Game of Thrones - Latest Report

About three-quarters in, and I've had to eat my words with one of my friends who likes giving me crap.  I like this damn book.  I don't know why.  No, I do know - Tyrion.  And Daenaerys.  I still don't like Bran.  DON'T GIVE ME THAT.  Yeah, he's paralyzed.  You think he wants your pity?  He doesn't have mine.  He's not going to die.  You can practically see the plot armor.  He's probably touched by the gods, too.  My hypothesis is that he is the seven-year-old kid that seven-year-old Martin wished he had been - bold and adventurous, staying strong through heavy burdens, chosen for a special destiny.

Samwise Gamgee Samwell Tarly, on the other hand, is Martin's author avatar, where he admits "This is what would really happen if I were in one of my own stories."  To be fair, that is what would happen to most of us.  I mean, I fence, but I know modern Olympic-style sport fencing.  I'd get slaughtered.

Speaking of being slaughtered, I know Martin has a reputation for killing popular characters, but so far the only characters to die have just made me think "expendable tourist." (OMT)

I just know he's going to kill Tyrion.  Tyrion is the only character who is not boring or a complete asshole.  Tyrion has his own priorities, and isn't wrapped up in being noble and saving the realm.  And he's a badass dwarf.  How many fantasy stories - any stories - have a badass dwarf that that isn't from a dwarf-people?

I just realized that Martin was having a joke in that one scene where Tyrion was forced to fight with an axe...

Tyrion looks out for Tyrion, and Tyrion keeps himself to his standards.  He's not bad.  He's not good.  He's just himself, and I think it is more important (and interesting) to be yourself than to try to be what you're supposed to be.

Dany has that going for her too.  She's supposed to be the meek, submissive child-bride, but then she decides she's taken enough crap, and she's going to take over the kingdoms.

Arya is not this type of character.  Sure she learns to use a sword and defies her role as a gentle lady, but she is still concerned with being noble and good and whatever.

Still, I haven't been swearing at the book much at all anymore.

Just a few more little complaints.

1.  The f'ing "Common Tongue."  There is no language in the history of language that has ever been called the "Common Tongue."  If one particular country that speaks one particular language becomes a really big trade powerhouse, then that language becomes dominant in the world and people learn it as a second language to communicate with many cultures, rather than trying to learn three or four languages.  Even Esperanto had a proper name - and look how many people speak it now, anyway.  But somehow, fantasy writers are too lazy to come up with an ethnic name for language, so they call the language of the patriarchal white pseudo-Europeans the "Common Tongue."

2.  The king is never evil.  Seriously.  When a kingdom goes to shit, it's always the evil queen, or the evil minister, but evil kings are fought in battle - they don't actually run kingdoms. Kings can be weak or misled, but never evil.

It doesn't sound like I'm actually enjoying the book much, does it?  I'm not.  I just can't stop reading it anymore.  And I was sad when Lady died.  Then I was pissed because Arya had to lose Nymeria, and it was like "Oh, right, none of the girls get to be followed around by a big badass wolf, even though the three-year-old boy gets one."

And then Tyrion got thrown in a dungeon, and I was quite distressed about that, because shoot, Tyrion's the best part of this book.  And I've been catching myself having "What's going to happen next?" moments, like after Robert dies.

Maybe a final post on this once I finish the book.  Or maybe I'll find something new and interesting to blab about.

Queering Epic Fantasy - Anthony vs. Martin, Part 2

I didn't even get to the queer stuff yesterday, did I?  I probably won't get to it today either.

I'm going to talk about food.

I am also going to cheat on my five-chapter limit, but it's for good reason.

Here is Martin's description of a feast:

"The Great Hall of Winterfell was hazy with smoke and heavy with the smell of roasted meat and fresh-baked bread.  Its grey stone walls were draped with banners.  White, gold, crimson:  the direwolf of Stark, Baratheon's crowned stag, the lion of Lannister.  A singer was playing the high harp and reciting a ballad, but down at this end of the hall his voice could scarcely be heard above the roar of the fire, the clangor of pewter plates and cups, and the low mutter of a hundred drunken conversations."

Here is Anthony's description of a feast:


"The great hall of Calavere had been decorated to resemble a winter forest.  Boughs of evergreen and holly hung from soot-blackened beams high above, and more had been heaped along the base of the walls.  Their icy scent mingled with the smoke of torches.  Leafless saplings stood in the corners of the hall, to suggest the edges of a sylvan glade, and even the tapestries on the walls added to the illusion with their scenes of stag hunts and forest revels, woven in colors made dim and rich with time."

What I'm getting from this is:  If you are going to write epic fantasy, and you have to describe a feast, you must always start with "The great hall of X..."

But seriously.  Where would you rather be?  Winterfell or Calavere?  My take on Martin - and one of the reasons I don't like him - is that his fantasyland is very generic.  Who is the singer and how did he get there?  What is he singing about?  Who cares?  It's a medieval feast, and they have bards and shit there, don't they?

It looks like I am going to get to queer stuff today after all.

One of the reasons Anthony is much more detailed in his description of castle life is because he has quite a few female characters.  The king's ward practically runs the castle - including preparations for feasts.  Who put together the Winterfell feast?  The wife, whatsername, Catelyn?  She doesn't seem to have much imagination.  Or maybe it was planned out by a man.  That would explain a lot.

Martin's female characters are annoying me five chapters (and one episode of the show) in.  We have the supportive wife, the victimized child-bride, and the tomboy princess (though I have heard that the child-bride takes a level in badass later, so I promise I'll read a few more chapters after this rant).  So - we have one woman whose strength is being married to a strong man and making him stronger, we have one woman who is completely dominated by the heteropatriarchy, and we have one who takes on a male role in order to gain power.

Anthony's world is also quite male-dominated, but he uses the patriarchy to ask questions about power and gender relations.  He has not one but two queens, neither of which rule over a matriarchy.  He has no crossdressers.  And yes, the Witches are a big equalizing factor in his world, but it is not so much a matter of giving women power as giving women space.  Martin has yet to pass the Bechdel test.  Okay, so Anthony takes until chapter 9, and then it's a cryptic warning and not really a conversation, but once you get more than one female character, he really takes off.

So the reason I like Anthony and not Martin is that Anthony's writing is queer.  I'm not talking about his order of gay knights, or his gay protagonist, or his representation of every letter in the LGBTQetc. acronym.  Anthony is queer because he gives attention to issues of power and privilege, so that his almost stereotypical quest arc becomes fresh and exciting because it is seen through a different lens.

Now it's time for five more chapters of Martin.  Maybe I'll have another rant by then.

Queering Epic Fantasy: A critical comparison between "Game of Thrones" and "Beyond the Pale." Part One.

If you're read any of my other posts on this blog, you know that I am obsessed with this obscure fantasy series by a guy named Mark Anthony (not the singer) called "The Last Rune."  I am not unbiased.

But I can't stand Game of Thrones.

I don't know why.  Sure, he has a massive cast, and I can't seem to care about any of them, and everyone in the prologue dies, and it's very hetero-European-centric.  And it doesn't have a Dark Lord, while Anthony does, and there are certain storytelling conventions that make me think that Anthony was in some ways influenced by Martin (it's plausible - Thrones came out in 1996 and Pale was published in 1998).  And we certainly cannot disregard the effect of nostalgia goggles.

So what is so different about the two books?

I have only read the first five chapters of Thrones, so I will limit my text citations of Anthony to the first five chapters of Beyond the Pale.

Let's start with the first line of the prologue.

Thrones:  "We should start back," Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them.  "The wildlings are dead."

Pale:  The derelict school bus blew into town with the last midnight gale of October.

What can we deduce from this?  Well, Thrones tells us immediately that there are going to be weird names of pseudo-European fantasyland tradition.  Seriously, have you noticed that nearly every fantasy novel has a character named "Gareth"?  "Gared" tells me that he is going to do a lot of re-spelling, which is possibly even more annoying than scrabble-bag names.

What else?  Starting the story at dusk gives a sense of darkness and foreboding and spooky things; like the start of a horror movie.  But WTF is a wildling?  That's not explained until the next chapter; instead, the author spends a great deal of time describing the characters' clothes.

Now in Pale, we see we are in the real world with school buses and Octobers.  We can see the scene, instead of trying to imagine some dude named Gared in some kind of wood with some other people.  The question that keeps you reading, then, is not "What is going on?" but "Why is the school bus blowing into town at midnight?"  Obviously, Martin does not have that luxury, but half the time I feel like he does not explain things enough, and the other half I am frustrated by him giving too much detail and name-dropping.

The rest of the prologues are as follows:  In Thrones, the viewpoint is actually held by Will, but they all get killed by spooky zombie-things so it doesn't really matter; you never really get a sense of the characters, so you don't really care that they're dead.  In Pale, a creepy preacher-like figure oversees a troupe of faerie-like beings raise a tent (for some reason my mental image always looks like that one scene in Dumbo) to host "Brother Cy's Travelling Salvation Show."  You can tell no one here is a real viewpoint character; they are kept distant, mysterious, not someone you connect to but someone you wonder at.  The prologue is quite different from the rest of the chapters; which is why it is a prologue and not a first chapter where everyone dies.  Also, the preacher reappears in chapter two, so he isn't completely forgotten.  He's relevant, just not a viewpoint character.

Now for the first line of Chapter One.

Thrones:  The morning had dawned clear and cold, with a crispness that hinted at the end of summer.

Pale:  Sometimes the wind blowing down from the mountains made Travis Wilder feel like anything could happen.

There's no contest here - a description of the weather, or an introduction into the main character's soul.  Ugh,  okay, I'll try for less bias.  Autumn signifies dying things, and adds to the foreboding of the prologue.  The chapter also details a seven year old boy witnessing his first execution, and so it can also signify and end to childhood innocence.  But that's a cheap metaphor.  Wind as a vehicle for infinite possibilities is not something you see every day.

Now, in the first five chapters of Thrones, there are five different viewpoint characters; I believe there are a total of seven in the book.  In the first five of Pale, there is one, with a total of two main ones and a few glimpses of others in the climax toward the end.

On page one of Thrones, we are introduced to six characters:  Bran, Robb, Mance Rayder, Old Nan, Jon, the man that gets killed.  On page two we get Eddard Stark, Theon Greyjoy, Jory Cassel, and Robert.  Also, I can't find anywhere that explicitly says that Robb is Bran's brother.  Yes, there is a character list in the back, but I'm trying to get into the story, and I'm trying to focus on Bran, and there are all these names distracting me.

Pale does not introduce anyone besides Travis until three pages in, for a total of three:  Travis, Moira Larsen, who is not important, and Max, who is.  Moira Larsen is introduced as Travis, a saloonkeeper, is worried about being late for work and having to face irate patrons.  Max is his one employee.  I'm still fuzzy on who half the names in Thrones are.

I think the fundamental difference in the structure of the two books is that Martin takes a broad sweep of his story, introducing the setting and the people, and telling the story after the stage has been set.  Anthony introduces Travis, and pulls him into the story once we know him.

Anthony is also quicker on the action.  By the end of chapter five, we have already had our first incident, complete with fire and danger and strange beings.  Prologue of Thrones does not count as an incident because it doesn't connect to a recurring character.  Five chapters in, it looks like some kind of fantasyland family drama.  It's a soap opera.  The characters are shallow enough.

I have so much more to say on these books.  So much that I think I'm going to break it up into multiple posts.  Tomorrow:  Feasts and castles!  After that, I might actually get to the queer theory component.

History Project - 1979: Tales of Neveryon

I need to come up for a more concise name for what I'm doing that "Queer Fantasy History Project."
"Tales of Neveryon" is a book by Samuel R. Delany that consists of five tales and an appendix (it's one of those books where the appendix is part of the story).  The tales all take place in the same fictional kingdom of Neveryon, a proto-civilization, pseudo-Mesopotamian sword-and-soceryland.  The tales share a few characters and in the last tale pulls all the plots together in complicated and interesting ways.

The story behind the story:  Neveryon was on my list for vintage queer fantasy I needed to read, and I finally tracked it down at a used bookstore.  On that same trip I bought "Nocturne," partly because I have been trying to finish the Indigo books, and partly because I did not want to buy only that book with that cover.

I.  The Tale of Gorgik

Gorgik is a slave, who finds favor with a noblewoman (yes, I do mean sex) and ends up not only freed but becomes very successful in the military.  Right away you can tell this is not your typical post-Tolkien sword-and-sorcery. There is a lot of class commentary and power relations.  Oh, and Delany is African-American.  Matters of race and slavery come up a lot in his books.  Just saying.

He's also gay, and I heard that there is quite a bit of queer content in the Neveryon books (which is why I tracked it down for the history project).  All that I could find from Gorgik was mention of male prostitutes in the scenery, implication that the eunuch servant has sex with men, and implication that Gorgik has sex with a guy, or at least that a guy approached him for sexual favors.

II.  The Tale of Old Venn

This is the tale which blew my mind a little.  I mean, to all appearances (namely, the scantily clad people on the cover) it's a tpyical 70's sword-and-sorcery book.  Then it starts to ask quesions about gender roles and the origin of prejudice and Freudian theory and the effect money has on society.  Somehow, it does not come off as didactic, even though the format is mostly an old woman giving lessons to a group of children.

This story is not queer in the sense of homosexuality, but Old Venn does have some stories of her time as a wife in a not-your-typical-polygamist-society.  Instead of the women being property of the men, the man is the property of the women; until that sociey was introduced to money, which skewed things into a patriarchy, by ways that really do make sense but are a bit complicated for a blog post.

III.  The Tale of Small Sarg

Now it gets gay.  Sarg is a barbarian prince, "which meant that his mother's brother wore women's jewelry and was consulted about animals and sickness."  Sarg himself also has the opportunity to assume such an office (the barbarians seem to be some sort of matriarchy), but prefers not to.

Then Sarg is captured and sold as a slave to Gorgik.  After the sale, Sarg says to his new master "You should have take [sic] the woman.  You get her work in the day, her body at night." To which Gorgik replies "You think I'll get any less from you?"

Yep.

Apparently the reason Gorgik bought a slave is because he physically cannot have sex unless one partner is wearing a slave collar.  This toes the line between implying that gay sex is really messed up, and bringing up issues of the psychology of power relations. 

That's all I have to say on that, except that people who claim that speculative fiction is more homophobic than other genres obviously are not reading the right books.  This was not a bromance, or homoerotic undertones.  There was very unambiguously sex.

IV.  The Tale of Dragons and Potters

I have to bring up an interesting coincidence on this for people who have read The Wheel of Time.  There is a character named Bayle who has "an inch of yellow beard, mostly beneath his chin - no real mustache."  Granted, he's eighteen.  No he does not have a funny accent.  Still.

There is also a character named Raven who is...you know your friend whose a rabid man-hating feminist?  That's her.  She's from an oppressive matriarchy, and at one point tells her people's creation story, which parallels Christianity in odd ways, except that Adam and Eve are both women, and Adam's punishment for original sin is to be turned into " 'man, which means broken woman." 

Interestingly, not only are the male characters uncomfortable with this story, but the female as well.  A sign of feminism gone too far?  Or internalized oppression?  Though this is the girl (now grown-up) who listened to Old Venn's stories.

This is also the story where it is revealed that there is no birth-control herb (Tamora Pierce won't be part of the scene for a while).

V.  The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers

Most of these issues are brought up in Sarg, but there's not too much to say about this one, so I'm going to talk about the dragons.  Dragons in Neveryon are vicious, impractical creatures, tamed only because some lord way back when decided they were pretty.  Their riders (yes, they have riders, this is post-McCaffery) are girls - young girls - because they are smaller and therefor lighter.  It is also a very high-risk and undesireable job, so the riders are also the delinquent "bad girls" who don't have a choice.

The last tale has Gorgik and Sarg on a violent campaign to end slavery.  There is an interesting debate between Sarg and a slave, who explains that their methods are actually counterproductive.  Sarg kills him.  The slave had a point.  But Sarg's rage, his desire to make a change now - that also is understandable.

Also, upon their meeting with Norema and Raven, Gorgik introduces himself and Sarg as lovers.  No one really bats an eye at the gender relations.

Appendix:  Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus, Part Three

The title of this scared me too.  In fact, it details the discovery of an ancient text telling the oldest story known to mankind, and the difficulties in translating this.  I'm pretty sure it's all made up, but it's very plausible sounding.  But when you google "Culhar text," the only links that show up are related to Delany.

Essentially, the point of the appendix is that Delany took inspiration from this story for Neveryon.  Or that someone did; I think it might be a story-within-a-story, and that the appendix relates to one of his other books.  It's so brilliant, though, because some of the passages from the alleged text have translations that run thus:

Either

1) "the love of the small barbarian slave for the tall man from Culhare."

Or

2)  "the love of the tall slave from Culhare for the small barbarian."

Or even

3)  "the small love of the barbarian and the tall man for slavery."

Or...all three at once.

So by this point I am quite determined to become a Delany fangirl, because that man is brilliant.  He asks so many questions, and doesn't answer a single one, instead forcing you to think about it.  In a 1970's sword-and-sorcery novel.  This is pre-Brooks/Eddings fantasy at its finest, before the Star-Wars-with-dragons plot became standard and everyone had to invent their own world, and the world you invented explored possibilities and questions that could not be explored in our own world.

Feminist Fantasy: Alanna vs. Indigo

The other day I was in a used bookstore and I ran into Nocturne: Book Four of Indigo, by Louise Cooper (1990).  Now, I've been spending the past several years off and on perusing secondhand bookstores for the Indigo series - I've only been able to get book 3 at a library.  I picked the first one up on a whim at a used book store, and took about a year to get around to reading it.  It was kind of like what happened a couple weeks ago when I woke up in the middle of the night needing to read some trashy B-fantasy.  And I had Indigo on hand.  And about a chapter in, I realized my mistake.  This was not trashy at all.

The story starts with a princess who pulls a Pandora ("What's in this box that no one's ever, ever supposed to open?") and releases seven demons into the world, and condemns her boyfriend to eternal torment (or until the demons are destroyed) in the process.  She is given one chance to redeem herself - the goddess grants her immortality, so she has all the time in the world to destroy the demons. 

What I really love about the series is that it flips the traditional fairy-tale narrative on its head - the princess goes out and has adventures while the prince just sits in his tower.  It's one of the few books I know of that has a strong female protagonist who is not involved in a love triangle.  And the mutant wolf.  Gotta love the mutant wolf.

There is more than one kind of feminist literature, however.  When most people think of feminist fantasy, they think of Tamora Pierce (Actually, they probably think Katniss or Hermione, but for now we're going to pretend I'm right, 'kay?).  Pierce's characters are always defying the patriarchy and breaking gender roles and confusing misogynists and saving the world blah blah blah.

I was big into Tamora Pierce back in middle school/high school, having started with the Circle of Magic quartet in elementary school from the book orders, moving on to The Immortals because the first book had ponies on the cover (Yeah.  So?) and deciding to round out my repertoire with the author's first work, the Alanna books (Song of the Lioness, whatever).

Alanna is a princess (well, the daughter of a duke or a lord or something) who decides to switch places with her twin brother, disguising herself as a boy to go to knight school while he goes to magic school and becomes evil and gay. 

Contrasting approaches to feminism in the abovementioned works:

1.  The Strong Female Protagonist
Crossdressing.  Girl dressing as boy still gives power to masculinity.  Granted, she "comes out" as a woman in later books, and Pierce has a later series of an openly female knight, but crossdressing princesses still sends the message of "How does a woman get power in society?  Become a man!" 

Second point on the crossdressing note...it's just too damn convenient that she has a twin brother that she can switch places with.  Too-convenient things in novels just bug me.  And attributing it to divine intervention is cheating.

Indigo is a woman and it's not a big deal.  It's fantasy, after all, so the pseudo-medieval world does not have to be a rabid patriarchy if you don't want it to be.  Her gender is very rarely brought up.  She becomes a strong female character by being strong and female, rather than strong despite being female.  And yes, this route completely ignore relevant questions of gender roles, but it is still refreshing to have a woman character who is not defined by her woman-ness.

2.  Relationship with men
Tamora Pierce may have invented magical birth control.  The purpose of this was so that her characters could experience the sexual liberation that America was having by the 80's.  The books make a big fuss over Alanna's sex life and the double standard regarding women and sexuality.  And there's the love triangle with the prince and the rogue and blah blah blah.

Indigo has a boyfriend in hell. And she's a bit gloomy over missing him, and the fact that he's suffering - who wouldn't be? - but she spends remarkably little time brooding on it.  And she doesn't get tempted into a love triangle with another man (and the fact that she's immortal would make temptation awkward, I imagine).  There's a guy in book 3 who has a thing for her, but she's like "Uhh...no.  It's complicated."  Her love life is so much less important than slaying the demons.

3.  Relationship with gods.
Okay, done with the hard-core feministy stuff.  Moving on to the fantasy stuff. 

Pierce's pantheon are all just so meddlesome.  With Indigo, the god's function is to say "You fucked up.  Go be immortal and fix it."  And that's it.  She's done her part, and stays out of it.  With Alanna, the gods are constantly "Oh hey, go do this."  "Why?"  "I'm a god, don't argue.  Here's a thing to help you." "What's this do?"  "This gets you out of a situation later that the writer can't think of a proper resolution for."

4.  Animal companions
Alanna has a stupid cat that does what now?   It's basically just a mouthpiece for the gods; it's like that owl in the Legend of Zelda games, that shows up and tells you "Don't go to Kakariko village yet.  You have to go to the castle first," even if you know perfectly well you can't move on in the game until you go the castle and get the ocarina, but maybe you just feel like completing the cucco quest to get a bottle first and you don't need a stupid owl telling you not to.  Indigo has a freaking mutant telepathic wolf who has her own tragic backstory, and even though she falls a little flat as a character because she's just the supportive sidekick, she still has more motivation and personality than the stupid kitten who bullies the protagonist with plot advice.

So which do you prefer?  Female protagonists that actively subvert the patriarchy?  Or strong protagonists that just happen to be female?

I apologize if any of the information I gave on any of the books here is inaccurate.  I haven't read Alanna or the early Indigo books in a few years.

I will say I honestly like the later Pierce books a lot more than the early ones.  Maybe I'll do a post on that so you don't think I hate her.  I really don't.

An (Incomplete) Account of the History of LGBT Characters in Fantasy Fiction

So I've pretty much decided to do a Vito Russo on this whole thing.  I've been trawling book lists on the intenet, and I have over 100 starting in 1962 (well, it's a dystopia).  That's only for gay major characters, though.  Many other books have a small queer presence that you don't notice unless you're twleve years old and desperately searching for some confirmation of your identity.  Most of the following I read before I was out, and I (somewhat subconsciously) kept a mental checklist of every gay character and incident that I read about.

A Brief Timeline of Queer Content in Fantasy Literature

The 70's
1977 - The Farthest Shore, by Ursula K. LeGuin
From everything I know about LeGuin, there's a lot of queer stuff in her books.  I've only read The Left Hand of Darkness (gender-bending aliens) and the Earthsea trilogy (wizards 'n' shit).  The third book in the Earthsea trilogy, The Farthest Shore, has a very strange relationship between Arren, the teenage prince, and Ged, the Archmage who is...I'm not sure how old.  Fiftyish?  The text says quite clearly that Arren is "in love" with Ged.  This is the 70's, so I'm assuming it passed under the radar because people didn't take it literally and nothing sexual happens or is implied.  But it seems to be somewhat reciprocated, as when Arren is captured by slavers, Ged whips out the big magics in a "You don't fuck with my prince" gesture.

The 80's
1983 was a big year.  Diane Duane published So You Want To Be A Wizard, though I never realized the Advisory wizards were a gay couple until I read about it on Tropes.  It was a big "Oh! So that's  why they live together!" revelatory moment.  We also have McCaffery's Pern novel, Moreta, where the implications that riders of green dragons are gay are more or less confirmed.  And finally, Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, a feminist retelling of the King Arthur legends (it wasn't that bad, if I recall), has a scene where Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinivere have a threesome, and Lancelot gets a bit preoccupied with Arthur.  Kind of a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, as it doesn't really add anything to the plot, or develop into a subplot.  And, while I'm at it, I may as well throw in Alanna, by Tamora Pierce.  I need to reread those, but apparently the main character's brother has a thing with the villain (and subsequently turns evil), which got toned down when the publisher decided to market the book For The Children.

1987 - Arrows of the Queen, by Mercedes Lackey
"Look!  Lesbians!" is about all that happens, with regards to the queer content.  Oh, there's some subplot in the end where the one lover dies, and they hook up the survivor with the random girl who had an unrequited crush on her.  Like, right after the first lover dies, and the survivor is in telepathic shock.  There is also a moment when the lesbian character is talking to the main character, and is like "You're chill that we're lesbians, right?"  and the main character's reaction is "Oh yeah, I'm from a patriarchal polygamist society.  We had lots of lesbianism going on behind the men's backs."  So...progressive?  They are out of the closet, at least.

The 90's
1990 - The Eye of the World (Book 1 of The Wheel of Time), by Robert Jordan
These you have to do a close reading for, and I don't think I have time.  A few times, he mentions some of the (all-female) magic users are "pillow friends."  Apparently, that means lesbians.  I don't even remember which ones were, though; no one important.  They're just kind of there.

1993 - Hexwood, by Diana Wynne Jones
Very, very minor, but it's Jones and I love her and I just have to mention it.  There are two "gay boys who run the wine shop" in the town.  And they have an annoying dog.  That's all that's said about them.  They're never given names.  But hey, now we're using the word gay.  And they're not evil or tragic or closeted.  Or important...

1996 - Stone of Tears (Book 2 of The Sword of Truth), by Terry Goodkind
"Look!  Lesbians!" even more than Lackey.  One spends a chapter giving the main character her life story, including a page dedicated to her relationship with another female character (whose backstory is not given, and she subsequently dies tragically in her lover's arms during the Plague Episode). Considering that in Book 1, the one homosexual character was a muderous pedophile, I think this is progress.

1997 - Harry Potter and the Sorceror's/Philosopher's Stone, by J.K. Rowling
Yeah, remember?  Dumbledore is gay.  So, so closeted, though.  You can tell there's subtext in book 7, with Grindelwald.  I thought I was just slashing, but Word of Gay confirmed in '07.  We may have just taken a step back; however, this is a children's book series, and hugely popular, so any presence at all is not to be scorned.
1997 - Sandry's Book (Book 1 of the Circle of Magic), by Tamora Pierce
More closeted children's book characters!  Same with So You Want To Be A Wizard.  I forget if I read about it on Tropes or found out through The Will of the Empress.  I think it was Tropes.  Rereading those books now, there's sort of contradictory subtext.  In Book 1, Lark calls Rosethorn "Rosie" and in Book 2, it's explicity stated that they sleep in separate rooms.  If I had been ten and allowed the possibility that I could grow up and marry a woman, high school would have been a lot less stressful.  And if I had figured this out when I was writing my paper on LGBT content in children's literature my freshman year of college, I could probably have added another page.

The 21st Century
2000 - Storm Front (Book 1 of the Dresden Files), by Jim Butcher
There's a random bisexual hooker in Book 1, and random references to the fact that homosexuality exists throughout the series, though no important characters are actually gay.  Except maybe the vampires.  Still, I appreciate a straight writer acknowledging that homosexuality exists in his universe (our universe), instead of either having a straight universe or a token queer.

2002 - Abarat, by Clive Barker
Clive Barker is the queer Stephen King.  I don't mean gay (though he is), I mean queer.  Stephen King writes staight horror; vampires in Maine, psychic powers at the prom, etc.  Barker writes queer horror, which basically means he's about ten times weirder than King.  A vampire that feeds on time instead of blood, or, as in Abarat, a high-schooler who is whisked away to a bizarre archipelago.  One of the side characters has a male partner and a bunch of dogs.  Probably supposed to be an author avatar, except Barker and his partner broke up while he was writing the third book.  Incidentally, he also had health problems that resulted in a brief coma.  No wonder it took him 9 years to finish book 3.

2003 - Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower, Book 5), by Stephen King
And speaking of Stephen King...Father Callahan (of Salem's Lot) is gay!  Ish.  He had an awkward man-crush in his backstory/interimstory.  Interpret that how you will.

2006 - The Book of Lost Things, by John Connelly
I just had to include this right after Dark Tower.  It's a sort of grown-up fractured fairy tale, where a kid (it's not a kid's book) gets whisked into a world of fairy tales and classic literature.  One of the people his meets is Childe Roland of the poem (was it Browning?).  The same Roland that King's Dark Tower series is based on.  And this Roland is gay; he had a thing with a fellow knight who died and so now he's on a quest for...redemption or something.  But gay Roland just makes me lol.

2009 - Best Served Cold, by Joe Abercrombie
I suspect there might be more in his trilogy, but in this stand-alone novel, one of the...villains, I guess...is gay.  Which seems likes a step back, but every character in the book is morally suspect - the protagonist is a mercenary on a vengeance quest.  The villains are all quite well fleshed-out, and no correlation is drawn between the one character's sexuality and his villainness.  In fact, I believe he is a general, so he's a big important gay, which is positive in a way.

2010 - The Last Hunt, by Bruce Coville
Yeah, this one is kind of cheating because no one is actually gay.  There is a beautiful bromance, which I don't count as queer, but since it borders on ho yay, one of the characters actually asks if they are a couple (in a non-homophobic, just curious way).  He gives a "No - not that there's anything wrong with that" answer.  Coville directly addresses the homoeroticism of a bromance...in a children's book!  So which is better?  Having gay characters without saying that they're gay, or having characters who aren't gay explicitly support homosexuality?

Conclusion:  Over the past forty or so years, representations of gay characters in fantasy have become more open.  Even if they are not outed in-universe (and that's mostly just in children's books), the authors have no problem saying their intent.  I would hesitate to claim that representations have become more postitive.  I would say, just from this sample, that they have grown less positive but more realistic.  Not all gay people are morally sound staunch sidekicks, after all. 

It occurred to me the other day that people complain the gay characters always die, but - in fantasy, at least - that might have a closer correlation with the fact that gay characters are always minor supporting characters, who have a higher mortality rate than the main cast or heroes.  The solution, then, would not be to help gay characters live longer, happier lives, but to give them more important roles so that they can have longer, happier lives.  Or have more than just the one token gay.  But, long hours of research and many, many books stand between me and any solid conclusions.

Top 13 (14) Queer Fantasy Novels

As I was going back over my list, and recounting, I realized something.  I was perplexed as to why, even at midnight hopped up on insomnia, I had decided to wedge "The Sword of Truth" onto that list as an afterthought.  I mean, it has the random lesbians, but they're not really important.  Then I realized I had actually written "The Skull of Truth," which is a chapter book by Bruce Coville about a kid who finds a magic skull that forces people to tell the truth.  Leaving it too close to the family dinner table brings a number of shocking family secrets to life, including that his grandmother used to be a stripper and that his uncle is gay.  And as soon as his uncle outs, he realizes he has to get that skull the hell away from there, and so flees the dinner table, making his uncle think that he's really that freaked out, but it's all okay in the end.  And this was written in 1999.  For a gay character - in a kids book no less! - to be out and not have AIDS and be a nice guy who is happily settled with his patner, I give it an A.  It's hard to find books with that good of gay characters nowadays!

Now to continue my original list.

7.  The Magicians and Mrs. Quent (2008) - Galen Beckett
Character:  Eldyn the gay mage tertiary viewpoint character, who isn't really connected to main plot.
Queer Context:  The whole idea of having "male magic" and "female magic" isn't anything new, but Beckett is (as far as I know) the first to also have "gay male magic."  Lesbians, I assume, just count as women.  It is unclear whether all gay men are sons of witches and have illusion magic, or all illusionists are gay men.  In any case, the theaters are run by gay male illusionists. 
LGBTQ-friendliness rating:  B-.  Yes, Eldyn's a positive character, but he doesn't really do anything; he's just kind of there because the author wanted a gay character.  Also, there are the unfortunate implications of all gay men work in the theater.  Plus, Eldyn is just kind of stupid, which is endearing in a Woobie Destroyer of Worlds hero, but makes him an annoying dope as an ordinary (ish) person.

6.  The Steel Remains (2008) - Richard K. Morgan
Characters:  Ringil the ex-hero anti-hero, and Lady Archeth, the half-human magical person tertiary viewpoint character.
Queer Context:  In at least one country (Ringil's) you get killed for being gay, unless, like Ringil, you're too important for them to dare.  Archeth's lesbianism isn't addressed in the context of society, but some king tries to bribe her with a slave girl.  Also, she's half human, so I don't count her as a discount nonhuman lesbian.  The creepy fairy beings, one of which Ringil has a fling with, don't count as gay; I think they are universally pansexual.
LGBTQ-friendliness rating:  C+.  Ringil is supposed to be a dark deconstruction of fantasy tropes, and the author (who is straight) made him gay to add something off about him.  However, he does give a solid queer context for society, and includes a lesbian as well, and I don't know why he decided to make her gay.

5.  Fire Logic (2002) - Laurie J. Marks
Characters:  Everyone, except the token straight couple. 
Queer Context:  Universal pansexuality.  Despite this, most of the main characters end up in same-sex relationships.  To the point where one wonders how the human race manages to reproduce in this world.  Also implied polyamory in some cases, which is just fine in-universe.
LGBTQ-friendliness rating:  B.  The "everyone is gay" aspect gets a little overwhelming, but this book is notable in that same-sex couples will refer to their partner as their "husband" or "wife" (presumeably opposite-sex couples or groups do this as well).  There isn't any sort of ceremony that goes along with it, but the fact that Marks actually uses the words is remarkable.  Even Lackey and Pierce, who try to deal with issues of gay acceptance vs. homophobia, never get into the legal aspects of same-sex relationships. 

4.  Swordspoint (1987) - Ellen Kushner
Characters:  Everyone but the villain is bi.  The main protagonist, Richard, has a male lover, and the secondary viewpoint character, Michael Godwin, sleeps around with everybody.
Queer Context:  No sexual categories.  The villain mentions at one point that he personally isn't in to having sex with men, but it's not a homophobic thing, it's just a personal preference. 
LGBTQ-friendliness rating:  B-.  Taking advantage of the genre to create a world without sexual categories is nice, but not really helpful.  Also, even the "good" guys aren't nice people.  But gay characters not being defined by their sexual orientation is nice, even if Kushner takes that idea to extremes.

3.  Melusine (2005) - Sarah Monette
Character:  Felix, the crazy asshole wizard.
Queer Context:  So it's okay if Monette doesn't say "gay" but not for Lackey?  Well, yeah.  "Molly" is an actual 18th-Century word for gay people, not a Scrabble-bag cop-out.  Also, "Janus" is the two-faced Roman god, or in the Melusine world, a bisexual.  Very few fantasy authors address bisexuality as distinct from homosexuality, if they address it at all (outside of universal pansexuality).  Different countries have different views on homosexuality.  In Marathat it is frowned upon, but tolerated.  In Troia everyone's chill with it - they're ginger fantasyland Greeks.  In Kekropia they kill, torture, or imprison you - they're the hates-everything people.  In Caloxa it's taboo, but not a death sentence.
LGBTQ-friendliness rating:  B+.  Felix is a wonderful jerkass.  There are enough gay molly characters throughout that it doesn't come across as "all gays are jerkasses," but he is the main protagonist.  To be fair, both the protagonists are very well-rounded (not all gays are nice people, after all; sucks to the helpful minority) and it is clear that Felix's abusive tendencies have nothing to do with his sexual orientation.

2.  Eon (2008) - Alison Goodman
Character:  Lady Dela, a male-to-female transgender who acts as a mentor to the crossdresser protagonist.
Queer Context:  Lately it's started to bother me that all the plucky crossdressing princesses are heterosexual.  Historically speaking, if you were a lesbian, you were statistically more likely to be a crossdresser.  Also, the issue of actually being transgender is never mentioned.  The inclusion of a transgender character - male to female, no less! - fleshes out the issues of gender, gender identity, and gender roles in society that the book raises.  Not to mention that Dela's role as a transwoman in her society is seen as something special and awesome by her people, and even though she is currently abroad, she's too important for anyone to give her crap about it.
LGBTQ-friendliness rating:  A.  There are so many books about princesses in pants, but no one thinks to put a penis in a dress.  She is just an awesome strong female character.

1.  Beyond the Pale (1999) - Mark Anthony
Character:  Lots.  Namely, the male lead and hero, Travis, is implied to be bisexual, but rather than hooking up with the female protagonist as every other novel would have him do, he ends up with the knightly sidekick.
Queer Context:  Half(ish) the story is set in our world, the rest is in a typical medieval fantasyland, where homosexuality is frowned upon unless you belong to a certain order of knights where it's almost required.  The gay subtext is very low-key in the first book, but this is the late nineties, so I think Anthony was waiting until he had a contract and no one could do anything about it.  Besides the gay knights, there are also a gay cowboy couple, a gay Brit in the Wild West (during the time-travel episode), a transwoman seeress, an implied bisexual who has a thing with a fairy (part-human; and there are other hints) but ends up with a man, and numerous minor references scattered throughout.
LGBTQ-friendliness rating:  A.  Yes, I'm biased because this is my favorite book series ever.  But Travis is the archetypal dopey hero, and he ends up with a guy, plus a lot of other queerness happening throughout, mostly among the "good guys".  I should have made a separate category for queer presence.  Hm.

Coming up next (I'm not done with gay fantasy yet!):  Incidental homosexuality in fantasy literature.  Those minor characters are not to be discounted!

(Bottom) Top 13 Queer Fantasy Novels - Part 1

I can't believe I haven't done one of these before.    Then I started putting together a top ten, and realized that I only had 13 to choose from.  So I decided to just include them all

This list consists only of books I have read.  I have not read Fleweling's Lark on the Wing or Hambly's Darkmage, or Duane's Door Into Fire, so I can't judge where to put them on the list.  At some point, if I want to be the fantasy lit Vito Russo, I might track down the rest of the books, but for now, this is what is in my repertoire.

Criteria for "Queer Fantasy":  Must have a queer protagonist or major character.  Queer character must be out in-universe - no Dumbledore.  Also, must be human.  Vampire lesbians are cheating.

13.  City of Bones (2007) - Cassandra Clare
Character:  Alec, the gay sidekick.
Queer Context:  Real world-ish.  There’s an underground clique of demon-hunters, and it’s implied that they would be very not happy if they knew Alec was gay.  He’s kind of a straight gay, and hooks up with the one other gay character in the story, who is a flaming glittery gay mage, after minimal off-page courtship.  They have nothing in common except being the only two gay characters in the story.  Also, the story begins with him having a crush on his stepbrother, the male lead Jace, who gives Alec a pep talk and tells Alec that he isn’t really in love with him, he just likes to torture himself by falling in love with unattainable people.  And the main cast seems to be chill that Alec is gay, but no one overtly supports him, they just see it as a nonissue.  I’d be upset with the way the gay romance subplot was handled, except that the main romance subplot was just as bad; there’s an incest scare, but it turns out it was all a misunderstanding.  That’s the best obstacle you could give their relationship?  That’s totally relatable.
LGBTQ-friendly rating:  B-.  Clare at least tries, and Alec is a positive character, if not actually an accurate representation of anything.

12.  Ash (2009) - Malinda Lo
Character:  Ash, a lesbian Cinderella.
Queer Context:  Queer retelling of Cinderella.  Only I feel cheated because I was expecting her to hook up with a princess, and instead she hooks up with the Huntress, which is a completely created role and not really kosher.  And then she breaks a curse by sleeping with a (male?) fairy thing, which is really not feminist.  I mean, gaining independence from the male presence by submitting to it?  Solving problems with prostitution. 
I don’t remember how people react to their relationship; I think it’s one of those worlds where homosexuality in society is not talked about, and so I have no idea if Ash had any context for understanding her desires. 
LGBTQ-friendly rating:  C+.  There's no context for the lesbian relationship, which makes it hard to relate to.  Also, the end with the fairy.

11.  Wolfcry (2006) - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
Character:  Oliza, the shapeshifter princess.  Has some really scary genetics, but conveniently ends up in a non-procreative relationship with a woman.  Each book in the series has a different viewpoint character, and this one is hers.
Queer Context:  Not given in the previous three books or even foreshadowed in this one.  Just all of a sudden the princess is gay, and mostly everyone’s fine with it.  Do they allow gay marriage?  What are the social stigmas?  No other characters are gay, and no word for gay is given.  I assume the author knows more than was revealed in the books; she has a wife, and I usually like to know the queer context of anything I write.  Granted, I usually end up with queer characters.
LGBTQ-friendly rating:  B.  Oliza isn't tokenized at all, and it's obvious she was a character first and became queer in the writing.  It's just a little sudden and lacking in context.

10.  Tithe (2002) - Holly Black
Character:  Corny, the gay sidekick.  In later books, his boyfriend Luis, and lesbian sidekick Ruth.
Queer Context:  Real world.  With fairies.  Black is one of those authors who makes sure some of her characters are gay, because some people are gay.  Always the unwaveringly supportive sidekicks, though.  Yay for helpful minorities.
LGBTQ-friendly rating:  B.  Corny was based on Black's gay friends, who are geek-gays and not flaming queens, and he's a fairly well-fleshed out character.

9.  Magic’s Pawn (1989) - Mercedes Lackey
Character:  Vanyel, the only gay Herald who actually does anything interesting.
Queer Context:  Lackey always tries to include a random queer in every book.  Someone once called her out on having way more gay men than lesbians.  She counted them up and said they were actually about even.  However, only two of her queer characters achieve major character status, and both are gay men.  Homosexuality is severely stigmatized by wider society, but any named character who is “good” is fine with it.  Nor are the parameters for the stigma clearly defined; vaguely religious, but considering it’s a massive fantasyland pantheon, you’d think there would be some variation.  Also, this is one of Lackey’s few stories where the protagonist dies at the end, and it’s the gay one.  However, I find her tragedies are at least slightly better than her happy endings.  Oh, and there are the random forest people who seem to be universally pansexual, and a gay couple of the forest people serve a sort of mentor function for Vanyel.  And the other gay major character, Firesong (in later books) is also of the forest people.  The people in “bad” countries are more homophobic than in the “good” countries.
LGBTQ-friendly rating:  C.  Because it's 80's, and preachy.  In the context of the 80's, I would give it an A for effort, though.  And the other major gay is a flaming queen.

8.  The Will of the Empress (2005) - Tamora Pierce
Character:  Daja, the lady blacksmith mage, has a sexual revelation when she is kissed by a woman.
Queer Context:  The first series was originally published in the 90’s.  The characters were ten, but they were being raised by a lesbian couple, who I did not realize was a lesbian couple until I read this book and they directly referenced it.  I wish they had been more out in the earlier books, that I read when I was ten; it would have made my life a lot simpler.  One thing I do like about it is that it includes a queer protagonist by retcon in a children’s book; me reading those books as a child and then reading the later one after coming out was a rather validating experience.  Even though the queer character is like “I had no idea I was gay” and you’d think being raised by a lesbian couple she’d have enough context to figure herself out.  Really, it’s the author deciding to make her gay a decade later when society has progressed enough and it’s in a YA novel.  Because Pierce is another who makes sure to include gay minor characters all the time.
LGBTQ-friendly rating:  B+.  Lark and Rosethorn spent the 90's in the closet, and I resent them for that.  Also, because since the author obviously decided "They've hit puberty!  Let's make one gay!" she decided the butch blacksmith should be a dyke, and not the feisty seamstress or the grouchy bookworm.  I will say, though, I really appreciate the character existing in a non-queer context first; so many gay characters (in fantasy and out) are introduced at puberty when they are struggling with sqhishy hormonal feelings.  Yes, we were once kids too.

Coming soon:  1-7.  What are my favorite gay fantasy novels?

B-Novels of the Eighties

So for some reason last night I was really craving some shoddy B-Fantasy, to the point where I would have been willing to do embarrassing things to get my hands on a Mercedes Lackey...

What's that?  B-Fantasy?  Oh, it's the same concept as B-movies - formulaic, low production value, flat characters - just with fantasy literature.  Basically, what normal people think of when they think of fantasy, with the teenage protagonist who has to save the world from the Dark Lord and runs all over the countryside learning magic and eating stew.  Etc.

Anyway, since all I brought with me to my apartment was some beautiful magic realism and some weird children's genre-benders, I was stuck.  See, books are like food.  Sometimes you want to go out to a fancy restaurant for steak and shrimp alfredo, or whatever you order (that actually sounds really good right now...) and sometimes you just want to heat up some Kraft mac and cheese in the microwave, because that's what you grew up on, and even if as an adult it disgusts you intellectually, and you can't bear to read the list of ingredients, it just tastes so bad, but so good.

But since I didn't have any to read, I started listing and categorizing and researching to try and pin down what makes B-Fantasy B-Fantasy.  Because apparently when I want mindless entertainment, I have to analyze it.

I started doing a little research, and here are my findings thus far.  Mostly is it some half-assed hypotheses and some Wikipedia trawling, but I intend to reasearch the matter further, I really do.

B-Fantasy was inspired by Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (1954), and augmented by LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy (1968).  From LOTR we get the epic quest, magical macguffin, underdog hero, and Dark Lord.  After Earthsea, the protagonist is allowed to use magic, and magic becomes institutionalized.  However, many other aspects of Eathsea, such as the protagonist aging, did not catch on.  The first Dungeons and Dragons manual was published in 1974, which codified the Fantasyland setting and rules for the narrative.  This I need to look into further, but currently I blame D&D for making every fantasyland need 3races+2 - elf/dwarf/human, and two of the author's own creation; usually one of the extras is evil, and the other is unimportant to the plot.  No one besides Tolkien wrote about the elves until D&D! (needs fact-checking)

1977 saw The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks, and also the Star Wars movie.  I try not to mix fantasy and scifi, but Star Wars has the traditional epic narrative wth the whiny hero that all B-Fantasy uses, and is a potential forerunner.  Shannara had 3races+2, and all the trappings of LOTR, except instead of quiet little middle-aged hobbit protagonist, it had a dopey teenage male protagonist, likely in reflection of the anticipated audience.  It is also serialized; while Tolkien stopped with a trilogy, a prequel, and a manual, if Brooks isn't dead then he's still writing to this day.

Now we come to the 80's, which is the birth of B-Fantasy proper.  David Eddings, I kid you not, saw the emerging market and decided to jump on it for the money - literally, created a formula and cranked out books for profit.  He ditched the races (though they still remained prevalent elsewhere), instead creating a multiracial and paradoxically racially uniform world of humans (everyone of every race is the same as each other member of the race), and added meddlesome deities.  Also, the hero is allowed, in fact required, to use magic.  There is also the annoying crossdressing spunky princess love-interest.  Like Leia but less badass.  Oh, and she hooks up with the teenage protagonist.

1983 - Tamora Pierce sees the spunky crossdressing redhead princess and decides that she needs her own story, thus bringing about the start of feminist fantasy that tries too hard. Also the practice of making fantasyland be America with a medieval veneer, though Eddings hinted at that with Sendaria and I can't believe I remember the name of that country.  Hero's homeland, go figure.  Also has institutionalized magic (school of magecraft and blah blah), rather than random wizards who just float around organically to make plot things happen.  Wizards become working-class.

1984, ten years after the first Dungeons and Dragons manual was published, the Dragonlance  series is born.  It was based off of a D&D campaign.  No, honestly, it was.  We have races, we have quests, we have institutionalized magic and meddlesome deities.  For the most part, they do ditch the dopey farmboy, replacing him with the naive warrior, who is supposed to be all troubled and dark, but is really just naive and angsty.  Also, the focus is more on the quest group than any one hero.  It still has very black-and-white morality.

In 1987 Mercedes Lackey published her first book.  So here we have feminist fantasy, and clique fantasy.  I have to backtrack a little for that.  In 1967, Anne McCaffery started the Dragonriders of Pern  series.  So we have a special clique of people with special powers whose job is basically to be heroes.  This solves the problem of how to keep having the same person solve all the problems; it's their job, because they are telepathically linked to a magical critter.  Because that totally makes sense.

Now we come to the 90's, which may be the Golden Age of B-Fantasy.  Most of these series started in the 80's, but gained momentum throughout the decade and eventually came to dominate the 90's.  There was still some very original stuff in the 80's - Kushner's Swordspoint, Diana Wynne Jones's everything, Suzette Hardin Elgin's Ozark Trilogy about a planet that was colonized by the South and people who ride flying Mules (it's good stuff).  In 1990, however, Robert Jordan published the first book in The Wheel of Time.

What did WoT do that other books didn't?  It's basically the same setup as Eddings' Belgariad.  Teenage farmboy whisked away from his home by a wizard, told it is his destiny by birth to save the world from the newly reawakened Dark Lord, oh yeah and he has magic powers.  All I can say is that Jordan made it bigger (800 pages per volume, minimum), he made it better (the world at least makes slightly more sense and is more memorable than Eddings'), and he made it with love.  He kept writing even when he was dying, because he loved those books so damn much.  And I can tell you a hundred things that make the books awful (don't call me on that, please), but I can at least understand why they are so loved.

Lately, however, there has been a mainstream movement away from B-Fantasy.  Conflicts have become less idealistic, between the innocent and the Evil, and more political, between the jaded older warriors and the forces of society - kind of like the teenage hero grew up.  I won't be able to say much about George R. R. Martin, because I haven't been able to get through more than three chapters, but I think he is the key to this movement.  The current generation of writers grew up on B-Fantasy, and are too jaded with it in today's society. 

Other books like David Anthony Durham's Acacia (2007) have similar political orientations - I can't talk much about this one either because I ran into the same problem as Martin, though in Durham's case the last straw was not "I don't know which of these characters I'm supposed to care about" (though there was an element of that) and more "That is the stupidest fencing lesson I have ever read."  Then there are more direct criticisms such as E.E. Knight's Age of Fire series (2002), which is basically what Wicked did to Oz, only to Dragonlance.  Sure, there are still throwbacks like Eragon (2002), but the mainstream voice of fantasy is shifting from a teenage coming-of-age quest to multiperspective stories of human conflict.  Though in fact this sort of storytelling started in the 80's as well, with the Mannerpunk movement started by Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint.  It did not gain momentum until just recenty, though.

And of course there are all the little splinter genres like Feminist Fantasy, which I touched on a little, and Queer Fantasy (people say that fantasy is really homophobic, but I think that the fantasyland setting actually makes it easier to include gay characters without stigma; again I point to Swordspoint), and I've already ranted about Dragonrider Fantasy, which is actually a subcategory of Animal Companion Fantasy or perhaps as a genre rather than a device, it would fit better under Heroic Clique Fantasy - you have this world where there is this institution of heroes, be they dragonriders or Jedi or what have you, and every book/trilogy is about a different one whose turn it is to save the kingdom/world/continent.  Then there's the Supernatural Ensemble, which I'm not sure belongs in fantasy proper - technically its roots are in horror.

But right now, I still just want to read a magic pony story.

In Defense of the Fantastic

Here's the thing:  My Creative Writing professor assigned us a short story to write.  It can be "about anything you want.  Except elves."  I had mised thoughts on that.  On one hand, I was thinking "I know, right?  I f***ing hate elves."  And on the other:  "Sure, elves are stupid, but they don't have to be.  You could write an elf detective story if you wanted to."

Hmm.  I'll have to get back to you on that.

The point is, fantasy is what you make it.  That is what it used to mean to "fantasize" - to come up with something completely new.  Not to blindly follow the  Tolkien-Eddings paradigm.  Tolkien knew what he was doing when he wrote and epic quest, drawing on all sorts of mythology stuff.  That is why the only thing resembling epic fantasy I can read anymore is The Last Rune series by Mark Anthony; because he, like Tolkien, pays attention to the epic myth, so that even though he tropes up the wazoo, he still manages to convey a sense of awesome.

That and I have two-inch thick nostalgia goggles.

So what if you don't like myths?  They're silly, outdated, nonsensical, boring.  Guess what?  You can still write fantasy.  Set it in modern day?  Urban fantasy!  Set it in a world with technology analogous to our own but they have MAGIC?  Go right ahead!  That is the whole point of fantasy.  You can do whatever the heck you want.

Take Sarah Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths series.  Sure, it has its fair share of traipsing across the countryside, but there are saints and churches and random French and factories - and that's just background details she throws in to mess with your head.  Monette also throws out your expectations.  You think the wizard is the hero, but he goes insane and has to be dragged across the countryside by his half-brother, and once he gets better you think they're going to be all buddy-buddy, but the wizard is a complete douchebag in the second book, and the one character who is pure evil does not have any dastardly plots to take over the world.  There are no epic battles.  Felix and Mildmay have enough on their hands just trying to save themselves, without saving the world.

In the same vein Sarah Micklem's Firethorn has nothing whatsoever to do with traditional fantasy.  She does all her own worldbuilding, the characters are mostly jerks, and even the ones that are a bit nicer are very not okay by modern standards - but it works in-universe.  The magic is so subtly done you sometimes forget it is there - about all there is is that the main character can see in the dark - and the religion is so intricate I need to start a new sentence.  There are two main types of religion in fantasy.  The pantheon that doesn't do anything, and the annoyingly meddlesome pantheon.  Firethorn has both.  Seriously.  The characters attribute events to divine intervention appropriately, but the reader can still shake her head and say "You silly pagan," if so desired.

And now for the counterexample.

Havemercy.

It is essentially Doctrine of Labyrinths fanfic.  Sure, they made their own world, but they wanted to do esactly what Sarah Monette did.  There's the gay wizard, but he doesn't go insane, and his love affair reads like a slash.  There are the long-lost brothers, who have nothing at stake in their relationship.  All the authors really made up was mechanical dragons, and that is not enough to support the overlarge cast of underdeveloped characters.

Now, what did they do wrong?  They did not write fantasy.  They wrote paradigm, only instead of Tolkien-Eddings, they just used Sarah Monette.  But they completely missed the point.  In copying the elements, they neglected to copy the style.  Tolkien wrote travelogues, so he knew how to write traipsing across the country (your milage may vary).  Monette knows everything there is about the Elizabethan era, and she reads nonfiction everything for fun.  Micklem read army survival handbooks and memoirs - her whole first book is an army waiting for a war.  Not one to save the world.  And the war does not even start until the next book.  The problem with Havemercy is that the authors did not know what they were writing; they just blindly followed what they though they should be writing.  Take the gay character.  Did any of your gay friends hook up because they were thrown into awkward physical situations by the writer?  It sounds like an oxymoron, but fantasy needs to be realistic. 

Sure, you make up a few rules, but humanity remains the same, and that is the strength of fantasy.  Fiction deals mostly in the realm of what is.  Yes, there is a certain amount of imagination in coming up with it, and you do actually face many of the same issues with worldbuilding, but in fantasy, you don't have to match the real world.  It is more than just laziness; you can escape the usual explanations and arrive at deeper truths.  Anything is possible.  Anything. 

Take advantage of it.

What Was I Thinking?

Hello Hello!  I'm still here.  I don't know if you are, though.  Ah well.  I don't take blogging seriously, like some people I've met.  I believe I'm going to consider this my training blog, so that when I'm a published writer and people actually care what I have to say, then I'll know how to say things worth saying.

Blah blah blah aside, I'm doing better and worse on the writing front.  Worse, because I haven't written anything of significance in...well, I'm not even sure.  Since I decided to finally put that nameless Baleful Polymorph that I'd been working on since high school out of its misery and be DONE WITH IT FOR REAL THIS TIME.  I am now free to work on my multitude of side stories that are all so much more interesting! 

...

...

You know, despite being a hideous monster with a broken plot that had gone through so many versions it didn't even know what it was anymore...I don't really feel the same sort of dedication for anything else.  Maybe it was just my age, and now I realize it was crap, I'm hard pressed to come up with something new that isn't.  At this point I'm tempted to take it out of storage, dust off the pieces, and see if there's anything I can stitch together.  But I can't.  It's dead.  As it should be and it's time to move on.

I did say I was doing better, though, and here's why:  I'm taking Creative Writing.  Yep.  I displaced some poor Creative Writing major who won't be able to take any actual CW classes for another semester.  Eh.  They have so many generals and literature components they won't really fall behind.  It seems that a lot of the people in that class aren't CW majors either, so it's a nice laid-back atmosphere for me to finally rid myself of this damn phobia.

For those who haven't been following, I have an absolute terror of sharing my writing with other people - what I like to term "page fright."  What I noticed the first time I had to read a poem in that class, however, is that it was mostly physiological.  I was twitchy and tense and kept fidgeting with a yo-yo while I took deep breaths and tried to keep my vision from blurring.  You know, like I was on the verge of a panic attack.  Only I wasn't actually scared.  It was weird.  And they liked my poem.  Better than some of the others.  A lot of the others.  I'm not going to say there are some bad writers in that class, but some are better than others.

So I think I'll be able to kick this habit, since it seems to be a Pavlovian reflex more than an emotional response.  Problems:  It's exhausting.  Writing a poem every week. Reading twenty poems a week.  What was I thinking?  I'm a prose writer.  I'm sick of poetry, and we're not even halfway through the poetry unit.  There's only one short story required for the class, and  - best part - the professor will not accept fantasy. 

Now, if his rationale had been that traditional High Fantasy requires a great deal of worldbuilding that does not work well in short works - okay.  I can accept that.  But no, he just doesn't like fantasy because he thinks it's crap.  This guy, by the way, writes crime fiction.  Murder mystery detective stories.  Room to judge?  I don't think so.  He also refuses trashy paranormal romance - but you know that several girls are going to write trashy mundane romances anyway.

 Does it matter if a stupid girl is in love with a stupid angsty hipster or a stupid angsty vampire?  At least if there's a vampire, you know that someone's going to bleed eventually.  And you know, just bcause a story is a paranormal romance does not mean it has to be trashy - people just write with that assumption.  The thing is, there are some good mundane stories about lovers - The Time-Traveller's Wife, The Gargoyle - okay, I lied when I said mundane.  But this just proves the point I was going to make anyway!  Fantastical elements do not automatically make a story crap!  It is how you use them that determines the quality of your story.

Better stop now, I'm rambling.  I shall return anon!

The Plague Episode

Have you noticed in series that are longer than trilogies, the authors seemed stumped for that many sub-villains and minor conflicts and will throw in a plague, just to change things up?  Generally of a magical cause, and the hero traipses about the countryside some more until he finds the cure, and everything's fine by the time the next book rolls around.  Unless there has been a token death in the party.  Surprisingly, this is not a trope - there is a "Plague," a "Mystical Plague," and a "Find the Cure," but none are quite what I am talking about here in terms of the episode.

As anyone who has read Albert Camus' The Plague or has a decent knowledge of history (or even current events) is well aware, plagues...don't exactly work like that.  People get sick.  And they go to the resident witch-doctors, who are stumped, but do the best they can.  More people get sick.  The town goes into quarantine.  Fear.  Boredom.  More fear.  More boredom.  Unless you're actually a doctor, but even then finding treatments, cures, and vaccines is really tricky even with modern medical technology.

There is no magical cure, because there is no magical cause. That does not stop people from trying.  The Jews got blamed for the Black Death in Europe - partly because they were the only people washing their hands and so weren't getting sick right away.  This led to lynchings and hate crimes.  After all, what is a hate crime but fear+boredom?  Nothing like a crisis to fuel xenophobia.

The miracle cure is pure wish-fulfillment; sickness is an enemy we cannot fight, and we humans don't deal well with helplessness.  Even in modern western society, we have flus and cancers - we can take preventative measures, but sometimes not even that is enough.  Illness is something universal that has a profound impact on the human psyche - and yet much of modern fantasy literature boils it down to a cure-Macguffin.  This happens in part because the plague is a single episode, not the story in itself as Camus made it.  It lessens the impact.

Dear fantasy writers, if you are going to write a plague story, read Camus and not any of the following.  While Novik is a historian-goddess and has probably read Camus and more, I am still approaching the fourth Temeraire book with caution, as it seems to be that series' plague-episode, and this is usually what Plague Episodes look like:

Plague Episodes in Fantasy Literature:

Temple of the Winds (Sword of Truth book 4) by Terry Goodkind – a witch releases a magical plague from a box to mess with the hero.  The hero and his girlfriend are forced to marry other people in order to cure the plague.  It doesn’t really make sense in context.  The hero gets the plague in the end, but he gets better.  One of the token lesbians dies.

Briar’s Book (Circle of Magic book 4) by Tamora Pierce – a careless witch dumps some magical toxic waste in the sewers, starting a plague. Luckily, the plucky kids notice things that lead the cleverer adults to a cure.  They’re healer-mages, so it works.  A friend of the main character who only appears in that book dies.  The main character mentor gets sick, but he calls her back from the edge of death.  It’s a kid’s book.  Curiously, this breaks my aforementioned pattern by being the last book in the quartet, but the stories are self-contained and switch viewpoint character for each.  Also interesting that there seem to be a lot of book fours.  "Four" is a homonym with "Death" in Chinese.

Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods (Underland Chronicles book 3) by Suzanne Collins – yes, that Suzanne Collins.  Gregor and his companions go on a quest to find a plague, then find out someone dropped a test tube in a lab where the “good guys” were designing a bioweapon.  Gregor’s bat and mother get sick, but neither die (it is Suzanne Collins though; it’s just that she saves the heartbreaking death for the last book).  No named characters die of the plague that I recall.

The Lost City of Faar (Pendragon book 2) by D.J. Machale – turns out to actually be a mass poisoning by the villain intending to start a war.  Only book two so plot is still formulaic.  Secondary character’s parents die, but he’s supposed to be an orphan because of his destiny, so they would have vanished somehow anyway.

The Keep of Fire (The Last Rune book 2) by Mark Anthony – a plague that causes people to burst into flames is affecting both worlds.  Hero and companions travel to title location and send the radioactive magical rock that is causing the plague into space, thus ending the plague.  It makes sense in context.  Main character’s bestie in our world dies, which is sad.  Other plot-relevant people get sick and die.

Lady Friday (Keys to the Kingdom book 6) by Garth Nix – embarassingly enough, I don’t really remember.  I think the title character was causing the Sleepy Plague, and once she was defeated…there was an extra step in there.  It didn’t just go away.  Main character’s friend got sick, but got better and rallied the defense in our world and took care of the plague victims.

Salamandastron (Redwall) by Brian Jacques – the inhabitants of Redwall abbey get sick with a mysterious illness, and Thrugg the otter journeys to a mythical mountain to find a mythical flower guarded by a mythical eagle which is the only cure.  He finds it of course, and the eagle is nice enough to fly it back for him.  It’s Redwall, so there is some token death, though the token death occurs in a different subplot.

Warriors by Erin Hunter – a recurring subplot where it is actually done well.  Cats get sick.  Sometimes a lot at the same time.  Sometimes they die.  Sometimes there are herbs.  Sometimes the herbs are not enough.  No questing for a special cure to a special illness.

Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner – as a joke when people would ask her “What happened next?” she would say “Oh, the next year there was a diphtheria outbreak and they all died.”  Which, in a pre-industrial pseudo-medieval society, is not entirely unlikely.  Though she did eventually write a sequel that was devoid of a diphtheria outbreak.

(Top) Five Books About Griffins

Why am I doing all these lists?  Because I'm bored!  And I read too much!  And I've been watching a lot of Nostalgia Chick videos!  And because I can!  And because I just finished a griffin book.

I like griffins.  You may have guessed from the title of this blog, even though it is a word I got form watching a spelling bee years ago and apparently means messy handwriting and has nothing to do with griffins.  The thing is that griffins are way underdone, especially compared to, say, dragons, or wolves.  So instead of being a "Top" Five, this is really just a list of the five books about griffins that I've read and ranked.

5.  The Griffin Mage Trilogy - Rachel Neumeier

This one I only read a couple years ago, but I had to do a library search by "griffins" because I could remember neither title nor author, nor the names of any of the characters, nor exactly what happens.  I only read the first book, Lord of the Burning Sands. So let's see.  There's this girl, who's an orphan, and lives on a horse ranch (points for not making it a generic farm) and then a bunch of griffins swoop in and make the area a desert because they have some kind of Grogromon effect on the environment.  And then they kidnap the girl because she has some special magic.  And...stuff happens, and there's a big fight at the end.  Oh, and there was some sub-plot with this soldier boy, and apparently certain humans have a kind of magic where they can control a particular type of animal, and the big twist at the end is when the soldier boy discovers he can control griffins.  Which makes them animals or what?  They seemed pretty sentient.

What I did not like about Neumeier's griffins is that she focused on making them savage and unhuman, which to me made them uninteresting. 

4.  The Fallen Moon Trilogy - K.J. Taylor

I was at the new bookstore, and I felt like I had to buy something, so when I saw The Dark Griffin  I was like "Hey!  I like griffins.  It can't be too bad."  And it wasn't.  More on that later.

My first big hurdle reading this was when I realized that people are riding these griffins.  They're  bond creatures.  But it is fairly integral to the plot, so I got over it.  And I mean, I had a griffin-rider fantasy when I was, like, twelve, so I can't really judge.  The prose isn't the best - it reads like a draft, but a draft by a rather good writer.  It's like in the original draft she wrote "And then the baby griffin grew up on its own" and by the final draft had to wrack her brains for details that really didn't matter to the plot overall.  And there there was the food.  Literally.  Her characters always eat "food."  As in:  "The food was plain but nourishing" or "His house had been ransacked, the food trampled into the floor."  Again, it seems that she put it in as a placeholder, and by the time she got to later drafts was like "Crap.  What do they eat instead of pizza and ramen?"  Her answer:  Bread.  Cheese.  Dried meat.  Apples.  Oh, and cabbage.  That was the one original item mentioned, only the thing is, you don't eat cabbage raw.  You have to cook it.  So what do they do with cabbage in...whatever the country was called?  Steam?  Boil?  Bake?  Fry?  Pickle?  Or do they eat it raw?  At one point the main character eats stew at an inn, and that's as excitingly detailed as it gets.  Read Redwall if you need inspiration, girl.

The only real problem I had with the book, though, was the characters.  They were so flat I could not tell that the one chick was the main character's actual established girlfried until they were having sex.  This was about three or four conversations in, and I had been wondering if they were a pre-couple.  There were so many times during the book I was practically shouting "Why are you doing that?  You have no motivation!  Real people don't talk like that!  Real people don't act like that!  Real people aren't motivated like that!"  Namely the part where the main characters friends all try to help him feel better after his griffin dies (oops, slight spoiler, but it's fairly early on).  And I'm thinking Dudes, his bond creature just died.  Some 'verses don't have people survive that, though that's usually the telepathic ones (points for no telepathy).  And the friends...you don't get any real sense of friendship.  The author was just "Hey, main character must have social life (insert friends here)"  None of them have a distinct personality and one can tell their only purpose is to be the failed support network.  They are characters playing a role, not people.  Also, more amusing than anything else - the one friend seems to be the only cop in town.  I mean, it's implied that it's kind of a bigger city, but every single time the cops show up, Bran is there.  Every.  Single.  Time.

I will give credit where credit is due, though, and say that the book has a very good plot.  As in I want to read the sequel even though the characters are flat as paper.  It's a Martinesque rather than a Tolkienesque story, meaning (I think; I'm just making this up and I've only read about three chapters of GRR Martin) that it is a human story with twisty political gimmicks, rather than a quest to destroy a Great Evil*.  The main character is sent to capture a wild griffin and told "Oh yeah, you'll be fine"  when really that sort of operation takes a specialized team, but he manages it even though his griffin partner dies.  And there's a mini-conspiracy against him, and this racism subplot that makes it really obvious the writer is white.  The second plotline follows the titiular dark griffin that he captured.  On the whole though, it's a really intriguing story despite the blandness of the chracters.  Plus there are references to Diana Wynne Jones, I swear there are.  The oranges.  The arena that is totally Costamaret.  You don't...?  Oh never mind, just keep reading.
(*Just read on author's website that it is supposed to be a villain origin story.  I am intrigued.  Library, y u no have sequels?!  I don't like it so much I want to spend more money on it.)

3.  The Black Griffin - Mercedes Lackey

Yes, I ranked a Mercedes Lackey book this high.  I actually kind of like this one.  Mostly because of the griffins.  This book is about...um...a sort of masseuse/psychotherapist/companion who hangs around an army camp in the middle of a war.   And so do a bunch of griffins.  Okay, they're fighting in the war, but I think the reason I actually like this book is because it is more character driven, rather than trying to destroy the Great Evil.  The war is there, but it is background to the story until the very end.  The other books in the trilogy are meh at best - the second book could show them rebuilding after the war, except by then everything's kind of rebuilt and Lackey has to introduce a new conflict from the Other Continent.  And the third book is a Disney sequel where the offspring of the main cast go off on adventures that are not nearly as interesting as the parents'.  But the first book is solid.

2.  The Firebringer Trilogy - Meredith Ann Pierce

Yeah, okay, the main focus in this series is on the unicorns, but the griffins are a major subplot, and there's one of the cover of the first book.  They are shown as enemies of the unicorns at first, but then they are shown to have their own culture and traditions, and eventually make peace when the unicorns decide to drive the wyverns out of their ancestral lands instead of squatting on the griffins' ancestral hunting grounds (really, the griffins were only hunting them because they drove out the deer.  It's all just a misunderstanding.).  Only it gets a little weird when the one griffin has a romancey relationship with one of the unicorns, and it's implied that they have offspring, which is like, wut?  I would kind of like to read something about that, though.  The offspring, that is.  Except it would end up being full of race-angst, so maybe it's better she left it at that.

1.  Dark Lord of Derkholm/Year of the Griffin - Diana Wynne Jones

Of course I rank Jones at the top.  Am I biased?  Only because she's a damn good writer.  Was, I mean.  Fuck.

Book 1 of the...duology...introduces Wizard Derk genetic engineering wizard, and his genetically engineered griffin offspring.  Plus the two human ones.  The rest of the plot is about how the pseudo-medieval fantasyland is being exploited for tours from a parallel world.  Wizard Derk is bullied into running the operations for a year, and his kids, griffin and human, all pitch in and help.  The second book is after the tours are abolished, and follows one of the griffin children at college dealing with the aftermath of the tours.  And yes, that makes it sound like a Disney sequel, except 1) Elda was around in the first book, she was just too young to do much, and 2)  Even though it is technically less epic, it is still quite interesting - perhaps even more interesting.  It's not a sequel, it's completely different, slightly related story.  I like these griffins (okay, they were my first impression of griffins) because they are people, not talking animals or mysterious "others."  Lackey actually managed to do that too.  Huh.  Whodathunk?

But I wanted another sequel, dammit!  I wanted to see Elda and Flury hook up!  That would have been so adorable!  And I wanted to see the Other Continent.  And now Jones is dead and there will be no more, ever!

Anyway, we have, in ascending order:  Griffins as Grogromon, Griffins as bond-creatures, Griffins as created race, Griffins as...other race, and Griffins as created race AND other race on the Other Continent.  Griffins as different magic-users from humans, griffins as the ONLY magic-users (I thought that was pretty cool, especially since the didn't spend a lot of time on exposition, just snuck it in there periodically), griffins as the same sort of magic-users as humans, griffins not exactly using magic any more than anyone else, and griffins as mostly the same sort of magic-users with cultural and personal variation.

Shortlist:  Squire by Tamora Pierce, in which there is a griffin on the cover and the main character takes care of a baby griffin for a while which does absolutely nothing to further the plot.  The griffins are just part of a magical ensemble and aren't really important.  And it's Tamora Pierce.

That's about all I had to say about griffins.  Or, well, books.  I realize I may very well be obligated now to read Game of Thrones if I'm going to be making claims like that the Tolkienist movement has now split into Eddingsian and Martinesque factions.  Or maybe I'll just stay with my indie-fantasy.

I like griffins.  I've had a griffin story on backburner for years.  Must write before they become the new dragons...do you think that could ever happen?  There's been a lot of indie dragon deconstructions lately, so they might be on their way out.

Hmm.

Top 5 Best and Worst Books About Dragons

Mostly because I'm bored, and I just found out that Dragon Fate is not even in the library catalogue yet, even though it's been out for over a month.

5 Worst Dragon Books

5.  "Joust" by Mercedes Lackey. 

It's Mercedes Lackey.  What more need be said?  Few writers can pull of such cliche, shallow characters, long-winded monologues, or overly detailed, prettified worlds.  Worldbuilding details are good, but they should always be plot-relevant and not mere decoration.  "Joust" is actually not too bad as far as dragon books go.  The dragons do not talk (At least not in the first two books, and I don't see why that would change), and seem to be on a level of very clever animals with slight telepathic tendencies.  They are fed a fantasyland drug to keep them tractable, though of course un-drugged dragons that bond with humans as hatchlings perform much better.  Really the only problem with this series is that it is by Mercedes Lackey.

4.  "Dragonflight" by Donita K. Paul

This is a kid's book, so I can't really complain of the black-and-white morality, although I would...is that Jesus?  Why is there a Jesus in a dragon book?  Not that there's anything wrong with that necessarily, and kudos for not having a typical vague pantheon, but...the distinction is between a book about religion, a book about religious characters, and religious allegory.  The first is acceptable if it asks more questions than it answers (read:  The Sparrow), the second if the characters behave like actual religious people and not idiotic fanatics (though there are real ones of those, I suppose.  But read:  Firethorn) and the third...if you subscribe to the religion and don't want to have your mindset challenged?  The Dragonflight series, however, uses religion to support its very simplistic and childlike moral structures.  It is a kid's book, I suppose, so I can't really be too hard on it.

3.  Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffery

May her soul rest in peace.  I never got into the series.  I can't remember why; I can't remember many details of what I did read, so I'm going to go out on a limb and claim that the characters and stories were not very memorable.  Everything else I have is hearsay; namely, some very problematic portrayals of gender roles and relationships.  However, since this book is what started the whole dragonrider craze, I shouldn't be too hard on it.  Or maybe I should.

2.  "Eragon" - Christopher Paolini

The fifteen year old kid had enough dedication to sit down and write a novel from beginning to end.  I'll give him that much credit.  I can also list all of his sources:  McCaffery, Eddings, Tolkien, and Star Wars.  David Eddings is the reason fantasy is shit.  No, seriously, he codified if not started all of the needless traditions that the genre bears today, though most writers have the decency to not rip off his dull magic system word for word...Anyway, let's talk about Saphira.  For starters, she has no personality.  A few of the other characters in the books have some interesting quirks, so I'm going to count that as a fault of the character and not the book in general.  Basically, she's only there to make Eragon look cool.  Like a motorcycle.  But for her, Eragon (not quite an anagram of "Garion") is the whiny little bitch hero typical of the Eddings and Star Wars traditions; can't blame Tolkien for that one - Frodo was middle-aged!

1.  Dragonlance - created by Margaret Weis and Terry Hickman

Hoo boy. Where to start?  The plots are based off of D&D campaigns.  No, really, I'm not making that up.  The writing quality varies because there are so many different writers, but the dragons.  Ah, the dragons.  I don't believe they are actually in a lot of the books.  When they are, they are color-coded for your convenience.  Shiny dragons are good, rainbow dragons are bad.  And they talk, but they don't really do much when they're not being ridden around.  The only good part I can see is that since there are so many writers, some have tried to play around with the structure; there's a short story about an awkward misunderstanding with an albino silver dragon, and one where an evil dragon questions his evilness but doesn't actually follow-through (I think he dies, actually...).  On the whole, though, for a serial with "Dragon" in the title, they don't really do a whole lot.  Only ranks above Eragon because it is written by adults who should know better, but let's face it.  They don't.

Now before you start calling me a hater, here are my top 5 good dragon books

5.  "Eon:  Dragoneye Reborn" - by Allison Goodman

Full review here.  If you're too lazy to click on the link, it's about a girl who dresses as a boy in order to get a dragon companion.  Which is a horrible plot, so you can imagine my surprise when it didn't quite suck.  The setting is randomly Asian, and the dragons are life-draining energy beings rather than scaly kittens.  The story isn't exceptional, but it has some good points and on the whole isn't bad.

4.  "Dragon's Milk" - by Susan Fletcher

I haven't read these books in forever, so I can't give too many details.  It might not be as good as I remember, and if I haven't read it in forever it probably isn't the best thing ever.  But since I kept excusing "Dragonflight" for being a kid's book, here's another kid's book for contrast.  The story is about a girl who ends up caring for three dragon hatchlings after their mother dies or something.  They have to go on the run because people kill dragons in this world.  And there are people in difficult situations making difficult choices and facing the consequences, instead of people in difficult situations making difficult choices and having their problems vanish as a reward for making the right choice.  I think maybe one of the dragons died, too.  Not sure.  Kid's books can be pretty dark, you know.

3.  The Dragon Quartet - by Marjorie B. Kellogg

This series is just frickin' weird.  The first book takes place in medieval Germany, where this girl finds an earth-dragon and goes on this journey with it to find her destiny or something, ends up falling through some kind of time portal where, in the second book, she meets a boy from modern-day Africa who is bonded to a water dragon, and then they go back to medieval Germany for a brief bit and end up in this post-apocalyptic future run by a fire dragon, and the air dragon is really a computer, and the dragons are really transdimensional beings who incarnated at certain points in time in order to save the human race from global warming...or something like that.  I should really re-read those.  They're just so...weird.  And different.  See, that is what fantasy is supposed to mean - creating your own unique vision of a world.  Not pseudo-medieval whiny farmboy kill the dark lord questing. 

2.  Age of Fire - by E.E. Knight

Think "Wicked" for Dragonlance.  The original book, not the musical.  It's a sort of dark reimagining of a familiar world (not Krynn specifically, just the whole freaking genre paradigm).  You've got your elves/dwarves/humans/+2, and all kinds of crazy race relations.  And you have the dragons.  The book is told from the dragon's point of view as hominids try to kill them or enslave them.  They end up sort of turning that around and starting a dragon empire and making it very clear that in the dragon/rider relationship, the dragon is boss.  The characters are all very interesting, and in the latest (well, next-to-latest) I actually started to feel for them a bit (That poor Copper! - oh yes, it has amazing technicolor dragons, but physical appearance does not correlate with moral alignment), and I really want to read the last one, Dragon Fate.

1.  Temeraire - by Naomi Novik

Napoleonic Wars.  With dragons.  It is awesome.  Yes, the dragons tend toward the scaly kitten end of the spectrum, but they are not pastel greeting-card kittens, they are real live animals that poop on your floor.  Metaphorically speaking.  Actually, they are not animals.  They are people, and Novik does well building a subplot of a sort of impending dragon civil rights movement (I'm only about halfway through the series).  Also, historical detail.  England, Africa, China, Ottoman Empire, Prussia...Holy crap, that woman has done her research.  So yes, Temeraire is adorable.  He talks (not telepathic, thank the gods).  He chose his rider from the egg and loves him oh-so-much.  And he is a slave.  And seeing him struggle to compromise that with his love for his rider is so...woobifying.  Squee.

Yeah.  Dragons.  You probably think I think too much about dragons.  Funny that I don't usually write about dragons.  There might be some in my shapeshifter story, but they're not really in the plot.  Dragons just seem so overdone and so rarely done well.  At the same time, all the possible subversions are already being done (and done well).  So for the time being, I remain a dragon appreciater rather than a dragon writer.