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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 2051289" data-attributes="member: 812">There's a great interview with Erickson where he talks about this.Basically, Cook turned fantasy upside-down. He wrote these gritty tales about small people caught up in earth-shattering events. This wasn't Tolkien, it wasn't Howard or Lieber or Zelazny. He was telling stories from the worm's-eye view of a common soldier -- not a farm kid who turns out to be the mythically foretold bearer of the only weapon that can defeat the great enemy, not a prince of some ancient line, not a great hero who laughs at danger, but a normal guy who's just doing his job and trying to not get killed.Croaker is one of the great characters of fantasy, and when you consider the books as revolving around him, and compare him to the other main characters in this genre, I think Cook's accomplishment speaks for itself. Croaker's sitting in the pub across the street, or buying smokes in the corner store. He's shooting pool in the seedy billiards downtown and maybe holding his own against a couple of unpleasant bouncers. He lives right here where we live, and nobody in fantasy before had ever done that.And it may not be to your taste, and, well, your taste and mine evidently have very little crossover, except for Tolkien and Patrick O'Brien, but it IS important.</blockquote>