In Memory of America's Foremost Author of Bad Fantasy
"Nobody but a fool ever wrote except for money" --- Samuel Johnson
Every geek has a fantasy author who they plow through at an early age. For most it's Tolkien, I ended up reading Eddings first and didn't actually read LOTR until college.
I think the way this probably impacted me the most is that I tended to find Tolkien unreadable. Eddings wasn't a great author, but he was definitely motivated as a professional writer - he wanted to reach an audience, so that they'd pay him. As a result, there's this conscious shift about midway through the second of the Belgariad books where he stops talking in a faux-Tolkien voice and starts moving towards the more lighthearted and contemporary tone that dominates his writing ever after.
Again, not to say the writing is good, just very readable. He had an addiction to "peculiar", and every character more or less sounds the same eventually. He had a knack for writing comedy, but his plots tend to cycle very quickly - so much so that in the Malloreon series, the characters spend a lot of time hanging lampshades on the similarities. The Tamuli series pins all the evil in the universe on a character who appears for 2 sentences before then. He had a very pink frosted rose and Julio Iglesias on the limo stereo concept of sexuality which was made all the more amusing by his firm conviction that he was writing sexually frank material for the genre.
That said, Eddings wrote a significant book for the genre. Not the Belgariad, Malloreon, Elenium, Tamuli, Regina's Song, Redemption of Althalus or that damned whatever gods thing I never bothered to read. It was the Rivan Codex, his book on writing fantasy. Eddings didn't read fantasy for pleasure or research, and most of the evidence indicates he really didn't like the genre. He stated specifically that he primarily ripped off Thomas Malory more than anyone else, and yet his work was interchangeable with all the other quest literature. Given his beliefs on sexuality in fantasy, I believe him --- only somebody who had read only Malory and Tolkien would believe that Eddings' work was sexually liberated for the genre. This to me is an indication of the strength of the Bad Fantasy Genre, that subset of fantasy literature that includes the Shannara books, Raymond Feist, and everyone else who spiraled off from the collision of Tolkien and Gygax. Anything with a Dark Lord in a cardinal direction, the Dwarf and Elf who Become Friends, or, as Diana Wynn-Jones famously put it "Anglo-Saxon Cossacks". Weis and Hickman wrote such a platonic Bad Fantasy in Dragonlance that they've intentionally weirded up everything they've ever done afterwards to escape.
Eddings, to me, is the examplar of the Bad Fantasy genre; but he reveled in it. Unlike the majority of fantasy authors I've read over the years, he made absolutely no bones about why he was in the business: he was writing to make money. He'd written a couple of wilderness novels that had gone nowhere, and when he saw that fantasy took up so much shelving at his local bookstore, and decided he could do just as well. His most interesting book is "The Rivan Codex", which is essential David Eddings' Guide To Writing Bad Fantasy. He admits up front that he has no creativity, points out the sources he's ripping off, explains how he builds worlds, and generally throws a gigantic bucket of cold water on anyone who has any pretense that this is art.
Eddings' entire point is that his writing is stagecraft. Which Tolkien's explicitly wasn't. Tolkien invented the languages before he invented the lord of the rings, he had a philosophical position about the "subcreation" of middle earth vis-a-vis the creation of the world, and apparently spent the last week of his live ruminating over whether Orcs could be redeemed. Eddings, whose biography for the Belgariad always included a statement that he'd written the book to examine "Certain technical and philosophical" conventions within the genre, admitted that what he was exploring was what the minimal set of barely constructed hooey he needed was if he talked real fast and smiled a lot.
But since fantasy fans have that science fiction subset who wants it to "be real". There's always been this obsession within the genre with the most extreme worldbuilders. A habit I think was laid out by Tolkien and extended by Gygax, since in D&D you have mostly worldbuilding and little else. Eddings, however, argued that this was largely hooey --- in this, he was a professional writer in the way that L. Ron Hubbard was. He'd write in whatever genre paid, he'd generate something predictably and make money on it. Hack? Sure, but the field is filled with hacks. Arguably unless you've got an infrastructure to support hacks, you won't get the non-hack authors.
There's a scene in "A mighty wind" which I think sums it up nicely. The only clip I've found of it is in this top 10 scene list here, it's scene #1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAdhkk4IPGE
The stage manager is trying to explain to another character why the giant banjo "looks flat", and explains that this is stagecraft 101. Eddings was all about stagecraft 101. The Rivan Codex, a book I know has irritated more fantasy fans than any other book I've heard of, is about stagecraft. David Eddings wasn't a great author, but he was distinctly blunt about how you go about writing a fantasy book, and that was interesting reading in itself.
Every geek has a fantasy author who they plow through at an early age. For most it's Tolkien, I ended up reading Eddings first and didn't actually read LOTR until college.
I think the way this probably impacted me the most is that I tended to find Tolkien unreadable. Eddings wasn't a great author, but he was definitely motivated as a professional writer - he wanted to reach an audience, so that they'd pay him. As a result, there's this conscious shift about midway through the second of the Belgariad books where he stops talking in a faux-Tolkien voice and starts moving towards the more lighthearted and contemporary tone that dominates his writing ever after.
Again, not to say the writing is good, just very readable. He had an addiction to "peculiar", and every character more or less sounds the same eventually. He had a knack for writing comedy, but his plots tend to cycle very quickly - so much so that in the Malloreon series, the characters spend a lot of time hanging lampshades on the similarities. The Tamuli series pins all the evil in the universe on a character who appears for 2 sentences before then. He had a very pink frosted rose and Julio Iglesias on the limo stereo concept of sexuality which was made all the more amusing by his firm conviction that he was writing sexually frank material for the genre.
That said, Eddings wrote a significant book for the genre. Not the Belgariad, Malloreon, Elenium, Tamuli, Regina's Song, Redemption of Althalus or that damned whatever gods thing I never bothered to read. It was the Rivan Codex, his book on writing fantasy. Eddings didn't read fantasy for pleasure or research, and most of the evidence indicates he really didn't like the genre. He stated specifically that he primarily ripped off Thomas Malory more than anyone else, and yet his work was interchangeable with all the other quest literature. Given his beliefs on sexuality in fantasy, I believe him --- only somebody who had read only Malory and Tolkien would believe that Eddings' work was sexually liberated for the genre. This to me is an indication of the strength of the Bad Fantasy Genre, that subset of fantasy literature that includes the Shannara books, Raymond Feist, and everyone else who spiraled off from the collision of Tolkien and Gygax. Anything with a Dark Lord in a cardinal direction, the Dwarf and Elf who Become Friends, or, as Diana Wynn-Jones famously put it "Anglo-Saxon Cossacks". Weis and Hickman wrote such a platonic Bad Fantasy in Dragonlance that they've intentionally weirded up everything they've ever done afterwards to escape.
Eddings, to me, is the examplar of the Bad Fantasy genre; but he reveled in it. Unlike the majority of fantasy authors I've read over the years, he made absolutely no bones about why he was in the business: he was writing to make money. He'd written a couple of wilderness novels that had gone nowhere, and when he saw that fantasy took up so much shelving at his local bookstore, and decided he could do just as well. His most interesting book is "The Rivan Codex", which is essential David Eddings' Guide To Writing Bad Fantasy. He admits up front that he has no creativity, points out the sources he's ripping off, explains how he builds worlds, and generally throws a gigantic bucket of cold water on anyone who has any pretense that this is art.
Eddings' entire point is that his writing is stagecraft. Which Tolkien's explicitly wasn't. Tolkien invented the languages before he invented the lord of the rings, he had a philosophical position about the "subcreation" of middle earth vis-a-vis the creation of the world, and apparently spent the last week of his live ruminating over whether Orcs could be redeemed. Eddings, whose biography for the Belgariad always included a statement that he'd written the book to examine "Certain technical and philosophical" conventions within the genre, admitted that what he was exploring was what the minimal set of barely constructed hooey he needed was if he talked real fast and smiled a lot.
But since fantasy fans have that science fiction subset who wants it to "be real". There's always been this obsession within the genre with the most extreme worldbuilders. A habit I think was laid out by Tolkien and extended by Gygax, since in D&D you have mostly worldbuilding and little else. Eddings, however, argued that this was largely hooey --- in this, he was a professional writer in the way that L. Ron Hubbard was. He'd write in whatever genre paid, he'd generate something predictably and make money on it. Hack? Sure, but the field is filled with hacks. Arguably unless you've got an infrastructure to support hacks, you won't get the non-hack authors.
There's a scene in "A mighty wind" which I think sums it up nicely. The only clip I've found of it is in this top 10 scene list here, it's scene #1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAdhkk4IPGE
The stage manager is trying to explain to another character why the giant banjo "looks flat", and explains that this is stagecraft 101. Eddings was all about stagecraft 101. The Rivan Codex, a book I know has irritated more fantasy fans than any other book I've heard of, is about stagecraft. David Eddings wasn't a great author, but he was distinctly blunt about how you go about writing a fantasy book, and that was interesting reading in itself.