Tag Archives: fantasy

There Be Dragons: my 2022-2023 fantasy journey

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Stop reading here if you don’t care about my fantasy (novel reading) journey. I read the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings probably as a pre-teen in the late 1980s or so, and loved every minute of them. I was talking to a young person recently who has not read them and does not have any interest in them, and it kind of made me sad. I would not be the same person if I had not read them. Sadly, I don’t think anyone else can ever live up to Tolkien’s legacy, not even authors who put “R.R.” in their names and then don’t finish their books (I liked Ice and Fire as far as it went and I hope it eventually concludes). But anyway, here’s what I’ve read over the past year or so.

The Silmarillion: I finally went back and read this. I supposed it was in the back of my mind from the recent Amazon series (which I thought was decent and hope will continue) and from the mention of it in Ready Player Two. The Silmarillion is long and somewhat hard to read, but it really helped me appreciate the incredible depth of the fantasy world that Tolkien created. Long as it is, I did not appreciate before that the Silmarillion is only a summary of the incredibly deep alternate universe Tolkien created. He must have spent more time in that alternate universe than in this one. An interesting thing about the Silmarillion is the idea of a mischievous creator god who created evil on purpose. Was this for his amusement. He also created humans and elves, and we eventually learn that humans return to be with him after death. Elves do not die from old age or disease, but they die in battle, but they go somewhere but they don’t get to be with the creator god. Dwarves were created by a lower level of gods akin to angels, without the creator god’s permission. Orcs were created by the evil demon-like god in “mockery” of the elves.

Earthsea: I read the five-part Earthsea series by Ursula K. LeGuin. I’ve heard this described as “the other” great fantasy series of the 20th century. Maybe, but not on a par with Tolkien. I liked it.

Land Fit for Heroes: Since I love Altered Carbon, I will read anything by Richard K. Morgan. I enjoyed this, although I found the ending leaving me to piece some things together on my own, in a classic William Gibson move. Well, Morgan is clearly Gibson-inspired.

What to Middle Earth, Ice and Fire, Earthsea, and Land Fit for Heroes all have in common? DRAGONS!!! So I learned that Rule #1 of fantasy writing, should I ever choose to undertake it, is there have to be dragons.

Summer Reading 2021, and Donald Rumsfeld’s parallel universe

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Warning, I will mostly try to limit spoilers to things you could learn from reading the book descriptions below on Amazon, but if you are really interested in experiencing the Merchant Princes series, the Dark Tower series, or Star Trek Discovery with no prior inkling of what they are about, maybe avoid this post.

I haven’t made a summer reading post yet in 2021. And Donald Rumsfeld passed away this week. How are these two things related? Well, it seems that my summer reading theme for this year has settled on parallel universes. This happened somewhat by accident. A year or more ago, I ran out of books in Charlie Stross’s Laundry Files series and turned to his Merchant Princes series without really knowing what it was about. I’m going to try to avoid spoilers in this post, so let’s just say it involves parallel universes along with stealth lessons on economics and the history of technological progress. It’s also about a Game of Thrones-esque medieval succession crisis, nuclear terrorism, and how the United States government might (over)react to an incident of nuclear terrorism. Which is where Donald Rumsfeld comes in. And I’ll leave it at that, having already said too much. I never get quite into the characters or plots in this series as much as I did the Laundry Files, but I’m still enjoying.

In my mind, the real Rumsfeld in our universe gets a lot of credit for the Iraq weapons of mass destruction lie, the Iraq invasion, and Guantanamo Bay, and more generally civilian deaths and mistreatment of prisoners of war. And almost all of it was by choice rather than necessity. What I didn’t remember, but was reminded of by this Intercept article, was his central role in the “Plan B” assessment in the 70s that produced alternative facts (aka lies) about Soviet nuclear capability and led to the huge arms buildup of the 1980s. So in my book he had a lot of blood on his hands, and took foolish risks that could have led to unimaginable consequences. I find it hard to mourn his passing.

Anyway back to happier topics in bloodless fictional universes like Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. Ha ha, did I say bloodless? This is Stephen King we’re talking about. I read The Stand during the 2020 Covid-19 shut down, then moved on to this for this summer. In a forward to The Stand, Stephen King talks about how he originally intended The Stand to be a sort of Lord of the Rings set in the American west. The Stand turned out to be something different, and this turns out to be more like what The Stand was meant to be early on. There’s a tower and an eye, for chrissakes. It’s pretty awesome – a wild mashup of Lord of the Rings, Clint Eastwood movies (I’m listening to the audiobook and the narrator uses a spot-on Clint Eastwood impression throughout), King Arthur, Roger Zelasny’s Amber series (which is also evident in the Merchant Princes series, but I would say more evident here), Brothers Grimm (and/or its Disney variants), the Wizard of Oz, King’s own work, and I am sure thousands of other things I am not picking up on. Like at one point, we meet a crouching tiger and a hidden dragon just a few pages apart. It might not hold together if it was written by someone other than Stephen King, but hey…

Did I mention Star Trek Discovery above? I like Star Trek – it’s a little nerdy, a little campy, the acting is not always excellent, and it’s just relaxing and fun and you don’t have to think too hard. Well, this turned out to be less campy, better acted, and more fun than I expected. There’s some martial arts action from Michelle Yeoh, who starred in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in 2000, and is now 58 years old. And there is a parallel universe angle, which I wasn’t expecting, and just slotted it right into place with my summer theme.

I’m going to run out of Merchant Princes most likely, so I might read another Amber novel. I don’t love Amber actually, but it’s just canonical so I plan to work my way through it little by little. After Labor Day, I’ll return to my usual alternating of fiction and non-fiction, and generally slower reading pace.

Game of Thrones and human extinction

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Slate makes a pretty good point about Game of Thrones – the humans probably shouldn’t win, but they will. This happens in a lot of movies, of course. The bad guys are so bad that the good guys have no plausible chance, and then there is some deus ex machina that makes it all work out. Like all you have to do is throw a bucket of water on the previously invulnerable witch, and she melts. The Death Star has some ridiculous vulnerable point that can be taken out with one shot. The alien ship’s force field can be deactivated because it just happens to use Windows 95 as its operating system (Independence Day). It can be a little annoying if you feel like the authors/screenwriters were just lazy. But in the end, you can either suspend your disbelief and enjoy the story, or go watch a documentary or read a non-fiction book if you are such as deadly serious person you can’t do that.


Viewers have known from the beginning that humanity is facing an existential threat from the army of undead known as the White Walkers, but the show’s characters have discovered the looming crisis only gradually, and they’ve been slow to reckon with the little they do know. Now, with the Night King’s masses marching south from the sundered Wall, there’s no doubt that the threat is real. And yet, with only five episodes of Game of Thrones remaining, the human race is resolutely failing to rise to the occasion. Jon Snow’s attempt to form an alliance with Daenerys Targaryen has created dissension instead of unity, with some northern houses deserting the cause and others, like poor little Lord Umber’s, left unprepared and undersupplied. Despite having pledged her troops, Cersei is merely lying in wait, hoping that the rival armies weaken each other enough for her to conquer whatever remains.

So there you have it. I don’t really think Game of Thrones is primarily a climate change allegory. It mashes together a lot of different things as good authors (especially fantasy and science fiction authors) tend to do. Early on, I thought it was a realistic depiction of social conditions in a medieval, feudal society, examining what it was like for various groups to live there, with just enough fantasy and soft porn thrown in to keep people hooked. Mythologically, there are definitely some King Arthur ties. Zoroastrians have a seven-fold god and fire temples, and the Celts have tree spirits. Most religions have some sort of apocalypse scenario, and in many it is part of a cycle that repeats.

What do I think is going to happen? We may never find out what George R.R. Martin originally had in mind, any more than Disney’s Star Wars ending is likely to match whatever George Lucas had in mind. This is not a particularly bold prediction, but I predict the Deus Ex Machina is going to involve dragons and fire in some way. The humans will have all but lost, and then the fire god will step in and cleanse the land in some way so the cycle can begin again.

Tolkien and World War I

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Here’s an article on how J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels were influenced by his experience in World War I.

The descriptions of battle scenes in “The Lord of the Rings” seem lifted from the grim memories of the trenches: the relentless artillery bombardment, the whiff of mustard gas, the bodies of dead soldiers discovered in craters of mud. In the Siege of Gondor, hateful orcs are “digging, digging lines of deep trenches in a huge ring,” while others maneuver “great engines for the casting of missiles…”

In “The Lord of the Rings,” we meet Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee, Hobbits of the Shire, on a fateful mission to destroy the last Ring of Power and save Middle-earth from enslavement and destruction. The heroism of Tolkien’s characters depends on their capacity to resist evil and their tenacity in the face of defeat. It was this quality that Tolkien witnessed among his comrades on the Western Front…

Beside the courage of ordinary men, the carnage of war seems also to have opened Tolkien’s eyes to a primal fact about the human condition: the will to power. This is the force animating Sauron, the sorcerer-warlord and great enemy of Middle-earth. “But the only measure that he knows is desire,” explains the wizard Gandalf, “desire for power.” Not even Frodo, the Ring-bearer and chief protagonist, escapes the temptation.

Great stories tend to have a clear cut line between good and evil. In real life, we tell ourselves stories about good and evil, often to rationalize our own actions. But the vast majority of evil outcomes in the real world are not caused by intentionally evil acts, but by ignorance, negligence, and amorality. People don’t have the mental tools to understand and make good decisions about the complex systems we are all embedded in, and don’t think enough about right and wrong in their daily actions. How do you tell compelling stories about that?