Babel Clash

Every writer begins as a reader, so it makes sense to start this conversation about writing by talking about our influences.

My first brush with fantasy (like that of lots of people) came with Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings was a big book on campuses at the time and some of my parents’ hip young friends had given them a copies to get them up to speed. I don’t know if they ever read it, but I was fascinated by the weird covers and the alien runes decorating the splash pages.

Reynolds, cover for "Fellowship of the Ring"

Everyone in the world seemed to have given it a good review, including people I’d never heard of like C.S. Lewis and W.H. Auden. So I read it and instantly became obsessed with it. I took all-too-seriously Tolkien’s gravely flip remark that “the book is too short” and, after I ‘d read LotR and The Hobbit a couple times, I launched on my own multi-volume fantasy epic. This one was going to be five volumes long–I didn’t want to repeat the one mistake Tolkien himself admitted making. I wasn’t very far into it before I gave up, but I did, of course make a map. I don’t remember much about it, but there was a mountain range that ran west-to-east and it had a dangerous pass through it called the “Kirach Kung”. There was a scary Mirkwoody sort of forest in it, but I’m not sure if I was already calling it Tychar (the winterwood, at whose verge readers first encountered Morlock a few years ago in “Turn Up This Crooked Way”).

(continue reading…)

Brandon Sanderson here, author of various epic fantasy novels.  I’m happy to be here–thanks to Borders for giving me this chance.

The first topic for our discussion is one close to my heart.  Long ago, when I was an undergraduate, I wrote an essay entitled “Kill the Elves”  for the on-campus sf/f magazine.  I’ve long been a proponent for fantasy going in other directions, growing beyond the traditional Tolkienesque archetypes that have become so common in the genre.   I’m bored with elves, bored with dwarves, bored with quests for magical objects.

But is this just my cynicism speaking?  Is this like trying to get sf to stop using space ships?  Are elves, dwarves, and the other fantasy stand-by races such a vital part of the genre that, in pulling them out, we’d remove what makes fantasy fun in the first place?

What of the quest archetype?  An irreplaceable piece of the genre, tied to the hero’s journey and coming of age?  Or is it a crutch that has been rehashed so many times that using it changes a fantasy novel from original and fresh into reading like a video-game on paper?  And if we cut out these parts, where does that leave us?  Where is fantasy going, and what might it become in the next decade?

Speak out.  I’ve got more than a few thoughts on this myself, and I’m curious to see where the discussion goes.