A message from author of Elfish Gene
Wow, didn't know this thread was still going until Jonny Nexus pointed it out to me.
First, thanks to all the people who have said such positive things about The Elfish Gene. I'm really glad there are so many people who 'get' the book.
Second, sorry to anyone who's been offended by it. That wasn't my intention.
To offer a little background, I wrote the first and last chapters at the same time - the very last things I wrote for the book. They were written after I'd had something of a depressing experience at a gaming night and, in retrospect, were harsher on gamers than they needed to be. I wouldn't substantially change anything if I could rewrite the book but I would perhaps make it clearer in chapter one that what I am writing about in The Elfish Gene isn't really D&D at all but masculinity. It's a very particular coming of age story, as much about how a very young boy is rejected by, eventually accepted by and finally rejects a group of slightly older boys as it is about slicing up goblins.
I should have moved forward that bit where I say that the only way D&D was to blame for the pressure cooker of sniping, back biting and personality assassination that characterised my youth was that it gave seven or eight boys an excuse to sit in a room together for their entire teenage years. There's nothing intrinsic about the game, beyond that, that had such a stunting effect on my social development. And, in the interests of scientific objectivity, it must be said we didn't have a control group to test against.
It seems to me, though, that football, rugby, fishing, martial arts and other hobbies have a way of churning out socially stunted gits too. In fact, as I say in the book, the whole social system in the seventies and eighties seemed designed to turn men into fools. As you'd know if you'd read any of my other books, 'men are fools' is pretty much a theme of my work. Like most hobbies and games D&D had its own brand of git but also had many redeeming features.
If you remove a tiny bit of chapter one and a slightly larger chunk of the final chapter you have a very fond memoir of D&D. Like I said, now I've attended a D&D con and started playing again my view is different to what it was when I'd just finished the book. It didn't help that, on the gaming evening I attended for research, one of the players was the spitting image of my old tormentor Chigger and seemed to have a few of his arrogant traits too. I thought 'oh my God, nothing's changed at all'.
This was bad luck, really as it seems to me now that many of the people playing the game today are slightly better adjusted than the general population. They're mostly too old to care about fashion, they cleave to something because they love it and for no other reason and, on the whole, they're pretty bright. I hope that, in the next edition of the book, I'll have the chance to say that.
Anyway, I did finally get drawn back in to fantasy. You can take the boy out of Mordor but you can't take Mordor out of the boy. I've written a fantasy novel called Wolfsangel under the pen name MD Lachlan which is out May 2010, published by Gollancz. It's had very nice things said about it so far by Joe Abercrombie, who needs no introduction
Joe Abercrombie - News
and Adam Roberts who, apart from being a kick-bottom author, is also SFF critic for The Guardian (UK national newspaper) . His comments on the book are here
PUNKADIDDLE: M D Lachlan, Wolfsangel (2010)
The books about a werewolf and it's set in - I hope - a historically accurate Viking age.
I'm designing an RPG to come out at the same time as the game but, I'm quite sure, it won't be ready by then as I'm currently writing the sequel to the novel.
My own new blog is at
M D Lachlan ».
