It's been quite a while since I posted; the Holidays were packed and I spent a week touring the bayous and rod-iron gilded balconies of Louisiana with my girl for a week, which was spectacular. New Orleans is a hell of a place and Louisiana perhaps the most interesting American State.
But let's get back into the meat of things, here. We've talked about the Talisman and I think Cam has said pretty much all I have to say about that, everything about Jack's relationship with Richard and that wonderful Alice in Wonderland correlation. The great blighted lands to the west of the Territories are like the great blight of Mordor or Robert Jordan's Great Blight itself, the land of Nod east of Eden. That often used trope; of a world wasted away by evil or industrialization or magic or technology comes up so many times and it is always interesting. I've always had a fascination with those great wastelands - the uncharted East of Arthurian legend or James Axle's fabulous WASTELAND pulp. The great roving green fires, the "Worms" that even the devil feared, all of them are great concepts!
But let's talk about Fantastica. It is worth mentioning that I'd already been well acquainted with the film, worthy of mention in itself, and the Disney cartoon series (unmemorable entirely except in that it existed and I watched it). Interestingly enough, the book is what heavily motivated me to make this blog - when me and Cam were talking about The Talisman and I had read less than a 100. The Neverending Story is the closest I've come to reading The Legend of Zelda in a book - before, mind you, it bores into Bastian's character. Something about meeting beautiful people who live in a silver city built by creatures ugly and ashamed of their true forms, or of communities of will-o-wisps, make me think of Gorons and Zora and pirates and dungeons. Less logic and more magic. There is a juvenile sort of mad joy I take in wandering into fabulous jungles where beings spin and weave starlight into crystalline contraptions, where forest sing siren songs, where life and death and the cycle of natural rebirth are symbolized in the life-and-death cycle of a gorgeous, moonlit jungle and scorching desert of many colours reigned over by a fire god so majestic and yet so governed by the rules of his domain he is embedded into my mind and I find it hard not to want to plagiarize. Like Cam, it makes me wonder why fantasy is often less fantastic than you'd expect. The Four Wind Giants, governing the cardinal directions and constantly at war (much like the Stone Giants of the Hobbit, before Middle-Earth became less silly and more ponderous).
That concept of Fairy, then, comes to mind. Of the magic world teteering into this one, of Fantastica having no physical borders. Concepts I've read and enjoyed in The Broken Sword and the Kingkiller Chronicle, where Fairy doesn't necessarily have logic or monarchical lineages. Luckdragons, Child Empresses, and a mountain of ivory carved into a city at the center of a world without borders - whose borders by definition are as amorphous as the imaginations which fertilize the land.
The plot operates to the same lofty melody of many children's stories, much like The Hobbit, it the bildungsroman tradition, and is equally as enjoyable. I read through it with gusto, and enjoyed every minute of it.
In any case, there are a bunch of things I want to talk about - notable Watership Down and The Hobbit movie in my other blog. The next novel we're supposed to read here is Gene Wolfe's Something or Other, which I need to pick up. I've read a shit-ton over the holidays I expect I'll be talking about, and actuall Cam we should look into Jack Vance's The Dying Earth if we're going to talk about fantasy classics.
But let's get back into the meat of things, here. We've talked about the Talisman and I think Cam has said pretty much all I have to say about that, everything about Jack's relationship with Richard and that wonderful Alice in Wonderland correlation. The great blighted lands to the west of the Territories are like the great blight of Mordor or Robert Jordan's Great Blight itself, the land of Nod east of Eden. That often used trope; of a world wasted away by evil or industrialization or magic or technology comes up so many times and it is always interesting. I've always had a fascination with those great wastelands - the uncharted East of Arthurian legend or James Axle's fabulous WASTELAND pulp. The great roving green fires, the "Worms" that even the devil feared, all of them are great concepts!
But let's talk about Fantastica. It is worth mentioning that I'd already been well acquainted with the film, worthy of mention in itself, and the Disney cartoon series (unmemorable entirely except in that it existed and I watched it). Interestingly enough, the book is what heavily motivated me to make this blog - when me and Cam were talking about The Talisman and I had read less than a 100. The Neverending Story is the closest I've come to reading The Legend of Zelda in a book - before, mind you, it bores into Bastian's character. Something about meeting beautiful people who live in a silver city built by creatures ugly and ashamed of their true forms, or of communities of will-o-wisps, make me think of Gorons and Zora and pirates and dungeons. Less logic and more magic. There is a juvenile sort of mad joy I take in wandering into fabulous jungles where beings spin and weave starlight into crystalline contraptions, where forest sing siren songs, where life and death and the cycle of natural rebirth are symbolized in the life-and-death cycle of a gorgeous, moonlit jungle and scorching desert of many colours reigned over by a fire god so majestic and yet so governed by the rules of his domain he is embedded into my mind and I find it hard not to want to plagiarize. Like Cam, it makes me wonder why fantasy is often less fantastic than you'd expect. The Four Wind Giants, governing the cardinal directions and constantly at war (much like the Stone Giants of the Hobbit, before Middle-Earth became less silly and more ponderous).
That concept of Fairy, then, comes to mind. Of the magic world teteering into this one, of Fantastica having no physical borders. Concepts I've read and enjoyed in The Broken Sword and the Kingkiller Chronicle, where Fairy doesn't necessarily have logic or monarchical lineages. Luckdragons, Child Empresses, and a mountain of ivory carved into a city at the center of a world without borders - whose borders by definition are as amorphous as the imaginations which fertilize the land.
The plot operates to the same lofty melody of many children's stories, much like The Hobbit, it the bildungsroman tradition, and is equally as enjoyable. I read through it with gusto, and enjoyed every minute of it.
In any case, there are a bunch of things I want to talk about - notable Watership Down and The Hobbit movie in my other blog. The next novel we're supposed to read here is Gene Wolfe's Something or Other, which I need to pick up. I've read a shit-ton over the holidays I expect I'll be talking about, and actuall Cam we should look into Jack Vance's The Dying Earth if we're going to talk about fantasy classics.
