Book of Three
Fantasy Playland
University of Cairhien
TheGrimoire
Fantasy Playbook
Scrollwork
Fantasy Porn
Big Fantasy
Fantasy Taverna
The Giants Cup
The Wyvern's Lair
Gloin's Tankard
Iron Fantasy
Fantasy King
Come Fantasy
Lord of Fantasy
The Dark Art
Arcana Fantasy
Chaos Fantasy Light
Legend of Dongslayer
Battle Fantasy
Fantasy Legends
Infinity Fantasy
Yes, I really seriously considred using the word porn to drive traffic here. Ultimately though I settled on Gods of Dark - Swords of Light. It's not an easy thing to remember, we'll see how it goes.
My reasoning was thus: the subtitle of the page reads: Reviews of Fantasy Novels--New and Old, Thoughts on Fiction, Theme and Philosophy, Magic and Horror, Abundance and Dearth, Depravity and Goodness.
These sorts of dialectics abound in fantasy, in all literature and thought really. And what dialectics really do, is provide thoughtful memory aids, imaginative boxes around imaginary objects. These imaginary lines provide definition and scope for our thoughts. Anyone whose played a logic game knows that the trick to solving the game relies on your ability to drop objects into boxes. You solve the problem by seeing what's not there--not what is.
Fantasy, even in its gray areas, is about the battle of chaos and order, evil and good. Even masters like Erickson, who provides many great examples of characters who want to destroy the world, but heck, aren't that bad, ultimately rely on this trope of all tropes. And why not? There is so much awfulness in the world, so much brutality, that we live like pinpricks of light, flashing all around in eternal night. There was a video game I used to play, on the SNES, called Populous. Basically, you leveled earth so that your population could grow. You could create knights and such, but nothing like Age of Empires. Toward the end of the game, and these games would go on forever, you could select the Armageddon option. This would eliminate everybody's house, and the two populations would come at each other in full force, dropping everything. My metaphor here is: a beautiful dream of fantasists everywhere is to get all the good guys together, for one day, and fight the bad guys, for peace and preservation. Jordan provided another great analogy for this fight
. The Aiel, as they existed before the breaking, were a group of pacifists who believed that there was no excuse for violence. And in one story, they encircled a crazed madman, singing at him, buying time for the citizens to escape. The madman incinerated them one by one, but they kept singing, until finally he listened to the last Aiel for an hour, before killing him, snuffed like a candle. It's these pinpricks of light that make the fight against the dark so appealing. Its so hopeless, but self sacrifice is beautiful, and never in vain.My new title reflects this dialectic. It also throws in a few other ideas. Fantasy is always about dark gods. My last post mentioned the evil god Torak. Evil Gods are critical to fantasy, and men are like blades of grass to their casual predations. But man has an advantage, he builds tools, and he invests them with power and meaning. The Sword of Shannara was one of my first fantasy novels. The power of the sword's symbolism was almost as important as its actual power. This is an idea that many fantasy novels explore, what is man without his tools? And when his tools are powerful, does the power corrupt him, and are the tools themselves evil? Yet even so, they're such powerful symbols of hope in these beleaguered worlds that they retain their power.
But note that the dialectic here isn't God versus God, it's God versus Man. The obvious non-parallelism here indicates that the central tenets of fantasy are man's struggle against fate, against mediocrity, against cowardice. These are the things I wish to explore on my blog, and so, henceforth, Gods of Dark, Swords of Light.
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