Too Much To Dream

This isn't a new thing. Since LOTR developed a cult following among 60's college hippies (to Tolkien's disgust) our bookshelves have been groaning under badly-written, incoherent doorstop trilogies where covens of constipated drips defeat ultimate evils with silly names.

I'm just going to reread Gene Wolfe's Book Of The New Sun... This is a man who can write and tell a story for adults.

For a bestselling hack series, I must include The Wheel of Time. Aside from the novelty of a world ridden with spineless, indolent men, the novels just suck. I can't get through 'em.

Also, the Dragonlance series (even the first chronicles) have not stood the test of time. I tried reading them again recently, and found myself perturbed that I considered these High Art in High School.

Ok, there are more fantasy novels that have stood the test of time:
The Conan the Barbarian Series by R.E.Howard
The Elric Saga by Michael Moorcock
I also think that "The Icewind Dale" trilogy by R.A. Salvatore has the chops to last.

Lord Dunsany's Pegana series. Stephen King's Eye of the Dragon. Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique tales. A few H.P. Lovecraft stories. And Robert Jordan's Conan books are a lot better than his "WoT-the-hell-is-this-crap" series...

I can't disagree with the factual observations here, but I can toss in this observation:

In the entertainment industries, market analysis is an unsolved problem. There's no way to know what will tickle a mass audience and what won't. This makes publishers and movie makers and so forth inherently very conservative. They look for the same only different: similar enough to previous successes that they can believe in it, but different enough that they can claim they're not simply copying the landmarks of the past.

In the world of fantasy fiction, wherein I labor, this can result in very hard times for the writer with something genuinely original to vend.

And I think people will still be reading Neil Gaiman's superb work on The Sandman when Tolkien's spawn are rotting in the Mordor Landfill...

Remember Sturgeon's Law:

"90% of everything is crap."

A recommendation: try Roger Zelazney's Amber series for some of the best pure writing ever.

MonkeyPants
Imerial Falconer

Fantasy seems to have more rubbish than other genres, except maybe horror in the fiction realm. When things get popular expect a lot of rubbish. The cyberpunk genre, has its crap, but it reasonably rare.

I stopped reading most fantasy except for Terry Pratchet, after reading way too much total bilge.

Incidentaly you can't go wrong in the cyberpunk genre if you stick to Gibson, Sterling, Rucker & Stephenson (Becher too and Dick if you think he is cyberpunk).

Horror: Lovecraft and anything in the Chaosium Call of Cthulhu fiction series expect for the one novel they published which is utter crap. (This is also the reason they are reluctant to publish other novels...like er mine!)

BTW I agree with the writer above, selling original fiction is a right bugger. My agent could not flog it, keep getting if it were more like ___ or more ___ etc. Most frustrating.

I don't read a lot of fantasy. I read the first book in the Wheel of Time series and thought I would never get through it. Most other fantasy novels that I've read seem pretty much the same - slow moving plot, some kind of quest or journey, a little magic, strange, not quite human creatures, a few sword fights, etc.

One fantasy novel that I read recently and absolutely loved was Rhapsody by Elizabeth Haydon. It had the usual long journey, strange creatures, sword fights, magic and so forth but it's not like a lot of fantasy novels where you're mostly waiting for something to happen. There's always something going on, and the characters have personality. The world and it's history could be better developed but on the other hand, I hate fantasy novels that get bogged down in the background and forget to tell the story so maybe it's not such a bad thing when a novel doesn't go into a great deal of detail about everything. There is quite a bit of humor in Rhapsody also - well done and appropriate, which seems to be rather hard to pull of in a fantasy novel.

If you think Fantasy has a lot of crap, Fantasy HUMOR is even worse. Instead of merely writing the same thing over and over, they write the same thing over and over and make fun of the same things, with the same unfunny jokes. Paradoxically, the only things older and wheezier than storytelling cliche's are the jokes told about them.

Writers like Terry Pratchett are rarer than diamonds in the field of fantasy humor.... it's hard to find writers who aren't just skilled with words, but who can see the inherent humor in the story and make you see it too... instead of just taking crass potshots at the genre.

I've got to agree with you there. I haven't cared for humorous fantasy, what little of it I have come across. I really haven't been able to get into Pratchett, though I enjoyed Good Omens, which he wrote with Neil Gaiman.

The only other 'fantasy' books I've read outside of Tolkien are the Ender's Game novels by Orson Scott Card. But I'm not sure that's really fantasy, per se. I think it's probably more science fiction. Besides, Orson Scott Card is amazing writer.

I think the reason there are so many crappy books out there is because most people will buy and read those books regardless of their writing quality, which is sad. Poorly written books make me want to cry. To me, it's just as bad as having to listen to some tone deaf moron try to sing. It physically hurts my brain.

Regarding humor in fantasy, Rhapsody the book I mentioned in my earlier comment, is not primarily intended to be humorous but I can't help but love lines like this: (from memory)

"My people have always considered your people to be monsters."

"My people have always considered your people to be breakfast."

There is even humour in cyberpunk in the form of Rudy Rucker. Yes, Good Omens is very funny. BTW, speaking as a writer without a publishing deal, you can buy my books on my blog now :)p

There's lots of non-Tolkien fiction out there, though finding standalone novels is getting harder and harder and harder... publishers want the security of sales that comes with series.

I mean, I've got 2700-ish books along the hallway wall, and I'm having trouble coming up with current SF/Fantasy authours off the top of my head who aren't doing one or more series as the bulk of their recent material.

Gaiman. Stephenson. Umm... Dan Simmons, though he's probably best known for a four book series (Hyperion/Endymion). Tim Powers, who is interesting and talented but not a 'name'. Walter Jon Williams, though he has some series.

I like to use a TV comparison. Just because I may like a series with long complicated storylines that tell a long story (Babylon 5) doesn't mean that I'm not interested in a series where I can watch any one show out of sequence and miss little (Star Trek), or vice versa.

As a side note... You can blaim the 'multi-novel storyline' on Tolkien, since he's the popularizaer of that, but endless writing in the same series, or worse, endless rewriting of older novels with marginally different characters as the new novels in the series, is a practice that predates him handily. For example, Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Well, actually, blame Tolkien's publisher: it was their idea to sell the book as a three-parter. He wanted it released as a single novel, but the publisher was convinced that people would avoid the book like the plague if they did that.

I happened to like Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series, at least for the first few. I'll readily admit that it's dragged on much too long, though. I loved the first three books, but subsequent ones became harder to get through. I haven't even bought the most recent (or maybe the two or three most recent, I'm not quite certain).

Couldn't stand Rucker, though.

Lately (the past few years) I've been getting into older fantasy. Authors like Thorne Smith, Talbot Mundy, and H. Rider Haggard. Not "high fantasy" with elves and dragons, but certainly not the "real world."

Don't forget Fritz Leiber's "Fafrhd and The Gray Mouser" stories. They started out as a spoof of Conan, but wound up being a pretty fun Sword and Sorcery series in their own right.