fantasy

The Eye of the World — Robert Jordan

books and books review, fantasy
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Cover of The Eye of the World


The Eye of the World
Robert Jordan
800 pages
published in 1990

I remember the first time I read The Eye of the World, a year or two after it had been published. At the time I knew nothing about it, but the spine had that weird squiggly sign on it that my local library meant to represent fantasy or science fiction, so I took it off the shelves and started reading. By the time I got past the prologue and on to Rand and his father’s ride to Emond’s Field, I was hooked. And I stayed hooked through the rest of the novel, as well as through many of the sequels. Like many others eventually I stopped following the series when it seemed to have become a neverending story; A Path of Daggers was the last novel I bought, A Crown of Swords the last I’d read.

By that time however I must’ve read The Eye of the World at least a dozen times, rereading the complete cycle every time a new book in the series came out. Especially when I was still supposedly a student, there was many a day when I woke up determined to do some work that day, only to grab The Eye of the World and finish it when it had gotten dark again.

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Vimes on chess

fantasy, funny
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From Terry Pratchett’s latest, Thud!:

Vimes had never got on with any game much more complex than darts. Chess in particular had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the kings lounged about doing nothing that always got to him; if only the pawns united, maybe talked the rooks around, the whole board could’ve been a republic in a dozen moves.

Courtesy of Outside a Dog

Miéville on fantasy

Art & Criticism, fantasy
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I know I’m banging on a bit about China Miéville, with two entries on him in one day, but I missed this article in The Independent when it came out last year:

The real distinction between the tourists and what has become the “generic” fantasy tradition shows up in the weaknesses of the mainstream. When writers don’t respect the field from which they borrow, let alone when (cough, Theroux, cough) they despise it, their work doesn’t believe itself. On every page, nervously scrawled in invisible ink, are the words “It’s ok! It’s not fantasy! It’s really about oppression/marginalisation/exploitation/etc!” The curiously philistine and simplistic belief is that fantasy is only “meaningful” so far as it’s narrowly allegorical.

By contrast, writers within genres know perfectly well that they are writing about refugees, or economics, or gender oppression, or whatever else, but they also enjoy the strangeness they create for its own sake. And they always have done. Gulliver’s Travels is a vicious satire on various social ills, but it also revels in the uncanny spectacles it creates: squadrons of tiny people tethering a man to the ground; talking horses; islands floating with a giant lodestone. It trusts the reader to get on with the tasks of understanding, and of enjoying the strange. It is a book that delights in fantasy.

One of the great signs of fantasy’s health is that often these days, those who borrow its tropes from
outside genre, like David Mitchell, the hot favourite to win Man Booker prize, do so with facility and
respect. Mitchell writes brilliantly about human society and emotion, and about ghosts, sentient computers and transmigrating souls, without sneer, anxiety or generic despite.

China Miéville wins Clarke Award

fantasy
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Via Lenin’s Tomb comes the news that China Miéville has won the 2005 Arthur C. Clarke Award for his 2004 novel Iron Council. According to the Clarke Award’s administrator Paul Kincaid:

“Iron Council by China Miéville focuses sharply on political change, but note how many things feed into
that change: wealth and suffering and sexuality and hope. This is the point at which the conflict between the moral and the political which has underpinned his previous books bursts into the open. There are many wrongs in Miéville’s world, but very few rights, and politics in all its forms from simple co-operation to bloody revolution, is shown to be the frail and fallible attempt to find a way in the world. And in the last few dramatic pages, this is a novel about closing Pandora’s Box because of the necessity of preserving hope.

Iron Council is also still up for the Hugo Awards. So far however, not one Clarke Award winner has gone on to win the Hugo as well; might Iron Council be the first?