Babel Clash

When Lev Grossman visited Babel Clash, we discussed the most powerful wizards in modern fantasy literature.  Who would win the great wizard fight?

Looking back at that conversation, the names mentioned included:  Gandalf, Quentin Coldwater, Harry Potter, Raistlin Majere, Richard Rahl, Bayaz, Dr. Strange, Doctor Fate, Pug, Belgarath and Rand al’Thor.  All guys.

Where are the women?  Who is the paragon of magical might among female characters?

The Borders Facebook site is hosting a live chat with Lev Grossman, author of the Magicians and our recent guest on Babel Clash.   It is Thursday 9/3 at 3:00 EST.  Here’s the link with more information…

Lev Grossman Live Chat on Facebook

Hey Lev,

Thanks for joining us on Babel Clash.  It’s been fun.  Congratulations on the success of the Magicians.  What would you say to convince those doubting readers sitting on the fence?  Why is the Magicians one bestseller not to be missed?

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.

What is the # 1 fantasy game?  If you had to pick, what gets the nod?  Warcraft, Dungeons & Dragons, Magic the Gathering?  Is there a dark horse candidate?  I’m taking Magic.  It is a game in constant evolution and incorporating vast #s of possible variations.  It has puzzle solving and logic and even some poker-like bluffing.  Plus, it features  iconic fantasy images and concepts.

For best Science Fiction game, I’m tempted to take Halo, but I’m going with a board game instead.  Have you played Starfarers of Catan?  That’s a fun game that captures the feeling of racing through space on a voyage of discovery, and it’s perfect for parties.

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]

What about a movie like 9?

This is the type of movie that I very much want to see, and it’s something that I’d love to see become more common in fantasy & sf.  It doesn’t fit squarely into either genre.  It’s a doomsday and steampunk story with robots and scientists, but it also features warriors and “dragons.”  It feels like a fairy tale adventure, but maybe that’s because it is a cartoon.

So, I’m in favor of breaking conventions.  I’m preaching to the choir here, since the Magicians nicely subverts expectations.  Let’s have wizards and robots mingle and dragons commanding starships.  Three cheers to Justina Robson for her cyborg elves.

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.