Reviewer Praise from the Informed Reviewer
Best.. Review … Ever …
Rarely, very rarely, in the life of a writer, does he come across a book review by a critic who actually “gets” the point of the book he wrote.
REVIEW: Iron Chamber of Memory by John C. Wright
Monday , 25, April 2016 Appendix N
When the subject of Appendix N comes up, people almost invariably turns toward the question of what more recent fantasy belongs on the list. Certainly, several people have made the case that Clark Ashton Smith should have been included in the first place. Many are irked that C. L. Moore was excluded as well. And no small number of Earthsea fans have argued that Ursula K. Le Guinn deserved a mention. But you don’t tend to see anything quite like that level of consensus emerge for any of the writers that came onto the sceneafter 1977.
One reason for that is that as years got on, it became harder and harder for authors to be a direct inspirational source for a tabletop rpg. By that criteria, it’s Brian Aldiss that we should be talking about for incorporating into later iterations of the list due to his efforts in laying the groundwork in what would become Gamma World and Metamorphosis Alpha. Another example in a similar vein has would be Larry Niven for his work in putting the concept of “mana” into a format in which game designers could readily transfer to role-playing games.
People tend to get far less specific about just what it is that’s so inspirational about the more recent writers. Fantasy and D&D are at this point so intertwined that many claims that this or that book “belongs in Appendix N” really boil down to people meaning that they like the book. At best they might claim that it is useful to someone running a campaign, but even then they don’t mean running a particularly Gygaxian style campaign. They mean whatever it is that D&D has evolved into at this point, of course.
Meanwhile, the actual works on the Appendix N list are by now so obscure that they no longer serve as a frame of reference for these sorts of discussions. People don’t go out and find recent examples of weird tales, planetary romance, or science fantasy and advocate for them to be added. Those genres can hardly be said to even exist any more, of course, but it wouldn’t matter if they were thriving because they are no longer associated with either D&D or fantasy in any kind of substantial way. So while the wide-ranging diversity of Appendix N is the most striking thing about it, the underlying attribute of most peoples’ suggestions for new inductees is that of conventionality.
So what would a book look like that (all gaming aside) really was in line with what you see in Appendix N?
Well for starters, you might see a litany of magical loot that reads like it could have come straight out of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series:
One of the mirrors had been opened like a door. Behind was a cabinet made of dark wood, and piled high with parchment bound with ribbons, scrolls, librums, folios and quartos, grimoires, manuals, and books with iron padlocks.
You would also see the invocation of elements of Christian Lore side by side with the mythical and the fantastic– just like you would in stories by A. Merritt and C. L. Moore. Just as one example of this, compare the “last remnant of the strange race which sprang from the original Tree of Life” from the opening chapter of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Gods of Mars to this:
That wand was a branch from the Tree of Life, whose roots run deeper than the world. While you grasped it, you could not be moved.
From Lord Dunsany to Poul Anderson, the invocation of elves and Elfland is almost uniformly bound up with themes related to time. This disappears when elves become reworked into being just one of many fantasy “races” that can be described fully from within a purely naturalistic standpoint. In a “real” Appendix N book, however, you are much more likely to see something like this:
Lanval said, “Arthur is in Avalon, recovering from the wound that Mordred dealt, and the years and seasons in that land have no power to pass away, save when the three fair queens grant them leave to go. Here in the mortal world, time flies. There, time tarries. Evil prevails but for an hour.”
Looking at the classic AD&D monster manual today, it can seem a little hokey to see entries for traditional creatures such as the basilisk, centaur, dryad, harpy, hippogriff, leprechaun, medusa, merman, minotaur, nymph, pegusus, satyr, sphinx, and unicorn side by side with more usual dungeon denizens and beings drawn from widely differing mythologies. But the “monster mash” approach is something you see in everything from Narnia to The Broken Sword, so if something was going to invoke old school fantasy, I’d expect to see something along the lines of this:
With roars, shouts, howls, and yips of excitement, the throng of people shoved themselves into the chamber, dragging Manfred with them, and then the talking animals, walking mermaids, lamia, man-eaters, ghouls and witches, their apparel glistering, and making a riotous and unruly noise.
In the Appendix N time frame, Atlantis was almost ubiquitous in fantasy literature. (As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, H. P. Lovecraft, Manly Wade Wellman, Philip José Farmer, and Edgar Rice Burroughs all treated it as a first class world building element.) If someone was going to bill something as being “Appendix N” today, I would expect to see Atlantis dusted off and then worked into the overall background setting– more or less like this:
And the fires of the rainbow, Lanval saw, were words written in the three languages of Man, the Latin of Europe, and the Aramaic of Asia, and the Hieroglyphs taught to the Pharaohs from long-drowned Atlantis. Thunder and lightning fell from the black cloud all around Mandragora.
Finally, if someone really wanted to create something that could be billed as “old school fantasy in the tradition of Appendix N”, above all else it should explore the alien-ness of faerie– and explain why it would make sense for why Christendom would be so leery of it. Reading it should make you understand why the question of whether or not elves had souls could have been a serious game design issue back in the seventies. The book should really capture both the allure and the generousness of elves by incorporating things like this:
“Near Wool is the ruined Cistercian monastery of Bindon Abbey. A boy who once served the monks there would dawdle and frolic on his errands, and swim in this river. His name was Lubberlu. Well, once from between the bulrushes appeared a maiden whose eyes sparkled like sunlight on blue water, and whose silver hair was like a flowing waterfall. They dallied and kissed and laughed, and the boy day after day finding any excuse to be sent on errands, always found his way to the waterside as the summer days turned toward autumn, and the feast of all souls drew nigh. Lubberlu approached one of the monks of the abbey, and said he wished to marry the girl. But the monk knew she was no mortal maiden, and forbade it, warning him of the murderous ways of the daughters of the river water, the nix, the mermaids. In tears the boy fled, vowing to bring the girl to a proper Christian wedding, and turn her from her ways. The next day his drowned corpse was found floating face up in the river, tangled among the bulrushes.”
The book that all of these passages are taken from is Iron Chamber of Memory by John C. Wright. And while you’ll see contemporary authors ranging from Saladin Ahmad to Terry Brooks, N. K. Jemisin, George R. R. Martin, and Patrick Rothfuss incorporated into the latest iteration of D&D’s “inspirational reading list”, I’m not sure any of the additions are going to be anything like this. Fantasy role-playing and the genre of fantasy in general have just changed too much, really. Speaking for myself, reading this book… it’s like someone read everything I liked about Appendix N books and everything I disliked about post-1977 science fiction and fantasy… and then made a novel that addressed every single point I’d made about them. It’s astonishing, really… but this is the book that has forced me to retire my “they don’t make ’em like this anymore” spiel.
If you are a devotee of Appendix N literature, you won’t want to miss this one. While it has more than a little of C. S. Lewis’s approach to fantasy and science fiction within its pages– and while the case can be made that he is a great fit for D&D, admittedly he wasexcluded from Appendix N– it is nevertheless firmly within the same tradition of fantasy that Appendix N authors like Lord Dunsany and Poul Anderson worked with.
Recommended.
My comment: The critic here is Hugo-nominated columnist and SF historian Jeffro Johnson penned an award-worthy series of articles for the Castalia House blog wherein a he read the classic novels and authors listed in the Appendix N of Gary Gygax’s first edition AD&D.
Here, for the sake of completeness, is the list:
- Anderson, Poul: THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS; THE HIGH CRUSADE; THE BROKEN SWORD
- Bellairs, John: THE FACE IN THE FROST
- Brackett, Leigh
- Brown, Frederic
- Burroughs, Edgar Rice: “Pellucidar” series; Mars series; Venus series
- Carter, Lin: “World’s End” series
- de Camp, L. Sprague: LEST DARKNESS FALL; THE FALLIBLE FIEND; et al
- de Camp & Pratt: “Harold Shea” series; THE CARNELIAN CUBE
- Derleth, August
- Dunsany, Lord [sic]
- Farmer, P. J.: “The World of the Tiers” series; et al
- Fox, Gardner: “Kothar” series; “Kyrik” series; et al
- Howard, R. E.: “Conan” series
- Lanier, Sterling: HIERO’S JOURNEY
- Leiber, Fritz: “Fafhrd & Gray Mouser” series; et al
- Lovecraft, H. P.
- Merritt, A.: CREEP, SHADOW, CREEP; MOON POOL; DWELLERS IN THE MIRAGE; et al
- Moorcock, Michael: STORMBRINGER; STEALER OF SOULS; “Hawkmoon” series (esp. the first three books)
- Norton, Andre
- Offutt, Andrew J.: editor of SWORDS AGAINST DARKNESS III
- Pratt, Fletcher: BLUE STAR; et al
- Saberhagen, Fred: CHANGELING EARTH; et al
- St. Clair, Margaret: THE SHADOW PEOPLE; SIGN OF THE LABRYS
- Tolkien, J. R. R.: THE HOBBIT; “Ring trilogy”
- Vance, Jack: THE EYES OF THE OVERWORLD; THE DYING EARTH; et al
- Weinbaum, Stanley
- Wellman, Manley Wade
- Williamson, Jack
- Zelazny, Roger: JACK OF SHADOWS; “Amber” series; et al
To Mr. Johnson, it was a voyage of discovery, because the old books were new: to me, a walk down the lanes of nostalgia. And what he discovered was that Dungeons and Dragons, and, indeed, nearly all of pre-1977 fantasy and science fiction, had several elements missing (and to my mind, and his, regrettably so) from modern science fiction and fantasy.
No better man could be suited to review my latest book, IRON CHAMBER OF MEMORY. It could have been written with Appendix N in mind.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
