Taran Wanderer!

Our book today is Taran Wanderer, the fourth book in Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles. Taran Wanderer came out in 1967 and, like the rest of Alexander's work, has gone through about a gazillion editions with a gazillion different pieces of cover-art. For some mysterious reason, the cover to the 1990 'Yearling' Dell paperback has always appealed to me; it depicts Taran and his faithful forest-creature friend Gurgi (and in the background are the open-hearted blacksmith, the sternly moral farmer, and the complicated herder who all help to shape our young hero), and there's something that appeals to me about artist Jody Lee's decision to avoid pyrotechnics and stress instead something of the melancholy of growing up.

The book follows the adventures of young assistant pig-keeper Taran as he goes on a quest to discover his true parentage. Fans of the series will recall that by this point he's finally avowed his love for Princess Eilonwy, and he's necessarily feeling a bit antsy about not knowing his own background. There are two happy results of this: first, it guarantees us a nice meaty quest-narrative, which is always fun, and second, it means a book with no insufferable Eilonwy in it, which can only be accounted a good thing.

Instead, we have Taran (and Yoda-speaking Gurgi) finding their usual tally of adventures, and we have Alexander's passionate, at times sharply good prose describing it all (at one point when Taran is sick, we're told "Fever came, sweeping over him, a blazing forest through which he staggered endlessly"). Taran encounters our old friend King Smoit again and saves his life; Taran fights and as often as not thinks up alternatives to fighting; and in the book's most memorable sequence, Taran confronts the evil wizard Morda (hence the aforementioned pyrotechnics), who has already turned all of Taran's friends into animals and now threatens to do the same to Taran - and not just any animal in his case but the most lowly and wretched of them all, a blind, writing earthworm!

The wizard has scoffed contemptuously at Taran's threats of sword-play - Morda can't be killed, he tells our young hero, because he's used his mystical arts to locate his actual life outside his physical body - and he's hidden it away where nobody would think to look. Earlier in the book, Taran and his friends had by complete accident found a small cask made of bone hidden away, and Taran had kept it. In the thrilling confrontation with the wizard, Taran makes a leap of intuition that turns out to be right (and had the inevitable echoes of Tolkien):

In Taran's mind a strange thought raced. The wizard's life safely hidden? Where none would find it? Taran could not take his eyes from Morda's hand. A little finger. The coffer in the hollow tree. Slowly, terrified lest his hope betray him, Taran thrust a hand into his jacket and drew out the fragment of polished bone.

At the sight of it Morda's face seemed to crumble in decay. His jaw dropped, his lips trembled, and his voice came in a rasping whisper. "What do you hold, pig-keeper? Give it into my hands. Give it, I command you."

"It is a small thing my companions and I found," replied Taran. "How should this have worth to you, Morda? With all your power, do you covet such a trifle?"

A sickly sweat had begun to pearl on the wizard's brow. His features twitched and his voice took on a gentleness all the more horrible coming from his lips. "Bold lad to stand against me," he murmured. "I did no more than test your courage to see if you were worthy to serve me, worthy of rich rewards. You shall have gold in proof of my friendship. And in proof of yours, you shall give me - the small thing, the trifle you hold in your hand ..."

But the real drama of Taran Wanderer is personal, not sorcerous. Taran meets Craddoc, the herder, and spends a long time living in his cabin and on his humble farm, which Alexander describes with his typical broad strokes and bright colors:

The farmstead Taran saw to be a tumbledown cottage, whose walls of stone, delved from the surrounding fields, had partly fallen away. Half-a-dozen ill-shorn sheep grazed over the sparse pasture. A rusted plow, a broken-handled mattock, and a scant number of other implements lay in an open-fronted shed. In the midst of the high summits, hemmed in  closely by thorn bush and scrub, the farm stood lorn and desolate, yet clung doggedly to its patch of bare ground like a surviving warrior flinging his last, lone defiance against a pressing ring of enemies.

Craddoc convinces Taran that he is the boy's father, and the seasons Taran and Gurgi spend on Craddoc's farm are perfectly, winsomely rendered. When a terrible snowstorm descends on the hollow and Craddoc suffers a terrible fall from a ledge, many truths are revealed, and Taran is forced to continue on his quest. But the pause that is the essential quality of Taran Wanderer is nevertheless a welcome change of pace from the headlong narratives of the other books. That headlong narrative can be a great thing in itself - I doubt that anybody who's ever read The Black Cauldron has ever forgotten it - but sometimes it's nice to slow down a little and get to know the hero.

The Spirit Lens!

Our book today is Carol Berg's richly imagined 2010 fantasy novel The Spirit Lens: A Novel of the Collegia Magica, the first adventure of failed sorcery clerk Portier de Savin-Duplais, a young librarian (though not as young - or as distractingly pretty - as the elfin character on the book's eye-catching cover) at the last collegia magica in the kingdom of Sabria.

Portier is a true believer, but he's a few centuries too late; Sabria is in the boom of its own renaissance, and the magical lore so carefully accumulated and catalogued by his library is increasingly being seen as just so much mumbo-jumbo. Portier gets a little lecture on this very topic from no less a figure than Sabria's sovereign, King Philippe de Savin-Journia, a distant kinsman of our hero:

"I don't believe in magic, Portier. For most of my eight-and-thirty years, I have judged its practice entirely illusion, trickery, or coincidence. Alchemists daemonstrate every day that matter is not limited to sorcery's five divine elements. An opticum lens reveals that wood is not homogeneous, but is itself made up of water, air, and fibers. Water contains unseeable creatures and can be fractured into gaseous matter. Spark is but an explosive instance of heat and light and tinder. Similarly with air and base metal. Natural science brings logic  and reason to a chaotic universe. We have discovered more of truth in the past twenty years than in the past twenty centuries, stimulating our minds, benefiting Sabria and her citizens in innumerable ways. However, in this room, it pains me to confess, we find something different."

King Philippe has summoned Portier to investigate a murder at the royal court, a murder with distinctly magical overtones to it. To help her snarky, introspective protagonist solve this murder (a murder which, needless to say, quickly opens up into other and darker crimes), Berg creates a memorably delightful Odd Couple by teaming him with foppish clotheshorse and fumbling courtier Ilario de Sylvae, whose unwillingness to (inability to?) be introspective has him at gentle odds with his partner for the rest of the book:

Ilario's prattle dispersed my vision as the wind scatters feathers. But the pain lingered, and I could still smell the reek of blood and mortal panic. The scent of dry cedar never failed to rouse these persistent fragments of horror - memories of the day my father had tried to kill me, and I had killed him instead.

"Portier, are you quite well?"

"Yes, yes, I'm fine," I said, near breathless from a burgeoning headache. Half-sick, hands trembling and hot as if drenched in nine-year-old blood, I fought to lock away the cursed past like a stray book in its proper cupboard.

When I opened my eyes, Ilario wore an expression of drawn worry so at odds with his raked cap and dangling feathers, I had to smile. "All right, I am not fine," I said. "As with you, Chevalier, crypts and deadhouses give me the frights. Now, what were you saying about Soren?"

A friend of mine once remarked that today's extremely pricey paperbacks ($17 for The Spirit Lens when it first appeared in trade, $8 for this mass market paperback) make it impossible to walk into a bookstore's "new fantasy/sci-fi" section and simply take chances on a handful of books, as was once possible when they were reasonably priced. Sadly, this is true - so it's all the more eagerly that I recommend a book that's actually still in print and in bookstores! Give The Spirit Lens a try: you'll enjoy it very much!

The Silmarillion!

Our book today is The Silmarillion, compiled in 1977 by Christopher Tolkien from the copious miscellaneous writings his father J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, left behind when he died, writings that tell in more or less coherent narrative form the vast mytho-history of Middle Earth that's hinted at repeatedly in the two famous fantasy novels. Of all Christopher Tolkien's various necrotic vampings on his father's legacy, The Silmarillion comes to the closest to being something the father might actually have published himself had he lived.

It's a deeply, almost unfathomably strange book.

The guiding idea here is that Middle Earth isn't just a slight variation on, say, rural England of the 1890s but rather an entirely separate world with its own history, its own mythology, its own cosmology, and its own theology. In his preface to The Silmarillion, Christopher Tolkien claims that the story as he sets it out existed long, long before The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, contained in hastily-hotted old notebooks (the similarity here to Watson's battered tin dispatch-box is irresistible, and I'm betting those notebooks prove just as inexhaustible) dating back to the earliest years of the 20th century. If this is true, then Tolkien was indeed a trailblazer, since comprehensive ground-up ideological constructions of alternate realities had at that point been almost the sole preserve of science fiction, not fantasy. Certainly even Tolkien couldn't have known the tsunami his new approach would unleash; fantasy novels by far outsell science fiction novels these days, and their most common staple is the sporting of this kind of enormous undergrowth of hyper-detailed background reality. And if you detect a weary note in that, you're right: it seems to me that a very, very large percentage of the fantasy novels written in the last thirty years are a lot prouder of their meticulously-tended background reality than they are of the actual foreground-story they're supposed to be telling. Slavish imitators of Tolkien always see what he was doing, but they almost never see how well he was doing it, and the result is like sitting through somebody's extremely protracted description of a dream they just had.

Not with The Silmarillion, though: it's very, very good reading. And this is perhaps it's strangest quality, because there's no earthly reason it should be good reading. We've talked about the art of pastiche fiction here many times over the years, and we've seen it done on all kinds of templates, from Sherlock Holmes to Star Trek to Buffy the Vampire-Slayer. But The Silmarillion takes the humble art of pastiche fiction to undreamt-of levels, because the book is one long pastiche of nothing less than the King James Bible. Say what you want about Tolkien, but one thing is clear: he had a brass pair of palantir.

As such, it should be as silly and unreadable as the Book of Mormon, but J. R. R. Tolkien is a much better story-teller than Joseph Smith's garrulous angel. The Silmarillion has dull patches (Tolkien is very faithful in his pastiche, and so we learn that a fantasy-version of Deuteronomy isn't any more gripping than the original), as any long book will, but in all it's a fantastic book, populated by characters of such consistent realization that you quickly become grateful that most of Tolkien's major characters are Elves and so functionally immortal - the names gain a weird resonance as page after page - and age after age - go by in hearing them again and again.

But before the Elves, there are the gods: Tolkien (father and then son) begin the book with an account of the creation. There's a pretty little fusion of Christian and pagan right from the start, since there's both a Supreme Being whose the font of everything and a slightly lesser council of divinities who still wield enormous power. And one of those lesser divinities is evil, of course. This Satan is cast out into the realm that will one day be Middle Earth, and over the next several thousand years, this evil one is a recurrent plague to the newborn races of beings - Elves, Men, and Dwarves - who are created by the gods and come to inhabit Middle Earth.

All this mythologizing is grand and done grandly (I know it doesn't sound interesting, but trust me: you won't put the book down), but it's backdrop for the main stories Tolkien wants to tell. The foremost of these is the story of a proud, mighty Elf called Feanor and his proud, violent, fractious, and notorious sons - and the marvellous gems, the silmarils, they forge and hoard - but the real theme of the entire work is almost Homeric: that everything wanes with time. The wars between the evil god and the mightiest of Elves and Men in the first two Ages of Middle Earth are far bigger and more serious than that in the Third Age, between one of the god's lowly lieutenants and the few scattered remnants of Elves and Men still powerful enough to contest his will (only a handful of the Elves are the same in each case - Middle Earth is hazardous to your health). The simarils are far more compelling and beautiful than the Rings of Power in the book readers all know. Elves are more powerful, Men live much longer, even the stars in the sky are brighter.

When you notice this theme and read The Silmarillion with it in mind, the gorgeous melancholy of The Lord of the Rings becomes so clear as to almost break your heart, because it's the story of the end of everything great in the world. After it, there will be good in the world - and perhaps there will be bad - but nothing of either will be great.

Greatness abounds in The Silmarillion, punctuated by giant battle set-pieces that read like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle on mushrooms:

Now the phalanx of the Guard of the King broke through the ranks of the Orcs, and Turgon hewed his way to the side of his brother; and it is told that the meeting of Turgon with Hurin, who stood beside Fingon, was glad in the midst of battle. Then hope was renewed in the hearts of the Elves; and at that very time, in the third hour of morning, the trumpets of Maedhros were heard at last coming up from the east, and the banners of the sons of Feanor assailed the enemy in the rear. Some have said that even then the Eldar might have won the day, had all their hosts proved faithful; for the Orcs wavered, and their onslaught was stayed, and already some were turning to flight. But even as the vanguard of Maedhros came upon the Orcs, Morgoth loosed his last strength, and Angband was emptied. There came wolves, and wolfriders, and there came Balrogs, and dragons, and Glaurung father of dragons. The strength and terror of the Great Worm were now great indeed, and Elves and Men withered before him; and he came between the hosts of Maedhros and Fingon and swept them apart.

There is more, of course, to the Silmarillion than epic battles (although those sequences draw very visible enthusiasm from Tolkien) - there's also adventure, betrayal, internecine strife, cultural folklore, and at least one attempt on Tolkien's part at crafting something largely absent from The Lord of the Rings: an epic love story. This last, the tale of Beren and Luthien, is given its own fair-sized chapter and makes for memorable reading, but Lord of the Rings fans will find it hard not to skip ahead to book's concluding chapter, "On the Rings of Power and the Third Age," in which Tolkien manages a feat unprecedented in fantasy literature: he tells in brief, annalistic form the same story he elsewhere tells in lengthy, narrative form. It's fascinating to read about Halflings and such from a different viewpoint, to read about Curunir and Mithrandir and need to remind yourself that they're Saruman and Gandalf - in short, to find yourself wondering what "There and Back Again" would have read like if it had been written by Elrond.

Not much good can be said of Christopher Tolkien's many, many subsequent dippings into his father's literary notes and jottings, even though 2007's The Children of Hurin was a runaway bestseller. But in fashioning the Silmarillion from those notes and jottings, Christopher Tolkien has given fans of The Lord of the Rings their inestimable second epic, and he's to be thanked for that.

Top 50 Science Fiction/Fantasy - 2007!

Nothing quite so restorative as a nice long list, and there’s been some demand, so we here at Stevereads unveil the latest version of our world-famous ‘Top 50 Science Fiction/Fantasy Novels of All Time.’ (a note to completists: this list supercedes all previous lists, by virtue of the fact that we here at Stevereads just keep getting smarter)

50. Norstrilia – Cordwainer Smith
49. The Pastel City – M. John Harrison
48. The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury
47. Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
46. Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card
45. Fire Upon the Deep – Vernor Vinge
44. Dying Inside – Robert Silverberg
43. The Demolished Man – Alfred Bester
42. Gormenghast – Merwyn Peake
41. The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
40. The Lathe of Heaven – Ursula LeGuin
39. Up the Walls of the World – James Tiptree
38. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – Jules Verne
37. Dune - Frank Herbert
36. Dracula – Bram Stoker
35. Silverlock – John Myers Myers
34. The Last Unicorn – Peter S. Beagle
33. The King of Elfland’s Daughter – Lord Dunsany
32. Neuromancer – William Gibson
31. The Orphan – Robert Stallman
30. Them Bones – Howard Waldrop
29. War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
28. Under the City of Angels – Jerry E. Brown
27. The Worm Ouroboros – E. R. Eddison
26. Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
25. The Once and Future King – T. H. White
24. Elric of Melnibone – Michael Moorcock
23. Dhalgren – Samuel Delaney
22. Anno Dracula – Kim Newman
21. Perdido Street Station – China Mieville
20. The Lies of Locke Lamora – Scott Lynch
19. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
18. The Mists of Avalon – Marion Zimmer Bradley
17. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
16. Slan – A. E. Van Gogt
15. Soldier, Ask Not – Gordon Dickson
14. The Watchmen – Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
13. Glory – Alfred Coppel
12. A Million Open Doors – John Barnes
11. Doorways in the Sand – Roger Zelazney
10. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang – Kate Wilhelm
9. The Winter Queen – Joan Vinge
8. Farenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
7. Hyperion – Robert Simmons
6. A Princess of Mars – Edgar Rice Burroughs
5. Trio for Lute – R.A. MacAvoy
4. The Dragon Waiting – Robert Ford
3. Canticle for Leibowitz – Walter Miller
2. The Book of Merlyn – T.H. White
1. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien

As in previous versions of this list, there are some visible omissions. The journeyman work of such plodders as Asimov and Clarke continue to be absent, of course. Likewise we faced a problem with great writers – like Fritz Leiber, for instance – whose talents were almost always channeled into short stories (a top 50 short story list is in the offing). Another problem is of more recent vintage: fantasy authors don’t seem to write single, stand-alone novels anymore – most of the more talented writers are enmeshed in multi-volume open-ended mega-series that have no place on a list of this kind. So first-rate writers like Steve Erickson and R. Scott Baker find no mention here (a series list is another possibility).

But still! Even given unavoidable limitations, this list remains the single most definitive one in existence – which is surely what you’d expect here at Stevereads.