We’re always surprised by the depth and imagination of the Blog for a… comments. Last week’s discussion of fantasy professions included dragon detailing, Medusa’s hairdresser, and a discursion on Orc lingerie in which we discovered that goblins go commando, at least according to Jim Hines.
But in the end, it was a fantasy profession that someone didn’t want that won our prize, in Randy Henderson’s description of the difficulties of being an innkeeper in a heroic fantasy novel:
Someone’s always coming into my place, lurking in shadowy corners, and starting fights with heroic patrons. Do you know how many table’s I’ve had to replace after the hero kicks it up into their oncoming foes? Do you know how hard it is to get blood out of wood flooring? And forget about having any breakable mugs in the place. They last about a week, tops.
And if the heroic types don’t get into a fight in the common room, sure as shite someone’s going to try and attack them in their rooms in the middle of the night, leaving broken doors and slashed up bedding.
And hey, goosedown pillows ain’t cheap. If you want to create a fake body shape in your bed as a decoy for the bad guys to hack all up, use your frikin travel clothes or something, okay? Leave my bedding out of it.
Mail us to claim your fabulous prize, Randy, and we hope you’ll use it to tip the next innkeeper whose goosedown pillows you destroy!
This week, Sethily, the heroine of Camille Alexa’s Shades of White and Road, goes travelling, along with various faithful companions, which led us to wonder about the topic of fantasy and travel. Has anyone ever written the equivalent of Kerouac’s On the Road for the fantasy genre? What fantastic journeys would you like to take – and which would you avoid at all costs? What would you pack to take along?
As always, the most entertaining comment will win a fabulous $10. Start commenting!
1 • Larry Hodges said:
April 17th, 2009 at 12:31 pm, permalink
I believe Lawrence Watt-Evans solved the whole “innkeeper in a heroic fantasy novel” problem in his Ethshar series, where he had his hero retire and become an innkeeper. There’s nothing like having a hero with a magic sword run an inn to keep things civil! Of course, if Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and about 2/3 of all major SF and fantasy books and movies took this advice for their many inn and/or bar scenes, things wouldn’t be nearly as fun.
2 • Cat Rambo said:
April 17th, 2009 at 1:00 pm, permalink
Isn’t the guy in Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind running an inn as well?
Maybe we have discovered a new genre – inn fantasy!
3 • David Steffen said:
April 17th, 2009 at 2:56 pm, permalink
The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub is a fantasy story. A young boy hitchhikes across the US, and flips back and forth to a parallel world on a quest to save his mom’s life.
4 • Randy Henderson said:
April 17th, 2009 at 3:11 pm, permalink
Cat — indeed, Patrick Rothfuss’ hero does run an inn.
As for this week’s topic, the first thing to came to my mind was Silverlock by John Myers Myers. But that’s more a road trip through literature. I also, again, think of Tom Robbins’ books, which often involve travelling, though I’m not sure if they qualify strictly as Fantasy.
I would love to travel to other dimensions or other planets where civilizations exist, with some means to communicate and translate and survive. Because as much as I want to travel around the world and through time, people are people no matter where you go on our Earth, with very similar fundamental feelings, needs, similar mythologies and frames of reference, etcetera. And a Starbucks. So I’d like to go someplace where my fundamental perspective on life, the universe, and everything can be blown away and evolved.
Randy
5 • Rachel said:
April 17th, 2009 at 4:21 pm, permalink
Whenever people mention traveling in fantasy I think of the Belegariad by David Eddings for two reasons 1)The characters are always traveling 2)It actually takes time to get from point A to point B. Of course the second reason is why I really don’t want to travel in a fantasy world. Ride a horse for 3 months? Walk for 2 weeks? Even riding a dragon for a few days does not sound fun. If I was going to travel in a fantasy world, I’d like to travel via either a dragon from Pern, some instant transportation spell or the TARDIS. I can live without the discomfort of camping out and fending off robbers and armies while merely trying to get to where I want to be. I wouldn’t have cool adventures on my journey, but I would be alive and comfortable
As for what I would pack…I would pack the witching cloak from the Fables comics. It stores anything and everything you could want, gives you some protection, and can transport you places. If not that, then one of the dozens cloaks and bags that are bottomless and weightless to transport all my supplies.
6 • Chuck said:
April 17th, 2009 at 5:39 pm, permalink
Combining both topics (sort of)…
I’ve always wanted to solve the “kill the messenger” problem with heavily armed messengers who are thoroughly trained in the combative arts (naturally, they’ll also be trained in message delivery … or something).
The most (seemingly) innocuous messages will only require the services of one messenger (although they’ll be made aware that even those messages can be received badly). And messages that are sure to be deemed bad news will require the mobilization of several messengers, a full-scale invasion (there’s the travel), days-long sieges, and a putting down of the populace before the message can be delivered.
But, hopefully, if the intended recipients of the message see that the messengers mean business, then perhaps the message can be exchanged under a tense and uneasy truce between the two armies facing one another on the would-be field of battle. Of course, in that scenario, the messengers would risk leaving their recipients behind to cultivate a smouldering, growing enmity against the messengers, knowing that one day the recipients might mobilize their forces and seek out the messengers to exercise their wrath.
7 • Rachel said:
April 17th, 2009 at 5:45 pm, permalink
@ Chuck. I had never really thought about that. Good idea. Another option is to have the messengers ride fire-breathing dragons. That would definitely cool off the recipients
8 • Randy Henderson said:
April 17th, 2009 at 9:16 pm, permalink
@Rachel 7:
While on the surface this sounds like a good suggestion, I have grown wary of prescribing a fire breathing dragon (or a teleporting dragon, or a wise and ancient dragon, etc.) to people.
The problem is that witch doctors and crypto-therapists have abused the dragon solution. I’m not saying this is the case with you, but rather that “they” have ruined it for well-intentioned dracophiles like yourself.
No matter what you come to them with, they try and diagnose you with ADDD — Adult Dragon Deficit Disorder, and the solution is always the same — a dragon will solve your problem. They have big dragons, little dragons, red dragons, blue dragons, and they are all too quick to prescribe them all. I suspect they get kickbacks from the farm-a-pseudo-drac companies that grow the dragons.
Well, okay, if you come to them with marriage or sexual problems, they sometimes recommend that one partner become a vampire in order to reintroduce pseudo-sexual tension and excitement into the relationship.
But for everything else, the answer always seems to be dragons.
9 • Randy Henderson said:
April 17th, 2009 at 9:23 pm, permalink
Chuck: Sometimes, the messenger just needs to be killed. After all, the recipient may need to demonstrate their power or ruthlessness. Or blow off some steam. Or it may be that the message would not mean as much if the messenger doesn’t die (martyrs, for example).
The trick, I find, is to not stay dead afterwards (and in a way that doesn’t leave you smelling like 10-day old dead rat, or thirsting for blood or brains). I drink the blood of unicorns myself(a practice that was completely and unfairly misrepresented in Harry Potter), but there are other ways, of course.
Then, and only then, can you truly fulfill all the duties and needs of a messenger.
10 • Chuck said:
April 18th, 2009 at 4:12 am, permalink
Randy:
I think I see a series developing…
Book 1 (perhaps titled “KILL THE MESSENGER”): The messenger delivers a message. Someone tries to kill him. What follows is a pages-long account of flight (not by dragon) and survival as the recipients scour the land and try to kill him. (Or are they trying to silence him? Perhaps shades of conspiracy to reveal themselves later, but our messenger is too young and naive to realize this at the time.) Stumbling around on his last legs, he happens upon a mysterious old man (will there be a “mysterious woman” later?) living alone in the forest. The old man (who maaaaaaaybe is the last of a shadowy, secretive order of messengers) instructs the young messenger in the combative arts. The messenger vows that neither he nor anyone else in his profession will never be pushed around again.
Book 2: The messenger begins teaching other messengers everything he learned, and they slowly become a formidable delivery force, successfully defending themselves in both individual combat and smaller melees after delivering their messages. (Although some of the messengers find themselves coming under mysterious attacks away from their delivery duties — assassination attempts?) The messengers score greater and greater victories … er, I mean deliveries, even as the hostility to the messages themselves grow. (Although, perhaps — as you insinuated — the ultimate meaning and importance derived from the messages may be diminished with the higher survival rate achieved by the messengers. But this isn’t stated outright at the time.)
Book 3: Despite their successes (and survival), the messenger find that greater and greater forces are being mobilized against them. Shadows are moving behind the scenes. The messengers accept strange assignments, commissioned by agents of other shadowy figures, to deliver messages into what places and situations that appear to be obvious traps. But, of course, the messengers have a duty to perform. In other cases, recipients of seemingly harmless message fly into what looks like feigned outrage, and attack the messengers. At some point the head messenger, who we met in the first book, comes home at night to find that a leader from the enemy camp (also shadowy) has sneaked into his home; but rather than start a fight, this shadowy leader begins giving a strange relating to your idea about how sometimes the messenger has to die.
Book 4: Is this where the messenger dies and comes back from the dead? Or will he come back from the dead in Book 5?
11 • Chuck said:
April 18th, 2009 at 4:20 am, permalink
Ow. Too many grammatical and word omission mistakes in that last comment. That’s what I get for posting while half asleep.
12 • Randy Henderson said:
April 18th, 2009 at 1:47 pm, permalink
@Chuck 10:
Well, if you were a Robert Jordanesque writer, the messenger should have died at the end of book 5, possibly 7, but will die at the end of book 12. Er, make that book twelve part three (i.e. book 14. Or book 15, if you count the fact that they later split your book 1 into two books. Or book 16 if you count the prequel.).
If you are Donaldson or Feist or Herbert et al, your messenger will die at the end of the first series, but pressures from publishers and fans will lead you (and your successors) to create multiple spinoff and follow up series involving the returned messenger, and/or the messenger’s offspring and successors.
So, you know, you have options is all I’m saying.
13 • Randy Henderson said:
April 18th, 2009 at 2:07 pm, permalink
PS – whether said stretching out of a series is a bad thing or not is entirely up to the readers’ response, the quality of the work, and the believability of the reasons given and mechanisms used to extend the series.
Rachel mentioned Eddings’ series above. Talk about using travel to drag things out in a not interesting way. Oh look, they have to travel. Oh look, they have to travel again. Oh look, they have to travel back to that place they traveled from before setting off to travel some more. Even Tolkien’s “There and Back Again” didn’t overly bore us with the uneventful details of the “Back Again” part.
14 • Cat Rambo said:
April 18th, 2009 at 4:55 pm, permalink
With the Eddings series – doesn’t the second series go through exactly the same journey as the first one? Do the point where the heroes notice the similarity?
15 • Chuck said:
April 18th, 2009 at 5:33 pm, permalink
@Randy 12:
So I didn’t get ridiculous enough?
I do notice that I’ve omitted romance from Books 1-4. (Plus we could always flesh out the travel to deliver the messages.)
16 • Glenn said:
April 20th, 2009 at 1:07 am, permalink
It isn’t so much a matter of the places I would like to visit; it’s more about viewpoints I would like to acquire. I’d like to stand on planets whose night skies gave me an excellent, up close view of the Magellanic Clouds, or the Tarantula Nebula, and most especially the Polar-Ring Galaxy. (NGC 4650A, for the curious) I’d like to step outside our galaxy and see what it looks like from a hundred different angles. All of them, up close and personal, because the universe is very up close, very personal.
As to what to carry, I think Camilla had it right. Start out empty handed, because things are going to attach themselves to you no matter how hard you try to avoid it. The sole exception to the empty handed rule would be in deference to the sage wisdom of Douglas Adams. Always take a good thick towel. It will come in handy in more ways than you could possibly imagine.
BTW The most practical way to look at galaxies would be to go to the Hubble website. They have some fantastic pics.