Tolkien Lite

When I was a junior in high school I was very much into traditional fantasy fiction. I was in the middle of working my way through Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, and in between reading the actual tales I lived on steady diet of Conan and Kull comic books. I was only vaguely aware of Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft at that point, but I was already quite familiar with the Lord of Rings, first from the Ralph Bakshi animated film and then through the books themselves. Also around this time, I started playing Dungeons and Dragons PC-based games like Pool of Radiance.

One of my best friends at the time, a fellow geek and fantasy fan, was VERY much into the Dragonlance book series, and he repeatedly tried to sell me on it. He not only read the books, he bought up every ancillary publication that TSR sold, The Art of Dragonlance, The Atlas of Krynn, etc. We used to pour over these things studying the character designs, marvelling at the artwork and using it to build our own fantasy stories and art, as both of us considered ourselves budding artists/writers.

I was kind of a snob about it though, and we would often clash over whose fantasy was the "real thing" or whose was the best. I argued over and over for Robert E. Howard & Tolkien as the true fantasy, denigrating Dragonlance as a pale imitation. He argued that what I was reading was old and tired and that Dragonlance was new and fresh. I don't think I ever convinced him to read Conan or Kull (although I remember he gave more respect to Tolkien) but I did eventually attempt to read the first Dragonlance novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight.

I hated it. I couldn't finish it and the experience only hardened my resolve that what Weiss and Hickman had done was to raid Tolkien's work, coming away with a bunch of transparent, poorly imagined copies masquerading as characters. Eventually my friend and I agreed to disagree and put the subject to rest. I put the book aside and never touched it again.

As I continued reading other fantasy over the years, Dragonlance never left my mind though. I always held that up as the standard bearer for everything that was wrong with the genre. In my opinion, fantasy fiction by the 1990s was a dying art. All sense of innovation and creativity had been beaten out of it by a legion of writers hacking away about enchanted swords, dragons, rangers, knights and mages; plumbing the depths of imaginary inter-racial politics between arrogant elves, hot-tempered dwarves, impossibly noble/impossibly evil humans and code-word-disguised versions of hobbits.

These books are still being written (and still being purchased in large numbers, for some reason) but since then a new breed of genre-bending, genre-blending authors have started to do things with fantasy that are finally making it exciting again. I've already mentioned on this blog my admiration for the UK's China Mieville, but there are also people like K.J. Bishop, Jeff Vandermeer and even R. Scott Bakker, among others, who are pushing the envelope of fantasy fiction into new and interesting areas.

There is new life in the varied realms of fantasy. But old habits die hard, I suppose. This week I was browsing my local Hollywood Video and I discovered that my old friend Dragonlance did not go away gently into that good night, after all. Apparently someone made an animated version of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, with no less a voice than Kiefer Sutherland lending his talents to the role of Raistlin Majere.

I had no choice. I had to rent it, just to see it. To see if it was as derivative and weak as I remembered.

I wasn't disappointed. Perhaps because I could only stomach part of the novel the first time around (in 1988 or so) the story was almost completely new to me this time. I remembered only a few details. And yet the details were somehow VERY familiar to me.

See if this sounds familiar: A conflicted ranger with ties to both the human and elf world leads a group of companions on a quest, included in his party are a good-natured old wizard, a dwarf, a half-sized creature and a human knight. In their travels, always on guard against the growing evil of a deity who has returned from a long-ago defeat, the good-companions pass through a haunted forest, a ruined city and enter a beautiful Elvish city where the residents are in the process of leaving, possibly forever. That's Dragons of Autumn Twilight.

Or how about this? Aragorn leading Gandalf, Gimli, Frodo and Boromir, among others, traveling through the ruined Mines of Moria on their way to see Galadriel, after passing through the realm of Elrond, which will soon be evacuated as the Elves journey across the sea. Always on guard against the likes of a re-energized Sauron and his minions, back from ages of slumber.

I think a guy named Peter Jackson did something with that storyline a few years ago, didn't he?

So please accept my apology John, if by some chance you're reading this. I know we put aside our little argument about Dragonlance almost 20 years ago. But after watching this pale imitation, Jack Bauer's efforts notwithstanding, I had to take one last shot.