I said in my last post that Eddings engages in a heavy dialogue with Tolkien and the writers who follow him, and that’s probably my favourite part of his work; he takes a number of the tropes that emerged with Tolkien, like the massive armies moving about the world with a kind of missionary fervor, but he takes them apart and looks at them with a more pragmatic eye. Characters have to raise the army, they worry about how to feed the men, where their weapons and uniforms will come from, how far they can march in a day, and all sorts of other practical concerns. This sort of attention to detail is important to me in works of fantasy (almost even more so than in works of science fiction). The genre has become so mired trying to appear mythic that I feel the need to hold it to even stricter standards than I would other genre fiction.
Wow, it’s going to be difficult to come up with ten posts about these characters and stories. Anyway, next up is: Magician’s Gambit, by David Eddings.
