Tag Archives: beards

Why do fantasy writers always have awesome beards?

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So I’m sitting at the kitchen table with my housemate’s 14-year-old son, talking about the book reports he has to write before he goes back to school next week. (When did kids have to start doing homework before school even started? Seriously, WTF?) It’s a great list and, apparently, a great school, and the kid’s stoked. The whole situation is very happy-making. But what really made me smile was that one of the books on the list is Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett. Awesome. And the kid says to me “But why not have us read The Colour of Magic? It’s the first book in the series. It just doesn’t make any sense.” And then he gets up to go email his teacher about it. So either A) he’s already read Colour of Magic and is trying to get out of extra homework or B) he’s actually heard of Pratchett and wants to read the series in order. Either way, a child after my own heart.

All of which is a completely irrelevant lead-in to my telling you that I loves me some Terry Pratchett. (Such a hack! Me, not Pratchett, obviously.) I started reading the Discworld novels a couple of years ago. I think I got through seven or eight of them before we moved out here, and quite a few more since then. Still not all of them, but I’m on it. Cut me some slack – there are forty books in that series! Also, Good Omens, Pratchett’s collaboration with Neil Gaiman is fan-fucking-tastic (it’s like Small Gods and American Gods had a baby – a super-funny baby). I highly, highly recommend. But let us just talk about the Discworld books because…well, because they’re superfun and that’s what I want to talk about.

Basically, there’s this small little world which is flat (um, I probably could’ve skipped saying that, but whatever) and swims through space on the back of a giant cosmic turtle. And it’s got one ridiculously sprawly city that’s home to Unseen University (a university for wizards). The city is kind of something like maybe a little bit pre-Victoria London? Ish? And then everywhere else that’s not the city/university is a vague satirical “elsewhere.” A desert island, a set of rugged mountains, a Giza-that’s-not-Giza, etc, etc (but no suburbs, which is an odd omission, but the burbs are boring so who cares?). And then dunk the whole situation in magic and folklore and really odd people who don’t seem to understand irony and who have always lived in a world where weird magic-related nonsense happens. Hilarity ensues. Trust me.

I think the reason that I love this series is because it’s a monument to worldbuilding. Seriously, if you ever have to study worldbuilding, for whatever reason, start with Pratchett. (People do that, right? Just study stuff? No? Just me? Alright.) It’s so fucking thorough. Everything’s tied together perfectly. The prime directive of worldbuilding is that you, the writer, should know all the rules of your world, even if you never have to use them. And I guarantee you that if one were to ask Pratchett something about Discworld that’s not in the books, he would know the answer because it’s that well put together. Even the characters’ logic is skewed to their reality, as opposed to ours, down to the way they talk about weather or magic or gravity. Fluid. Seamless. Dude’s like a samurai. Not a word wasted. The characters are exquisitely weird. I’m a particular fan of Death. He talks IN ALL CAPS and his horse is named Binky. Who does that? Makes Death ridiculous? It’s awesome.

And, bonus, you don’t actually have to read them in order. You should usually read series in order, and honestly I would’ve preferred to just for OCD’s sake, but each book is loosely tied to all the others as opposed to each being a continuation of the last. Occasionally when I read one out of order there will be a joke or a scene that I don’t fully understand but so far nothing has come up that got in the way of the individual story. Which sounds like I’m damning with faint praise, but I’m really not. Because when I do get those things it’s like I’m in on a private joke. I love that, as a fan. And one day I will have read them all and then I get to get all the jokes. Mwahahahahahaaa…

Urm. Anyway.

I mentioned this briefly in my post about Douglas Adams, but Pratchett’s one of a very few authors that actually makes me laugh. Out loud. Quick, witty, clever, sarcastic, dry, British-tastic LOLs, you guys. And I don’t use any of those words lightly (except LOLs, because that shit’s ridiculous and you can’t ever say it with any gravitas, which I suppose is the point). It’s rare to find a fantasy series that doesn’t take itself seriously. Seems to be so for me, anyway. Most of them are all impending doom and there’s a damsel in distress and the dragon’s holding my family hostage and the wizard’s evil and has everyone brainwashed and obviously only a hero can save us so let’s beat the reader in the face with hamfisted metaphor to make the useless prince or the idiot blacksmith or the ragamuffin pickpocket or whomever into someone we can reluctantly rally around and who will save the day despite our trepidation. Sounds quite a bit like American politics during an election year, actually. And Pratchett would totally tell that story, but all along the way he’d be telling you how outlandish the situation is, or how it was all going to fall apart, or something to break the convention. Brilliant.

So, yeah. Go read Colour of Magic or Good Omens. And, in reference to my not-so-irrelevant-but-still-hacky opening paragraph: these books are pretty clean, so you could totally give them to a precocious tween or a perspicacious fantasy-inclined teenager. There’s very little objectionable language – nothing they wouldn’t hear on tv. And if I recall correctly there’s not a lot of (and certainly no graphic) sexy time. At least in the ones I’ve read. I like the idea of giving an epic series like Discworld to kids that age. Because if they love it, there are 30-something more books to keep them reading. And a great fun, funny series like that can be a gateway drug into other, more conventional or serious fantasy or scifi stuff. Which is basically giving them a lifetime of cheap, healthy, nerdy fun. The universe at their fingertips, right? What more could you ever want to give your kids (besides maybe some social skills to mitigate that budding geekiness)?

The Beardy One

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Oh, Patrick Rothfuss, where do I even begin? Perhaps at the beginning.

Once upon a time, I was in a writer’s group with some kickass scifi/fantasy nerds. One day, one of these excellent people, my buddy Jonathan (who will eventually bring us a fantastic graphic novel about the anthropomorphic exploits of the Seven Deadly Sins – I’ll keep you guys posted), handed me a book and said, “There are no words.” I had a total Matrix moment and was all “But books are just words, man.” Then I caught up and understood and went about my day. Then I started reading this book and the world fell apart for a minute.

It was that good. There are, in fact, no words. But I’ve got to try because that’s my gig here. Urm, so, here goes: Take everything you love about Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Game of Thrones and cut out all the bullshit. Take the good stuff that’s left and distill it down through a little bit dark, Joss Whedonesque, Quentin Tarantinoish, violent but beautiful and funny kind of filter. Then add obsessive lute playing, homeless starving orphans, drug addicts, mythical bad guys, some crazy demon spider monster things, unrequited love, and a dragon-lizard.

This will leave you reeling from an unreasonable amount of awesomeness.

So I read the book (The Name of the Wind, by the way, for titular clarity) in, like, a day. It’s a pretty hefty book. I may have laid out of work to finish it. Which I did more than once. (You can’t call out with “I hate my thankless, soulsucking job.” So fuck it. Call out sick and stay home and do what you love.) I immediately wrote an email to Mr. Rothfuss, telling him how mind-blowingly good his book was and that he had kind of fucked up the curve for the rest of the class and I felt like I didn’t have the chops to keep writing anymore, what with my face being melted by his greatness and all. And he wrote me back! A real live email, not a famous-guy form letter. He told me that no one’s going to write my stories if I don’t do it. And that we all need good books to remind us of that. Such a nice guy. Beardy guys are usually nice. Weird how that happens.

That all happened in early 2009. Book two in the series was supposed to come out that Christmas, according to the rumor mill at the Giant Evil Bookstore. So we waited and waited and Christmas came and went and we waited and reread book one and now it’s the end of 2010 and what the hell is going on?!? My nerds and I got agro. Meanwhile we’d been sustaining ourselves on Rothfuss’s blog and the fucking phenomenal graphic novel/picture book he put out (The Princess and Mr. Whiffle).

Long story short (or not) the second book (The Wise Man’s Fear) came out in March of 2011 and shot straight to the top of the NYT bestseller list. Hells yeah! I called out sick again to stay home and read it. And I forfeited my massive Giant Evil Bookstore employee discount to buy a signed edition from our local independent bookstore. Totally worth it, and I love that Rothfuss prefers to do signings and readings at small indie stores. Mad respect for that, sir; it’s important and means a lot. I tell you friends, in all honestly, and I don’t get to say this often: the second one was everything I wanted it to be. Just as good as the first. Not better, not worse. Just a seamless continuation. Which, judging by the few people who have been able to pull it off, must be hard as balls to do. I was so impressed. Usually I come out of a sequel wishing it was as good as the first one, or wishing it hadn’t been so good as to make the first one seem bad. But with Rothfuss’s books, it was like I had just turned a page. Brilliant.

And now I’m deep in the throes of waiting for the third book. Oh, the agony. The torture. But whatever. There are a lot of assholes out there who are giving the man guff about how long he takes between books. These are really long books, guys (according to Rothfuss, Name of the Wind is as long as Harry Potters 1-3, and Wise Man’s Fear is almost as long as the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy), and they have to be written, edited, rewritten, reedited, typeset, printed, distributed, etc, etc. You can’t just yell at an author to sit down in front of a computer and expect him to turn fucking tricks for you. Just, you know, for the record. Also, Rothfuss is a busy dude. Raising a kid, trying to have a somewhat normal (on a bestselling author, famous guy kind of scale) life, and running a pretty great charity. Cut him some slack. Chill out. Read his blog. Cultivate some patience. It will be worth the wait.

But I guess the real reason I wrote this blog, besides trying to spread the tao of Rothfuss, is that little note he wrote me. He’s totally right. We need some books to be better than others. To shake us up, remind us why we love them. I’ve read so many books. So. Many. And I don’t know if it’s just that my brain can only store so much, or that they’re really all the same, but I tend to forget most of them as soon as I’m done. I read The Name of the Wind at that perfect time: I’d been bored for a while, even reading the classics. The important ones that everyone should have read, but everything that’s been written since then is based on them, so when you read them you feel like you’ve read them before? Sad but true. Like Tolkien. I love Tolkien, but there are so many books that have been written by rabid Tolkien fans that when you read his stuff it can seem old hat, and it’s really unfortunate, for Tolkien and for us. But the ones that are great, the ones you want to read over and over, the ones that you remember everything about – those are the books that matter. When you’re struck down by good writing, rendered entirely useless because you’ve been sucked into another world and don’t want to leave, when you get it stuck in your head like a bad song. Man, that’s a great feeling, isn’t it? And, at least for me, it happens so rarely that it’s stunning. So, yeah, go read the first two so we can all do a delirious happy dance together when the third one comes out. Info on Rothfuss’s books, charity, and his awesome blog are all at patrickrothfuss.com.