A blast from the past
2008-11-21 | Filed under Books |
When Patti asked for another Forgotten Book post, she said: “The Western fans are about to run off with it.” Naturally, my first thought was to write about a western: Santiago, perhaps, or Iron Council (“It’s got cowboys in it, for fuck’s sake.”) But because the former made a sizable splash and the latter only came out a few years ago, I decided that would be cheating.
If you’d like to read about the Forgotten Book I did pick, click here.
If you’d like to read the extended Acknowledgments for Anathem, click here.
A couple weeks ago, Larry wanted to distract a seven-year-old and her brother while he and her dad watched the Liverpool game. Board games, Laser Tag, and knitting were employed at various points. So were books, this being a generally literate child in a house of generally literate people, and Larry pulled out a stack of books I liberated from my parents’ house several years ago.
And this is where I must point out the downside of libraries. Oh, to be sure, they are great and wonderful institutions, staffed by dedicated and knowledgeable individuals. But if one makes proper use of a library, then one cannot build up piles and piles of old books. That’s definitely a benefit from a housekeeping perspective, but it cuts down on the nostalgia opportunities, to say nothing of the child-distraction opportunities.
I have a small pile of choose-your-own-adventures, which I dearly loved circa third grade. The TSRs were always my favorites. In Return to Brookmere, the reader is an elf dispatched to gather intelligence about his conquered homeland. The standard fantasy trope locates elves in woodlands; but that doesn’t make for a very good dungeon-crawl, so the homeland in question is a castle.
The stench of marketing is heavy: it’s D&D lite, meant to hook kids early, and opens with a quick paragraph of elven abilities and equipment the reader can later look up in the player’s manual after finding a group of similarly-hooked kids and a bag of dice. It bears the requisite Larry Elmore cover, a snarky sidekick/plot device in the form of a talking amulet, and the endemic modern fantasy racism. A variety of perils and gruesome deaths await the unwary reader, who may be dissolved by green slime, captured by orcs, eaten by cave wolves, burned by a gelatinous cube, or turned into Nothingness by dangerous architectural elements (seriously, who would build a door like that in their basement?)
For all the silliness and blatant marketing…I still smiled while I was reading. And was somewhat shocked to realize I still remembered many of the details. I’m sure I could’ve made better use of those brain cells sometime in the past twenty-odd years. But I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. And if I ever run into a gelatinous cube, I know how to deal with it.
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