Unlike SF fans, who've got used to having all their expectations upset within the first few lines of each new story, Fantasy afficionados like to have horses, staffs, goblins, and elves - or some reasonable variant on same - crowd in to greet them pretty early on, regardless of how each author has chosen to account for their presence (creatures of a remote, post-nuclear-apocalypse future in Terry Pratchett remnants of the ancient Germanic world in J. Its fans are loyal and supportive - but they also tend to be resistant to change. The fact that, after all that, he's come back round to his starting-place, and is beginning yet another trilogy set in his Tolkien-esque kingdom of 'Osten Ard' also says something telling about the epic fantasy genre, however.
because (pragmatically) he's one of the few fantasy writers I've actually made an effort to keep up with since I first starting reading him in the early 90s.So why concentrate on Tad Williams in particular, then? Not because he's so much better than the others - though he's probably the most long-winded among them (the cover of The Dragonbone Chair describes it as "the fantasy equivalent of War and Peace", and I think it's as much its length as its narrative ambition the reviewer must have had in mind). Rest assured that the presses of the world have been busy adding to the total through all the intervening years.
#TAD WILLIAMS OTHERLAND NOVELLA SERIES#
So many new series have appeared since the late 1990s, when I stopped even trying to keep on top of them, that I couldn't begin to discuss them even if I had the knowledge. Of course, any fan of the genre will immediately point out how outmoded the above list is. So, while some of the authors may be a bit perfunctory in their prose-style, it's hard to fault them for richness of invention. Michael Scott Rohan takes the idea of the Ice Age more literally, and tries to recreate the vanished kingdoms of an era before the Mediterranean flooded, and when vast areas of land were laid bare by the glaciers.Ĭecilia Dart-Thornton relies more on traditional ballads and folklore to shape her own narrative, while Patricia McKillip contributes a beautiful, Ursula Le Guin-like clarity to her storytelling. His basic notion of a wood that resists visitors is an excellent one, but combined with the discovery that (like the Tardis) this wood is bigger on the inside than the outside, and - in fact - has no effective limit in time or space, since it constitutes a kind of repository for the collective mythological memory of mankind, as far back as the last Ice Age, the working out of his story has a peculiar resonance and even symbolic truth to it. Take Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood, for example. But then there are the exceptions: the genuinely original takes on the fantasy genre. Some of the examples in the list below include all of the principal, Tolkien-inherited ingredients: division into a trilogy the presence of elves, dragons, and/or otherworldly creatures a threat from some source of 'darkness' - generally in the North a lost heir or 'chosen one' who has to set all to rights, possibly with the help of some ring, sword, or other talisman. Tad Williams: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (1988-93)
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