The Worm Ouroboros

High ranking British civil servants from the 1920's and 30's are not generally known for their flights of fancy, but that's exactly what Eric Rucker Eddison, author of some of the most amazing pre-Tolkien epics, was.

I'd never heard of The Worm Ouroboros before starting this challenge. I'd seen it, but never picked it up before. The title conjured up images of a Conanesque tale with a mighty thewed, fur clad hero creeping through caves and catacombs, sword in hand, looking for a monster (the worm or 'wyrm' of the title) who was terrifying the locals. The Worm Ouroboros does have the mighty thews and some of the heroes wear furs, most of them carry dirty great swords that are lovingly described down to the very last detail. Robert Jordan has nothing on Eddison in the intricate description stakes. The rest of it, though, I was way off the mark there. The Worm (based on the Norse legend of the mighty world encompassing snake that swallows it's own tail) never actually appears in the book, it's the design of a signet ring that seems to give the near immortal villain of the piece; King Gorice of Witchland, power.

The story is set on Mercury, which has prompted some to call it a form of planetary romance, but the Mercury of Eddison's saga has more in common with Middle-earth than it does with the second planet from the Sun. It's rather like Eddison found every form of mythology and legend he could and tried to pack them into the one story. There's bit of Norse and Celtic legend and mythology in there. The Arabs get a look in as well. Readers encounter Demons, Witches, Imps, Pixys, Ghouls, there's gryphons and basilisks, there's even a talking bird based on a heraldic device.

The plot is fairly basic. Lord Goldry Bluszco of Demonland beats King Gorice XI of Witchland in a wrestling (the author calls it wrastling, which kept making me think of Hulk Hogan taking on Randy Savage) match and inadvertently kills him. This sparks off a war between the two superpowers of Mercury and that takes up most of the rest of the book. Matters are complicated by the devious Imp lord Gro, who seems to delight in protracting the fight. For love he eventually throws his lot in with the Demons and dies nobly.

Like a number of the older fantasies The Worm Ouroboros is big on description, Eddison's command of the language and his descriptive pieces are top notch, and I'd be surprised if Tolkien wasn't inspired in part by some of them. However the character and plot development suffer at the expense. I didn't get to really know any of the characters and therefore didn't much care what happened to them. Due to Eddison's use of archaic Jacobean language I had trouble picking the characters apart, to the extent that the females spoke exactly the same as the males. The insistence on using Jacobean language made the book fairly hard to understand and in fact to read for a modern reader, the passages with letters or excerpts from books were done in Middle Ages English and were virtually unintelligible. There was also the issue of beginning with using a native of Earth; Lessingham, as a narrator with the help of a martlet, but he seemed to have been forgotten by about the third chapter and was never mentioned again. I assume the poor bloke is still kicking about there up on Mercury.

It was an interesting read and modern day readers owe E.R Eddison a great debt, because it was writers like him who broke the ground for Tolkien and Lewis. Michael Moorcock, Robert Silverberg and Clive Barker have all been admirers of his work.

If you wanted to read something similar, but more accessible I'd advise you to look at some of L. Sprague De Camp's and Fletcher Pratt's Harold Shea Incompleat Enchanter books which do cover similar ground when Shea visits worlds like that of Spenser's Faerie Queene. There's also Edgar Rice Burroughs Princess of Mars, which I know is classified as science fiction, but Eddison's Mercury is about as scientific as Burrough's Mars is.

Lord Foul's Bane

The 2nd last of the D’s for the challenge.

I’ve read Stephen Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane (the opening book of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever) 3 times now and it’s never inspired me to read the rest of the series. As the last time was in the late 80’s, I thought things may have changed over time. Sadly that is not the case.

Lord Foul’s Bane came out at about the same time as Terry Brooks Sword of Shannara and both books were hailed as successors to JRR Tolkien’s (Lord of the Rings) mantle as the master of high fantasy. Right from the start Shannara was, and still is, pilloried as being extremely derivative of Tolkien. Donaldson’s work did not suffer the same fate, although it does not now seem to inspire the positive criticism that it once enjoyed. In a number of ways I found it far more derivative of Tolkien’s work than Terry Brooks’ debut.

One of the things that sets the Covenant Chronicles apart from other similar works is it’s protagonist. Thomas Covenant is an adult, a successful novelist, he lives in America and he is a leper.

Covenant is involved in a car accident and finds himself in the Land (no, I’m not kidding, Donaldson called his world the Land), a pre industrial world where humans and other races live in harmony with nature. Covenant's missing 2 fingers (they were removed to prevent the more rapid spread of his disease) and the white gold wedding ring he still wears, despite his wife having left him with their infant son after his positive diagnosis, mark him as the legendary hero Berek Halfhand. It’s never really explained how Covenant came to be transported to the Land, although it is believed to be the work of Cavewight Drool Rockworm at the behest of Lord Foul the Despised. Covenant believes that the entire thing is some sort of vivid dream and that is why he names himself The Unbeliever. He’s involved in a sort of quest to rid the Land of Rockworm’s army of Cavewights and ur-viles and the presence of Foul himself.. Aside from possibly the most unsympathetic protagonist ever in ef only one character is more than two dimensional sketch and that’s Covenant’s good natured friend the Ent…sorry Giant Seaheart Foamfollower. I think the Giant was meant to provide some sort of comedy relief, the book is unrelentingly bleak, but most of his jokes fell rather flat.

If it sounds like I didn’t like this book then you’re right. I didn’t. The prose is uninspiring, it’s appallingly derivative of Tolkien, it’s humourless, the world building is poor and the characters are two dimensional, it’s been saddled with an unlikeable, unpleasant anti-hero and then there’s his disease. There’s a reason Stephen Donaldson made Thomas Covenant a leper. Donaldson’s father was a doctor who worked with lepers in India, Donaldson himself lived there between the ages of 3 and 16. What he saw and experienced there obviously had a profound effect on him and seem to have inspired the creation of his main character. Readers are told right from the start what Covenant suffers from and given details about the disease and how it affect sufferers, we do not need to have this reinforced every single chapter from that point on. I didn’t care about Covenant himself, the Land, the quest or any of his companions. There are 8 more books featuring Covenant, with at least one more due in 2013 (The First Chronicles, The Second Chronicles and The Last Chronicles, there’s that marvellously inventive imagination at work again!)

I’ve been led to believe that some of Stephen Donaldson’s other work; his science fiction Gap Cycle and the Mordant’s Need epic fantasy books aren’t all that bad. I’m not sure that I really want to take the chance, though.

Similar works that are also rather Tolkienesque, but in my opinion far more enjoyable are: Tad Williams Memory, Sorrow and Thorn and some of Robert Jordan’s early Wheel of Time books, before that author became obsessed with the minutiae of his creation. At times I wondered if Jordan had taken some things from Lord Foul’s Bane and improved on them for his own epic. You could also of course read Lord of the Rings, but if you do that, treat yourself and read The Hobbit first.

Favourite Authors

Some time ago I participated in a forum topic that asked people to name their top 5 favourite SFF authors. This is what I came up with at the time.

I tried to limit myself by not including an author who doesn’t have a body of work behind them or whose work has not yet stood the test of time. I also tried not to include authors who are still writing unfinished series, because I may not like the ending of
the series or they may never finish that series. Now having said all that I just know my choices are going to contradict some of it. These are in no particular order, all I had to was name my 5 favourites not choose who was better than someone else:

1) Tad Williams: I haven’t seen this bloke write a bad book. From Tailchaser’s Song to the first volume of the Shadow series. He also writes different things. Tailchaser’s Song was a whimsical little piece about the mythology of cats.
Memory, Sorrow & Thorn was a big LotR style epic, in fact I feel it was William’s homage to Tolkein.
Otherland mixed fantasy and science fiction and had nods to everything from Alice In Wonderland to modern role playing computer games.
Then he blew me away with the dark, but ultimately uplifting The War Of The Flowers.
I’m reserving judgement on the Shadow series. The first book was less gripping than his other work and I’m waiting until he puts out the final book of that before getting the others.

2) Terry Pratchett: you can’t not include him. When A Colour Of Magic came out there were a number of ‘funny’ fantasies along the same lines of hapless, inept wizard (Rincewind) blunders from disaster to disaster, but eventually comes out on top, ACoM was a cut above most, but then when he decided to use totally different characters and examine another part of the world in Equal Rites that elevated him to a new level. He’s demonstrated that he can write across ages (the Bromeliad trilogy and the Johnny Maxwell books) and genres (Good Omens with Neil Gaiman and the new Nation, which is very different, but
still immensely enjoyable).

3) J.K Rowling: the first contradiction. The Harry Potter books, whilst fantastic, are all one genre and about the same characters. She may have other books in her, but following HP is a hard ask. I’ve included her because I loved the HP books, the way the world was presented and how the characters, even the peripheral ones (Neville Longbottom from shy, awkward kid to butt kicking revolutionary hero) grew throughout the 7 books. She also provided many people with their entry into the wonderful world of fantasy and reading in general.

4) Jasper Fforde: he’d get in there just for Thursday Next, a concept which turned amusing fantasy on it’s head. I think the books have been described as silly books for smart people. He’s also done some ‘nursery rhyme’ mysteries, which while not as groundbreaking orbrilliant as the Thursday Next series, are still thoroughly enjoyable and made me laugh out loud on public transport, something which always earns me disapproving glares from the people in dark suits and I love it when that happens. He did a good job with the first book of a completely new series: Shades of Grey, which I reviewed here back in January.

5) JRR Tolkien: had to be there. The Hobbit is one of my all time favourite books, very different from LotR. I’m not a big LotR fan, I liked the book and the films and I can appreciate the achievement and the writing, but mainly the good professor makes this list for what his masterpiece did. It legitimized fantasy writing, it revolutionized the genre. If not for LotR and it’s stunning success many of the authors we have all loved and enjoyed may never have written and certainly would not have been inspired to turn their talents to thetype of work that they have produced.

There were a whole bunch of people who missed out: George RR Martin,I’m a huge Ice and Fire fan, but I haven’t really enjoyed anything else that Martin has done and the last half a book (don’t kid yourself AFfC is half a book, no matter what spin the author or his more enthusiastic fans try to put on it) and the time and obvious struggle that the creator is having with the second half and the delay in producing it leads me to believe that he has lost control of the concept and that it may remain unfinished.
Alan Dean Foster missed out, he’s predominantly a science fiction author, but his Spellsinger series was something I really had a lot of fun with, however the last couple of books in that were written purely for the money and cheapened the whole concept. Clive Barker couldn’t quite get in there, yes I know he’s mostly horror, but Weaveworld and Imajica were pure fantasy.
Parke Godwin, although I see Firelord as fantasy, his other work was largely historical fiction.
Roberta MacAvoy, probably my fault because I’ve only read the Damiano series, but I did try to read The Book of Kells and was unable to get through it.
I would have loved to have included Scott Lynch, but the Gentleman Bastards series is unfinished and has yet to stand the test of time.
Joe Abercrombie was unlucky, because The First Law trilogy almost tops Martin for edgy, hard, epic fantasy, but again we’ve yet to see how well his work will be regarded in 5 or 10 years time.
Dave Duncan was another person I couldn't include. I still think his first Pandemia series: A Man Of HIs Word is one of the best fantasy series I've ever read, but aside from it's sequel series and the two Omar books (Reaver's Road and Hunter's Haunt) Duncan hasn't ever reached those same heights for me.