Blogcritics: Comments on The plot of the fantasy novel

Comment by Temple Stark

Tue, 31 May 2005 00:46:59 EDT

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Comment by bhw

Wed, 25 May 2005 03:15:44 EDT

Great post! My husband just finished reading The Hobbit to our daughter. Every once in a while, I hear her say something about Thorin Oakenshield, and now I'm going to have a hard time not thinking about old Strongarm Bluntaxe when she does!

Comment by parker

Tue, 24 May 2005 13:20:15 EDT

LOL. Yes, you summed it up nicely. How do you feel about speculative fiction works? I guess they are fantasy without the quest format.

Comment by Leoniceno

Tue, 24 May 2005 00:55:57 EDT

Dave: the part about them being from the real world isn't really necessary to the rest of it. I'm not really criticizing Lord of the Rings, I'm criticizing all those knock-offs of Lord of the Rings.

Comment by Steve S

Tue, 24 May 2005 00:30:11 EDT

Book 2: Since it was Steve who beaned the evil grunt-grunt on the head and saved the day, he now gets to be King of all the Land. A just ruler, he harbored no ill will about the fact that since he began his quest to defeat the evil Lord, nobody believed in him, nobody even believed in the evil Lord, they called Steve nuts for believing in his quest, but he presevered. Proved all those beyotches wrong. What a King.

Comment by Dave Nalle

Tue, 24 May 2005 00:06:13 EDT

The sub-category of fantasy, or more properly swords and sorcery novels, which rely on the mechanism of real-world humans transported into a fantasy world is very small and quite outdated. It had a brief resurgence in the D&D era when people started writing up their campaign worlds, but it's still not typical. There ARE some great novels in that genre, of course - Warlords of Mars, The Compleat Enchanter, Glory Road, Chronicles of Narnia - but they are really the exception rather than the rule. The best heroic fantasy or swords and sorcery starts with a coherent, self-contained world which doesn't require reference to the mundane world or the involvement of a real world main character - that's really a sort of cheap trick for poor writers. Imagine if Lord of the Rings had been told from the perspective of a 16 year old D&D player who appeared in Middle Earth and discovered he had magical powers just like gandalf. Sort of takes the wind right out of the sails. Dave

Comment by NancyGail

Mon, 23 May 2005 23:49:40 EDT

Sounds like Knights of the Holy Grail