[Abe Sargent]

Hello Folks!

I was just unloading and putting my books on the shelves here in Mobile. Man do I have a lot of fantasy books. The first adult book I ever read was The Lord of the Rings trilogy by Tolkien in the summer of4th grade. It was hard, but I slogged through it, and ever since I was hooked on fantasy. Series fantasy like Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance mingled with older stuff like Michael Moorcock and Tolkien. Today I have fantasy from the earliest influence writers like Lord Dunsany, RE Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith, all the way up to modern day writers, like Tad Williams or a certain Martin. I've read it all.

I was also a bit obsessive about reading foundational and influence works, by people like Poul Anderson or Ursula LeGuin, and others. I've obsessed over reading full series by major authors you've heard of, and some you probably haven't, like Lawrence Watt-Evans, Richard A Knaak and Joel Rosenberg and Louise Cooper. Worlds like Pern and Earthsea and more have unfurled in front of me.



Given my ongoing obsession with all things fantasy, and the extensive reading I've given it, I thought it would be useful to sort of give you my take on Fantasy as a genre, and then specially what I consider to be the top ten works of all time.




I'll give you my views on fantasy specifically in regards to it's most central conceit and concept. The central Ethos of the work. Who are the good and bad guys, and how is the world constructed?


There are four main figures who invested Fantasy with it's modern Ethos. Ever since the 70s, the genre has been fully codified in these ethical aspects of the worlds authors craft and share. So what are those authors and ethos?


RE Howard - In his seminal works with Conan the Barbarian, Howard portrays a core conceit. He often wrote in his letters his view that he was born centuries past when he should have been. He didn;t have the sheer love of technology and civilization that others did, especially after WWI. So his works, and Conan in particular, have a noble savage liek Conan against the decadence of civilization. Civilization is portrayed as evil, corrupting, and decadent. And while Conan is no saint, and he's certainly not good, he's not evil either. He is his own, individual person, and only has loyalty to himself and his friends. He has his own code of ethics, and he really pushes against the decadence of slavery, civilizations, and more. Conan was not the first, and Howard not the first writer, but this is a core concept of Hyborea and the Age fo Conan. And you'll see the Howard influence on numerous others.



JRR Tolkien - In his Lord of the Rings works, Tolkien takes the central conceit of evil and good and their conflict and weaves it into every interaction and aspect of Middle Earth. There are entire races of creatures that are evil by design. There are good races too, and thus the lines are really drawn between races that can go either way (like humans). But the good vs evil aspects of this world and author are the formulaic epic ethos that influences heroic fantasy to this day. And certainly good and evil were in works before Tolkien, but no one designed, codified, and created this central conflict and ethical underpinning like he did. I'd even argue its his greatest contribution to modern fantasy, beyond tall sylvan elves, the ranger archetype, and such. Nope, it's this good vs evil on a grand scale concept.


Michael Moorcock - Moorcock has written countless tales, and the great central conflict of his work is not savagery vs civilization or good vs evil. Nope! It's Law vs Chaos. And this central concept is the core central value of all of his many, many, many, many works. Law and chaos are the primordial forces of his worlds. And they aren;t inherently good oro bad. On planes that have a heavy law creation, they tend to be stagnant and such. chaostic ones are of course pure chaos. And again, there were a few books that had LvC as the major basis of their conflict, but they were few and far between, (and in those works, Law is good and Chaos is bad by defination, so they didn;t have the subtle aspects of Moorcock.) Moorcock was clearly the one to define it and put it out there.



Gary Gygax - As Moorcock's law vs Chaos Ethos was dominating the era of fantasy writers in the 60s and 70s, Gygax and friends sit down to crate a RPG where Gygax and Dave A and others create the central alignment system and ethic of one of law vs chaos. But as Gygax explored his world and game system, he realized that he needed to invest another level. So he published the AD&D handbook and changed alignment to have two axes. One is the Law vs Chaos, and the other Good vs Evil. He combined Tolkien and Moorcock, although inspired with Howard's characters and concept as well. The vast majority of fantasy since Gygax have been very cognizant of his alignment system, and countless characters an works have people that are talking about both good and evil as well as law and chaos. There was a real attempt by authors to create lawful evil protagonistic characters like Steel Brightblade and Artemis Entreri. Meanwhile good characters who fight against the system, raid towns and such, and as fully Chaotic Good began to pop up.

So the first three fathers of modern fantasy sort of codified three different ethical aspects and conflicts for their worlds, and Gygax came along and brought a lot of them together in major ways. And we're still there today!



Alright, next post I'll give you my own top ten Fantasy Works of All Time (not my own pet series) and then ask you to give your own choices, thoughts, and such!