Babel Clash

Doubting fence-sitters? What? I say we shoot one in ten. Pour encourager les autres.

Here’s the thing about The Magicians. I grew up reading the Narnia books. Also Tolkien, Piers Anthony, Ursula Le Guin, Anne McAffrey, Fritz Leiber, TH White, Norton Juster, etc. etc. etc. Just like you did. And when I was a kid I thought my life was actually going to be like that: exciting, heroic, epic, happy. Etc. etc.

Then I grew up. I kept on reading those books — well, not Piers Anthony, but the ones that held up. But funnily enough my life — spoiler alert! — was not like that. (continue reading…)

Magic the Gathering? Best fantasy game? Bite your tongue sir!

There is only one fantasy game, and that is D&D. All other fantasy games are but its imperfect reflections and bastard by-blows.

Except for Otogi. That was cool, too.

Though I will admit that I had some very formative experiences with an Avalon Hill board game called Wizard’s Quest. Just the sight of its cover brings nostalgic tears to my eyes.

One of the things I wanted to have in The Magicians — see how I’m staying on message here? — was a game. I love games in novels, I always have. So I put one in even though I was sailing a bit close to the wind, what with Quidditch and all.

The game — it’s called welters — turned out to be surprisingly hard to construct. I’m novelist, dammit, not a games theorist. I wasn’t sure how much detail to go into, how much to fudge the rules, how to call the action, and so on. I’ve never been convinced that Quidditch is completely playable, but I think welters is, though I could be wrong. And I wanted something more cerebral than Quidditch. Quidditch is a sport. I wanted a game.

Why did I do this? I suppose I was trying to recreate all the great games I’d read about in other SF/F novels. Like the game in Piers Anthony’s Adept books, where there’s a whole society based on game-playing. Or Herman Hesse’s Glass Bead Game. The Battle School in Ender’s Game, Azad in Iain Banks’ Player of Games … it is basically impossibly to write a crap novel as long as there’s a game in it. Right? Right?

I will go see 9, no question. Such is my devotion to the disembodied voice of Elijah Wood. But I feel like it’s walking before we can run.

We don’t need a steampunk masterpiece, or blended genres. Not yet, you fools! We don’t need a fresh take on fantasy featuring walking beanbags. We haven’t even had a stale take on fantasy yet! Show me a decent grown-up fantasy flick that can take the taste of Dungeons & Dragons out of my eyeballs, and we’ll talk. Somebody sell Best Served Cold to Jon Favreau.

[Kreacher voice]Filthy mudbloods … mixing genres … we were always a pureblood family … [/Kreacher]

It’s sort of amazing, really. Imagine if fantasy movies were like SF movies. There are actually good SF movies that are not merely based on good SF novels. In the world of SF there is actual parity between books and movies. They can hang together. Have a beer, play Settlers of Catan, whatever. Sf movies sometimes actually advance the genre.

In the world of fantasy, this is not so. There are vanishingly few decent fantasy movies that are not based on decent fantasy novels, and even most of the ones based on decent books are unbelievably horrible.

Why should this be? With the obvious exception of Peter Jackson, really good directors don’t seem to be interested in fantasy. And the ones that are don’t seem to really get the point of it (I’m think of Ridley Scott’s Legend and Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur.) Imagine if a Neill Blomkamp decided to shoot a straight-up dungeon crawl. No soaring celestial-choir music, no cute-kid sidekick, no “clever” twists, just a buncha guys out to stab some monsters and take their treasure. Shoot it the way Tarantino would shoot a heist movie: gritty, real, sweat in their beards, blood on their armor.

How hard would that be? And how awesome?

I’ve never been able to get excited about wolfmen. I don’t know what it is, You’ve got a guy. He turns into a big dog. He does it on a regular basis. Sure, it’s a problem. It just doesn’t grab me.

As for this particular incarnation of same, it’s looking pretty bog-standard. Which is to say that if I liked werewolves, I would like this. As it is the only thing that really speaks to me is the bit at 1:39, where Anthony Hopkins is all, “you’ve done terrible things,” and he’s kinda smiling, creepily, as if he’s glad Benicio del Toro has done terrible things …

As for Avatar, I’ve weighed in on this elsewhere at greater length, so I’ll just say two things here. One, the movie itself looks pretty not-great — big and sentimental, like a mega-budget FernGully remake with borderline-cliché exotic aliens. But two, it’s a tech demo for what will be a really unbelievably great movie that somebody else is going to make. It really moves the chains on what CGI can do. Seriously, you have to see it on the big screen, in 3D. It doesn’t look like anything else.

See, that’s awesome. A vampire prince who got turned human again! Seriously, wrap that in a black cover with some hands holding some fruit on it and you’ve got yourself a runaway bestseller. (BTW everybody looooook! The Magicians is on the bestseller list. That’s a big first for me.)

The problem with me as a D&D player is that I never thought of stuff like that. You might think, oh, right, novelist, I bet he was all like a master of subtle characterization and rich back-story and role playing such. But no. I — or should I say Dirk Whispershadow, as I was then known — was like the douchiest treasure-grubbing, stats-inflating, rule-protesting fighter-thief in Hommlet. I just wanted to “win.”

Speaking of D&D, if you’ve never seen this, prepare to lose an hour of your life.

OK, I’m still here. I swore a mighty oath that I would post every day, and I betrayed that oath yesterday. I had lots of book-tour-y things to do and it got away from me. And as a result Smurfland is doomed and Christmas will never come again.

Or maybe I’ll just post multiple times today to make up for it. Yeah, I’ll do that.

I’ve been reading back through China Mieville’s posts, and as I physically resemble a smaller, less perfectly  formed China Mieville, I’m going to take him as my model.
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Someone asked me the other day who I thought would win in a duel, Harry Potter or Quentin Coldwater, the hero of The Magicians. This immediately seemed like a good question to blog about. Partly because it involves mentioning The Magicians. But also because I think the volume of debate about what wizard could kick another wizard’s ass is insufficient.

Now one of the major pleasures of writing a fantasy novel is being able to roll your own magic system. I don’t know about you, but whenever I read a fantasy novel, regardless of whether I like it or I don’t, I always mentally grade its magic system on accuracy. Because for some reason, on a gut level, I think I know how magic actually works. This is insane. And yet it is true.

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Greetings all from Chicago, where I am on tour. I am hereby cheating on my regular blog Nerd World with Babel Clash. It doesn’t mean anything honey, I promise!

Morgan suggested a bunch of different topics for me to write about, and I picked Secret Crushes, meaning stuff I secretly love that you wouldn’t expect me to love. Presumably because it’s embarrassing. I then wrote and deleted a bunch of posts on this topic that turned out — through no fault of Morgan’s, and every fault of mine — to be boring, mainly because they weren’t embarrassing enough to be funny, and they mostly concerned things that nobody but me has ever heard of.

I will summarize them briefly:

THE GREATEST VIDEO GAME EVER, WHICH NO ONE BUT ME LOVES: Magic Sword. An epic dungeon-crawl side-scroller, which I used to play nightly at a 24-hour arcade in Times Square, back when there were such things. At your side fights a rotating, leveling-up cast of sidekicks, all different classes, all different abilities, whom you release from prison cells you pass along the way.

Bonus, there’s lots of bad Japanese English. When your sidekick wants to get out of jail, he/she rattles the bars of his/her cell and yells: “Get rid of me!” Whenever I’m feelingtrapped somewhere, in my head I still hear that plangent cry.

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