“Children can have a cruel, absolute sense of justice. Children can kill monsters and feel quite proud of themselves. Even a girl who carries spiders outside instead of stepping on them, a girl who once fed a tiny fox kit with an eyedropper every two hours until wildlife rescue could come and pick it up–that same girl can kill and be ready to do it again. … She can look at her brother and believe that together they’re a knight and a bard who battle evil, who might someday find and fight even the monster at the heart of the forest. A little girl can find a dead boy and lose her dog and believe that she could make sure no one else was lost.”
Of these 9, I’ve read 4, given up on 2, not yet started 2 and am currently reading one. Has anyone managed them all?
This is a nice selection (and lovely art, the crinkles in the spinds are *chef’s kiss*)! I’ve also read four. Absolutely loved three of them—The Lord of the Rings, The Once and Future King, and Pyramid. I enjoyed Circe a lot too, although not quite as a much as the others.
The Lies of Locke Lamora is on my to-read list, recommended by a friend, and I’m quite excited about that one. Same with Assassin’s Apprentice. I want to give the others a proper go at some point too. I remember trying one of the Wheel of Time books before and not managing to get into it, but that was a long time ago so I was probably just too young.
I’ve realised that what I miss about fantasy is it being truly escapist. I miss it depicting places where I would actually want to go.
Every dang kid I knew waited for their Hogwarts acceptance letter. Reading the books and seeing it on screen gave you this warm, fuzzy feeling and a feeling of longing, even when they were in danger and fighting monsters and evil wizards, you want to be there.
You want to go to Middle Earth, see hobbits and elves and dwarves and run through this land of incredible beauty, mysticism and magic.
You want to be in the TARDIS, seeing the universe.
The more recent trend of fantasy is this gritty, dark realism and places where you would just never want to go. I don’t want to go to Westeros. I don’t want to be in The Hunger Games, I don’t particularly want to be in The Witcher universe. I’m living in the world of Black Mirror and I hate it.
Fantasy used to say “hey our world kinda sucks but here’s a cooler one”, but now it says “hey our world kinda sucks, but here’s an even worse one.”
That isn’t to say that the above are bad. They’re not.
But I miss beautiful, escapist fantasy that gives me a break. That takes me somewhere magical, somewhere otherworldly and gives me messages of hope and optimism in the face of darkness. I really, really miss that.
The Amazing Maurice is a fantasy book. Of course, everyone knows that fantasy is ‘all about’ wizards, but by now, I hope, everyone with any intelligence knows that, er, what everyone knows…is wrong.
Fantasy is more than wizards. For instance, this book is about rats that are intelligent. But it also about the even more fantastic idea that humans are capable of intelligence as well. Far more beguiling than the idea that evil can be destroyed by throwing a piece of expensive jewellery into a volcano is the possibility that evil can be defused by talking. The fantasy of justice is more interesting that the fantasy of fairies, and more truly fantastic. In the book the rats go to war, which is, I hope, gripping. But then they make peace, which is astonishing.
In any case, genre is just a flavouring. It’s not the whole meal. Don’t get confused by the scenery.
”
- Terry Pratchett, as part of his Carnegie Medal acceptance speech for The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents.
“Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country but for most of us it is only an imaginary country. Edmund and Lucy were luckier than other people in that respect. Their secret country was real.”
“And I’d grown up not just in England, but in a land of fantasy. Though I was the kind of child who (like you, perhaps) read anything and everything, my true love was deep make-believe, from fairy stories to all the buried archetypes of folk tale and myth. Then when I went to the University of Oxford to study English literature, two professors named Tolkien and Lewis made sure that our syllabus stopped at the year 1832, so that we were soaked in the earliest fantasies of all: Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory’s Le Morte d'Arthur, Spencer’s The Faerie Queene. As a friend of mine said, ‘They taught us to believe in dragons.’”
- Susan Cooper, preface to the The Dark is Rising.
“Soon after A Wizard of Earthsea came out in England it received a review in a science-fiction periodical which took the book to task for being “consolatory” and “reassuring”. Well, fair enough, I thought, if the consolation is false, if the reassurance is unwarranted; but are consolation and reassurance inherently false, unwarranted - foolish, soft, silly, childish - sentimental? Are we writers only to threaten, terrify, and depress our readers with our ruthless honesty: have we not as good a right to offer them whatever comfort we’ve come by honestly?”
“The chronicle of Prydain is a fantasy. Such things do not happen in real life. Or do they? Most of us are called on to perform tasks far beyond what we believe we can do. Our capabilities seldom match our aspirations, and we are often woefully unprepared. To this extent, we are all Assistant Pig-Keepers at heart.”
- Lloyd Alexander, preface to the The Book of Three.
