Babel Clash

Hey Matt: It is interesting how much fantasists have to think about what’s real and how to make use of it for our unreal worlds—-more than many writers of realistic fiction, I bet. Actually, I like C.S. Lewis on realism. He says there’s a difference between “realism of content” (a story that somehow expresses truths about the real world, e.g. This novel tells the unvarnished brutal tale of a man’s struggle to clip his toenails, the women who loved him, and the dog who despised him!) and “realism of presentation” (the nubbly details that embody experience—-”the touches that make for life” as Zelazny puts it). I think both of these matter for fantasy, though maybe the distance between them is greater than it is for mainstream fiction.

For instance, from LotR there’s Frodo’s gruesome encounter with Bilbo in Rivendell, after Bilbo asks to see the Ring: “[Frodo] found himself eyeing a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands. He felt a desire to strike him.” It’s the physical details that carry the emotional weight, here (realism of presentation), but the idea that Frodo is gradually becoming subject to desire for the Ring and its power, overriding his natural affection, strikes me as very plausible—-realism of content: I’m sure someone might react that way. The trick is, of course, there is no ring of power; there never was. Yet this is exactly how someone would react to it if it did exist. Any fiction writer has to be realistic about things that never happened; fantasists have to be realistic about things that never could have happened.

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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”).

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China, I’m stumped on this trinary question.  I haven’t figured out a great one yet, but your post’s heading “third’s a charm” got me thinking.  What are some cases where the concluding volume in a trilogy was the strongest of the set?

A few of  my picks:  Revenge of the Sith & Return of the King (the book;  Fellowship would get my vote for best of the movies).

What is fantasy’s fascination with the trilogy?  Is it tradition in honor of Tolkien?  Proven success from Terry Brooks and his early Shannara trilogy?  Does it tap into the 3-act structure of films (beginning, middle & end)?  Is it just that authors have a hard time abandoning a fully realized fantastic setting after only one novel’s worth of adventure?

Dragons are the apex predator in fantasy.  There’s nothing out there bigger, meaner or more cunning.  We want our heroes to prove themselves against the ultimate adversary, and somewhere deep in our psyche, we recognize that the dragon fills the role.

So which dragon is your favorite, or which scared or fascinated you the most?  My choice is Glaurung from Tolkien’s Children of Hurin.  I love Alan Lee’s depiction of the character (attached), from the book.