Sic transit gloria mundi.

 

My wife Karli has had glorious pink and purple* hair for the last few months, a look which suits her so well that people frequently comment that it looks like her natural hair colour.

However, all things come with a price, and in the case of glorious hair, it's time spent at the hairdresser.  Because people tend to chat during things like hair colouring, Karli has discovered that Chenoa, her hairdresser at Field Trip Hair,**, is a fantasy fan, and in turn Karli has revealed that I'm a science fiction and fantasy fan (with the emphasis on science fiction.)

When Karli mentioned that she'd discussed my hobby with Chenoa, I casually wondered if she'd read Joe Abercrombie's darkly entertaining First Law trilogy, or any of the other related novels set in the same world.  Karli passed this along via text, and I gather that Mr. Abercrombie's name came as a bit of a surprise as a fantasy option - which in turn surprised me a bit.

The moral of the story is that just because someone like Abercrombie is part of the contemporary fantasy marketplace, that doesn't guarantee that everyone will know about them.  I myself became aware of Abercrombie while browsing in a Waterstones book store in London in 2011, and although his first book had been published in 2006, that was the first time I'd heard of him.

Just out of curiousity, I took at look at Amazon.ca, and to my surprise it wasn't easy to find most of my favourite fantasy novels.  If you sort by Average Customer Review*** Harry Potter shows up first, not a huge surprise, but there's only a token nod to Game of Thrones with an audiobook on the first page of results, and you won't see The Lord of the Rings until page 2.

Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett, arguably two of the best fantasy authors of the last 25 years or so, don't make an appearance until page 5, and the actual Game of Thrones books don't show up until page 8.  The collected Narnia books are on page 10, and Ursula K. Le Guin's critically acclaimed Earthsea series is MIA until page 11.  Even Conan the Barbarian doesn't make the cut until page 15.  I stopped looking after 25 pages of results - and I never did see anything by Joe Abercrombie.

It really does illustrate the fleeting nature of literary fame - in a way, it's very much like the music scene.

Musical acts come and go, and whereas a group might hit big for a period of time, if they stop releasing songs, their fame diminishes.  And even if they're still producing, that doesn't mean that everyone will be familiar with their music.  Some groups - the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and so on - leave a large enough mark that their songs survive their era and become classics, whereas other groups have their moment in the sun, and then end up on the Golden Oldies station, unknown to the next generation of listeners.****

I'm still a little surprised, though.  There are a LOT of authors that weren't on the search results that I would have expected to have some kind of ongoing readership.  I'm not talking about the classic authors from the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th - you need a bit of a scholarly outlook to discover Lord Dunsany, A. Merritt or E. R. Eddison, or even authors from the mid-20th century like Mervyn Peake and his flawed but brilliantly written Gormenghast series -  but the writers I was reading when I started buying books in the 1970s.

Where's Michael Moorcock?  He first introduced the character of Elric, his haunted albino kinslayer, in 1961, and his books regarding Elric and the rest of the Eternal Champion characters such as Erekosë, Corum Jhaelen Irsei, and Dorian Hawkmoon are considered to be classics.  The same with Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories, which he started writing in the 1930s but I was able to purchase in collected form in the 70s.  I've already mentioned Ursula K. Le Guin and her first Earthsea trilogy from the late 60s and early 70s, which I suspect have won every award there is - and they still didn't show up on Amazon.ca until page 11. 
 
The challenging Thomas Covenant series hit the fantasy industry like a bomb in 1977, but, unlike Star Wars: A New Hope, which also debuted that year, apparently Stephen Donaldson's work hasn't retained its fame. The Thomas Covenant books are described as "demanding" in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, and it's hard to improve on that description, but Donaldson's flawed, bitter protagonist broke completely new ground in the genre.  Patricia McKillip's clever and lyrical Riddlemaster of Hed series from the same era is equally unique, if less deconstructionist, but may actually be out of print at this point.

I feel I could sit here and list authors and books all day - Garth Nix's Sabriel,  K. J. Parker (Tom Holt in disguise), Tad Williams, Canadian author Guy Gavriel Kay and his breakout Fionvar Tapestry series from the 80s, Karl Edward Wagner's Kane stories, Charles De Lint (also Canadian), Mary Stewart's historical fantasy, and so on - and no sign of them in terms of public recognition on Amazon, which I think is more than a little sad.  It's a shame there isn't some equivalent of the aforementioned Golden Oldies radio stations to keep the classics in the public eye.

I think it would be fun to sit down and have a conversation with Chenoa about some of these books, but I don't think that's likely to happen - we only know her professionally, and as you can tell from photos of me that that have appeared here, I'm not exactly in need of a lengthy visit to a hairdresser.

- Sid

* Highlights have varied from aqua to caramel.

** Unsolicited endorsement:  Chenoa does great work.  If you live in the greater Vancouver area and you're thinking about getting coloured hair, she is definitely the person you want to see.

*** Amazon's Sort By feature has always made me a bit crazy.  Why is there no ALPHABETICAL ORDER BY AUTHOR - how hard would that be?  It's the way brick and mortar stores do it, how bad would it be to be able to do that online?

**** This is an interesting analogy, because it also acknowledges the way in which styles and preferences change over time.  Some people listen to a wide range of music, whereas other people will be stuck in the 80s forever.  Using this approach, J.R.R. Tolkien is Beethoven, and George R.R. Martin is...Metallica, perhaps?  Freddy Mercury?  No, I think that maybe Michael Moorcock is Freddy...hmmm...I'll have to give this some more thought.