Books on the Beach: A Ramble

This post is brought to you by the Swords of Fire anthology series, with the fourth book due in 2026. Like the three previous collections, this one will feature four longer Sword & Sorcery adventures with one being a Sirtago & Poet tale set in a country much like Japan. This is by Jack Mackenzie, of course. There is also the next adventure of Bradik the Slayer by M. D. Jackson. One of the other two tales is a new Arthan the Bear Man story featuring giant spiders. For the previous anthologies, go here.

After a lovely two weeks of not writing I am back and not really sure what to natter on about. I write somewhere near 300,000 wrds a year on this blog and natter I do. But I’m feeling a little rusty so forgive me if I am off my game. I spent two lovely weeks in Cozumel, laying on a lounger, avoiding the hottest of the Mexican sun, reading two fat Fantasy novels. These were the first Wheel of Time book, The Eye of the World (1990) by Robert Jordan and Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind (2007). Two very different books, though both bestsellers. And for me, fairly recent publications.

I wanted to read The Eye of the World because the TV show is done. I hate reading books that I have seen adapted as a general rule unless the two are quite different from each other. In this case, the show helped me navigate all the references I would not have understood if I had been one of those first readers back in 1990. My opinion of the book is complicated. First, and I’ve said this on Discord: Jordan writes Tolkien better than Conan. The novel is a mere shade of the TV show, with the characters of Rand, Mat and Perrin as the focus and most of the female cast playing secondary roles. The show corrected this well, I think.

For example, in the first episode of the series, the trollocks invade Emond’s Field and Moraine and Lan help stop their attacks. This does happen in the book but it happens off stage. You only hear about it second hand after the fact. Wisely, the producers brought the event front-and-center. It was too good a fight scene to recount in a flashback. That being said, many of the elements of the book were in the show but rearranged. The book is much closer to The Lord of the Rings with the heroes fleeing the bad guys for half the 800 pages. We don’t learn much of what is going on behind the scenes (as you do in the show. Moraine tells the five Emond Fielders they might be the Dragon from the get-go. We only hear abut it and that it is Rand in the last portion of the book.)

The other book, The Name of the Wind, was entirely a different deal, and happily so. I don’t think I could read two Tolkienian quest tales in a row. Patrick Rothfuss’s novel is a first-person character study more than a LOTR re-do. It features a university and magic school so the Harry Potter comparisons are immediate and exactly wrong. If Rothfuss was influenced by anyone it was Ursula K. Le Guin and A Wizard of Earthsea (1969). Using a mild version of the Arabian Nights style (with story-within-story) we follow Kvothe from childhood as a traveling player to the University where he does three-four years worth of magical studies in one year. (I heard one critic on Discord call him a ‘Gary Sue’ but I disagree. Kvothe does everything better than others, is really talented, but he also gets the shit kicked out of him, and wins and fails and wins and fails over and over. A Gary Sue would find it all easier, I think.)

I guess you can tell I quite liked the book. I have to say I loved what it said about “story” in many different ways. I’m still picking it apart and savoring its deliciousness but some first thoughts. I think there is a connection between Kvothe and Don Quixote. In that famous literary lampoon, Sancho Panza helps Quixote to regain his sanity, which he has lost and has him attacking windmills. In The Name of the Wind, we have Bast, Kvothe’s student and employee trying to do the exact opposite: help Kvothe get his mojo back, for he has become “normal”. It’s an intriguing reversal that I’m still thinking about.

A conversation I had shortly after returning to the chilly plains of Alberta (both places had 27 degree Celsius weather, only Alberta’s was -27) was with one of the writers in my weekly writer’s group on trying to read mainstream fiction, something I can not do anymore. I’d rather read cereal boxes. This got me thinking of Lin Carter, another hopeless genre addict who wrote the following in one of his Ballantine Fantasy Series intros:

…People who do not themselves read or enjoy fantasy have no conception of why we read it or of the kind of enjoyment we derive from it. But the next time you suffer the indignity of such a put-down, you might try defending your reading taste with this line of reasoning: We read fantasy not so much to escape from life (that is one of their labels, “escapist reading”), but to enlarge our spectrum of life experience, to enrich it and to extend the range of our experience into regions we can never visit in the flesh. For fantasy is not all airy-fairy nonsense, it can be deadly serious and deeply meaningful. (The Young Magicians, 1969)

I am reminded of C. S. Lewis’s famous quote: “Who are the people most opposed to escapism? Jailors!”

Carter was a writer who was quite happy to write in other writer’s styles and traditions. For this reason he is often disregarded as a hack. His editing of the Ballantine Fantasy Series saves him with some critics. He was a guy who loved Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, as do I, writing in all three genres (or in the larger context let’s call it the the Fantastic.) I can’t quite agree with slavishly imitating the writers who influence us, but we all do it to some degree. Look at Robert Jordan and Patrick Rothfuss. Both have obvious connections to Tolkien and Le Guin and sell novels in the bestseller numbers. Terry Brooks did the Tolkien thing before either of these two and The Sword of Shannara is not in the same class. But Terry made it a profitable venture.

Personally, and I know this is only my opinion, I like writers who can take a style/theme from a great writer and do something new with it. I don’t think Lin did that much. His Edgar Rive Burroughs stuff reads like ERB, his Howard and Brackett stuff, etc. Both Jordan and Rothfuss take their influences in new directions. Jordan would remind me of LOTR in a scene (That’s like the black riders chasing them to the Buckleberry Ferry!) but it would fade quickly. Rothfuss did it less but then I haven’t re-read A Wizard of Earthsea lately. I do remember her name magic which has influenced several other writers (myself included).

All of this is supposed to be an explanation of “Why do you read that stuff?” I do agree with Lin that it is all about “enlargement” of reality. A good Fantasy tale makes you see the “real world” more clearly. Analogies have a way of saying more than realistic fact statements. (J. R. R. Tolkien’s could and use butter-scraped-over-too-much-bread to nail just how crappy you feel sometimes navigating this “real world”.) Fantasy plays with symbols, tells “big truths” and discusses ideas that just aren’t going to be the same in a realistic setting. Let’s take Gollum for example. His love of “The Precious” could be an analogy for drug addiction. Someone who is addicted might try to explain to a non-user what the drug does to them, why they act the way they do, etc. but so many fail to understand. You simply say, it’s like Gollum and the One Ring, and that same person goes, “Oh, like that.” That is the power of story. That is the power of Fantasy. (I kind of wrote about all this before in “The Purpose of Fantasy” if you want more.

Conclusion

I can understand the frustration Lin Carter feels with “Mundanes”. My own father could never understand my own love of both fiction and Fantasy. (He was strictly a DIY guy, maybe a non-fiction book on Canadian history.) He grew up in a time when the written word needed to be instructive otherwise it was a frivolous waste of time. That was all fiction, not just Fantasy fiction. He couldn’t understand why my small shelf of Edgar Rice Burroughs needed to be doubled when I bought more paperbacks. “Don’t you have enough already?” (Now that’s a stupid question, dad. I will never have enough!) He just didn’t understand but he did help me put up more shelves. How does a hunting-fishing-work-on-your-car kinda guy spawn a child who lives in Fantasy worlds in his head? (He actually got three of them, as my brother, T. Neil and my sister, Sheila, are writers/artists as well.)

Going into 2026, I am looking over the last year, which was pretty successful. In 2024, RmB published six books but in 2025 we did fifteen. I am thinking about what I’d like to do in the coming year and more Sword & Sorcery is certainly on the block. I don’t know if I will ever write  a Tolkienian Fantasy. The big sprawling epic doesn’t fulfill my writerly needs. I have no idea why. Somehow I have always preferred to write about singular heroes. And I can’t see changing that. Conan, Elric, Brak, Thongor, Solomon Kane, Tarzan, these are the heroes I grew up on. They gave me the direction to navigate my young adulthood. I wish I could have explained that to my dad, but he wouldn’t have got it. He should have (He grew up on Tom Mix.) but there it is. I am currently writing a new Arthan the Bear man novella for Swords of Fire 4. And when I saw writing, I mean playing hooky really. Happy New Year and all the best in 2026.

Sword & Sorcery from RAGE machine Books