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writers that the key to success is to marry his rate of
output with Tolkien’s bulk.
Take, for instance, the case of Robert Jordan. He
started his career writing pastiches of Conan and
moved on, after writing a few military historical novels,
to The Wheel Of Time series. At last count the series
had reached book nine and had, according to a very
reliable source (my brother) finally managed to inject
some momentum into his story after four gratingly dull
instalments. I wouldn’t know. I gave up reading the
damn thing after chapter two of volume two. Jordan’s
world simply held no interest for me. He may follow
the Moorcock/Tolkien formula, but he possesses neither
Moorcock’s cool anger and strapping disavowal
of received wisdom, nor the lofty poetic impulses that
drove Tolkien. Jordan’s ambitions in the field of subcreation
far surpasses his ability to give them adequate
expression, and the world and characters of The Wheel
Of Time remain hopelessly one-dimensional.
Now I understand that a man has to pay his bills and
it’s nice to think that someone, somewhere, is making
a living from doing what they love, but there has to
be a better way. Tolkien published maybe 2,000 pages
of fiction in his lifetime. Jordan churns that out every
two years. The inverse ratio of quality and quantity has
never been more starkly illustrated.
For god’s sake, man, you’re not writing the Bible or
the Mahabharata. You’re writing pulp fiction. And the
BUY fantasy books online from and
golden rule of pulp fiction, in whatever genre or whatever
medium, is not to overstay your welcome. Tell
your story, move the reader, and then get the hell out of
there. Short, sharp shocks, that’s the stuff: in pulp the
act of secondary creation doesn’t have to be profound
or deep to conjure up in one’s mind images of strange,
otherworldly realms. The trouble starts, however, when
you stretch a story out. The creases and lacunae are
easier to spot the longer you go on. In other words, to
continue beyond a certain point you have to be really
good at what you’re doing.
Jordan is not very good at what he’s doing. But then,
none of the best-selling writers of fantasy fiction are.
The people writing decent fantasy, people like John
Crowley, Gene Wolfe, Robert Holdstock and Jonathan
Carroll, are doing so on the margins of the genre. The
trouble is that they are marginal figures, and will remain
so, unless someone can write a fantasy – in a mode other
than the heroic – that has genuine mainstream appeal.
If there was anyone who I thought could pull this off
and be the saviour of fantasy writing, it would have been
Neil Gaiman. If you recognise the name it’s because
he wrote The Sandman, the most talked about comic
books series of the last 15 years. They are a deceptively
intoxicating distillation of Jungian archetypes, EC horror
comics, Paradise Lost and C.S. Lewis. Tasting as
if they had been brewed in some age-rimed cauldron
the quaint, knowing, disturbing, moving stories that
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