Last year for my fiftieth birthday, Taryn and Shasta gave me a "Game of Thrones" party.  There were just a dizzying amount of gifts -- embroidered sigil patches, kraken pins, dragons, eggs, a beautiful wolf cup -- and of course, the five extant books of The Game of Thrones. 

The TV show had already become a social event for Chris and me; and on our 10th anniversary trip last year, he and I went on The Game of Thrones tour to Northern Ireland, visiting Tollymore Forest and other film sites, where we had a delirious, glorious time ooo'ing at trees where characters had met their demises in a number of ways, and petting the adult wolf dogs that had played the direwolf puppies in the first season.

Interesting fact: one of the dogs had double dewclaws.  Oh, and they were AWESOME ANIMALS.

I had not read the books.  I had two fears.  First fear: they would be awful.  Second fear: they would be great and I would then be compelled to spend half a year reading through all of them.  But neither fears came to fruition.

Martin cites many influences on his series, but I think Dune also had to have been a huge influence as well, since this is a story of grand politics told at a very personal level, which lends both aspects gravitas.  I was surprised at how solid the writing was despite its bulk, and also how respectful and understanding of the source material the TV show is: in fact, I am not sure I could have read through this book without having seen the show first, because this is not a comfortable genre (high fantasy with quests and politics) for me. But I am not reading the rest of the books (right now): I know the stories already, and as Taryn has noted, they are terribly sad -- tragic -- stories.  It's much easier to watch them with a friend (thank you, Chris), then to be with them alone, curled in your chair.  

Taryn won't watch more of the series and does not want to read the books.  I still want to make her a mashup of all the cool dragon scenes.  Not the miserable ones.  The cool ones.

One of the passages I liked, from Arya's dancing master, Syrio:

"Just so. Opening your eyes is all that is needing. The heart lies and the heart plays tricks with us, but the eyes see true. Look with your eyes. Hear with your ears. Taste with your mouth. Smell with your nose. Feel with your skin. Then comes the thinking, afterward, and in that way knowing the truth."

Lessons for Writers: Perhaps a writer needs to remember that although she is creating a world in which her reader lives that -- even though characters must not be coddled -- perhaps some care of the reader needs to be taken.  Perhaps.  

Before we go further, this very salient article on fantasy from Ed Power, originally published December 22, 2013, in The Boston Globe.

WITH THE “THE HOBBIT: The Desolation of Smaug” sitting atop the box-office list—as now seems automatic for each of Peter Jackson’s vivid renderings of Middle-earth—we’re treated to a new round of public accolades for author J.R.R. Tolkien. With each movie’s release, we’ve been reminded of the Oxford professor’s rarefied position in the genre: his epic imagination, unique storytelling abilities, and foundational role in fantasy’s history.

Modern fantasy is a vast and commercially successful realm. HBO’s gritty, bawdy “Game of Thrones” is one of the most successful shows on cable, wooing critics and audiences with smart dialogue and sophisticated plotting. Schoolboy wizard Harry Potter anchored a colossally successful book and film series, spawning college quidditch teams and making its author, for a time, wealthier than Queen Elizabeth. Online, an estimated 8 million subscribers play “World of Warcraft,” a multiplayer game that unfolds in a shared universe of sword-wielding heroes and horrific monsters. A movie adaptation is in the works.

Clearly fantasy has evolved in a way that makes it a touchstone in the culture. But how much of its success do we really owe to Tolkien’s influence? Questioning Tolkien’s status as the father of fantasy fiction might seem as presumptuous as marching into the villainous realm of Mordor through the front gate. But the closer you look at contemporary fantasy, the less Tolkien you see. Harry Potter owes more to Peter Pan than to Bilbo Baggins. The moral and political complexity of “Game of Thrones”—both the TV series and the George R.R. Martin books on which they are based—didn’t exist in Tolkien’s universe. (Those astonished by the lusty mix of betrayal, nudity, and casual violence in “Game of Thrones” are perhaps unaware these have been standard devices in fantasy for decades.) Indeed, Martin, along with the majority of notable fantasy writers of the past 30 years, sidesteps Tolkien almost entirely.

Tolkien may overshadow other fantasy writers in name recognition, and his high-handed purity and saintly protagonists may define fantasy in the popular imagination. But the real strengths of modern fantasy, what makes the genre increasingly popular, are qualities that come from other sources entirely. Most important is a parallel, overwhelmingly American, tradition of fantasy that has its roots in the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s—and whose surprising influence and foresightedness suggests that sophistication doesn’t always come from the libraries of Oxford.

IN THE BROADEST sense, the roots of fantasy extend to the very foundations of world literature. What are “The Odyssey” and “Beowulf” but “Lord of the Rings”-style epics? Fantasy in the narrower modern sense, however—a distinct category of derring-do with a stereotypically medieval setting, where magic and nonhuman races mingle—began in the Victorian era. That period gave rise to fantastical storytellers such “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” author Lewis Carroll and William Morris, the noted British textile designer and socialist campaigner. Morris’s 1894 epic “The Wood Beyond The World”—a ripping quest novel in which the protagonist journeys to an unfamiliar world, makes the acquaintances of a comely heroine, and is menaced by ogre-like “mini giants”—can be seen as a direct precursor of modern fantastical writing.

That writing began to blossom as a genre with the rise of the pulps, the cheap and lurid fiction magazines of the first half of the 20th century. Chief among them was Weird Tales, which began publication in 1923. Established by J. C. Henneberger, a Chicago journalist, Weird Tales published gothic horror stories and lusty adventure yarns, the latter typically set in reimagined versions of Middle Ages Europe or Asia.
It was in the feverishly penned pages of Weird Tales, and rivals such as Unknown and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, that several of fantasy’s most authoritative voices gained prominence. One was Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian; another was Fritz Leiber, one of the acknowledged inventors of “low fantasy,” which emphasizes gritty realism and is skeptical as to the possibility of Arthurian chivalry in a pre-modern world. Weird Tales also published H.P. Lovecraft, the Providence-born horror pioneer whose dystopian dread informs much modern imaginative fiction.

The pulp writers were contemporaries of Tolkien, but operated in a far darker milieu. Howard’s Conan stories are rip-roaring and full-blooded, a tapestry of amoral protagonists, exposed flesh, and gory action. Leiber showed fantasy could be urban—and urbane. His wry Lankhmar series is set in a vast fetid city of the same name; his recurring “heroes,” Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are, respectively, a thuggish hired sword and a wiry thief. Through their eyes, Leiber investigates the murky side of human nature, the characters indulging in such unTolkien-esque pursuits as boozing, wenching, and dueling. A cesspool of inequity, populated with feuding guilds, conspiratorial cults, and cutthroats lying in wait, Lankhmar feels vividly alive in a way Middle-earth arguably never does: You can almost smell the exotic spices, the open gutters, the freshly spilled blood.
 
Tolkien, meanwhile, was giving the world a different sort of fantastical writing. Middle-earth represented a lifetime’s work for the Englishman, who started sketching its fabulous races, swooping topography, and imagined languages as early as 1917, on sick leave from the army. His first novel, “The Hobbit,” was published in 1937. Typical of Tolkien, it contains plenty of peril and lots of backstory, but it is ultimately simplistic in its moral outlook. A heroic quest is undertaken by a doughty band, an evil dragon is defeated, and important lessons are learned. Granted, one of the heroes is killed at the end—but it is a noble passing, a respectable warrior’s death. “The Lord of the Rings,” the more ambitious and grandiose trilogy that followed, synthesized Anglo-Germanic heroic literature with a similarly black-and-white worldview, one colored by the conflicts of the 20th century. There is good and evil in Tolkien and very little between. The moral ambivalence of those American fantasy magazines—and of the world we actually inhabit—is largely absent.
Tolkien’s work did one undeniably important thing: It reached people who had never even heard of Leiber, Howard, or Weird Tales. The book particularly caught on in colleges, colonizing a highbrow new audience for what had been a fairly marginal and pulpy genre. As “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” achieved a critical mass of fandom through the late 1960s and early 1970s, fantasy and Tolkien started to become synonymous in the wider culture.

AT THE PEAK of Tolkien’s ascendancy, a new force arrived that would drive the development of fantasy: hobby gaming. First published in 1974 by two war-gaming fans with a taste for epic adventure, the complex pen-and-paper “role-playing” game Dungeons and Dragons quickly began to redefine the genre. D&D put fantasy’s tropes in the hands of a new audience who might have been disinclined to sit through hundreds of pages of Tolkien’s plodding prose, and provided a way to mix and match them. In a way, it open-sourced the genre.
 
D&D did borrow characters straight from Tolkien—its imagined realms teemed with dragons and orcs, halflings and dwarves. D&D’s designers, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, were clearly well-versed in Middle-earth, and it is often assumed the game represented an early kind of Tolkien fan fiction. But its roots were far more diverse. D&D’s intricate magic system is thought to have been based on American fantasy writer Jack Vance’s “Dying Earth” cycle; the gaudy, grubby warrior medievalism of the game owes more to the lurid imaginings of Robert E. Howard than to Tolkien’s donnish pastoralism. The game’s chief motive is usually a treasure-driven quest of shifting alliances or a straightforward monster-slaying spree—a far cry from Tolkien’s noble band united to save the world from creeping evil.

Forty years on, that more worldly and cynical sensibility exerts far more influence on fantasy—and on the wider culture—than does Tolkien. “World of Warcraft” and other popular online gaming franchises, as well as the popular collectible card game Magic The Gathering, flow from the distinctive sensibility established by Dungeons and Dragons. Many of the authors responsible for some of the most influential works of the post-Tolkien era are gamers themselves. George R.R. Martin has role-played, as has Terry Pratchett, creator of the greatly loved “Discworld” books. Dungeons and Dragons was likewise an inspiration for Steven Erikson, whose sprawling “Malazan Book of The Fallen” saga is, in terms of universe building and narrative ambition, perhaps the most significant fantasy sequence of the past decade.

By contrast, the most Tolkien-esque strains of fantasy have largely tumbled by the wayside. Terry Brooks’s “The Sword of Shannara,” a surprise blockbuster that reached The New York Times Best Seller list in 1977, was so indebted in tone and structure to Tolkien that today it reads like the literary equivalent of a covers record. That isn’t to suggest that people have stopped writing, or reading, fantasy that follows Tolkien’s old-fashioned sense of moral certainty. But these books have dwindled steadily in number and cultural heft, so that today “classic”—i.e Tolkienesque—fantasy exists as merely a subcategory of a wider genre.
Why has fantasy fiction prove so enduringly popular? Clearly part of the appeal lies in the way it speaks to our imagination. More than that, however, it lets writers work through complicated moral questions at a distance from the real world. It explores very human themes—loyalty, ambition, how to govern a society—in a setting imaginary enough to avoid coming across as partisan or preachy.

The works that do this best—most recently “Game of Thrones,” “The Malazan Book of the Fallen,” Joe Abercrombie’s “First Law” novels—draw their mood and internal architecture from books with a very different worldview and moral code than “The Lord of the Rings.” Tolkien will always have his place in the canon; after all, it’s fun to lose yourself in “The Hobbit” for three hours in a theater. But as people read the books and watch the bloated movie adaptations, it does no service to the genre to suggest that his work is the model for all that followed. It makes it all too easy for those new to these fantastical worlds to assume Tolkien’s prudishness, his sometimes archaic prose, and his Boy Scout characters are failings not of one man stooped over a desk in postwar Britain, but of all fantasy—for all time.

"Women are horrible.  I mean, quite as horrible as men.  Is there anyone in the wide world that has aught but ice water in his or her veins?"

Fritz Leiber is a favorite author.  I was really impressed by his science fiction story The Wanderer; Conjure Wife is already a favorite fantasy book of ours.  There is no doubt that he had seminal influence on many authors -- Roger Zelazny, and R.R. Martin has no doubt borrowed a lot of gravitas from this series of stories  written over half a century. This story I had read before, in eighth grade --  originally entitled Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser  -- but I only remembered one scene: where Fafhrd's betrothed Ice Woman is furious at him for being attracted to the visiting showgirl, Vlana.

In Conjure Wife, all women are secret witches who control their husbands' lives.  In this book, the northern Ice Women are a domineering and sorcerous matriarchy, and in the more "civilized lands," women are utterly excluded from power and position.  These stories were written in the forties, so I found myself searching for some indication that Leiber was making a statement about unfairness, cruelty, and the play of power between the sexes, rather than displaying overt sexism.  There is evidence that this is indeed thoughtful commentary, overlaid as it is with a lively its "swords and sorcery" adventure.

I enjoyed this book, though I was not enthralled enough to continue reading more stories in the series-- just yet.  What makes this a very nice read is , at 150 pages, it is not longer than it needed to be (I am wearying of overblown thousand page stories), the images and concepts often invoked a "I can't believe you went there," reaction, and amazing use of adjectives made the story pop ("Pawky" comes readily to mind.).

I have more appreciation for this story, too, because Chris and I visited Borderlands in San Francisco yesterday, which is a bookstore for science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery.  I went through a half dozen books looking for a good read... and I can't believe how much poor, blocky, obvious-hit-the-numbers writing is out there.  Are editors even aware of how powerfully books can evoke a reader these days?  How books should be?

As an example, this paragraph:

"Mouse," the mage had said, firelight dancing on his short white beard, "when you stare your eyes like that and flare your nostrils, you are too much like a cat for me to credit you will ever be a sheepdog of the truth. You are a middling dutiful scholar, but secretly you favor swords over wands. You are more tempted by the hot lips of black magic than the chaste slim fingers of white, no matter to how pretty a misling the latter belong -- no, do not deny it!  You are more drawn to the beguiling sinuosities of the left-hand path than the straight steep road of the right.  I fear me you will never be mouse in the end but mouser.  And never white but gray -- oh well, that's better than black.  Now, wash up these bowls and go breathe an hour on the newborn ague-plant for 'tis a chill night, and remember to talk kindly to the thorn bush."

For writers, these lessons: even a muscular adventure story can have the sinews of thematic relevance, and should.  And even a high fantasy story can have magical, take-your-breath away writing, and should.

And for more thoughts on Fritz Leiber's symbolism...