Tag Archives: Epic Fantasy

Memoranda

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Memoranda [Amazon, Abebooks, Author, Local Library] by Jeffrey Ford, book 2 of the Well-Built City Trilogy series, cover of Golden Gryphon edition by John Picacio.

Ford Memoranda Golden Gryphon Edition

This second volume of the Well-Built City trilogy does include some incidental exposition to refresh readers on the events of the first book, but I don’t think it would read well in the complete absence of the prior text. Unlike its predecessor, it finishes with a clear pointer toward its sequel. 

The style and format are consistent with the first book: short, limpid chapters narrated by the former Physiognomist First Class Cley, who has found a new life as the doctor of the village of Wenau made up of refugees from the now-ruined Well-Built City. But Drachton Below, the malign demiurge of the Well-Built City, is still alive, and he mobilizes a devious plot to bring the villagers under his control. Memoranda is Cley’s odyssey to confront his former Master so that he can rescue his new neighbors, a confrontation that takes place in a surprising and exotic interior environment.

It is a really wonderful and artful fantasy, reminding me more than a little of the Hypnerotomachia and The Neverending Story. I have compared its predecessor The Physiognomy to the Terry Gilliam film Brazil, and this one equally deserves comparison to The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Author Ford provides a prefatory note acknowledging the importance of Frances Yates’ works on traditional memory arts in the composition of this novel, a fact that could not have been missed anyway by readers familiar with that subject matter.

By the way, John Picacio’s cover art for the 21st-century Golden Gryphon edition of the trilogy is sublime.

These books are not for children. But if you’re a jaded adult who wants the vertiginous pleasure that good fantasy provides to children, they can deliver. Exquisite.

Swords & Dark Magic

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery [Amazon, Abebooks, Local Library] eds Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders, with Joy Abercrombie, C J Cherryh, Glan Cook, James Enge, Steven Erikson, Greg Keyes, Caitlín R Kiernan, Tim Lebbon, Tanith Lee, Scott Lynch, Michael Moorcock, Garth Nix, K J Parker, Michael Shea, Robert Silverberg, Bill Willingham, and Gene Wolfe.

Strahan Anders Swords Dark Magic

I acquired this massive anthology of 21st-century sword and sorcery fiction primarily because it contained a new Elric story by Michael Moorcock, but also because I hoped to find some new authors whose work I would enjoy. With some disappointment, I realize that the Elric story was in fact the one I liked best in the book. The others that I found especially fine or memorable were almost all by authors with publication histories going well back into the 20th century, and often in settings that had already been composed and established back then. The editors’ introduction, while asserting the significance and innovation of newer authors, is more focused on the genealogy of the form and the work of its 20th-century creators.

I enjoyed the new Silverberg story of Majipoor (although it’s been so long since I read Lord Valentine’s Castle that it hardly had anything to do with my prior acquaintance with that world). Tanith Lee’s “Two Lions, a Witch, and the War-Robe” was quite entertaining. The Gene Wolfe contribution was not one that I would class with his best work, but I liked it. Michael Shea’s “fully authorized” story in Jack Vance’s Dying Earth milieu had the audacity to change that world’s fundamental destiny. 

Among the newer authors, the only story that made a marked impression on me was “The Sea-Troll’s Daughter” by Caitlin R. Kiernan, for the ways in which it twitted reader expectations regarding gender, sex, and conflict in this genre. Some of the newer material seemed sadly influenced by the lowest-common-denominator fantasy of Dungeons and Dragons, or — worse, but happily less often — the gimmicky magic and school fetishism of Harry Potter. None of them were awful, but none of them were really stories I can imagine myself referencing in the future.

The Birthgrave

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Birthgrave [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Tanith Lee, introduction Marion Zimmer Bradley, book 1 of the Birthgrave trilogy, 80s cover by Ken Kelly.

Lee The Birthgrave 80s cover by Ken Kelly

The Birthgrave was Tanith Lee’s first published novel for adult readers, and the first novel of hers that I’ve read. The Publishers Weekly review excerpt in the jacket copy stresses its size, and compares the protagonist to Robert E. Howard’s Conan. But it’s not such a very big book by today’s fantasy standards. At just a little over 400 pages, it’s fairly modest among the doorstop novels the genre has come to produce. 

The acute storytelling might justify the comparison to Conan, but the central character actually couldn’t be more dissimilar. A much closer comparison would be Moorcock’s Elric, who is in many ways a schematic anti-Conan. Lee takes that reversal one step further with the change of gender. For style, pacing, and mood, I found myself more reminded of Gene Wolfe’s multi-volume fantasies — but it appears that Tanith Lee got there first, so I can wonder if she influenced Wolfe.

The protagonist is a nameless survivor of her own cruel, sorcery-wielding race, who adopts different identities in the course of her interactions with humanity. She is obscurely cursed, and brings misery and death to her casual and intimate contacts alike. There is an allegory here, for those who want to read on that level, made especially plain in the anagnorisis of the final twenty pages. (Feuerbachian philosophy, Freudianism, and feminism can each be useful to interpret the message of the story.)

There are a number of passages of hallucinatory vividness, and I found the entire novel quite engaging. The ending is almost too tidy, and I can see why some readers resented its deus ex machina qualities, along with what might seem like an abrupt shift in genre. But at the same time as it imposes that dislocation, the book returns to the business of its beginning in a way that makes it whole.

Hadon of Ancient Opar

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Hadon of Ancient Opar [Amazon, Abebooks, Local Library] by Philip Jose Farmer, illo Roy G Krenkel, with essays by Frank Brueckel and John Harwood.

Farmer Hadon of Ancient Opar

Hadon of Ancient Opar is a “prequel” to the Tarzan books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, if the term can be applied when the respective narratives are separated by a chronology of some twelve millennia! The story is set in and around the empire of Khokarsa, a civilization surrounding the interior seas of prehistoric Africa. 

During the events of Hadon, Khokarsa is on the cusp of potential change into a violent partriarchy from a matrifocal culture ruled by priestesses, with the eagle-headed goddess Kho being supplanted by the flaming god Resu. (The story thus bears interesting comparison to Aleister Crowley’s ancient Egyptian fantasy “Across the Gulf.”) Khokarsan religion involves a stunning frequency of blood sacrifice as a matter of routine, and the culture combines a high bronze-age level of technological development with totemistic, quasi-tribal social organization. 

The story begins with the youth Hadon going to compete in the great games of Khokarsa that are supposed to produce a suitor for the High Priestess of the empire. (Thus, the winner could become king.) Hadon encounters many obstacles to his ambitions, but remains a virtuous hero throughout the book. He is loyal to the old regime of Kho, and when a partisan of Resu proffers a paraphrase of Exodus 20:5, he characterizes it as “insanity” (159). There is a frank acceptance of sex in Khokarsan culture, but Hadon’s adventures here involve much more violence than sex.

Appendices to the book provide about twenty-five pages of maps and chronology, but they are largely superfluous, and they appear to have been the product of Farmer’s development of the Khokarsan context from the article “Heritage of the Flaming God, an Essay on the History of Opar and Its Relationship to Other Ancient Cultures” by Frank Brueckel and John Harwood in The Burroughs Bulletin. Roy Krenkel’s dozen or so illustrations for Hadon are ink renderings in a loose style, that were probably dynamic and exciting in the originals, but mostly come across as muddy and incoherent in their reproductions here. 

The most important observation I can offer to potential readers of this book is that it is not a stand-alone novel. It ends with a cliffhanger, and the sequel Flight to Opar takes up at the very instant that Hadon ends. Farmer repeatedly implies that he is kicking off a long series of books with Hadon, but Flight was the only other Khokarsa/Opar book to be published during his lifetime. It appears that Christopher Paul Carey has subsequently brought further materials into print, posthumously developed from Farmer’s MSS.