Who are Howard and Leiber?

[jaerdaph]

Interesting bit of trivia about Fritz Leiber I learned this weekend:

Leiber's father, Fritz Sr., was a film actor in the 1910s, 20s and 30s and appeared in the 1939 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Charles Laughton. Fritz, Jr. also appeared in that movie with his father, uncredited.

 

[WayneLigon]

Fantasy fiction is unusual as to how many books it takes to tell one story. Most other genres do it in one.

Juliet McKenna has a great article on the 'why' of trilogies.

 

[barsoomcore]

Newer authors tend to use more pages and tell bigger stories.

I don't entirely disagree with this, but wanted to point out that there are plenty of big, long stories in earlier years: Peake's Gormenghast books require serious commitment from any writer, and Charles Dickens (in which one can see many modern fantasy tropes prefigured) certainly wrote effective doorstops (in serial format, no less).

But 50, 100 years ago, I suspect the primary market for fiction was magazines. And so stories tended to be shorter, more self-contained. Nowadays the publishing business has its manufacturing and distribution processes well-tuned enough that churning out thousands of mammoth tomes and getting them to bookstore shelves and readers' hands is more feasible than it once was.

So part of the trend has little to do with fantasy in and of itself. And certainly other genres produce extended series -- go review the mystery section of your favourite bookstore and see how many books are subtitled "A Mr. Hoobajoob Mystery" or "Fifth in the Small-Time Murders series".

But of course it is fantasy that is primarily concerned with world-building. In writing a fantasy novel, a writer typically creates an entire world, with history and what not. When telling their tale, they have to also explain the context in which it occurs, which something the writer of detective novels doesn't have to worry about so much. When John Le Carre's character goes to France, John can write, "He went to France," and his readers have all sorts of built-in context for that statement.

But when a fantasy writer writes, "He went to Yamamunga," he needs to provide for his readers all the context that Le Carre gets for free.

And of course part of the motivation driving a fantasy writer is the chance to show off his world, and therefore a story that explores every nook and cranny and brings to light every clever detail is going to naturally appeal to him.

So I don't think it should be surprising that fantasy writers tend towards large tomes.

That said, it's instructive to review the old magazine/serial writers, because they tend be very good at providing that context very efficiently. You don't need to read much Leiber to know what Lankhmar is like, nor much Howard to get a very clear impression of Hyboria.

Or go back to Burroughs and watch how he evokes Barsoom. Mm, tasty...

 

[tetsujin28]

Granted. But if you are looking to Tolkein for polished fiction, you're missing the point.

Other than The Hobbit, I don't look to him for fiction at all I'm mainly a fan of his academic work, which was top-notch.

 

[tetsujin28]

One of the things that... well, I can hardly say it amazes me. Perhaps saddens. One of the the things that saddens me about this thread are the group of people who seem to think that if you're a modern writer of fantasy who is incredibly succesful, you're a BAD WRITER.

No, I just think bad writers are BAD WRITERS I'm very, very hard to please when it comes to fiction.

I'd say the edge of Classic - most of his seminal work was back in the 60s and 70s.

Ron Edwards puts Moorcock in the second wave of sword-and-sorcery writers, "the fans". The '60s and '70s is actually where S&S takes a serious plunge into mediocrity, with a few notable exceptions (Moorcock, Karl Edward Wagner, Poul Anderson).

 

[Glyfair]

Pratchett is one of the few authors that I know played D&D - he has mentioned it in interviews with gaming magazines back when his books first started appearing, for example the luggage was actually in a D&D game originally. Not sure what edition though (must have been either OD&D, BD&D or 1e due to the period though).

George R.R. Martin has at least played Superworld (the Wild Cards series developed from a Superworld campaign). Feist has played D&D. I think a number of the shared world series developed out of roleplaying games (I think Thieves World might be on of the few that went the other way). Liavek comes to mind.

 

[Glyfair]

Let's face it, prior to 1970, fantasy was a tiny little genre read by very few people (with a couple of exceptions).

A lot of that seems to have been publisher bias (although some of that might also have come from audience bias). I read somewhere that in the 40's and 50's if you wanted to write fantasy and make any money, you needed to write it as science fiction. A good percentage of the middle century's fantasy would actually be considered fantasy. Vance's Dying Earth comes to mind. Any of the books that seemed to be pure fantasy, but took place on another planet (which is a huge sub-genre of its own).

 

[MonsterMash]

George R.R. Martin has at least played Superworld (the Wild Cards series developed from a Superworld campaign). Feist has played D&D. I think a number of the shared world series developed out of roleplaying games (I think Thieves World might be on of the few that went the other way). Liavek comes to mind.

I think I should have added a rider to my note about Terry Pratchett to say that obviously the authors of the D&D related novels probably have played at some point (Weiss, Hickman, Salvatore) and are very much immersed in their settings.

So part of the trend has little to do with fantasy in and of itself. And certainly other genres produce extended series -- go review the mystery section of your favourite bookstore and see how many books are subtitled "A Mr. Hoobajoob Mystery" or "Fifth in the Small-Time Murders series".

True, though it tends to be extended series of stand alone titles with a recurring cast of characters rather than having a plot continum (at least with the mystery authors I've read the most of recently - James Lee Burke and Iain Rankin), unlike say Philip Pullman or Stephen Donaldson, though Pratchett generally writes with a recurring cast but no overall plot arc.

The amount of space that authors have in the trilogies I suspect leads to prolixity, while a Howard, Vance or Burroughs was writing to fill an x,000 word slot usually.

 

[tetsujin28]

Interesting bit of trivia about Fritz Leiber I learned this weekend:

Leiber's father, Fritz Sr., was a film actor in the 1910s, 20s and 30s and appeared in the 1939 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Charles Laughton. Fritz, Jr. also appeared in that movie with his father, uncredited.

Yep. Fritz Sr. was in a number of movies. He was also in the Theda Bara Cleopatra (lost), The Prince and the Pauper, The Sea Hawk, the Claude Rains Phantom of the Opera...lots of films.

 

[barsoomcore]

I spent the weekend reading Swords and Wizardry.

1. Lieber rocks.

2. People who think these books are sexist are confusing a sexist society with a sexist story. Nehwon is a sexist world, no question (nearly as sexist as, say, the REAL world), but the stories themselves are hardly sexist. A surprising number of the stories end with the Twain getting rescued by fearless young ladies of surprising ability ("Stardock", for one, and even The Swords of Lankhmar), and they are certainly not superior to the women they encounter ("The Two Best Thieves In Lankhmar"). Sure, an inordinate number of women fall for the lads, but they never seem to stick around very long, and it's the men's hearts that seem to suffer the most.

3. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser are YOUNG men. It's interesting to read these stories now that my (ahem) younger days are behind me -- they're young men, and so they behave and think (or DON'T) like young men. So yeah, when they meet a woman they tend to consider her sexual potential -- as far as I know, that's what young men do. And they have big, clumsy hearts that they wear on their sleeves and get broken over and over again, but because they're young, they recover and move on with their lives. Or DON'T, it sometimes seems.