Wizardry & Wild Romance
March 24th, 2004Score another hit for MonkeyBrain!
LTR received his copy of Wizardry & Wild Romance, the reprint of Michael Moorcock’s survey of epic fantasy fiction, and read it in one evening. In addition to an excellent cover by John Picacio, the book features an introduction by China Miéville called “Michael Moorcock—Extreme Librarian”:
Reading Michael Moorcock’s history of literary fantasy is like walking an immense, brilliantly stocked library, through which you don’t know the way, following a librarian who walks briskly, nodding and pointing at various books as he goes.
The book also has an afterword by Jeff VanderMeer, and Moorcock’s 140 pages or so are padded by some contemporary book reviews and an updated “Sources” section. (In fact, the whole text is updated, with references to Harry Potter, the Lord of the Rings movies and probably other, more subtle changes.)
Chapter One, “Origins,” begins with an interesting and clear-cut examination of what is and isn’t epic fantasy. Moorcock accepts the imitative and commercial aspects of epic fantasy’s Gothic roots. The summary of Amadis of Gaul is a occasionally funny but a bit long. Otranto is mentioned.
The Second Chapter, “The Exotic Landscape,” is the highlight of the book. It is a look at, to quote VanderMeer’s afterword, “the way in which setting becomes a kind of character.”
The rest of the book is useful as an idiosyncratic guide to the development of sword and sorcery literature, a miniature encyclopedia in essay format. It is also a fairly well developed polemic against certain idols of fantastic fiction. Moorcock’s study suffers at times from breeziness and informality, but perhaps the best a book like this can do is leave the reader pining for more.