My name is Damien, and I am a fantasy fan. It started as a child, when my mum read me The Lord of the Rings. Three times. Eventually tiring of JRR Tolkien, I scoured the shelves for alternatives. I found Ursula Le Guin but her great books were too few for my habit. So I turned to David Eddings – but even the 10 volumes of the Belgariad were soon exhausted. That's when I got into Dragonlance. My fate was sealed.
I understand the pain of the addict. At the turn of a page, weeks of total immersion in a fantasy world come to an end and mundane reality is waiting. Fantasy is epic because that is how we like it. But like any narcotic substance, fantasy operates on the law of diminishing returns. Once you've see a few dozen dragons, you've seen them all. The fantasy fan is on an eternal quest to recapture that first taste of magic. Eventually, the doorstoppers don't cut it anymore. And then we are forced to go underground.
I blame it on Jeff Vandermeer. I thought I had the habit kicked. I had gone to university and moved up in the world. I had the greats of literature under my belt, from the classics to the postmodern. Then in a moment of weakness I went looking for old thrills. And there was Vandermeer, waiting. In his tales about the city of Ambergris, I found writing that looked and smelled like fantasy, but had the taste of ... literature. If Vandermeer had been alone I might have resisted, but there was Mieville with his army of remade monstrosities and the rest of the New Weird behind him. They were tearing the tired carcass of fantasy apart and stuffing it with the brutalised flesh of literature. Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.
And then I found Mythpunk. Bubbling up from the speculative fiction small press were stories that crossbred the raw material of myth, legend and folktale with the philosophy and techniques of postmodernist fiction. Theodora Goss, Ekaterina Sedia and M Rickert were telling stories so addictive that I spent months seeking and imbibing their work. But it was Catherynne M Valente who had what I needed. Her Orphan's Tale duology offers a powerful trip for fantasy heads, and the on-going "crowdfunded" serial novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland now offers a weekly dose of potent Valente strangeness.
But I was no longer satisfied with just consuming fantasy. I wanted to move up the supply chain, and for that I needed to contact the source. There were rumours of a land called the Dying Earth, a future where our world lived under the cinder of a fading sun and the tropes of fantasy and science fiction collided. A world discovered by the legendary Jack Vance, explored by M John Harrison and now ruled by Gene Wolfe. With The Book of the New Sun, Wolfe established himself as the fantasy writer's fantasy writer. Dense with symbolic meaning and lush imagery, Wolfe's writing can seem impenetrable to those seeking simple sword and sorcery adventure. But for anyone who has been traveling the realms of fantasy for a time, Wolfe comes as a revelation of what fantasy can be at its most sophisticated.
The truth is I don't suffer just from a fantasy addiction, but from a powerful and overwhelming love of reading. And in that I am not alone; in fact, dear reader, you likely share my affliction. We all know the joy of finding a great book, and the pain of sifting through the bad ones in between. The fantasy genre certainly produces its fair share of badness, but for those willing to look, there are great books to be found. I hope you take note of my suggestions (but be warned, its a slippery slope to addiction, as Sam Jordison has discovered) and, as I'm in need of my next fix, maybe the fantasy fans among you can suggest anything I might have missed?
