Old School Fantasy – 80s

[cgw]

Okay.

Emma Bull was a former rock musician among other things, so War for the Oaks is very much in the tradition of 1970's and 1980's music-centered/filking contemporary fantasy, a la Charles de Lint, etc. I haven't read that one, but I have read Bone Dance, a futuristic post-apocalypse fantasy that was interesting, and Territory, a historical western fantasy that sets up for a sequel that she never got around to doing.

Elizabeth Moon is a Marine veteran, so both her SF and her fantasy have a lot of military stuff in them. That particular trilogy is, I believe, somewhat episodic, with adventures that involve fantasy elements as the protagonist works through the ranks. I think the last book in the trilogy has more heavy fantasy elements in it but I have not read it. The more recent sequel series to the trilogy, Paladin's Legacy, which has a different protagonist, may be more fantasy heavy.

Sequels that they never got around to doing - is a whole topic for another thread.
But speaking of 80s fantasy and sequels I am waiting for:
PC Hodgell's first book came out in the early 80's. (I think I picked it up as one of my intro books for the SFBC.) Her latest from a couple years ago ended on a cliff hanger, which is the first time she has done that.

 

[KatG]

Yeah, that series has been an episodic one, with her doing books at random intervals. I'm sure she'll try to get another one out in another year or two, but she was a prof for a long time and there was a long interval in the middle, from the looks of it. It's a very trippy one, though I haven't really explored it.

 

[Mostlyharmless]

One of the simplest ways to find many of the SF books published over a decade is to read Jo Walton’s series of posts at Tor looking back at award winners and nominees https://www.tor.com/features/series/revisiting-the-hugos/. Rereading those posts, I find that far more science fiction than fantasy books were nominated from 1981 to 1990 but a fair number of 1980’s fantasies are mentioned.

 

[Alchemist]

When I think of 80s fantasy, I have two streams of thought that intermix.

One, my personal memory. I was a kid in the 80s, so grew up on that fantasy. I read some older classics (LotR, Earthsea, Prydain, etc), but mostly read the big epic fantasies of the 80s: Raymond Feist, David Eddings, Tad Williams, the Dragonlance novels, Louise Cooper, etc, and, of course, played Dungeons & Dragons.

When the Wheel of Time came along at the end of the decade (1990, to be exact) it felt like the culmination of 80s epic fantasy. There were precursors, and Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn is sometimes cited as the first "fat fantasy," but Wheel of Time was on an entirely different level as far as scope and, not to mention, word-count (although that only really become clear half a decade later). I read the books pretty much as they came out, until I lost interest in the late 90s when the narrative became very drawn out (I didn't finish Path of Daggers).

The other stream of thought is within the context of what I've learned after the fact, especially in recent years, about the history of fantasy. The 80s--at least the epic, secondary world fantasy that dominated the market--was a direct response to the popularity of Sword of Shannara in 1977. Fantasy was gaining steam as a whole, the genre becoming more cohesive around 1970, and probably the Dungeons & Dragons phenomena--first published in 1974, but then booming in the early 80s--playing a role. So a lot (though. not all) of the popular fantasy books in the 80s had a quality of being in the lineage of Shannara, although stories diverged more and more from "Tolkien clone" as the years and decades progressed.

And if Wheel of Time was the culmination of "Shannara fantasy," then Game of Thrones (1995) was somewhat of a subversion of that stream, in a somewhat similar fashion as Moorcock's Elric was of Lord of the Rings, though I don't think George RR Martin wrote Game of Thrones specifically as a subversive of genre fantasy, more that me wanted to join the fray, but in his own way, which ended up being somewhat subversive, darker and grittier...but that's just my speculation. Darker, low fantasy had been around a long time (e.g. Glen Cook's Black Company, and of course the various iterations of Sword & Sorcery over the years), but as far as I can tell, no one merged the two streams, epic fat fantasy and low/darker fantasy, until Martin came along.

Cue KatG telling me how I'm wrong .

 

[KatG]

You're not entirely wrong, but yes, a lot of that is wrong, partly because you didn't grow up with 1970's fantasy fiction which built the market and caused a lot of the trends in the 1980s and the 1990s. And the stuff about Martin's Song of Ice and Fire is wrong, including that low fantasy, dark fantasy and gritty battle fantasy are three different things and that Song of Ice and Fire is not low fantasy. The fantasy field is not one linear progression, or to put it in SOIF terms, one house instead of dozens. But I'm not sure that cgw really wants that discussion in this thread.

So far, the commentary is that cgw likes to have a high level of active fantasy elements and suspenseful plots and seems to mainly be asking for opinions about 1980's fantasy works they have picked up to read and their authors. So I have not deluged with lists, but if cgw wants lists of suggestions, I just need to know the parameters besides the 1980's time period.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Alchemist, IMO, is totally correct about WoT "losing the plot". Should have been 5 books. I have the entire series and lost interest about book 7 but kept reading. I think I did read book 8 Path of Daggers, but I don't remember where I stopped.
I don't think the Dragonlance / WoC books were ever very mainstream fantasy. I read a huge amount of Fantasy from late 1960s till now and my son gave me a shelf full of those from a Charity shop a few years ago. I read maybe three and gave them away a couple of weeks ago because with about 3000 paper books I'm running out of space.

 

[KatG]

I don't think the Dragonlance / WoC books were ever very mainstream fantasy.

That would also be incorrect.

 

[Windshadow]

Well I have to mention that the fantasy collection known as the Discworld series, got its first book early in the 80s, though I grant you that due to its limited sales and restriction to just UK markets means that few of you will have heard of it’s author the late Sir Terry Pratchett.
What?
Too heavy handed with the dripping sarcasm there? Sorry.

I just finished an exchange with a Goodreads troll who started off by saying that Pratchett did not count as a fantasy author as he was a humorist and did not properly adhere to the basic foundational tropes of the genre. Then finished with a few insults of my name and presumed background and parentage…topped off with that as a ‘populist' author Pratchett also did not count as his popularity was outside of true fantasy fandom. At that point I belatedly reported the troll and took a shower and came here. I should know better at my age than to let punks like that push my buttons.

 

[Hobbit]

I just finished an exchange with a Goodreads troll who started off by saying that Pratchett did not count as a fantasy author as he was a humorist and did not properly adhere to the basic foundational tropes of the genre.

Sorry to hear this Windy. I'm sure you know, but Terry's first published fiction was SF in the 1960's - I've reviewed one story at Galactic Journey. So he was versed in the tropes of the genre/s and knew what he was doing...

The troll also seems to imply that you must be one 'type' at the exclusion of all others? Hmm. I'm further reminded of the response "Guilty of Literature".

 

[Ray McCarthy]

That would also be incorrect.

Maybe it depends where you live? Though the "Forgotten Realms" series were republished in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand by Penguin in association with TSR, it's possible they weren't carried by regular booksellers here but places like Forbidden Planet.


I'll stop digging now.

 

[KatG]

Well I have to mention that the fantasy collection known as the Discworld series, got its first book early in the 80s, though I grant you that due to its limited sales and restriction to just UK markets means that few of you will have heard of it’s author the late Sir Terry Pratchett.
What?
Too heavy handed with the dripping sarcasm there? Sorry.

Terry Pratchett's Discworld books were not as globally distributed at first, because the global market hadn't gotten as broad and organized as it got. But by the 1980's, Pratchett was of course a big cheese in the U.S. and elsewhere, with translations in non-English territories happening a pace. He's probably the most long running in print author around except for Agatha Christie.

I just finished an exchange with a Goodreads troll who started off by saying that Pratchett did not count as a fantasy author as he was a humorist and did not properly adhere to the basic foundational tropes of the genre.

Stares in comic fantasy. Well at least he made you laugh. Yeah, the Russian bots and weird alt righters found Goodreads once Amazon bought it and they are becoming quite an annoying problem that Amazon does nothing about.

Then finished with a few insults of my name and presumed background and parentage…topped off with that as a ‘populist' author Pratchett also did not count as his popularity was outside of true fantasy fandom.

I think the response to that is, "Huh?" Although it is a common claim to make that bestsellers are somehow then not part of the SFF market. Never made much sense, but it's an identity idea for some folk.

Maybe it depends where you live? Though the "Forgotten Realms" series were republished in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand by Penguin in association with TSR, it's possible they weren't carried by regular booksellers here but places like Forbidden Planet.

In the Commonwealth, not counting Canada, TSR was less widely distributed up until the global market increased in the 1990's. But TSR's D&D was a major shaper of the whole English language market in the late 1980's through the 1990's, along with other tie-in fiction for games and t.v./movies, including Star Wars. While a lot of TSR's tie-ins paperbacks came and went, they launched a ton of new writers who then moved into original fiction and a solid crew of mega-bestsellers like R.A. Salvatore and Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman who were on the NYTimes list and had front of store displays in the major chains. Other game companies followed suit, as well as big name SFF authors recruited for Star Wars, Star Trek and other properties. The tie-ins got their own set of bookstore shelves, which were usually, most of it being SFF, put near the SFF section but also sometimes more in the middle of the stores. The TSR books were far more widely known to the mainstream because it drew in gamers from the much bigger, commercial game market and a lot of young people. Tie-in fiction was so successful, with TSR's ones leading the pack, that a lot of folk in the SFF category market freaked out in the 1990's, thinking that it would take over and wipe out original SFF because writer-for-hire deals were cheaper for pubs, etc.

But what it did instead, is what always happens and that is it funneled tons of new readers into SFF, helping to keep fantasy expanding during the 1990's when science fiction and other types of fiction were struggling due to the collapse of the wholesale/mmp distribution market. In particular, the TSR tie-ins helped secondary world fantasy be the premier expansion sub-genre during the 1990's. Lots of SFF fans who started in the 1990's did so by way of TSR tie-in fiction. Only Harry Potter probably drew more new readers into SFF. The TSR were utterly aimed at the mainstream, commercial, multimedia audience and they were big chiefs there for awhile. In the oughts, tie-in fiction further expanded and became more global with the rest but the books were also more integrated when it comes to shelving. They usually get a smaller section or display within the SFF category shelves now. But it's still a huge, commercial, thoroughly mainstream market.

 

[Alchemist]

You're not entirely wrong, but yes, a lot of that is wrong, partly because you didn't grow up with 1970's fantasy fiction which built the market and caused a lot of the trends in the 1980s and the 1990s. And the stuff about Martin's Song of Ice and Fire is wrong, including that low fantasy, dark fantasy and gritty battle fantasy are three different things and that Song of Ice and Fire is not low fantasy. The fantasy field is not one linear progression, or to put it in SOIF terms, one house instead of dozens. But I'm not sure that cgw really wants that discussion in this thread.

Haha, as expected. Funny, though, Kat, how you say lots of "wrong," but most of it is not really what I said. For instance, I didn't say that low/dark/gritty are "three different things," nor did I say that ASoIF is or is not "low fantasy." Nor did I say that fantasy is one linear progression. But you do you, Kat! Misinterpret what people say, then tell them how they're wrong...about what they aren't even saying In other words, be wrong about what others are supposedly wrong about! Haha.

I can't comment about the 70s/80s thing, because you don't say how I'm wrong, just that I'm wrong. Have you been watching the greatest hits of our previous president?

I mean, is it wrong that much of 80s epic, secondary world fantasy was influenced by and riding on the coat-tails of Shannara's popularity?

But I am familiar with 70s fantasy - I didn't grow up with it, but I've ready a bunch and studied the field. In fact, the late 60s and 70s is one of my favorite eras for fantasy and science fiction, so even if I didn't grow up with it, I've dived into it a lot in later years.

If you look at the writers I mentioned of 80s sec world fantasy--Feist, Eddings, Weis/Hickman, as well as Williams and Jordan--I don't think it is wrong to suggest a line back to Shannara as one of the more influential 70s fantasies. Certainly Kurtz, Chant, McKillip, Lee, Le Guin, McCaffrey, Bradley, Moorcock, Zelazny, Springer, and others had a say in forming post-Tolkien secondary world fantasy, but I don't think you can really discuss the commercial/mainstream secondary world fantasy from the 80s seems without seeing the impact of Shannara.

I see Louise Cooper more in the tradition of Moorcock, Tanith Lee, CJ Cherryh, even McKillip, Mayhar, etc...more stylized like a lot of 70s fantasy, and less "Tolkien spawn."

 

[KatG]

Haha, as expected. Funny, though, Kat, how you say lots of "wrong," but most of it is not really what I said. For instance, I didn't say that low/dark/gritty are "three different things," nor did I say that ASoIF is or is not "low fantasy." Nor did I say that fantasy is one linear progression. But you do you, Kat! Misinterpret what people say, then tell them how they're wrong...about what they aren't even saying In other words, be wrong about what others are supposedly wrong about! Haha.

I apologize; I think I worded that previous post awkwardly so you misunderstood some of what I said. I was saying that low fantasy, dark fantasy and gritty battle fantasy are three different things and that ASOIF is not low fantasy, (though some of Arya's adventures are low fantasy-ish.) So what you thought I was saying you said was actually what I was saying for myself in disagreement with you. Does that make more sense or am I still muddling it? Also, what I meant about trying to make it one linear progression is that you're describing a straight progression over time -- that there was this author, which changed things and then ASOIF that changed things, etc. and that's not how the history of fantasy developed. It's not a straight line (one house) it's lots of different traditions that were often popular at the same time and multiple sub-genres that affected each other.

I can't comment about the 70s/80s thing, because you don't say how I'm wrong, just that I'm wrong. Have you been watching the greatest hits of our previous president?

I didn't say how I thought you were wrong because, as I said, I wasn't sure that the OP wanted their thread about 80's fantasy titles and authors to turn into a debate between you and me about the history of fantasy fiction. (You invoked me, so I responded but it's a different conversation.) If you want to have the conversation, we can, but I didn't want to hijack the thread. So we'd have to do it in another thread unless cgw says go to it. And on that point:

I mean, is it wrong that much of 80s epic, secondary world fantasy was influenced by and riding on the coat-tails of Shannara's popularity?

Yes, it is wrong, at least partly, on the influence side. Shannara is also not a secondary world fantasy. It takes place on Earth. It is a post-apocalyptic futuristic fantasy that also uses science fiction elements. Which was part of an on-going and popular tradition that influenced many popular fantasy writers in the 1980's as well as Brooks. There was a lot going on in the 1980s.

But I am familiar with 70s fantasy - I didn't grow up with it, but I've ready a bunch and studied the field. In fact, the late 60s and 70s is one of my favorite eras for fantasy and science fiction, so even if I didn't grow up with it, I've dived into it a lot in later years.

Then you can understand the impact of them on Brooks and other fantasy writers in the 1980's. Fantasy written in the 1970's and 1960's was commercial and mainstream already. Fantasy had an expansion in the 1980's in several sub-genres, though the big expansion in straight secondary world fantasy came in the 1990's. Again, I don't want to hijack this thread to discuss Shannara and its role. But if you want to make another thread, I'll come play.

 

[cgw]

I would argue that Eddings Belgariad (what ever you think of it) was hugely influential.
It probably was influenced by Brooks but that is hard for me to weigh in on as I read The Sword of Shannara, and while it was OK I thought it was such a LotR rip that I never bothered reading more of his.
My loss?

 

[cgw]

I read Jhereg by Brust back in the day. I remember liking it OK, but for whatever reason I never got around to reading more.
I just picked up Taltos with the intent on trying in chronological order.
My comment so far is the switching between present and flashbacks is jarring.

 

[Alchemist]

I would argue that Eddings Belgariad (what ever you think of it) was hugely influential.
It probably was influenced by Brooks but that is hard for me to weigh in on as I read The Sword of Shannara, and while it was OK I thought it was such a LotR rip that I never bothered reading more of his.
My loss?

I haven't read them since the mid-80s, but my memory is that Elfstones and Wishsong (book 2 and 3) were better than Sword, and far less derivative of Tolkien. But I'm not a huge Brooks fan and haven't ready anything since.

 

[Alchemist]

But if you want to make another thread, I'll come play.

OK, will do - in the next day or two. Maybe a "history of fantasy" thread is in order, anyway, if only to come back to over time.

 

[Hobbit]

I haven't read them since the mid-80s, but my memory is that Elfstones and Wishsong (book 2 and 3) were better than Sword, and far less derivative of Tolkien.

Having interviewed Terry about 10 years ago about it, he would probably appreciate those comments. Whilst he totally admits to Sword being an homage to Tolkien (without all the poetry!), he told me that the books after were a deliberate attempt to improve his writing and feel more like his own work.

As for his other work, I think what I have read gets better. The Word and the Void trilogy I would recommend as perhaps his best, with more than a touch of the Stephen King about them.

 

[pogopossum]

One of the simplest ways to find many of the SF books published over a decade is to read Jo Walton’s series of posts at Tor looking back at award winners and nominees https://www.tor.com/features/series/revisiting-the-hugos/. Rereading those posts, I find that far more science fiction than fantasy books were nominated from 1981 to 1990 but a fair number of 1980’s fantasies are mentioned.

I applaud Mostly H's suggestion of Jo Walton. I have barely tapped her TOR blog, but her What Makes This Book So Great & An Informal History of the Hugos each describe and profile the literature with commentary in lovely detail. As suggested, they focus more on SF (as did the Hugos) , but are excellent in describing what, when and how books were original.

 

[KatG]

I would argue that Eddings Belgariad (what ever you think of it) was hugely influential.
It probably was influenced by Brooks but that is hard for me to weigh in on as I read The Sword of Shannara, and while it was OK I thought it was such a LotR rip that I never bothered reading more of his.
My loss?

1) Yes, Eddings' Belgariad was hugely influential to 1980's and 1990's fantasy writers doing secondary world fantasy and also highly bestselling from the very first book onwards. By the late 1980's, he had front of the store displays for the series and the Elenium sub-trilogy (1989-1991) was particularly huge. People tend to discount Eddings books nowadays because you are likely to find the reprints being sold in the YA section or shelved in YA at the libraries and/or the books are simply considered YA by many because the first part of the series started with a child/teen protagonist (though most of the books don't have a teen protagonist.) But the books weren't published as YA, but with Del Rey as part of Ballantine/Del Rey's launched (adult) fantasy lines. Back then three quarters of non-contemporary fantasy novels had teen protagonists (including Shannara). Adults read them without worry that they would seem childish doing so -- that wasn't really a thing in fantasy fandom until the late 1990's when YA fiction in general had its mega-growth expansion in the wake of Harry Potter. But for the period of 1982-1995, Eddings was huge and influential and certainly encouraged the idea of long, dynastic series, along with other big name writers like Mercedes Lackey. (He had planned to do the first story as a trilogy; Lester Del Rey needed the books -- all mass market paperback, not hardcover -- to be a certain size to work with the big chains and the paperback racks in the wholesale market and so made him cut it into five books of smaller size.) Numerous fantasy authors later on cited the series as a major influence.

2) Eddings was not influenced by Brooks at all. He noticed that Lord of the Rings was having a perennial reprint life in the category fantasy market and so sought to enter the market himself after having written several non-fantasy novels. He looked at the medieval epics he'd studied in college -- which Tolkien also drew from as a scholar of them. The main influence on the Belgariad is Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur -- the story of Arthur, and also Tennyson and Chaucer. (Of course, Tolkien also drew heavily on the tale of King Arthur -- Gandalf is Merlin, Aragorn is Arthur, the Fellowship on a quest is the Round Table knights, etc.) Eddings, who was also helped a great deal by his wife Leigh in the writing, wanted a story with a variety of cultures, major female characters and a grittier and less traditional and dated world set-up (where the Chaucer comes in.)

3) Shannara had LOTR leanings, but Brooks also was drawing from other epic fantasies of the time, D&D material, several science fiction novels of the time (leaning heavily into the idea of nuclear war mutations which Brooks placed alongside the magical race of elves/presence of magic) and Dumas' The Three Musketeers, which had a bigger influence over the series than LOTR. Shannara isn't really a LOTR rip-off -- it's a mish mash of various 1970's popular trends and isn't much different from many stories in the 1960's and 1970's. But Lester Del Rey chose Shannara to help kick off his new fantasy line/imprint and decided to market the book very heavily as Tolkien's heir, (even though it's a futuristic fantasy, not a sec world epic,) complete with an initial trade paperback edition to get more book reviews and library placement rather than just a mass market paperback.

That strategy, one which would kick off into overdrive in the 1990's for SFF when the mass market paperback market shrunk and they got more reliant on the bookstores, got the book more media attention in the 1970's but also a lot of backlash against Brooks. So Brooks' Shannara was a coattails book -- it hitting the NYTimes list hard helped fuel and fund a growth expansion for category fantasy (of all kinds) at Del Rey and otherwise by bringing in lots of readers, some of whom then browsed outward to other fantasy and SF books. But as an influence on other fantasy writers, Brooks' Shannara was not very influential. Writers weren't trying to copy Brooks; they didn't need to when they had Tolkien and other bestselling writers and sources who had much bigger thematic and stylistic impacts on secondary world fantasy and other sub-genres of fantasy.

Brooks' writing got more confident in the Shannara series and you can see the Musketeers influences more fully as the series goes on, as well as science fiction elements. However, it was his later Word & Void series (late 1990's) that was the one that was more of an influence on other fantasy writers and is often regarded as his best work as noted in this thread. The Word & Void trilogy is technically a prequel series to Shannara, set in present day Earth, but also worked as a standalone series (this is in keeping with how Stephen King connects many of his novels and King is the big influence on The Word & Void novels.) It is a dark fantasy series heavily influenced by King's Dark Tower series and other works and various other authors/influences and is very in keeping with the 1970's contemporary fantasy, dark fantasy and horror traditions. So you might like that one more, as others have suggested.

I read Jhereg by Brust back in the day. I remember liking it OK, but for whatever reason I never got around to reading more. I just picked up Taltos with the intent on trying in chronological order. My comment so far is the switching between present and flashbacks is jarring.

Brust's Vlad Taltos series was another big one, bestselling and deeply influential through the 1980's and 1990's, as was the side series set in the same universe, particularly The Phoenix Guards. I would suggest reading the Taltos series in the order in which it is published, rather than trying to read it chronologically. The books are mystery thrillers, partially episodic, following that tradition; Vlad is an assassin but also a detective/spy and each book in the series built on and was connected to the previous ones and their mysteries and incidents. So if you read them out of publication order, it is more confusing and you'll miss connective clues.

It's a favorite series of mine but it does go back and forth in time (which was a common technique throughout 1970's and 1980's fantasy fiction.) And you seem, from comments on some of the other books you've mentioned, to not like that type of story structure. So it might not work for you either way, publication order or chronological.

OK, will do - in the next day or two. Maybe a "history of fantasy" thread is in order, anyway, if only to come back to over time.

Well I was just talking about Shannara and related big cheeses, but if you want to do a bigger history thread, that's fine with me. Bear in mind, however, that thematic theories about fantasy fiction do not tend to hold up under actual historic publication facts and I am not being a meanie if I point that out.

I applaud Mostly H's suggestion of Jo Walton. I have barely tapped her TOR blog, but her What Makes This Book So Great & An Informal History of the Hugos each describe and profile the literature with commentary in lovely detail. As suggested, they focus more on SF (as did the Hugos) , but are excellent in describing what, when and how books were original.

Walton is good on history and insightful on analysis (and I like some of her fiction) but one grain of salt is that there are disputes over some of her opinions and interpretations (but when are there not.) But that series has been considered very informational.