The Gaming Philosopher

Under the influence of Tolkien, fantasy moved towards the creation of secondary worlds. Let me define that term: A secondary world is a fictional world which is neither a geographical nor a temporal part of our world; and is not connected to it as a dream world, a realm of Faerie, a space of Ideas, a land-beyond-a-portal or anything of that sort. Furthermore, the secondary world should be a real world , not just an allegory. For instance, the tall tales that Odysseus tells in the Odyssey are fictional and fantastic, but are not set in a secondary world, because they are supposed to have happened on our Earth. On the other hand, modern fantasy writers like Martin and Jordan do use secondary worlds: no explicit or implied relation exists between their fantastical realms and the world we inhabit. My question is, what was the first book that introduced a secondary world? I haven't managed to think of any clear examples that predate The Lord of the Rings by more than a few years. T...

I just read A Wizard of Earthsea , the 1971 tale by Ursula Le Guin. It has been marketed as children's literature, but it would be more accurate to say that it stands in a tradition that precedes the distinction between children's literature and adult literature. A Wizard of Earthsea is also definitely not a novel, but a tale. Perhaps I can summarise the difference as follows: novels affirm the truth of the particular, tales affirm the truth of the general. If you take a novel and change all the details, you will have a different book; but if you change all the details of a tale, you will still have the same tale. Faery tales are a good example: you can rewrite Sleeping Beauty as a tale taking place in the 20th century, with chemical substances instead of spells and scientists instead of princes, and you'll end up with Sleeping Beauty. On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine Crime and Punishment taking place anywhere else than a late-nineteenth century eastern-Europ...

Today, I wish to investigate a connection between Benjamin's Der Erzähler and Ursula K. Le Guin's Science Fiction and Mrs Brown . (The latter essay can be found, like From Elfland to Poughkeepsie , in her non-fiction collection The Language of the Night .) One of the theme's in Benjamin's essay is the difference between the story and the novel; the theme of Le Guin's essay is the possibility of SF (and fantasy) novels. Together, they may get us a bit closer to an answer to the question: what is the relation of the novel, and of the story, to fantasy? Le Guin quotes Virginia Woolf, who is musing upon her meeting an old lady ("mrs. Brown") in the train: I believe that all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite. I believe that all novels, that is to say, deal with character, and that it is to express character - not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, a...

In the comments to my last post, Ian mentioned an essay by Walter Benjamin , Der Erzähler ( The Storyteller ). Benjamin was an important German philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century; he wrote on a wide range of topics, but his best-known work is probably his essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (it is widely cited as The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction , but The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility would have been a better translation). Der Erzähler is a very rich and complex essay. It claims to be a reflection on the work of Nikolai Lesskow (in English known as Leskov, I believe); but it also touches on the difference beween a story (in the sense that a storyteller tells stories; Erzählung , not Geschichte ) and a novel, on the communicability of experience, on the role of death in modern life, on the nature of wisdom, on the relation between man and nature, and on several other topics. All...

This post is not about roleplaying or interactive fiction, but about fantasy literature. I suspect that there will be more posts like that in the future, so my apologies if you do not care for the subject. The [Fantasy]-tag will help you recognise and avoid them. I am currently reading Ursula K. Le Guin's From Elfland to Poughkeepsie , in which she discusses writing styles appropriate to fantasy. But more interesting than her comments on style (which, though true, are not especially insightful) is the framework of her discussion; the insight in fantasy that allows her to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate styles. Her metaphor is that of a big national park, which people should go to in order to experience something they normally do not (wilderness, nature), but which some people do go to "in a trailer with a motorbike on the back and a motorboat on top and a butane stove, five aluminium folding chairs, and a transistor radio on the inside. They arrive in a tot...

Being ill, I wanted to read an easy book this weekend. I chose R. A. Salvatore's The Dark Elf Trilogy , a set of Forgotten Realms novels describing the youth of that well-known D&D character, the good drow Drizzt Do'Urden. They were pretty bad, of course, but just the kind of light entertainment I was looking for. Except... There has been some discussion of sexism in roleplaying games on the internet, among which John Kim's interesting and shocking Gender Roles in RPG Texts . Although Salvatore's books are not roleplaying games, the fact that they are official TSR-published novels set in one of the most popular roleplaying settings in history makes them relevant to this discussion. And boy, these books are so sexist that I couldn't believe what I was reading. Not that Salvatore ever says anything like "women are inferior to men". I suspect that he is not even aware of his own sexism, and that - what is even worse - most of his readers never notice it....