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Fantasy Game Changers


SkynJay

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Bakker is just doing what Gene Wolfe has been doing for DECADES.

Edit: No slight to Bakker intended, but to see a thread like this with no mention of Gene Wolfe makes me want to slap you all around with a large trout. :P

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Yeah, Bakker isn't a gamechanger yet. He could become one, but that would require a much bigger profile. The same for Erikson.

Gene Wolfe...possibly. The Book of the New Sun is beloved by hardcore SFF fans, but more casual fans of the genre don't seem to cite it that much, and I'm not sure if there's that many books that followed in its trail. More notably, The Book of the New Sun followed itself in the trail of The Dying Earth series, which very definitely was a gamechanger. It created a subgenre (or consolidated it, and gave its name to it which is always notable), was immensely popular at the time and was one of the very first fantasies with a 'magic system' (and that specific system was borrowed for D&D and made its way into many following books, most notably by Feist).

I think some of you are seriously underestimating Cook.

Cook is like that. If you were't reading his stuff as it was released, you likely weren't reading much fantasy, and therefore didn't see what was the norm back then, and so don't realize what he did.

No-one (I think) is arguing that Cook was not a good writer, or that he has not been influential: both GRRM and Erikson have cited Cook as doing some interesting new things in American fantasy in the mid-1980s.

The problem was that it was not a gamechanger. Cook was never particularly famous, he was successful enough to have a category midlist career, but he never set the world on fire. He wasn't even published widely outside the USA for many years (his first UK edition wasn't until two years ago, and that doesn't seem to have done very well). He's namechecked by those who did read him, but Erikson has probably sold far more books worldwide than Cook has in maybe a third of the time. You can't be a gamechanger if you're not very widely-read.

To put it another way, Gemmell was published the same year as Cook in the UK, and is not widely known in the USA because of a relative paucity of US editions of his books. He did many of the same things (particularly the grim realism thing), though Gemmell was somewhat more optimistic than Cook. However, Gemmell did eventually become a bestseller and Legend is widely-cited as a major influence now. Yet I'd hesitate to even call Gemmell a gamechanger simply because he is so little-known in the USA.

Erikson might be overstating the case, but not entirely; Cook added to fantasy what Haldeman and Drake did for military sci-fi.

Except that everyone who's ever looked into SF beyond a mere surface glance will have come across Haldeman (Drake, not so much; probably a US thing). Before Erikson and GRRM started mentioning him regularly over a decade ago, Cook was relatively little-known, and certainly not one of the first names you'd come across in the secondary world subgenre. Maybe not even in the Top 20.

Cook is influential on a small number of other authors who did read him. But he was not a gamechanger.

Btw - I wouldn't call Brooks anything but somebody who cashed in on the LotR, and wrote a weak knockoff at a time when fantasy was mostly stuck in either Conan (and, yes, I still have my Conans that Jordan wrote), very adult stuff like Donaldson, or the classic Moorcock and Leiber type stuff.

No doubt. Brooks's early work was pretty crap. But it changed the game. It was the first fantasy novel since LotR itself to hit the NYT bestseller list. It opened the floodgates to everything that followed and created the epic fantasy subgenre as we know it. It did it by ripping off Tolkien, which is a bit lame, but there you go.

What Cook seemingly adds is introspection, which may have not existed in Fantasy before Cook started writing?

Donaldson had tons of introspection a decade earlier, as someone else said. Gemmell had it at the same time (Legend was published the same year as The Black Company, IIRC). Elric was prone to moping around a fair bit. Steerpike and Titus both had their moments of introspection in Gormenghast.

That's a good one: Gormenghast: gamechanger or no? A very famous trilogy, one of the few fantasies beyond LotR and a couple of others to have genuine lit-cred. But I have't exactly seen a ton of Gormenghast-alikes piling along in its trail. I've see people take elements of it - Williams and GRRM's various vast edifices - but no-one's really tried to do something similar but with their own twist on it.

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You guys know Glen Cook is still around right? You talk about him like he's dead.

Was Gormenghast popular enough to be a gamechanger? I ask cause I really have no idea. Wasn't born yet. This whole idea of gamechainging bothers me a bit, fantasy/scifi doesn't seem like the type of thing to have noticeable changes, or at least changes that aren't noticeable to years and years later.

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I beleive you can be a game changer without being popular, if you influence the people behind you that are. I wish i knew the fantasy lit world well enough to give examples, but since I do not, I will use video games.

Almost everything Blizzard has done in RTS were done before they did it. Dune II was widely known as the first RTS, but Warcraft is the one that made the changes popular. Almost every convention used in warcraft was found in Dune II, but Warcraft polished it up and went So which was the game changer?

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I beleive you can be a game changer without being popular, if you influence the people behind you that are. I wish i knew the fantasy lit world well enough to give examples, but since I do not, I will use video games.

Almost everything Blizzard has done in RTS were done before they did it. Dune II was widely known as the first RTS, but Warcraft is the one that made the changes popular. Almost every convention used in warcraft was found in Dune II, but Warcraft polished it up and went So which was the game changer?

Dune II was by now means the first RTS. That's urban myth. The first RTS was on the C64. Forget the name. Herog Zwei also came out before Dune II for the Sega Genesis.

Er, I see your point though. Certainly Cook has had a big Influence on some authors writing now. I dunno. It's all a mystery to me, like credit scores.

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Almost everything Blizzard has done in RTS were done before they did it. Dune II was widely known as the first RTS, but Warcraft is the one that made the changes popular. Almost every convention used in warcraft was found in Dune II, but Warcraft polished it up and went So which was the game changer?

That's why this topic is perfectly suited for heated, personal-attack-filled debate on the Internets: because there's a solid argument for either one, but a less solid argument for both.

That said, I think the argument that Glen Cook is a game-changer is much weaker than the one for Dune II (or whatever RTS was really the first). The first RTS told us: this kind of game can be done, and it can be fun. The Black Company, likewise, told us that this kind of book can be written, and it can be reasonably good.

However, if an aspiring writer were to think, "Can I tell a gritty military fantasy story, and tell it well, and make it entertaining, even though it's never been done before?" - the answer is "yes". Maybe not for any writer, but for many. Jim Butcher's Codex Alera, for instance (FWIW, I haven't read it) is supposedly based on the idea of taking the Pokémon concept and turning it into a good story. Authors live for that kind of challenge. To do something nobody has done before.

An aspiring game designer, however, isn't nearly as free to experiment. The systems are much more complex. Developing a prototype takes an order of magnitude more time, and even then, the fun probably isn't there until it's balanced, AI is coded, and all sorts of other barriers have been crossed. From the beginning to near the end they won't know whether or not what they're doing is going to pay off, unless they're a rare visionary. And as anyone familiar with Peter Molyneux knows, often not even then.

A game-changer is something that opens doors, something that makes people say "Oh, I can do it!" and "I was going to have to settle for A, but now I see I can do B!" My argument is that this just can't apply to a novel that isn't particularly popular*. Authors already know that anything can be done and done reasonably well. They just don't know if it will sell. They don't know if the publisher will say "Yes, it's good, but nobody buys [fantasy/1000-page incomplete epics/etc]." Or "Yes, it's good, but it's pseudo-feminist noir fantasy action romance, and bookstores don't have a shelf for that."

If all it did is inspire, if all it did is act as the seed of an idea in other authors' minds, then it's not a game-changer. It's just influential.

ETA: Put another, more concise way: a game-changer basically is something that creates a (sub)genre. In books, genre is just classification. In games, genre is integral to the entire structure and design.

*unless it's some really wacky structural thing, like being written backwards on toilet paper

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Almost everything Blizzard has done in RTS were done before they did it. Dune II was widely known as the first RTS, but Warcraft is the one that made the changes popular. Almost every convention used in warcraft was found in Dune II, but Warcraft polished it up and went So which was the game changer?

Neither, it was Command and Conquer, building on what Dune II had done beforehand ;) WarCraft I was fairly obscure and the franchise didn't become hugely popular until WC2. But the RTS genre as we know it was pretty much born with C&C, which was massively popular and put the genre on the map, even though it wasn't the first game in the genre (or indeed the first by that company). That's also the same argument with the FPS: Castle Wolfenstein came first but Doom was the game that put the genre on the map.

Of course, this raises another question about what exactly a gamechanger is. To bring in a musical comparison, who was the gamechanger: Nirvana or the Pixies? Kurt worshipped at the altar of the Pixies but they were (relatively) obscure until he started talking about them every other interview after Nirvana became huge. But according to Cobain without the Pixies we wouldn't have had Nirvana. If you listen to Erikson, sometimes he does seem to be saying that without Donaldson and Cook, we wouldn't have Malazan. But without those two we probably would still have ASoIaF, as Martin's primary influences (Tolkien, arguably Williams) were different.

So the definition may need clarifying in this context. Are we talking about who did 'it' (whatever particular facet of the genre we're talking about) first or who did that anyone paid a significant amount of attention to?

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I define a game changer as something that proves a genre or style can be commercially successful. Basically it changes the game, changes what must be done and what the conventions necessarily are to be successful commercially and somewhat mainstream.

I'd consider Cook influential. He influenced the eventual game changers, but didn't necessarily change the way a large number of people looked at anything.

These are just my personal definitions though.

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The big game changers in fantasy of the past 100 years:

-Robert E. Howard: Invented sword and sorcery.

-J.R.R. Tolkien: The most obvious.

-Jack Vance: His fantasy was the basis for role playing games.

-T.H. White: Made fantasy profitable before Tolkien. (Also wrote the best Arthurian book of all time, and one of the greatest fantasies ever written.)

-Ursula K. LeGuin: A Wizard of Earthsea brought us the first wizard school.

-Michael Moorcock: He turned s+s on it's head with Elric.

-Robert Jordan: Love it or hate it, The Wheel of Time changes everything.

-George R.R. Martin: The face of fantasy is changed. There would be no Abercrombie, Bakker, Abraham, Lynch, Rothfuss, etc in the current form without him. IMO.

-J.K. Rowling: There is no escaping the waves she brought to fantasy.

I believe those are the big ones. I don't think Glen Cook even made waves.

ETA: Terry Brooks also made waves, but in a negative manner. He and his fanfic are responsible for the garbage that came after him. Eddings, Weis & Hickman, Salvatore -- all these can be laid at his feet. Profitable, simple minded fantasy. Ick.

Agree x 100.

Perhaps Anne McCaffery deserves some mention for making fantasy less 'macho-centric'?

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Agree x 100.

Perhaps Anne McCaffery deserves some mention for making fantasy less 'macho-centric'?

First fantasy I ever read was McCaffery.

I have a serious question about it. Before Pern, who were the major female characters in fantasy lit? Did they often take the lead role? I ask because I honestly do not know. If not, then yes, I would put her down as one of the game changers.

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That's a good one: Gormenghast: gamechanger or no? A very famous trilogy, one of the few fantasies beyond LotR and a couple of others to have genuine lit-cred. But I have't exactly seen a ton of Gormenghast-alikes piling along in its trail. I've see people take elements of it - Williams and GRRM's various vast edifices - but no-one's really tried to do something similar but with their own twist on it.

I wouldn't regard Gormenghast as a game-changer for the reasons you provide: given its complete lack of imitators, it isn't so much a game-changer as a work that goes ahead and plays its own game entirely.

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Patrick Rothfuss: Brought epic fantasy back into vogue with his immensely huge-selling first novel.

No. Brought epic fantasy back into vogue? Its basically a more adult version of Harry Potter. And because it sells well means little, because like Gormenghast, his might be a one man road. If no one else follows, he's done nothing but make a boat load of money.

We won't be able to tell if he's done anything for at least a few years. Trying to claim any of the new breed (Abercrombie/Rothfuss/etc) is a game changer is moot at this point.

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First agree on the semantic.

Erikson never intended "game changer" or "change Fantasy" from the commercial perspective. So he's not "wrong", he's misunderstood.

It's obvious, to Erikson as well, that Glen Cook hasn't changed the MARKET of Fantasy or has sold really so much to be very influential.

And yes, you can change something even if no one notices. He changed Fantasy, not the widespread perception of it. He wrote something different in the genre that is strongly recognizable. The number of imitators is not part of this equation.

So give your own commercial definition of "game changer" if you want, but it's pointless to quote Erikson only to twist what he meant to say.

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Anyway, my attempt at a list of fantasy game-changers:

- Lord Dunsany. Did the private mythos thing before Tolkien, inadvertently founded sword and sorcery, and was a major influence on H.P. Lovecraft.

- Edgar Rice Burroughs. The John Carter stories were pulp adventure stories in what was essentially a fantasy setting, and the first one predates Conan by a good twenty years.

- E.R. Eddison. An epic novel-length fantasy in a secondary world more than three decades before Tolkien.

- Robert Howard. Didn't invent sword-and-sorcery, but defined it.

- Jack Vance. Didn't invent the Dying Earth as a fantasy setting, but made it famous. Rise of the idea of a magic system.

- J.R.R. Tolkien. Obviously. Defined secondary world fantasy.

- C.S. Lewis. Multi-volume children's fantasy in a secondary world.

- Fritz Leiber. Humanised sword-and-sorcery.

- Michael Moorcock. Inverts, subverts, and deconstructs sword-and-sorcery conventions.

- Terry Brooks. Demonstrated the existence of a market for bad Tolkien imitators.

- Stephen Donaldson. The first attempt to "rebut" Tolkien (Tad Williams does more of this). Introspective fantasy with a less-than-glamorous anti-hero.

- David Gemmell. Rise of gritty fantasy.

- Terry Pratchett. Went beyond Leiber in defining modern conceptions of comic fantasy.

Wolfe and Peake are too "unique" to really count as game-changers. It's also a bit early to really evaluate Rowling's impact on the genre.

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I also don't think that The Black Company was intended as a game changer as a "military Fantasy". It's not a "Starship Troopers" done in Fantasy.

The signature of The Black Company is about a mercenary company that ends up, without a real "choice", working for the Bad Guys. It's the story of that moral ambiguity as well survival in that delicate situation.

That's the part that Erikson "lifted" from Glen Cook. Humanity caught within, small versus big. Astra caught the major theme by just reading GotM:

"It is now we gods who are the slaves, and the mortals our masters – though they know it not"

So "bringing the story down to the human level", as it can all become a metaphor for a very real condition.

Glen Cook was very much Vietnam War, seen from that perspective. You have to survive while coming to terms with your morality. You are in danger, you are under bigger powers that give you commands, yet it's you there on the front line, and sometimes what you do is going to matter.

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More concisely: game changer means changing the rules of the game. At least from Erikson point of view the commercial aspect is ENTIRELY OUT OF THE PICTURE.

I'd say that from Erikson point of view "game changer" = innovator.

Innovation is a concept entirely disconnected from commercial response. You can be an innovator and fail commercially. Innovation doesn't imply success. Or recognition.

With his cover blurb to Glen Cook Erikson didn't mean "Cook has sold so much, you have to read these books too". He meant instead: "This is a completely different Fantasy that changed radically the rules of the genre. Read this if you want something very different."

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I also don't think that The Black Company was intended as a game changer as a "military Fantasy".

"Military fantasy" is vastly different from "military sci-fi". Military sci-fi is usually about movers and shakers, or grows to be, and is based on naval combat where it's the decisions of the captain and such that have real, visible effect on the outcome. Fantasy about similar movers and shakers, lords and kings, on an army scale - it's almost the default, it's certainly not a "military" category. I mean, the books aren't full of this, they're usually smaller-scale but bigger-picture quests, but when there is a serious battle, this is how it's told.

So "military fantasy" does mean something different, which is the in-the-trenches, Full Metal Jacket kind of military setting, as seen in Cook, Erikson, &c. At least to me.

The signature of The Black Company is about a mercenary company that ends up, without a real "choice", working for the Bad Guys. It's the story of that moral ambiguity as well survival in that delicate situation.
Bad Guys? Maybe on the surface. It's more a rejection of the very idea of Bad Guys, replacing it with the knowledge that we're all doing what we can with the shitty hands we're dealt. (The more pessimistic and gritty version of 'we're all heroes of our own story'.) I don't know that it was ever done as baldly as Cook did, but he hardly invented moral ambiguity. Amber comes to mind.

So... what rules of the genre were changed? What rules even exist?

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