Thaumaturges tinker with physical reality, using sympathetic magic to accomplish great things they’re bound, though, by the need for some kind of energy source to power their wonders. Master of the Five Magics (which, like so many fantasy books, inspired a notable heavy metal song) introduces us to a world with, as the title implies, five distinct magic systems. The three books share a setting, and a character or two, but are not a formal trilogy. It’s a fairly unusual approach, and may be worth looking at. Take, for example, Lyndon Hardy’s three-book sequence Master of the Five Magics, Secret of the Sixth Magic, and Riddle of the Seven Realms.Įvery so often you hear people talk about “ hard fantasy” as a counterpart to “hard science fiction.” The Encyclopedia of Fantasy describes it as “stories where magic is regarded as an almost scientific force of nature, and subject to the same rules and principles … By analogy with science fiction, the term hard fantasy might refer to fantasy stories equivalent to the form of hard sf known as the ‘scientific problem’ story, where the hero must logically solve a problematic magical situation.” Hardy’s books are the best examples of hard fantasy I know, defining a system of magic - several systems, in fact - and rigorously working out the ways in which they play off of each other and off of actual physical laws. I don’t mean to suggest that there’s a mass of neglected masterpieces, but I do suspect that some of those 80s fantasies have elements to them which might be worth re-examining, or which might speak to contemporary ideas in fantasy. This is annoying, as I think it increases the possibility of good work slipping through the cracks. I can’t find much thoughtful criticism of 80s fantasy fiction as a whole, or even much discussion about the relevance of the books of that time to contemporary fantasy writing. It sometimes seems like that generation of books is either ignored, or remembered only for its most popular examples - the big sellers, or the series which started then and are still going. What I wonder is whether certain things tried then and since almost forgotten are in fact worth revisiting. As a result, I think, it was a time when the idea of fantasy broadened new ideas and forms and voices were tried, even if certain assumptions (like a quasi-medieval-European setting) were often unquestioned.
So far as I can learn, it seems that this was when fantasy really took root as a novel category - that is, when fantasy novels stopped being relatively rare events and began to flourish as a genre. More specifically, about the wave of fantasy fiction that began to be published in the late 70s, in the wake of The Sword of Shannara and the first Thomas Covenant books, and which over the following years developed into fantasy as we know it now. I’ve been thinking lately about fantasy in the 1980s.
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