The Worm Ouroboros is the only book that I actually detest. Like, bring back book burning detest.
Por que?
I'll try to avoid being too spoilery in case anyone reading this thread feels particularly sadistic.
It starts off on Earth with a man going to bed and then flying to Mercury on a hippogriff. It then spends an ungodly number of pages detailing every scrap of fabric worn by pretty much everyone of consequence in the world. Whereas most books aim to have well developed characters, this one settled for well developed garments. The man at the start has no relevance to the plot whatsoever and is never even mentioned or alluded to after the third chapter. Mercury has a climate similar to Earth and is populated by humanoids who keep quoting ancient Greek texts. The races are called Ghosts, Witches, Goblins etc despite having nothing to do with any of those things. The characters are ALL sadistic, two dimensional sociopaths and the moral of the story seems to be that chopping people's heads off is harmless fun.
If the book has a single redeeming factor, it has been hidden incredibly well.
True on all points. The "go to sleep, dream of things on Mercury" is a clumsy as hell segue, but it's an artefact of the times. Look at John Carter of Mars, or Lovecraft's works, or Lord Dunsany. The idea of writing high fantasy for its own sake and not even trying to connect it to the real world just wasn't around. So there always had to be some tenuous connection to allow suspension of disbelief.
I don't particularly remember the bit about clothes, but it wouldn't surprise me. Again, it's emulating the classic epics, like the Illiad or the Norse sagas. Which also spent a LOT of real estate talking about someone's clothes or weapon or all the various things they were called.
The bit about calling them Demons, Witches, Goblins, etc. is a bit peculiar but again -- this is before the real birth of high fantasy. And much of the core of the story came from bits Eddison wrote as a teenager, especially the naming. The alternative was to invent bizarre alien names like Lovecraft or delve deep into linguistics like Tolkien (and both of those approaches were breathtakingly novel for the period). Again, look at John Carter of Mars -- you have the less-than-imaginative races of White Martian, Red Martian, Green Martian, Black Martian, etc.
I wouldn't agree that all the characters are sadistic assholes. Yes, the "heroes" are mostly unlikeable. But I found the Witchland generals (Corund, Corinius, Corsus) to be fairly interesting. And then Lord Gro is the most complex character in the book (and in my opinion really the main protagonist). It compares to the Illiad in that respect. I remember reading the Illiad and thinking, "Wow, Achilles is an asshole."
I'm not saying that I wish fantasy novels were Eddison ripoffs rather than Tolkien ripoffs, but you have to admit it *is* different from the stock "elves, dwarfs and orcs" mishmash that constitutes sooooooo much of the fantasy genre.
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Topic: What comes after J R Tolkien. (Read 8955 times)