What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

Fantasy Section, by Kaz Cooke

Once upon a time in the 90s, there was an Australian columnist called Kaz Cooke of whom I was - and remain - an enormous fan. Most of her pieces were about politics and feminism and the various intersections thereof, but she also had occasion to write the following piece about SFF, and even though it’s a send-up of a genre I love deeply, it’s also something that still makes me laugh, because while she’s clearly bemused by fantasy novels as a whole, she manages to poke gentle fun at their idiosyncrasies without actually shaming anyone who likes them or making blanket generalisations about their worthiness, and given how many articles I’ve seen subsequently - and especially recently - that do both, I felt hers was something worth sharing. This is how you write something funny about a pastime you don’t necessarily share without making value judgements about the people who actually like it. (Plus, bonus nostalgia points for being written back when The Wheel of Time only ran to five volumes!)

Fantasy Section, by Kaz Cooke

(taken from Get A Grip, Penguin Books, 1996)

Due to a hideous pile-up at the cash register, I got stuck in front of the fantasy section of the bookshop the other day. This is not, as you might think, full of books called My Night in a French Maid’s Uniform or Girls in Red Thighboots or Mr Python Meets Someone Called Tracey. 

It is full of books called The Faeries of Qantars, The Great Big Dragons of Zorg and The Enchanted Stone Thingie. There are two main genres, roughly divided into: Dragons in Space and Medieval Trolls Run Amok in the Hinterland During Mysterious Medieval Type Times.

As the jostling at the cash register grew more rowdy, with vast numbers of the general public demanding not to buy the memoirs of former politicians, I had time to glance through a few. Unfortunately, Anne McCaffrey’s Dolphins of Pern was snatched from my hands by a pushy maiden, but not before I had divined that the Chronicles of Pern was also available.

Pern is in outer space, where there are dolphins and dragons, and Torene comes to realise that her dragon could become the next Queen of the newly formed Benden Weyr. Ms McCaffrey is the author of twenty-one other books, including Decision at Doona*. (Honestly.)

By contrast, Tad Williams’ Stone of Farewell is not set in outer space, but is big enough to stun a dugong with, and part of a series of volumes that could safely dispatch approximately half-a-dozen dugongs. In a kind of Georgette-Heyer-romance-meets-The-Thunderbirds, Simon-the-former-kitchen-hand, now resident of the troll stronghold of Yiqanuc, uses his prophetic dreams to help trounce the evil Storm King, ruler of Osten Ard. 

There are chambermaids, giants, dragons, your ‘small, man-like subterranean creatures’, monks, Ancient King John and a helpful twenty-one page glossary  in which we learn that 'Avi stetto’ means 'I have a knife’ and 'Ohe, vo stetto’ means 'Yes, he has a knife’. Extrapolating, one sees that 'Ohe, ohe, ohe vo dirty great stetto’ means 'Do I have to tell you again, this bloke is completely fair dinkum about the knife’.

The Eye of the World, Volume 1 of the five-volume Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, has back-cover praise from the increasingly well-known L. Sprague de Camp, who says it is a 'splendid epic of heroic fantasy’. The back-cover blurb reads like the sort of thing people say when they’ve been drinking Mezcal tequila: 'The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and go, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten, when the Age that gave it birth returns again. In the Third Age, an Age of Prophecy, the World and Time themselves hang in the balance. What was, what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow.’ ('And now, I shall eat the worm.’)

The Eye of the World has some excellent stuff including wolves and a guy called Egwene.

The really good fantasy books, which run to about 10,000 pages, have a map. Maybe several. Raymond E. Feist’s A Darkness at Sethanon has two maps because he’s got a fair amount to fit in, including the Sea of Blood, the Confederation, Empires, the Great Sand Wastelands, the Endless Sea, the Straits of Darkness and also the Trollhome Mountains. Frankly, I don’t think this sort of stuff will catch on.

As I adjusted my jerkin and prepared to take my leave, I warned the shop assistant. 'Dougalrod,’ I said, 'mind the Marshes of Quarg.’ 'And don’t take any crook dolphins’, he rejoindered menacingly, giving me the Sacred Sign of the Aardvole.

*Apparently unbeknownst to Anne McCaffrey, 'doona’ is the most common Australian term for a quilt/comforter/eiderdown, and therefore an unintentionally hilarious name to Antipodean readers.  

  1. loquamani reblogged this from fozmeadows
  2. happyspider6 reblogged this from fozmeadows and added:
    Love Kaz! Thanks for the nostalgia!
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