“The Exit to San Breta” was by no means the first fantasy I ever wrote, either. Even before Jarn of Mars and his band of alien space pirates, I was wont to fill my idle hours by making up stories about a great castle and the brave knights and kings who dwelled there. The only thing was, all of them were turtles.
The projects did not permit tenants to keep dogs or cats. You could have smaller pets, though. I had guppies, I had parakeets, and I had turtles. Lots and lots of turtles. They were the sort you bought in the five-and-ten, and they came with little plastic bowls divided down the center, one side for water, one for gravel. In the middle of the bowl was a fake plastic palm tree.
I also owned a toy castle that had come with my toy knights (a Marx tin litho castle, though I don’t recall which model). It sat on top of the table that served me for a desk, and had just enough room inside its yard to fit two dimestore turtle bowls side by side. So that was where my turtles lived…and since they lived inside a castle, they must be kings and knights and princes. (I owned Marx’s Fort Apache as well, but cowboy turtles would just have been wrong.)
The first turtle king was Big Fellow, who must have been a different species, since he was brown instead of green and twice as large as any of the little red-eared guys. One day I found Big Fellow dead, however, no doubt the victim of some sinister plot by the horned toads and chameleons who lived in the adjoining kingdoms. The turtle who followed Big Fellow to the throne was well meaning but hapless, and he soon died as well, but just when things were looking bleakest, Frisky and Peppy swore eternal friendship and started a turtle round table. Peppy the First turned out to be the greatest of the turtle kings, but when he was old…
Turtle Castle had no beginning and no end, but lots of middle. Only parts of it were ever written down, but I acted out all the best bits in my head, the sword-fights and battles and betrayals. I went through at least a dozen turtle kings. My mighty monarchs had a disconcerting habit of escaping the Marx castle and turning up dead beneath the refrigerator, the turtle equivalent of Mordor.
So there you are. I have always been a fantasy writer.
I cannot say that I was always a fantasy reader, though, for the simple reason that there was not a lot of fantasy around to be read back in the ’50s and ’60s. The spinner racks of my childhood were ruled by science fiction, murder mysteries, westerns, gothics, and historical novels; you could look high and low and not find a fantasy anywhere. I had signed up for the Science Fiction Book Club (three hardcovers for a dime, couldn’t beat that), but they were the science fiction book club in those days, and fantasy need not apply.
It was five years after Have Space Suit, Will Travel that I stumbled across the book that would give me my first real taste of fantasy: a slim Pyramid anthology entitled Swords & Sorcery, edited by L. Sprague de Camp and published in December of 1963. And quite a tasty taste it was. Inside were stories by Poul Anderson, Henry Kuttner, Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany, and H. P. Lovecraft. There was a Jirel of Joiry story by C. L. Moore and a tale of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by Fritz Leiber…and there was a story titled “Shadows in the Moonlight,” by Robert E. Howard.
“Know, O prince,” it opened, “that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of the Aryas, there was an age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars—Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirths, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.”
Howard had me at “Zamora.” The “towers of spider-haunted mystery” would have done it all by themselves, though by 1963 I was fifteen, and those “dark-haired women” stirred some interest up as well. Fifteen is a fine age to make the acquaintance of Conan of Cimmeria. If Swords & Sorcery did not start me buying heroic fantasy right and left, the way Have Space Suit, Will Travel had started me buying science fiction, it was only because you could hardly find any fantasy, heroic or otherwise.
In the ’60s and ’70s, fantasy and science fiction were often considered one field, although the field usually went by the name “science fiction.” It was commonplace for the same writers to work in both genres. Robert A. Heinlein, Andre Norton, and Eric Frank Russell, three of my boyhood favorites, were all strongly identified with science fiction, but they all wrote fantasy as well. Poul Anderson was writing The Broken Sword and Three Hearts and Three Lions in between his tales of Nicholas van Rijn and Dominic Flandry. Jack Vance created Big Planet and the Dying Earth. Fritz Leiber’s Spiders and Snakes fought their Time War even as Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were fighting the Lords of Quarmall.
And yet, though all the top writers wrote fantasy, they did not write much of it, not if they wanted to pay their rent and eat. Science fiction was far more popular, far more commercial. The SF magazines wanted only SF, and would not publish fantasy no matter how well done. From time to time, fantasy magazines were launched, but few lasted long. Astounding spanned years and decades to become Analog, but Unknown did not survive the paper shortages of World War II. The publishers of Galaxy and If tried Worlds of Fantasy, and as quickly killed it. Fantastic endured for decades, but Amazing was the prize horse in that stable. And when Boucher and McComas launched The Magazine of Fantasy, it took them only one issue before they renamed it The Magazine of Fantasy and Science-Fiction.
These things often go in cycles, of course. As it happened, huge changes were looming just around the corner. In 1965, Ace Books would take advantage of a loophole in the copyright laws to release an unauthorized paperback reprint of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. They would sell hundreds of thousands of copies before Tolkien and Ballantine Books, moving hurriedly, could answer with an authorized edition. In 1966, Lancer Books, perhaps inspired by the success that Ace and Ballantine had been having with Tolkien, would begin reprinting all of the Conan tales in a series of matched paperbacks with Frank Frazetta covers. Come 1969, Lin Carter (a dreadful writer but a fine editor) would launch the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series and bring dozens of classic fantasies back into print. But all that lay well in the future in 1963, when I finished de Camp’s Swords & Sorcery and looked about for more fantasy to read.
I found some in a most unlikely place: a comics fanzine.
Early comics fandom grew out of science fiction fandom, but after a few years it had become so much a world unto itself that most new fans were not even aware of the existance of the earlier, parent fandom. At the same time, all those high school boys were growing older, and their interests were broadening to include things other than superhero comics. Things like music, cars, girls…and books without pictures. Inevitably the scope of their fanzines began to broaden as well. The wheel was duly reinvented, and before long specialized ’zines began to pop up, devoted not to superheroes but to secret agents, or private eyes, or the old pulps, or the Barsoom stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs…or to heroic fantasy.
Cortana was the name of the Swords & Sorcery fanzine. Edited “on a tri-monthly schedule” (hah) by Clint Bigglestone, who would later go on to be one of the founders of the Society for Creative Anachronism, it came out of the San Francisco Bay Area in 1964. Printed in the usual faded purple ditto, Cortana was nothing special to look at, but it was great fun to read, full of articles and news items about Conan and his competitors, and original heroic fantasies by some of the top writers of ’60s comics fandom: Paul Moslander and Victor Baron (who were the same person), my penpal Howard Waldrop (who wasn’t), Steve Perrin, and Bigglestone himself. Waldrop’s stories starred an adventurer known only as the Wanderer, whose expl
oits were recorded in the “Canticles of Chimwazle.” Howard also drew the covers of Cortana, and provided some of the interior art.
In Star Studded Comics and most other comics fanzines, prose fiction was the homely sister; pride of place went to comic strips. Not here. In Cortana the text stories ruled. I wrote a gushing letter of comment at once, but I wanted to be a bigger part of this great new fanzine than that. So I put Manta Ray and Dr. Weird aside, and sat down to write my first fantasy since Turtle Castle.
“Dark Gods of Kor-Yuban,” I called it, and yes, my version of Mordor sounds like a brand of coffee. My heroes were the usual pair of mismatched adventurers, the melancholy exile prince R’hllor of Raugg and his boisterous, swaggering companion, Argilac the Arrogant. “Dark Gods of Kor-Yuban” was the longest story I’d ever attempted (maybe five thousand words), and had a tragic ending where Argilac got eaten by the titular dark gods. I had been reading Shakespeare at Marist and learning about tragedy, so I gave Argilac the tragic flaw of arrogance, which caused his downfall. R’hllor escaped to tell the tale…and to fight another day, I hoped. When the story was done, I shipped it off to San Francisco, where Clint Bigglestone promptly accepted it for publication in Cortana.
Cortana never published another issue.
By my senior year of high school I did know how to use carbon paper, honest. I was just too lazy to bother with it. “Dark Gods of Kor-Yuban” became another of my lost stories. (It was the last, though. In college, I made carbon copies of every story I wrote.) Before folding up its purple ditto tent, Cortana did me one more favor. In his third issue, Bigglestone ran an article called “Don’t Make a Hobbit of It,” wherein, for the first time, I learned of J.R.R. Tolkien and his fantasy trilogy, Lord of the Rings. The story sounded intriguing enough so that I did not hesitate a few months later, when I chanced to see the pirated Ace paperback of The Fellowship of the Ring on a newsstand.
Dipping into the fat red paperback during my bus ride home, I began to wonder if I had not made a mistake. Fellowship did not seem like proper heroic fantasy at all. What the hell was all this stuff about pipe-weed? Robert E. Howard’s stories usually opened with a giant serpent slithering by or an axe cleaving someone’s head in two. Tolkien opened his with a birthday party. And these hobbits with their hairy feet and love of ’taters seemed to have escaped from a Peter Rabbit book. Conan would hack a bloody path right through the Shire, end to end, I remembered thinking. Where are the gigantic melancholies and the gigantic mirths?
Yet I kept on reading. I almost gave up at Tom Bombadil, when people started going “Hey! Come derry dol! Tom Bombadillo!” Things got more interesting in the barrow downs, though, and even more so in Bree, where Strider strode onto the scene. By the time we got to Weathertop, Tolkien had me. “Gil-Galad was an elven king,” Sam Gamgee recited, “of him the harpers sadly sing.” A chill went through me, such as Conan and Kull had never evoked.
Almost forty years later, I find myself in the middle of my own high fantasy, A Song of Ice and Fire. The books are huge, and hugely complex, and take me years to write. Within days of each volume being published, I begin to get emails asking when the next is coming out. “You do not know how hard it is to wait,” some of my readers cry plaintively. I do, I want to tell them, I know just how hard it is. I waited too. When I finished The Fellowship of the Ring, it was the only volume out in paperback. I had to wait for Ace to bring out The Two Towers, and again for The Return of the King. Not a long wait, admittedly, yet somehow it seemed like decades. The moment I got my hands on the next volume I put everything else aside so I could read it…but halfway through The Return of the King, I slowed down. Only a few hundred pages remained, and once they were done, I would never be able to read Lord of the Rings for the first time again. As much as I wanted to know how it all came out, I did not want the experience to be over.
That was how fiercely I loved those books, as a reader.
As a writer, however, I was seriously daunted by Tolkien. When I read Robert E. Howard, I would think, Someday I may be able to write as well as him. When I read Lin Carter or John Jakes, I would think, I can write better stuff than this right now. But when I read Tolkien, I despaired. I will never be able to do what he’s done, I would think. I will never be able to come close. Though I would write fantasy in the years to come, most of it remained closer in tone to Howard than to Tolkien. One does not presume to tread upon the master’s heels.
I began a second R’hllor story during my freshman year at Northwestern, when I still deluded myself that Cortana was only delayed, not dead, and that “Dark Gods of Kor-Yuban” would be coming out real soon now. In the sequel, my exile prince finds himself in the Dothrak Empire, where he joins Barron of the Bloody Blade to fight the winged demons who slew his grandsire, King Barristan the Bold. I’d written twenty-three pages when some friends found the story on my desk one day, and had so much fun reading the purple prose aloud that I was too chagrined to continue. (I still have the pages, and yes, they’re a bit purple, bordering on indigo.)
I wrote no more fantasy during my college years. And aside from “The Exit to San Breta,” which was neither high nor heroic fantasy, I hardly touched it as a fledgling pro. That was not because I liked it any less than science fiction. My reasons were more pragmatic. I had rent to pay.
The early ’70s were a splendid time to be a young science fiction writer at the start of a career. New SF magazines were being launched every year: Vertex, Cosmos, Odyssey, Galileo, Asimov’s. (There were no new fantasy magazines.) Of the existing magazines, only Fantastic and F&SF bought fantasy, and the latter preferred quirky modern fantasies, partaking more of Thorne Smith and Gerald Kersh than Tolkien or Howard. New or old, the SF mags had serious rivals in the original anthology series: Orbit, New Dimensions, Universe, Infinity, Quark, Alternities, Andromeda, Nova, Stellar, Chrysalis. (There were no original anthologies devoted to fantasy.) The men’s magazines were also booming, having just discovered that women had pubic hair; many wanted SF stories to fill up the pages between the pictures. (They would buy horror as well, but neither high fantasy nor heroic fantasy need apply.)
There were more book publishers than there are today. Bantam Doubleday Dell Random House Ballantine Fawcett were six publishers, not one, most of whom had SF lines. (The major fantasy imprint era was the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, which was largely devoted to reprints. Lancer had its Robert E. Howard titles…but Lancer was a bottom-feeder, a low-prestige, low-pay house that most writers fled as soon as they could sell elsewhere.) The World Fantasy Convention did not yet exist, and the World Science Fiction Convention rarely nominated any fantasies for Hugo Awards, no more than the Science Fiction Writers of America (who had not yet added “and Fantasy” to their name) nominated them for Nebulas.
In short, you could not make a career as a fantasist. Not then. Not yet. So I did what all those other writers before me had done, what Jack Williamson had done, and Poul Anderson, and Andre Norton, and Jack Vance, and Heinlein and Kuttner and Russell and de Camp and C. L. Moore and the rest. I wrote science fiction…and from time to time, for love, I snuck in a fantasy or two.
“The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr” was my first pure fantasy as a pro. Fantastic published it in 1976. Keen-eyed readers will notice certain names and motifs that go all the way back to “Only Kids Are Afraid of the Dark,” and other names and motifs that I would pick up and use again in later works. In my fiction, as in real life, I never throw anything away. You can never tell when you might find another use for it. Sharra and her dark crown were originally meant for the Dr. Weird mythos that Howard Keltner once asked me to create. By 1976, however, my fanzine days were almost a decade behind me and Dr. Weird had folded up shop, so I felt free to reclaim the ideas and rework them for a different sort of tale.
Once upon a time I meant to follow “Laren Dorr” with more tales about Sharra, “the girl who goes between the worlds.” I never did…but the phrase remained with me, as you’ll see when we reach the section
about my years in film and television.
“The Ice Dragon” was the second of the three stories that I wrote over Christmas break during the winter of 1978-79, as described in the last commentary. Dubuque winters had a way of inspiring stories about ice and snow and freezing cold. You won’t often find me saying, “The story wrote itself,” but it was true in this case. The words seemed to pour out of me, and when I was done I was convinced that this was one of the best short stories I had ever written, maybe the best.
No sooner had I finished than I chanced to see a market report announcing that Orson Scott Card was looking for submissions for an original anthology called Dragons of Light and Darkness. The timing could not have been more perfect; the gods were trying to tell me something. So I sent “The Ice Dragon” to Card, and it was published in Dragons of Light, where it promptly vanished with nary a trace, as stories in anthologies so often do. Maybe surrounding it with other dragon stories was not the best idea I ever had.
Ice dragons have become commonplace features of a lot of fantasy books and games in the twenty-odd years since I wrote “The Ice Dragon,” but I believe mine was the first. And most of these other “ice dragons” appear to be no more than white dragons living in cold climates. Adara’s friend, a dragon made of ice that breathes cold instead of flame, remains unique so far as I’m aware, my only truly original contribution to the fantasy bestiary.
“In the Lost Lands,” the third of the stories showcased in this section, first appeared in the DAW anthology Amazons, edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson. (“How did she get a story out of you?” another anthology editor asked me, in annoyed tones, after the book came out. “Well,” I said, “she asked for one.”) Like “The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr,” it was meant to be the opening installment of a series. I would later write a few pages of a sequel called “The Withered Hand,” but as usual I never managed to complete it. Until such time as I return to it (if ever), “In the Lost Lands” will remain yet another example of my patented one-story series.
Dreamsongs. Volume I Page 40