A History of Epic Fantasy - Part 15

One of the criticisms levelled against epic fantasy and some of its trappings - worldbuilding, magic systems, maps, constructed languages - is that it runs counter to the more traditional idea of fantasy as being strange, exotic, weird. East of the Sun and West of the Moon is not a point on a map (to quote Pratchett expert Stephen Briggs) and knowing the metaphysical rules that allow a princess to be put into suspended animation for a century only to be woken up by a passing prince is a bit unnecessary to the story at hand.


There's also the fact that an awful lot of fantasy can feel like a history of the real Middle Ages but with dragons and fireballs replacing research. Starting in the 1980s, some authors wrote books that looked like epic fantasy and had many of the same trappings, but had rather different settings and were combined with other genres to create more interesting and original stories.

The Gunslinger


As a child, Stephen King developed a fascination with the poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (1855) by Robert Browning. This was one of a number of poems and poetic works that would stick in the minds of various science fiction and fantasy authors, to be extensively quoted later on (see also The Second Combing by W.B. Yeats and The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot). King's take was rather more literal: a man named Roland seeks out a dark tower. Working out exactly what that meant took King over a decade, with him writing down the first version of the short story known as The Gunslinger in 1970. He finally published it in 1978. A series of four further short stories followed, with them being collected together and published as one volume in 1982.

When The Gunslinger appeared, King was already a rising star. He'd published Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Dead Zone and the novel that had arguably defined him more than any other, The Stand. The Stand is itself a work of epic fantasy using modern American characters to stand in for archetypal fantasy heroes and the destruction of the modern world through a viral epidemic as its backstory. North America itself stands in for a fantasy landscape, with Las Vegas serving as the novel's Mordor. The novel was hugely successful, but some readers felt that there was a lot more to its mysteries - such as the enigmatically evil Randall Flagg - than King revealed on the page.

In the back of King's mind (perhaps influenced by Moorcock) had been the idea of a multiverse, a layering of fictional universes in which different stories could take place but where all these stories could intersect with them. What he lacked was a way of tying them together. The Gunslinger, with its ambiguous setting and the ability of its characters to pass between shifting planes of reality, provided that mechanism.

Seven more volumes in The Dark Tower series followed The Gunslinger: The Drawing of the Three (1987), The Waste Lands (1991), Wizard and Glass (1997), Wolves of the Calla (2003), Song of Susannah (2004) and The Dark Tower (2004), along with a stand-alone spin-off novel, The Wind Through the Keyhole (2012). The novels focus on Roland Deschain, a knight and gunslinger who pursues a mysterious "man in black" across a desert, gathering allies along the way. There are hints of a post-apocalyptic world, strengthened by references to The Stand and its characters. Real-life figures, including (controversially) King himself, make an appearance. Many other novels King wrote during this period tied into the main work: The Eyes of the Dragon (1987) is King's only "traditional" epic fantasy novel and features the return of Randall Flagg and references to The Dark Tower. Black House, Hearts in Atlantis, Rose Madder and Insomnia (among others) also feature blatant references to the series. In fact, some King fans suggest that all of King's work (even the non-supernatural thrillers like Misery) is set in the Dark Tower multiverse and they may be right.

Cloud Warrior

Patrick Tilley had already had an interesting writing career before he started writing his magnum opus in 1983. His first novel, Fade Out (1976), had been an SF novel about the arrival of an alien spacecraft on Earth that drained the planet of electricity, throwing us back into the Middle Ages. His second, Mission (1981), had asked what would happen if Jesus turned up in present-day New York City.

For his next work, Tilley decided to fuse together Mad Max, Shogun, The Lord of the Rings and the American Western because, well, why not? The resulting series was The Amtrak Wars, the kind of inspired, crazy genre mash-up that we don't seen nearly enough of in the genre.

The books open in 2989. The Old World was destroyed in a nuclear apocalypse (which took place in, er, November 2015) but a group of American industrialists and billionaires survived in a massive underground shelter beneath Houston, Texas. With the surface world too radioactive to survive on, they expanded the underground facilities into a vast subterranean empire, the Amtrak Federation. Emerging centuries later, they found to their horror that the surface world had been taken over by "Mutes", the mutated survivors and descendants of less fortunate Americans who'd had to struggle to survive after the thermonuclear war. The Federation initially waged war against the Mutes to retake the surface world, but ran into problems when it was discovered that the Mutes had somehow gained mastery of the elements and magic. Complicating matters further was the presence of a large nation of descendants of Japanese survivors on the eastern seaboard, Ne-Issan.

The books chronicle the development of the Talisman Prophecy, which the Mutes believe will see the destruction of the Amtrak Federation, and the role played in it by four young people from both the Federation and the Clan M'Call of the Mutes. The books are also notable for their vivid action scenes and extraordinarily complicated politics and schemes-within-schemes developed by the central character, the Machiavellian antihero Steve Brickman.

Six volumes were published in the series: Cloud Warrior (1983), First Family (1985), Iron Master (1987), Blood River (1988), Death-Bringer (1989) and Earth-Thunder (1990). The sixth volume ended on something of a cliffhanger, intended to lead into a sequel series set 15-20 years later when the Talisman Prophecy came to fruition. However, Tilley chose to move onto other projects. There was a renewed attempt to continue the series in 2007 with a new trilogy, whilst an Australian production company licensed the film rights in 2010 with a view to making a movie called The Talisman Prophecy, but neither came to fruition. Still, the series remains remarkable for the ease with which Tilley brings together a myriad number of sources and ideas into a coherent world and story.

The Wizards and the Warriors

Few could accuse New Zealand novelist Hugh Cook of lacking vision. In 1986 he published The Wizards and the Warriors, the first novel in a series he called Chronicles of an Age of Darkness. Cook's plan was for this series to run to twenty volumes, to be followed by two series of equal length, Chronicles of an Age of Wrath and Chronicles of an Age of Heroes. The sixty-book plan was overly ambitious despite Cook's high speed of output, but ultimately he only finished the first half of the first series (ten novels in six years) before it was halted due to lack of sales.

Unusually, the series was not one massive epic story. Instead, it was more episodic with some novels taking place simultaneously alongside others, with events varying depending on who was witnessing or instigating them. The books used unreliable narrators and a prose style that could vary significantly from volume to volume. The books also eschewed a lot of epic fantasy tropes, with the books not following a set chronology and not having a central hero or villain. The books featured whimsical humour and influences from sword and sorcery as well as planetary romance. Some books were reminiscent of the later New Weird movement (China Mieville was a big fan). Some books were more like roleplaying games, with Paizo Publishing reprinting one of the volumes, The Walrus and the Warwolf, as part of its Planet Stories line.

After the series concluded (prematurely) Cook published several more books before sadly passing away in 2008 from cancer. His massive mega-series was never finished, but its breadth, vision and general batshit insanity remain intriguing (and echoes, intended or not, of the tonal variations, dark humour and continent-skipping structure can be found in Steven Erikson's Malazan novels).

Wolf in Shadow

We have already looked at Legend, David Gemmell's first novel, published in 1984. Gemmell subsequently produced several more books in the same setting and he was soon being pigenoholed as a heroic fantasy author.

In 1987 he shifted that perception with Wolf in Shadow (sometimes published under the title The Jerusalem Man). This was a post-apocalyptic novel, set in a world devastated by an unspecific event known as "The Fall". An episode later in the novel has the titular Jon Shannow, a gun-wielding antihero, discovering the wreck of the Titanic, indicating the action is set on the now-bone-dry floor of the Atlantic Ocean. The novel and its two sequels featured post-apocalyptic tropes combined with fantasy, particularly with the introduction of the Sipstrassi or Stones of Power, items with magical capabilities.

The core series featuring Jon Shannow is among Gemmell's most popular works, but it was later expanded with a duology set in ancient Greece and featuring Alexander the Great. The duology initially appears to be historical fiction, but the introduction of the Sipstrassi linked it to the Jon Shannow books and hinted at a grander, weirder scheme in place. Gemmell later returned to his Drenai setting and several new fantasy worlds before concluding his career with pure historical fiction, so it is unclear how this series would have continued.

Shadowrun

Released in 1989, the roleplaying game Shadowrun has a central premise which it executes very well: epic fantasy meets cyberpunk.

The roleplaying game and its attendant video games and novels postulate an existential catastrophe which takes place in 2012. The world is transformed, with some of the human population transformed into fantasy races like elves, dwarves, trolls and orks. Magic also suddenly comes into existence, other planes of existence are revealed to exist, allowing demonic entities and dragons to enter our world. Despite widespread death and destruction resulting from the catastrophe, humanity manages to survive and prosper, with technological advancement proceeding and the new races integrated into human culture.

The roleplaying game is set fifty years further down the line, with massive mega-corporations controlling the world and people surviving best they can. The game focuses on "shadowrunners", freelance agents who act as corporate spies, soldiers of fortune and mercenaries, working for themselves or corporations or underground resistance groups.

In Shadowrun's case, the mashing together of epic fantasy races, tropes and magic with science fiction and cyberpunk is wildly successful, bringing both a sense of fun from simply colliding the two worlds together and also allowing the creators to investigate themes of technology versus spirituality in unusual ways. After a lengthy period of relative quite, Shadowrun recently exploded back into popularity with the release of three new video games, Shadowrun Returns, Dragonfall and Hong Kong. Its future seems bright.

The mashing up of fantasy with SF and other genres has generated interesting results, although success and sales have often been patchy when this has been attempted. The once exception is historical fiction, which epic fantasy has riffed on with frequent and ongoing success.

A History of Epic Fantasy - Part 11

1984 represented another shift in the evolution of epic fantasy. Most of the books published up until this point had been adventure stories, either derived from Tolkien or bringing in their own ideas. With the exception of Donaldson, the darker side of fantasy remained relatively unexplored.

That changed with the release of two novels on opposite sides of the Atlantic, both from authors interested in the idea of heroes and morality. Unusually, it was the American author who took the more cynical viewpoint, painting a picture of a dark world terrorised by an amoral and ruthless empire...who the protagonists are working for. The British author also took a downbeat, maybe even more realistic view of war and politics, but also used that to make his heroes shine all the more strongly.

 
The Black Company

American author Glen Cook had served in the US Navy before starting work at General Motors, in an auto assembly plant. The job was not mentally taxing, so Cook was able to spend his work days conceiving ideas for stories and novels. One of these was about a mercenary outfit, the Black Company.

The Black Company worked for money and for something to do: they were not "evil", as such, but had no issues working for more morally dubious employers. Over the course of the eponymous first novel, they start working for the Lady, a powerful sorceress whose armies have overrun the land and now rule with an iron fist. However, as the series continues they discover the fate of the world itself is at stake and, as much out of self-preservation as anything else, decide to take a stand.

The Black Company and its sequels (Shadows Linger and The White Rose in the initial trilogy, with more books following intermittently) dealt with interesting questions of relative morality and how far you can go down the dark path before you can go no further. The notions of there being such a thing as a "just war" and that people can be unaffected by war or suffering are rejected. But there is also room for forgiveness: the primary antagonist of the first trilogy becomes a leading "hero" of the later books and arguably atones for her crimes, but never repents them fully.

The Black Company and its sequels are also notable for combining military tropes with what can also be called flat-out weirdness: magical trees, windwhales and a sentient menhir alarm system contribute to a series whose grim tone and reputation occasionally mask a genuine sense of the fantastic and some whimsical (if dark) humour.

Up in Canada, a young pair of budding writers named Steve Lundin and Ian Esslemont were reading with interest, and taking notes.

Legend

David Gemmell came from the school of hard knocks. Born in the aftermath of World War II and growing up in a tough part of East London, Gemmell got into trouble in school, was taught how to box by his stepfather and had a number of jobs including a nightclub bouncer and a labourer. Writing was perhaps an unlikely-seeming profession, but Gemmell had a love of reading as a child, particularly of history. His mother arranged for him to have an interview at a local newspaper, but he got the job more for his take-no-prisoners attitude than his actual writing skills.

In 1976 Gemmell was diagnosed with cancer. Believing his time was limited, he decided to write a fantasy story he'd had knocking around in his head. He completed The Siege of Dros Delnoch in two weeks before learning that he'd suffered a misdiagnosis. A friend read the manuscript and urged him to expand it into a full novel. Gemmell completed the book in 1982 and it was published in 1984 under the title Legend (no relation to the Tom Cruise movie released a few months later).

Legend tells a fairly straightforward story: the northern barbarians have united under a new warleader and are now marching on the Drenai Empire, which they believe is weak and vulnerable. The only obstacle is Dros Delnoch, a fortress defending a narrow mountain pass. The defenders are outnumbered fifty-to-one but amongst their ranks is a legend: the great warrior Druss, wielding his axe Snaga. Old and failing, haunted by the prophecy that he will fall at Dros Delnoch, Druss must take a stand alongside his people.

Legend is a book that also has a cynical and dark tone, but is not as nihilistic as Cook's work. Gemmell's philosophy is a shade different, namely that true heroism comes from the darkest hour, that people will be tested and some will fail, but a few will not. He does not believe that heroes are perfect or flawless, but they are heroes because they overcome those flaws to achieve things greater than they are. Legend's message is simple but delivered with brutal, stirring efficiency to make it one of the most well-regarded fantasy novels of all time. Gemmell passed away in 2006 whilst telling another story about a brutal siege (this time at Troy) but his legacy was secured when the David Gemmell Legend Award for Fantasy, the most popular award for epic fantasy, was named in his honour.

By the mid-1980s fantasy had become a bigger and more successful genre, but one that was dominated by male authors. However, more women were starting to write in the genre and several key works by female authors emerged at this time, drawing on Celtic mythology, Chinese politics and an absolutely massive number of dragons.

David Gemmell Award audio recording available now

The David Gemmell Award organisers have released an audio recording of the ceremony here. It's worth checking out, if just for James Barclay's dramatic re-enactment of Druss' speech from Legend that kicked off proceedings.

Award winner Andrzej Sapkowski also had this to say about receiving the award:

"I am very happy and proud to be a winner in the contest for The David Gemmell Legend Award, the prize precious to me indeed, as I am a great admirer of the writings of the late David A. Gemmell. I would like to express my gratitude to all the readers who voted for my book. I would also like to thank and congratulate all the other fellow writers in the final poll. Finally, it is fantasy - our genre - that was the ultimate winner."

The Gemmell Awards 2009

Friday saw the inaugural David Gemmell Legend Award for fantasy being presented. The venue was the Magic Circle in London (minor fact: my great-grandfather worked for a time with Maskelyne & Devant, the two magicians who had a major formative role in the organisation) and there was a good turn-out (fantasy authors and particularly editors being vulnerable to the allure of free booze and canapes). Rumours that numbers were looking low until David Devereux promised to come along in a kilt, at which point they soared, cannot be substantiated at this time.

The event got underway with fantasy author (and friend of the late David Gemmell) James Barclay coming out on stage and booming out Druss' speech to the men before the battle at Dros Delnoch in Legend in an impressive and theatrical manner. Deborah J. Miller and Stan Nicholls were the main comperes for the evening and did a sterling job. Stan's wife came out to give an excellent tribute to David Gemmell, and then Mr. Barclay returned for the charity auction. Seeing people having to sit on their hands for fear of spending too much money was quite amusing, with the signed, mint-condition first edition of Legend (which went for £500) being the highlight of the evening. The featured charity, Médecins Sans Frontières, raised quite a lot of money on the night, which was great.

The awards were then announced, with each author getting a miniature replica of Druss' war axe, Snaga, as modelled here by Mr. J. Abercrombie.


Joe was the only author in attendance, the other writers not being present due to the excuse of living on other landmasses (Australia, in Juliet Marillier's case).

The winning book was Blood of Elves by Andrzej Sapkowski, originally published in Poland in 1994 but with the English translation only being published last year. This is the first book in his five-volume series of novels featuring the character of Geralt, the Witcher (also the hero of a recent bestselling computer roleplaying game), following on from two earlier short story collections, The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny.

Sapkowski's win may seem a little left-field (the favourites were Abercrombie and Brent Weeks for his Night Angel trilogy), but makes sense. Although new in English translation, his books have been published in Europe for almost twenty years, and in places like Spain, Germany, Russia and of course Poland he is mentioned in the same breath as authors such as George R.R. Martin and Robert Jordan. I'd also wager that he is the biggest-selling author on the list by some margin, probably bigger than the others all put together. For a genre often completely dominated by discussions of English-language authors, seeing a European author win the first Gemmell Award was quite refreshing.

Joe took the news magnanimously, possibly because Sapkowski doesn't have a book coming out in English this year to compete with Best Served Cold at next year's awards :-)

Anyway, a good time was had by all and it was a great start to an even I suspect is going to get larger and more influential with each passing year. This year alone there were over ten thousand votes (or about fourteen times as many people who voted for the Hugo Awards last year).

Troy: Fall of Kings by David & Stella Gemmell

David Gemmell sadly passed away after completing about 90,000 words of the third and final volume of his Troy Trilogy. Fall of Kings was completed by his wife, Stella (who was his editor and researcher throughout the trilogy), and published at the end of 2007.


We pick up after the events of Shield of Thunder. The Great Green is beset by war. Agamemnon and his allies (including the reluctant Odysseus) have secured most of the west and are now poised to strike directly at Troy itself. Hektor is leading the effort to dislodge their armies to the south, whilst Banokles - very reluctantly - is commanding forces to the north. Helikaon is ordered to sea, to take Kassandra to the island of Thera, but along the way he meets Odysseus and is drawn into a side-adventure to Ithaka.

Fall of Kings is a worthy conclusion to the trilogy. It's very difficult to tell where David Gemmell left off this work and his wife took over, and it's probably for the best to ignore that diversion and just enjoy the story. This book is, predictably, the story of the siege and fall of Troy, and frankly it may now have to be classified as the definitive modern retelling of the myth. The duel between Hektor and Achilles is here, but with a very interesting spin placed on it, whilst the fate of Helen is beautifully depicted. But it's the end of the book, particularly the last stand of the survivors within the palace of Troy, which will probably live longest in the memory.

Fall of Kings (****) is definitely not quite as polished as the prior two books in the series, but finding out the fates of the characters we have grown to know and love over the course of the trilogy more than makes up for any (minor) weaknesses in the prose. This is a fitting end to a monumental story of war, love and honour, and a grand retelling of one of the greatest myths of all time. Thoroughly reccomended.

The book is available from Corgi in the UK and from Ballantaine in the USA.

Troy: Shield of Thunder by David Gemmell

Shield of Thunder continues the epic Troy Trilogy begun in Troy: Lord of the Silver Bow. Shield of Thunder was the last book completed by David Gemmell before his premature death in 2006, and was published posthumously.

Rather than picking up the narrative immediately after Lord of the Silver Bow, Gemmell starts Shield of Thunder by focusing on Banokles and Kalliades, two of the Mykene soldiers sent to Troy by Agamemnon to murder King Priam. However, Priam spared their lives as an act of mercy in return for them slaying their treacherous commander. Agamemnon does not look well on failure and now the two Mykene soldiers are on the run. Their paths cross with Piria, a runaway priestess, and mighty Odysseus, whose path leads back to Troy. Back in the Golden City, we are soon reacquainted with the central characters from the first book, such as Andromache and Helikaon, and soon meet important new characters, most notably Achilles, the great hero of Thessaly, who burns to pit his skills of war against Hektor, Prince of Troy.

Shield of Thunder undercuts reader expectations nicely. We may be nearly two hundred pages in before the major characters from the first book reassert themselves, but Odysseus, Banokles and Kalliades are such great characters you barely notice. The writing is as tight as ever and there's much greater humour in the book, particularly the opening sections revolving around the mighty boar Ganny, whilst Banokles' refreshing lack of moral complexity makes him a particularly engaging character: someone who just works out what has to be done and does it whilst everyone else agonises with moral quandaries around him. However, this is the story of the tensions building to war. Gemmell undercuts reader expectations again and again. Paris and Helen are married quite legally and happily at the start of the book but Agamemnon exploits a legalistic loophole to allow him to challenge the might of Troy for her 'capture'. Menelaus, usually depicted as a fearsome warrior, is here a passive man much more at home on his farm than on the front lines. And Achilles and Hektor meeting in the arena prior to their infamous duel on the battlefield may strike some as sacrilege, but it builds up their distant rivalry and thirst to clash in battle all the more effectively.

Shield of Thunder (****½) is an excellent continuation of the story begun in Lord of the Silver Bow and sets things up for the grand finale in Fall of Kings. Shield of Thunder is publshed by Corgi in the UK and by Ballantine in the USA.

Troy: Lord of the Silver Bow by David Gemmell

David Gemmell was a prolific and popular author of heroic fantasy, penning more than thirty novels (most of them well-receved) between the 1984 release of Legend and his death in the summer of 2006. His final project was The Troy Trilogy, an epic retelling of the Trojan War, its causes and consequences, marrying the likely historical reality of the conflict (now seen less as a story of doomed love and more the explosion of tensions building up over decades between the Greek cities and the Hittite Empire) with some fantastical elements, although these are mostly restricted to prophetic dreams. Arguably the trilogy, or at least Lord of the Silver Bow, barely qualifies as fantasy, instead more neatly falling into the subgenre of the 'speculative historical' novel shared by the likes of Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles.

The time is three thousand years and more in the past. The world is dominated by the Great Green, the vast sea that divides the Greek city-states (now coming under the dominion of Mykene and its ruthless king, Agamemnon) from the Hittites and their colonies in the near east, Assyria further to the east and Egypte to the south. Lord of the Silver Bow is the story of several individuals. Helikaon, Prince of Dardania, is a warrior and sailor beyond compare, dubbed 'The Golden One' for his legendary luck and pride. He has built the Xanthos, the biggest ship on the Great Green, which sailors fear as it challenges the might of Poseidon. Helikaon is being hunted by assassins and has made an enemy of the Mykene for slaughtering their hero Alektruon, a pirate and reaver, but is unaware that Agamemnon has been told of a prophecy that he will be responsible for Agamemnon's downfall.

Meanwhile, the beautiful Andromache, exiled to the island of Thera by her father, is recalled after the death of her sister and is pledged to marry Prince Hektor of Troy, a warrior of legend. Her journey to Troy brings her into contact with Helikaon and his crew, a meeting that will spark many unfortunate events to come. The last of the three central characters is Argurios, a mighty Mykene warrior who loaths Helikaon, but destiny and honour compel him to fight alongside the Golden One and forge a story that will become a legend across the Great Green and challenge Agamemnon's wisdom and reputation.

Around these three central characters other lives become entangled: Xander, the ship's boy who becomes interested in healing; the strange Trojan girl and prophetess, Kassandra; the Egyptean exiled prince Gershom; the mighty warrior and legendary tale-spinner Odysseus, King of Ithaka; and King Priam himself, a contradictary figure, cruel and hateful one moment, with occasional flashes of honour and mercy.

Lord of the Silver Bow is nearly a flawlessly enjoyable book, with a depth of writing that is hugely engrossing and characters that leap clear of the page in their vividness. Such is the strength of the story that you forget you are reading a story that you know the end of, and the moments in the story that do intersect with the legend are all the most impressive for that, such as when the reader realises that Helikaon is actually Aeneas and when Prince Paris crops up for one of his extremely infrequent appearances. The combat sequences are brutal and convincing; the characters' philosophical musings are short, to the point and do not slow down the action; the drawing of the characters is so well-achieved that some of the deaths at the end of the book are almost physically painful to read about.

Lord of the Silver Bow (****½) is laying the groundwork for the war to come, but is in itself a hugely accomplished and significant epic fantasy novel with enough closure to make it a great self-contained work. The other two books in the sequence are Shield of Thunder and Fall of Kings, which I will read and review promptly.

The novel is available from Corgi in the UK and from Ballantine in the USA.