.
Dreamsongs is a good sampler of Martin’s work, particularly for those who didn’t have access to the early US fanzine scene where fantasy and science fiction shaped themselves. Martin was always a good writer, even when creating comic-book superheroes: his characters had depth and complexity. Those early stories often foreshadowed the concerns that make Ice and Fire so rich: environment, power, conscience — all explored through gorgeous sensory detail and riveting action, spiced with wit from slapstick to bitter.
Even more fascinating, though, are the interleaved essays by Martin himself, recalling why and how various tales got written. Want to know what differentiates science fiction from fantasy and horror? Check Martin’s Theory of Furniture. Imaginative fiction, like all other sorts, he declares, is at root about “the human heart in conflict with itself”.
What genre it is placed in depends on whether the protagonists communicate by raven or shriek.
It’s a pity Dreamsongs is not as well constructed as the stories within it. The solid cloth-bound covers, shoddily glued pages: mine fell to pieces nine-tenths in. But you’ll keep on reading as the pages scatter, because “fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab … We read fantasy,” says Martin, “to find the colours again.”
A different tide
The plot of Juliet E McKenna’s first fantasy series, the five-book Tales of Einarinn, didn’t have too much to distinguish it from all the other picaresque sword and magic epics weighing down the shelves. The jerkins, daggers and wands remained the same; only the main protagonist’s gender was changed to reflect 21st-century sensibilities.
The pattern for such tales, indeed, was set early in the genre’s development by Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series: quirky companions on a quest, with magic muddying the waters.
Leiber’s writing transcended the genre because his characters are so finely developed — far more than doublet-wearing dummies — and because they wrestled with real questions of morality and the fear of death, as well as with monsters. McKenna’s characters, too, are engaging, her writing was vivid, and her books’ world — centred on the sophisticated wizard city of Hadrumal — sufficiently fleshed out to be credible.
Her second series, The Aldabreshin Compass (Orbit) — of which Eastern Tide is the conclusion — takes readers to a very different part of that same world: the remote maritime Archipelago, where magic is outlawed but haruspex chieftains and their trader queens vie for status and territory within a conservative society minutely governed by ritual.
On one level, The Aldabreshin Compass uses the metaphor of its title to explore the personal journey of one man, Kheda, a chief forced to breach ritual to solve his people’s problems. As he steps ever farther outside convention, he loses his faith in the omens, but acquires startling new perspectives.
On a broader level, it is the story of a society in transition, from barbaric feudalism to mercantilism, with all that implies for the institutions of power and for personal relation-ships. That path was first trodden by writer Samuel P Delaney in his challenging, baroque, post-modern fantasy series Neveryon, in which gender and power are the key themes. McKenna’s somewhat broader brush strokes deal particularly convincingly with the shifting role of trade and traders — often consigned by the genre to colourful booths on the margins of the plot.
The world of the Archipelago is drawn inexorably towards the world of Hadrumal, and she deftly mines the rich seam of conflicts, misperceptions and prejudices this clash of cultures creates. Along the way, battles are fought, treasure hoards stolen, lovers parted, dragons defeated and, of course, magic is wielded. McKenna’s world-building is dazzlingly detailed, from the colour of the beading on a robe to the sound of spiny leaves in the wind. But it is the books’ deeper structure in their engagement with difference and change that gives them substance.
Eastern Tide brings the series to a satisfying conclusion — or perhaps not. Kheda’s character continues to grow and, having dealt with the current problems of his domain, the ending leaves him on the brink of fresh journeys. A third series may be brewing in the cauldron. — Gwen Ansell