Fantasy Series that Ruined My Life, Vol. 3

In which I try to turn writing into rupees and make my first half-baked attempts at being a functioning human. Ursula Le Guinn, Terry Pratchett, and Neil Gaiman were there. We check out The Tombs of Atuan, Making Money, and Death: The High Cost of Living.  

Earthsea; Discworld; Sandman
Plague, grief, and the porpoise of fantasy

And so, fired from my pizza job and disqualified from my college program, I plummeted into another crevasse. It could have easily been the last. I expected the crack to close above me and the fires of the earth to consume me. It was a bleak summer, to be sure, but after the first weeks of freefall, I hit dirt. Turns out I didn’t have that far to fall. For one thing, I hadn’t climbed very high. For another, I had the safety net of privilege. It wasn’t lost on me that, for someone else who didn’t have a family home to go back to, who didn’t have a hand-me-down car and a clean record, losing your job and getting kicked out of college would probably be the end of the story. That and other shames helped galvanize me with new purpose – you can only get dragged down so many crevasses before you gain some wisdom.
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I fought the balrog and respawned at my junior college, returned to the beginning to retread a familiar road. I still wanted to write, but instead of enduring academia, I committed to clawing my way into the weird worlds of entertainment. What followed were mostly good, busy years. I built up a portfolio and returned to CSUN — this time in the screenwriting program. I got a degree, worked as a writer at an animation studio, hustled with friends, moved around the Valley, got married, and ate mediterranean food. But somewhere in that process, I lost the time to read fantasy. Maybe I didn’t have the same need to. I wasn’t enduring long stretches of tedium or penance, and my teatimes of the soul were mostly brief and well-lit.

Mostly. The good news was, I was writing for a living. The bad news was, I was writing for a living. Even with three or four roommates, I barely scraped by. I spent long hours in Valley traffic. I participated in my society of my housemates. At night I tried to read and scratch out some words, but free time after work was hard-won. On the fantasy map of life, I was waylaid in a nameless cottage town whose smallfolk spent their days working, commuting, buying groceries, cooking them, and cleaning up the dishes. My epic series collected dust on the shelf. I added the later volumes as they came out, but never got around to reading them. Still, they weighed on my mind. When I looked at my bookcase on a quiet night, Foundations of Stone played in my head. The stories were there, and the road was waiting. If I couldn’t make time for reading and writing, was my own story over? The thought was chilling. Propelled by creative guilt, I endeavored to at least read some of the slimmer genre staples that I’d overlooked during my fiendish years.

A Wizard of Earthsea introduced me to the all-powerful Ursula K. Le Guinn. Hers is a subtle, subversive SFF, where a few short, delicate sentences can communicate a chapter’s worth of character and story. The first Earthsea book is a coming-of-age wizard story that’s been done a thousand times, but the other 999 compare themselves to this one and weep. Closed up in my bedroom, transcending the sound of my roommate’s TV blaring through the rice paper walls, I rediscovered the road I’d left after that last chasm.

​​I started to consider the tropes of fantasy as tools for metaphor and revelation. Maybe beneath the narcotic worlds and operatic plots, it was really the inlaid allegory I was drawn to. Le Guinn used fantasy as a lens to examine humanity, spirituality, culture and counterculture, to make you reconsider your biases or take on new perspectives. She was a ‘realist of a larger reality’, to quote her famous National Book Foundation speech.

​By the will of Gan, I then discovered Terry Pratchett, whose Thief of Time I randomly picked for a flight to snowy Idaho. What Le Guinn could do with the feels of life, Pratchett did with the foibles of society, using fantasy to satirize the inanity of politics, bureaucracy, class and culture, the constructs and cons that frustrate us by turns to laughter or tears. 

These helped crystalize my intention that whatever I ended up doing, it should be funny, and it should help people. I was writing for a few different animated series for teens at the time, projects themed around mental health and trauma and recovery, and it felt like I was on to something. The fantasy roads I’d traveled, and even the lonely bogs and slogs, were amounting to a point of view. Maybe even helping people.
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Then in 2021, the Earth cracked and a chasm I’d never anticipated swallowed the road entirely. That was the year my wife’s mother unexpectedly passed away. It was a sudden, tragic, shattering experience for a close family of siblings, children, grandchildren, parents, cousins and friends. I suppose everyone touches that kind of grief in time, but it was far beyond anything I’d imagined, a dimension of the human experience that lies behind the veil until you’re deigned to pass through it. The world became separated into people who have felt it, and people who haven’t, and we crossed over. 

​In the months that followed, I had no motivation to read, but we all seized on what distractions we could. I’d heard Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series talked about by folks coping with loss, so I gave it a shot. I read it in the early mornings in our apartment, sitting alone just outside reality, isolated not only by grief but by COVID, and an external world seemingly upended all around — a collapsing climate, an ascendant authoritarian cult, virulent anti-intellectualism, grotesque leviathans of Capital sucking the life out of the planet… all these ineffable mortal problems, the ebb and flow of bedlam at all scales, the callous cycle of life churning on. And here were Dream and the Endless, dispassionately observing our desperate lives from their unearthly abodes, and Death, appearing as a kind face at the end of the road. They were Gaiman’s cosmic perspective. Writing as Dream, he also sat alone just outside reality, attempting to make sense of it all. Or to make it make enough sense to carry on with things.

It turned out to be my own regimen of story therapy. The Sandman is about many things, but most of its stories are meditations on life and death, and the myths, cultures, and cosmologies that examine the veil between them. It’s filled with pain and loss, but also joy and love. Through Dream we’re reminded of the value of the ephemeral. It helped me better understand fantasy as a language to share and process grief, not just in The Sandman but all fiction. I could see thestrals. There’s a later Death story that Gaiman wrote after he’d lost a friend. In his preface, he said that he wrote it to help himself feel better. That line resonated. LeGuinn, Pratchett, Gaiman, each used the tropes of fantasy in their own way to help make sense of the world and leave a little light on the paths they walked. Stories can’t fix a broken heart or a broken world, but they can help us feel better.

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​Review: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan

​The Earthsea Cycle is another boulder of a tome, but the story of Sparrowhawk isn’t a linear journey with this or that macguffin contrived to fill another 800 pages. Each entry is a discrete tale with fresh themes and structure and worldbuilding. A decade on from A Wizard of Earthsea, I jumped back in with The Tombs of Atuan and found a new story and a new protagonist, told in the same graceful, incantatory voice I remembered.

Tenar is a young priestess of the Nameless Ones, tasked from childhood with safekeeping the labyrinthine Tombs of Atuan. This she does, fulfilling the lonely duties that have been assigned to her, until one day a mysterious thief becomes trapped in the Tombs. Though she is meant to condemn the intruder, she hesitates, and instead listens as he explains his purpose. From him she learns of the wide world beyond the Tomb, and people and places not ruled by a dark, inscrutable authority.

Le Guin keeps the stranger, who of course is Ged, Sparrowhawk, our former protagonist, at arm’s length from Tenar and from us. For much of the book we glimpse him only through cracks and vents in the inescapable labyrinth. He’s aged and traveled since Earthsea. No longer the boy we watched struggle and grow into his power, he’s now a wise and patient mage whose passing flame ignites Tener’s own awakening. Her fascination with Ged compels her to keep him alive but captive, a secret source of light in the darkness of her world. From his words, she begins to question her faith in the Nameless Ones and the implacable traditions that have consigned her life to them, the incoherence of her society and the confines of her role in it. She allows herself to question the path that was chosen for her at birth, a path that leads forever deeper into the dark and lonely Tombs.

Le Guin was a revolutionary of the 60’s and 70’s, known for subverting sword and sorcery tropes with the ethos and aesthetics of feminism and eastern philosophy. Case in point, following up her adventurous wizard story with a dark, contemplative sequel centered on the spiritual and intellectual awakening of a female protagonist. Though gloriously fantasy, the Earthsea novels (and all of Le Guinn’s work that I’ve read) are stages of imagined worlds and cultures that Le Guin used to examine our own social, political, and spiritual sicknesses. They’re more introspection than adventure, literary in the way of fantasists like Madeleine L’Engle, Lois Lowry, Mervyn Peake, Herman Hesse, Gene Wolfe.

Returning to Earthsea wasn’t quite like picking up with the fellowship or starting a new year at wizard school, but it was a return to something familiar and beautiful. If there’s a unifying quest, it’s within the reader — a yearning toward Daoist harmony that moves between the lines, carried by writing that flows like water with dark and hidden depths.

“He laid his hands on her head, pushing back the hood. He began to speak. His voice was soft, and the words were in no tongue she had ever heard. The sound of them came into her heart like rain falling. She grew still to listen.”

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Review: Terry Pratchett, Making Money

​Ah, Discworld. The sprawling satirical fantasy universe that’s somehow more realistic than our own bizarre 1942 with global cults, trillionaires and AI porn. Put that way, you’d think an old sword would lose its edge in the age of laser guns, but human bullshit transcends time and space. Pratchett may have writ in the austere 1980s and 90s, but Discworld is our world, its smallfolk are our smallfolk, and it won’t be outdated until the last rapacious aristocrat gives his fortune away, the last authoritarian lord leaves his pulpit, the last religious fanatic keeps it to themselves.
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Until now I’d only read Discworld novels at random, when their little paper voices peeped from one or another nest of paperbacks. And I think that’s how Discworld was meant to be read, with its loose continuity, range of settings and protagonists, and panoply of social commentary. There’s a Discworld story for whatever you’re going through.

In this case I returned to the Lipwig saga. Making Money is the sequel to Going Postal and the second book following the misadventures of scoundrel-turned-civil-servant Moist Von Lipwig. Going Postal was the one that pulled me forever into Discworld’s gravity, and Money is a perfect rejoinder to Moist’s previous Post Office enterprise. Despite his best efforts to keep his head down and make an honest living, fate (and Lord Vetinari) seem bent on elevating him to stations beyond his comfort zone, now as head of the Ankh-Morpork Royal Bank and Mint. Moist tends to rise to the occasion, though, creating social revolutions out of sensible ideas like stamps and paper currency. His other duties include assuring the good health of the chairman of the bank (a small dog), avoiding death from the Assassin’s Guild, and preventing an apocalyptic golem war.
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If you’re nostalgic for wizardly British humor but keep your Harry Potter memories preserved in a vial to protect them from she-who-must-not-be-named, take the next portkey to Discworld. 

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Review: ​Neil Gaiman, Death: The High Cost of Living

​Some years ago I picked up The Sandman in a lost and lonely haze of grief. That’s a tough time to talk to people. Your brain barely works, and there’s not much to say, anyway. Death and her siblings, in all their cosmic removal, gave me someone to pass those cold, pale thoughts with. Their stories are meditations on existence, mortality, systems of belief ancient and new, and I found some catharsis in viewing the incomprehensible human condition from their point of view.
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This year, I caught up with Death in her standalone volume. Once a century, the curious and compassionate Endless personifies herself in mortal flesh, to experience the lives she inevitably harvests, the weight and wages of mortality. There are a few arcs in the collection, but the story of Sexton, a young teen who’s lost interest in living, has a particular authenticity.

Sexton scribes for us his pointless story, the last thing he’ll ever write, enumerating the cold facts of his loveless life as he flees an apartment full of bad memories and broken dreams. He prefers to haunt the gutters and trash heaps of New York, immersing himself in the desolation that he feels inside. Alone at the dump, standing on a pinnacle of garbage, contemplating the end of all things, he slips, falls, and is nearly buried. He happens to be saved by Didi, a young girl whose dark aura belies her bright personality. Sexton finds himself caught in Didi’s gravity, taken briefly away from the world he wants to leave to see the wonders and horrors of life at the fringes. They go on an adventure, and like Didi, this odd girl who resembles Death, Sexton experiences all the precious fleeting madness of mortality, how easy it is to lose it and how irrevocable it is once lost.

The story examines teen suicidalism in a way that doesn’t come off as preachy. It feels more like a note to the author’s younger self, a conversation that acknowledges the darkness of the past from the vantage of the future. There are other wonders still ahead, people who need what only you can do and the experience that only you have.

I’m reminded of a Ram Dass quote: “You took this work because you have work to do that involves suffering and the kinds of situations you find yourself in. This is your curriculum for this birth. Where you are now with all your neuroses and is just the right place. This is it, and it’s perfect.”

It’s a nice short story for people touched by the specter of hopelessness. In my case, getting on after white-hot pain of grief had faded. You’ve lost an arm, but you learn to get by with the other. There’s a void in your soul, but your soul grows larger around it. There’s still a lot of precious crazy life to live, and only you can live it.

The whole collection has a nostalgic late 80’s/early 90’s Troubled Youth aesthetic, brought to gritty life by Chris Bacholo’s exquisite artwork. There’s even a PSA mini-comic where Death advises the reader on safe sex during the AIDS epidemic. It’s a cute time capsule, capturing, I’d like to think, an era when kids broadened their minds and explored their identities in bookstores and record shops, and found hope and wisdom in comic books.

Note: I’ve procrastinated on this essay for so long that the Gaiman scandal broke as I was revising. Yes, it is an immense disappointment, a grief of its own. A renowned and inspiring author has been lost to devilry of his own making. He’s certainly not the first. As with Harry Potter, the stories remain, as do the paths they accompanied me on. That’s one thing about our maps — we can return and linger and backtrack, but we can’t erase the roads we’ve traveled, much as we may wish we could.