My latest: on fantasy and theology in The Christian Century

In the latest issue of The Christian Century I have an essay on the divine comedy of epic fantasy, or as the editors titled it, “Gods Who Make Worlds.” It’s ostensibly a review of the final volume of Tad Williams’s quartet The Last King of Osten Ard, which is itself a sequel series to the original trilogy Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn—not to mention a prequel, a bridge novel, and a companion volume—for a total of ten books in this world. The name of that world is Osten Ard, and I use the glories of Osten Ard to think aloud about epic fantasy as a genre and its relationship to Christian faith.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

Three decades ago, Tad Williams published the final volume in the best epic fantasy trilogy written in English since The Lord of the Rings. Called Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, the series ran from 1988 to 1993 and totaled over a million words. Half of those words came in the final book—one of the longest books ever to make it onto the New York Times bestseller list.

There is no overselling the significance of Williams’s achievement: the biggest names in fantasy in the intervening decades all acknowledge his influence, from Brandon Sanderson to Patrick Rothfuss to Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin. (There is no Westeros without Osten Ard, Williams’s fictional world.) Yet, although Williams is hyper-prolific and widely admired, he has never had the success or name recognition of these other authors. No streaming service has yet broken the bank in adapting Williams’s magnum opus.

Why have these books sold well but never set the world on fire?

Three reasons come to mind…

Click here to read the rest. Thanks again to The Christian Century for letting me write about these books and this topic—a big ask, given my lack of qualifications.

To Osten Ard

I first journeyed to Osten Ard in the summer of 2019. Osten Ard is the fictional world of Tad Williams’ fantasy trilogy Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. It came out about thirty years ago and comprises three books: The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Stone of Farewell (1990), and To Green Angel Tower (1993). The last book, if I’m not mistaken, is one of the largest novels ever to top the New York Times bestseller list. At more than half a million words, it is so big they had to split it in two volumes for the paperback edition.

I enjoy fantasy, but I’m no purist. I’ve not read every big name, every big series. Nevertheless, not only is MST my favorite fantasy series. It’s the most purely pleasurable and satisfying reading experience I’ve ever had.

I remember wanting, at the time, to write up why I loved it so much. I had a whole post scribbled out in my head. Alas, I never got around to it. But I’ve finally decided to revisit Osten Ard, so I’m taking the chance now.

The reason? A full three decades after the publication of The Dragonbone Chair, Williams decided to write a sequel trilogy. That trilogy has expanded into a tetralogy, accompanied by three different smaller novels: one that bridges the two series (The Heart of What Was Lost [2017]), plus two distinct prequels set thousands of years in the past (Brothers of the Wind [2021] and The Splintered Sun [2024]). As for the tetralogy, it’s titled The Last King of Osten Ard, and includes The Witchwood Crown (2017), Empire of Grass (2019), Into the Narrowdark (2022), and The Navigator’s Children (2023). That last novel is finished and due to be released this November.

Since first reading MST in 2019 I’d been waiting for a definitive publication date for the final book of the sequel series before plunging in. Now that it’s here, I’m ready to go. But in order to prepare, I’m rereading the original trilogy via audio. It’s even better the second time round. Narrator Andrew Wincott is pitch perfect. The total number of hours across all three books is about 125—but already the time spent listening has been a delight. And then, once I’m done, I’ll open the bridge novel and the final four books that bring the whole 10-book saga to a close.

I’ve buried the lede, though. What makes these books so wonderful?

In a word: Everything.

Plot, prose, character, world-building—it’s all magnificent and then some.

1. Plot reigns in fantasy. Without a good plot, there’s no story worth telling. And what a story MST tells. It’s a slow burn in the first book. The first quarter sets a lot of tables before any food is served. I’ve had multiple friends begin the book and not make it past the halfway point for this reason. I get it. But I don’t mind the pace. All the pieces on the board have to be in the right place before the action begins. Besides, Williams’ leisurely pace is a welcome break from needing to Begin The Adventure! on page one.

Williams plots out everything in advance, and it shows. He also clearly loves four-part stories over three-parters. Every other series he’s written besides MST has entailed four books—and the third book in this trilogy is the size of the first two books put together! In any case, Williams always knows where he’s going, and he’s going to earn every step of the way. He never cheats. Never. That’s what makes To Green Angel Tower so extraordinary. Every single thread finds its way woven into the tapestry, always at just the right moment, when you least expected it. By novel’s end, the final achievement is a marvel to behold.

And even granting the slow burn of the first novel, by two-thirds of the way through, it’s off to the races, and you never look back or slow down.

2. The prose is delightful. Not showy, but not inert either. Williams has style. Above all, it’s not a failed attempt at Tolkienese. It’s “modern,” if by that one means tonally consistent, character-specific, emotionally and psychologically rich, morally complex, and written for adults. But not “adult.” Williams comes before George R. R. Martin—many of whose themes and even plot devices are lifted right off the page of MST—and beats him to the post-Tolkien punch, without any of the lurid, gratuitous nonsense. There’s neither sadism nor titillation on display here. Neither is it for kids, however. My 9-year old is reading Lord of the Rings at the moment. He won’t be ready for Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn until he’s in high school.

All that to say: For my money, granting that the genre is not known for its master stylists, Tad Williams writes the best prose in all contemporary fantasy. You’re always in good hands when you’re reading him.

3. The characters! Oh, the characters. Just wait till you meet them, till you’ve met them. Binabik, Isgrimnur, Morgenes, Jiriki, Tiamak, Josua, Miriamele, Pryrates … and so many more. One of the delights of rereading (=listening to) the trilogy is spending time with these old friends (and not a few enemies) once more.

And again, thankfully, we don’t have a Fellowship redux. There is a wizard-like character, but he plays a minor role and is nothing like Gandalf. There is more than one “good king,” in this or that kind of exile, but not only are our expectations of their “return” turned upside down; they aren’t cast in the mold of Aragorn (or David or Arthur or Richard the Lionheart or whomever). Likewise there are elf-like creatures, but they aren’t patterned on Legolas or Galadriel or the other elves of Middle-Earth. So on and so forth.

Two further comments on this point.

First, speaking of LOTR, here’s one way to understand what Williams is up to in the series. Tolkien famously ends his story with Aragorn’s accession to the throne and his long future reign and happy marriage. Williams begins his story where Aragorn’s ends: after 80 years of a happy, just, and celebrated royal reign. I.e., with the death of a universally beloved “good king.” In a sense, his story poses the question: Okay, suppose an Aragorn really did rule with peace and justice for as long as he lived. What happened next?

And then he asks: And what if this Aragorn had demons in his past, skeletons in his closet, bodies buried where no one thought to look? What if he had secrets? And what if those secrets, once brought to light, had costs?

To be clear, Williams is neither a cynic nor (like GRRM on his lesser days) a nihilist. But he wants to tell a full-bodied story about three-dimensional characters. No one’s a cardboard cutout; nobody’s perfect. That’s his way of honoring Tolkien without aping him.

Second, the protagonist of MST is a boy named Simon (Seoman) who, for much of the story, has a lot of growing up to do. He’s an orphan scullion in his mid-teens, as the story begins, and the truth is he’s petty, immature, self-regarding, self-pitying, and annoying. A real whiner, to be honest. And some folks I’ve known who gave Dragonbone Chair a chance finally put it down because they simply didn’t like Simon.

I get it. He’s not likable. He’s Luke from A New Hope, only if Luke was the same restless spoiled brat for multiple movies, not just the opening hour. Who wants to watch that?

Stick with it, is all I have to say. Williams doesn’t cheat here either. His depiction of Simon is honest and unflinching. Who wouldn’t be self-pitying and immature growing up in the kitchens of a castle without mother or father, aching for glory but ignorant of the world? Williams won’t let him grow up too fast, either. It takes time. But the growth is real, if incremental. And by the time he fully and finally grows into himself, you realize the journey was worth it. You learn to love the ragamuffin.

4. What fantasy is worth its salt without world-building? Middle-earth, Narnia, Westeros, Hogwarts, Earthsea, the Six Duchies … it either works or it doesn’t. When it works, it’s not only real, not only lived in, not only mapped and named and historied in painstaking detail. It’s appealing. It’s beautiful. It draws you in. It’s a world that, however dangerous, you want to live in too, or at least visit from time to time.

Osten Ard fits the bill in spades. It’s got all the trappings of the alt-medieval world universally conjured by the fantasy genre—fit with pagans and a church hierarchy, castles and knights, fiery dragons and friendly trolls, magical forests and mysterious prophecies—but somehow without staleness or stereotype. The world is alive. You can breathe the air. You can, once you master the map, move around in it, trace your steps or others’. It’s a world that makes sense. There’s not a stone out of place.

It’s a world with real darkness in it, too. Not the threat of it. The genuine article. Pain and suffering, remorse and lament, even sin find their way into the characters’ lives. As he wrote To Green Angel Tower, Williams was going through some real-life heartache, and you can feel it in every word on the page. But it’s not for its own sake. It serves the story, and it’s headed somewhere. If I said above that I’ve never been more satisfied by a reading experience, then I’ll gloss that here by saying that I’ve never had the level of catharsis that Williams provides the reader—finally—in the final two hundred pages of this trilogy.

And yet, apparently, that isn’t the end of the story! Williams is a master of endings, and I can call to mind immediately the closing scene, even the final sentence, of each of the three books. The first is haunting and sad; the second is mournful though tinged with hope; the third is full of joy, so much so it makes me smile just thinking about it.

But there are four more books to go! Another million (or more) words to read! A good friend whom I introduced to the original trilogy says the new series is even better than the first. Hard to believe, but I do. Between now and November—or should I say Novander?—I’m making my return to Osten Ard. Like Simon Pilgrim, I’m starting at the end, or perhaps in the middle. Usires Aedon willing, I’ll see you on the other side.

Eleven thoughts on Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove

Last month I read Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove for the first time, and it was even better than advertised. I have some thoughts, mostly on what makes it so good, as well as the underlying themes that (perhaps?) have been overlooked given the book's popularity, Pulitzer Prize, and adaptation into a TV miniseries.

1.  The prose is perfect. Perfect. Not perfect the way, say, Michael Chabon's is. There may not be a word in all the nearly-1,000 pages that rises above an eighth grade reading level. The sentences, moreover, are usually on the short side. The prose isn't complex. But it's pitch perfect. McMurtry never fails to communicate exactly what he intends, whether it be an action, a feeling, a thought, or a memory. Or a conversation. Oh my, the dialogue. I felt what all readers have felt reading this novel: I didn't want it to end. Like watching a sitcom for a decade, I just wanted to spend time with my friends. But anyway, reading McMurtry's prose was a delight. The way he uses euphemism and "native" construction—the way an uneducated twentysomething cowboy would think or talk—both in dialogue and in description of action or emotion from a character's perspective: it's nothing short of masterful.

2. The characters! Gus, Call, Lorena, Dish, Pea Eye, Deets, Clara—Clara!—Lippy, Newt, Wanz, Blue Duck, July Johnson, Roscoe, Po Campo, Elmira, Peach, Big Zwey, Wilbarger, Jake Spoon—oh, Jake Spoon—Cholo, Soupy, Bolivar. Each name calls forth a whole world, a flesh-and-blood person, a voice and a story and an inner dialogue. Waiting to have July open part 2 and then Clara open part 3, the latter two-thirds into the story, and for each of them to step onto the page fully-formed and wholly equal to those we'd met long before: it's invigorating, is what it is. Exhilirating for the reader. Because at that point you just don't know who might show up before long.

3. The plot is elegant in its simplicity and beautiful in its execution. An 1880 cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana, from the southern border to the northern (somewhere between the Rivers Milk and Missouri), led by two famous Texas Rangers in their 50s, after all the battles have been won and the land "secured" for settlement. A journey from vista to vista that live on in the American mythos. A tale filled with outsize characters and shocking events, combined with the ordinary quirks and peccadilloes of human life anywhere: back-breaking labor, bitter weather, taming the elements and animal passions in tandem, ubiquitous prostitution, city life and wilderness within walking distance, penury and plenty even closer bedfellows, unclaimed bastards and long-lost loves, abrupt deaths and children orphaned, gallows humor and gambling and ghost stories and other ways to kill the time on the short way to the grave.

4. That leads me to what most surprised me about the novel (spoilers hereon). This is a dark story lightly told. And I cannot decide whether that is a virtue or a vice (it's certainly a feature and not a bug). The tone floats upon the surface of the pages, flitting from a Gus monologue to a light-hearted memory to a gripping set piece without pausing for Existential Comment or Thematic Flag-Planting. And that, I think, is why the book (appears to me, at least) to be remembered for the joy and pleasure of the plot and the characters and the dialogue. That was certainly my experience of the first half or so. But make no mistake. This is not a comedy. It is a tragedy.

By story's end, random minor characters have died to no purpose; Jake Spoon, fallen into mindless self-justifying murder, is captured and hanged by his friends before killing himself; July's wife, who never loved him and despises him, runs off to find another man, "marries" a third and is killed by Sioux; July's stepson and best friend together with a runaway, abused little girl are brutally murdered by Blue Duck; Deets is killed by a confused and overwhelmed young Indian boy for no reason; Clara is living alone on hard plains land, with a dying husband and three dead sons in the ground; Lorena has her dreams of San Francisco dashed by being kidnapped and gang-raped by Blue Duck's crew before being rescued by Gus, only to find herself at Clara's, alone in her grief mourning Gus (perhaps losing her mind in the process); Gus himself dies randomly as a result of an accidental run-in with Blackfeet who probably would have meant him no harm if they'd met otherwise. In fact, like Jake Gus chooses to die in a fit of vanity, preferring loss of life to life without legs, thus leaving both Clara and Lorena bereft of his presence and his love. Even Wanz burns himself alive in the saloon that just wasn't the same without Lorena there.

That's only to mention the deaths. Call's bastard son by a prostitute (herself dead) lives in his shadow for two decades, only to learn from others that Call is his father; yet Call cannot bring himself to tell the boy or give him his name, and abandons him in Montana: unclaimed, unnamed, unloved, alone. Call keeps his promise to his dead friend, eventuating with him—alone—back in Lonesome Dove, without meaning or purpose or drive. Why did he take all those cattle and all those men to Montana, and tolerate all those deaths in the process, anyway? Because Jake Spoon made mention of wide green pastures? So what? Or what of Dish, love-sick for Lorena, and July, love-sick for any woman in his orbit (Ellie, Clara, ad infinitum), both too naive and foolish and earnest ever to have their love requited. Even poor Bolivar regrets leaving the outfit and joining his wife south of the border, a house empty of his beloved daughters, home only to a woman who despises him.

Not one person in the whole book proves happy by the end; not one gets what he's looking for; not one finds lasting love or satisfaction. Even Pea Eye, the least unhappy and lonesome character in the story, precisely because he asks little of life except not getting murdered in his sleep, is bewildered and set adrift by Gus's death and Call's actions toward Newt. Never one for words, he is silenced one last time.

Lonesome Dove, in short, is a desperately sad tale. It is bleak, violent, unsparing, even merciless in the fates it doles out to its characters. And yet, for probably 600 or 700 pages, that is not the way the book reads. It reads like a romp, full of color and life and simple joys and little silly detours that make you cackle with glee. It's a book to make you smile, until you don't—because you're crying, or in shock.

Is that just the way McMurtry writes? Or is it a stylistic Trojan horse—slipping in a bleak revisionist Western tragedy in the trappings of a happy well-worn genre? I'm inclined to believe it's the latter, but I confess I don't know enough to form a judgment. I'll have to do some more reading of the book's reception and interpretation to tell.

5. The book is full of provocative themes. One of the biggest is the randomness of life. That Call or Gus lived through the battles of the '40s, '50s, and '60s is sheer luck: the bounce of a rock, a horse's ill-considered step, a bullet's trajectory infinitesimally altered—they're dead, and not the living heroes they find themselves to be as aging men in the '70s. That July Johnson gets mixed up in the Hat Creek's affairs, that Jake Spoon whispers a dream of Montana to Call, is owed to nothing so meaningful as a stray bullet in Fort Smith, Arkansas. All is arbitrary, the luck of the draw. Whether some men are lucky or we merely call men lucky who live in the absence of bad luck, it's chance all the way down either way.

6. If life is random, it's also without intrinsic purpose. What meaning one's life has is mostly a matter of the meaning one assigns to it or discovers in it. Call's nature is to work, and so work he does. When the drive to work leaves him, however, he is listless, lethargic, confused. Why, again, drive cattle north, risking danger to life and limb? Why, for that matter, hang Mexican horsethieves all the while crossing the Rio Grande to steal horses from Mexican rancheros? Why pursue and clear out and kill Indians? Gus asks these questions aloud. Call dismisses them as so much nonsense. But when the question presents itself to him once all is said and done, he has no answer, for there is no answer.

7. Are Gus and Call "good men"? We readers are disposed to think so. Because we grow to love them, our affection tells us they are admirable and virtuous. Are they, though? Call is an unreflective taskmaster, and though he is a gifted leader of men, he acts for no clear higher purpose, and is quite literally possessed by violence when provoked. Gus, for his part, is larger than life, funny, clear-headed, philosophical, lettered, skilled, and wholly undetermined by others' opinions or desires. Then again, he spends most of his time doing nothing; and when not doing nothing, he is gambling, eating voraciously, busting balls, or paying a woman for sex. He openly questions whether the work of a Texas Ranger is just, and does it anyway. Would we call such a person a "good man" in real life?

8. To be sure, the novel does not "need" Gus and Call to be "good men." I imagine lovers of the novel think they are, though, and would defend the claim with feeling. Such a claim is found in one of the blurbs in my copy of the book. But I have to think McMurtry, even apart from the aim of rendering believable and interesting characters with detail and affection, intends this, too, as a kind of Trojan horse. We want to believe Gus and Call are good men because they appear to fulfill the role. But our love for them and our wanting to be in their company blinds us to a true estimation of their character. And McMurtry wants us to see, on the one hand, the emptiness of our approbation of our ancestors; and, on the other, the vacuity of any such estimation at all.

9. What McMurtry so accurately captures in this novel is the sheer givenness and there-ness of life in all its passivity and activity. The characters in Lonesome Dove rarely do things with foresight or reflection. They do them because they are the sort of things one does in their shoes. You rope the bull or drive the cattle or steal the horses or hang the thief or chase the bandits or pay the prostitute or cross the river or give or obey orders because that's just the thing to be done, the thing all of us do, here and now, in these circumstances (and not others), as the persons we are (and not others). Biases and prejudices here are not rendered in world-historical or structural terms. They're inherited, rarely thought of, and only slightly less rarely acted upon. One simply lives, typically a short while, and dies. What action occurs in between is mostly stumbled into.

10. McMurtry, though his two main female characters (Lorena and Clara) are exquisitely drawn, excels in depicting masculinity. The men of the Hat Creek outfit act exactly as men do in such conditions. The moodiness and boredom and in-fighting, the ball-busting and petty quarrels and venting of pent-up frustration, the paralyzing fear and loneliness that grips them all to one degree or another: it is as true to life as any narrative description of men in close community together as any I have ever read.

11. Perhaps my only real criticism of the book is the almost complete absence of religious matters. By this I don't mean that the novel should be theological in outlook (the way, for example, that Blood Meridian drips theological significance off every page). Nor do I mean that a character should have stood in for the Good Christian, or some such thing. What I mean is that mid-19th century Texas was a land saturated in settler-colonial European-cultural Christianity. If you were a white person in the continental United States (prior to their being United States), you belonged to a civilization that claimed the Bible and Jesus and God and Christian faith as a birthright. Even if, sometimes especially if, you were untutored and unpracticed in such faith, you talked as if you were. The vernacular was marinated in it.

And oddly, McMurtry almost never adverts to such vernacular. The boys of Hat Creek don't wonder around the campfire where they go when they die. There's no fierce defender of the name of Jesus Christ against casual sacrilege. There's no Christian burial (except for a briefly mentioned one right at the end). There's no begging Jesus for mercy with a gunshot wound in the gut. There's basically nothing of the sort. There's not even God-salted or Scripture-ornamented speech. And that seems to me a shocking historical oversight. Everything else in the novel rings true. But not this. McMurtry could well have offered his tragic vision of the old West, with no heroes or only heroes compromised by violence and vanity, a vision untainted by transcendent virtue, and yet one pockmarked by a thousand imperfect encounters with the texts and names and stories and concepts of the Christian religion. I have to think he left it out by intention, and that that intention was to give us an unfamiliar, desacralized West, godless and faithless. But the wiser course by far (as, again, the example of Cormac McCarthy attests) would be to leave the religious in, as nothing but empty ornamentation and self-aggrandizing consecration of the otherwise amoral or evil.

Had McMurtry gone that way, I might call Lonesome Dove a flawless novel. Even as it stands, I'm inclined to think it may well still be perfect.

MCU Phases 4 & 5: dream or nightmare?

I have a mixed relationship to the Marvel movies that have so dominated the last decade of Hollywood. On the one hand, I readily enjoy them. I think, for the most part, that they are well made blockbusters, occasionally quite good, directed competently, written with care, and acted superbly. Their achievement as TV-like serialization across 23 films (and three "phases") is, as Matt Zoller Seitz has written, without precedent and accordingly impressive.

On the other hand, I'm neither a comic books "fan" nor an apologist for the MCU. I've read all of two graphic novels in my life, and have nothing invested in "geek culture." I furthermore share the general sentiment that the Marvel-fication of cinema as such is an unhealthy trend. It isn't good that there's a new superhero movie out every three weeks, and that Hollywood wants any and all blockbuster filmmaking to be (a) built on preexisting IP and (b) part of a larger "cinematic universe."

At the same time, I think it's too easy to use Feige and the MCU as a scapegoat. Marvel's (and Disney's) success did not and does not necessitate a systemic change in Hollywood, or the monotonous assembly line of genre fare we've seen in its wake. Moreover, while critics like Scorsese are certainly right to be exhausted by the last decade, two factors militate against an overreaction. First, great films continue to be made and recognized. Second, "cinema" includes more than the art house: indeed, cinema intrinsically includes the spectacle of sheer, broadly appealing fun. Scorsese and his cohort of directors know that more than anyone.

Having said all that, with Feige and Marvel taking a victory lap right now, it is a fascinating and revealing thing to look into Disney's plans for the MCU going into the next 3-4 years. For denizens of the art house, it is indeed a nightmare of sorts. For geeks, doubtless it is a dream. But like all dreams, it's going to come to an end. Indeed, in looking at the lineup below, it's hard to believe it's real.

So far as I have been able to put together, what follows is the forthcoming schedule of theatrical films and television shows (exclusively on Disney+) on the slate for 2020 through 2023 or so. Beginning with 2022 I'm taking educated guesses on timing. Movies are bolded and shows have a (+) after them. Read it and (alternately) weep or rejoice.

2020

May – Black Widow

Fall – The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (+)

Nov – The Eternals

2021

Feb – Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

Spring – Loki (+)

Spring – WandaVision (+)

May – Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

Summer – What if...? (+ animated)

July – Spider-Man 3

Fall – Hawkeye (+)

Nov – Thor 4: Love and Thunder

2022

Feb –Deadpool 3

Spring – Moon Knight (+)
May – Black Panther 2 [update: confirmed]

July – Ant-Man 3 

Fall – Ms. Marvel (+)
Oct – Blade [February seems a better bet, but since they specified October, that suggests "scary"]

2023

Feb – Captain Marvel 2

Spring – She-Hulk (+)
May – Guardians of the Galaxy 3

July – Fantastic Four reboot

Nov – X-Men reboot [perhaps FF or X-Men are introduced back-door via a summer or fall Avengers 5, a la Black Panther or Spider-Man in Civil War—that seems wisest]
 
–It's worth noting that not included here are even further sequels: Shang-Chi 2, Doctor Stranger 3, Spider-Man 4, Black Panther 3, The Eternals 2, Captain Marvel 3, and so on. It also assumes some sort of big team-up. [Updated question: Will there be another "Avengers" movie, properly speaking? Or will team-ups just happen organically within other characters' movies?] And there are definitely even more properties and characters to be introduced not mentioned here.

–It seems clear that, although 2020 will revert to 2 films in the year—a sort of deep breath after Endgame and before the onset of Phase 4—beginning the following year, it's going to be four MCU films per year going forward. And that, as they say, will test the market's limits.

Genre criticism

I'm in a book club with some buddies in town, and as it happens I'm the only one who liked the latest book, a work of fantasy. Two issues with the book have come to the surface, and I've been thinking about their status for fiction more generally.

First, I've realized that I don't believe in "pace." Or rather, a book's having a slow or fast pace is at best a neutral statement that requires content to be filled in: was the slow pace done well, or was the fast pace rushed? More often, I think pacing is a cipher for other matters: whether the reader finds the characters, interactions, descriptions, and events engaging—or not. In that sense a reader might well say, "I found the pacing slow," to which the author could reply, "Yes, exactly, that's the idea," at which point the reader then must supply further reasons as to why the slow pacing was a problem. There may be good reasons to make such an assertion, but they involve reference to other features of the narrative, not the pace as such.

Second, all fiction, all storytelling, is responsive to other instances of the same art, indeed every other art form, and thus every novel is derivative in one way or another. So that tropes—particularly when speaking of genre fiction, given the more identifiable and delimited features of that sub-form—are always everywhere present; there is no storytelling, there has never been a novel, without tropes. Nor is a novel or story's success directly proportional to the minimization of tropes: the very worst fiction in the world might be the most original. What we mean by originality, at least when using it as a criterion in the right way, is that the author's handling of the story's tropes was deft, subtle, unexpected, masterful, funny, gripping, complex, pleasing, or otherwise well done. In which case, as with pacing, reference to tropes in critique of a novel is the beginning rather than the end of the conversation, since the proper response to such a reference is, "Indeed—go on..." At which point further reasons enter in to clarify the quality of the use of tropes, granted their inevitability.

Genre lists: the best science fiction authors and series

All right. I've written about my crime fiction list and my fantasy list; here, rounding out the genres (at least those in which I'm interested), is my chronological list of the authors and series in science fiction that I have read or aim to read. Far from exhaustive, and not aiming to be "completist." I want to read the best. What should I add to it? [NB: The list has now been expanded with suggestions.]

1. H. G. Wells, Time Machine + Invisible Man + War of the Worlds (1895–98)
2. Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars (1917)
3. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
4. C. S. Lewis, Space Trilogy (1938–45)
5. George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
6. Ray Bradbury, Martian Chronicles (1950) + Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
7. Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy (1951–53)
8. Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (1953) + 2001 (1968)
9. Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (1954)
10. Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination (1957)
11. Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
12. Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961)
13. Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) + The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966)
14. Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962)
15. Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)
16. J. G. Ballard, The Crystal World (1966)
17. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) + The Dispossessed (1974)
18. Joe Haldeman, The Forever War (1974)
19. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in God's Eye (1974)
20. Alice Sheldon (as James Tiptree Jr.), The Girl Who Was Plugged In (1974)
21. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
22. Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun (1980–83)
23. William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
24. Connie Willis, Fire Watch (1984) + Doomsday Book (1992)
25. Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game (1985) + Speaker for the Dead (1986) + Ender’s Shadow (1999)
26. Michael Crichton, Sphere (1987) + Jurassic Park (1990) + Timeline (1999)
27. Iain M. Banks, The Culture Series (1987–2012)
28. Dan Simmons, Hyperion (1989) 
29. Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992) + Anantham (2008)
30. Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993) + Parable of the Talents (1998)
31. Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars Trilogy (1993–96)
32. Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (1996) + Children of God (1998)
33. Ted Chiang, Story of Your Life (1998/2002)
34. Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam Trilogy (2003–13)
35. Theodore Judson, Fitzpatrick's War (2004)
36. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)
37. John Scalzi, Old Man's War Series (2005–2015) 
38. Liu Cixin, Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy (2008–10) 
39. Max Brooks, World War Z (2006)
40. Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 (2010)
41. Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers (2011)
42. China Miéville, Embassytown (2011)
43. Ann Leckie, Imperial Radch Trilogy (2013–15)
44. Pierce Brown, Red Rising (2014–)
45. Jeff Vandermeer, The Southern Reach Trilogy (2014)
46. Adam Roberts, The Thing Itself (2015) 

Genre lists: the best fantasy series

Last year I wrote about how I worked my way back into regular fiction reading through genre, specifically the genre of crime novels. I also keep separate genre lists for fantasy and science fiction. Each scratches a particular itch, and I slowly make my way through each one, as the mood strikes me. But I'm a novice, using either my own eclectic interests or the lists of others as guides. I thought I'd open myself up to others to build out my current fantasy list.

NB: I'm not looking to be a completist for completion's sake. I don't want to read just-fine or so-so series in order to comprehend the genre. I want to read the very best series, for nothing but pleasure. Having said that, I do enjoy (as my chronological listing below shows) understanding the relationship between different fantasy novelists and series, tracking the influence going forward and the reactions, revisions, and subversions looking backward. I find that endlessly fascinating.

So: Having said that, if you were to add 3-5 must-read books or series to this list, what would you recommend? [NB: The list has now been updated with suggestions.]

1. E. R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (1922)
2. Robert E. Howard, Conan the Barbarian (1932–36)
3. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937) + The Lord of the Rings (1954)
4. T. H. White, The Once and Future King (1938–58) + The Book of Merlyn (1977)
5. C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56)
6. Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960)
7. Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
8. Lloyd Alexander, The Chronicles of Prydain (1964–68)
9. Ursula K. Le Guin, Earthsea Cycle (1968–2001)
10. Richard Adams, Watership Down (1972)
11. Stephen King, The Stand (1978) + The Dark Tower (1982–2004)
12. Mark Helprin, A Winter’s Tale (1983)
13. Terry Pratchett, Discworld (1983–2015)
14. Guy Gavriel Kay, The Fionavar Tapestry (1984–86)
15. Tad Williams, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (1988–1993)
16. Robert Jordan, The Wheel of Time (1990–2013) 
17. Robin Hobb, The Farseer Trilogy (1995–97)
18. Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials (1995–2000)
19. George R. R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire (1996–)
20. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter (1997–2007)
21. Jim Butcher, The Dresden Files (2000–)
22. Neil Gaiman, American Gods (2001)
23. Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2004)
24. Gene Wolfe, The Wizard Knight (2004)
25. Scott Lynch, Gentlemen Bastard Sequence (2006–) 
26. Joe Abercrombie, The First Law (2006–)
27. Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn (2006–)
28. China Miéville, Un Lun Dun (2007) + The City & The City (2009)
29. Patrick Rothfuss, The Kingkiller Chronicle (2007–)
30. Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy (2009–2014)
31. Justin Cronin, The Passage Trilogy (2010–16) 
32. N. K. Jemisin, Broken Earth Trilogy (2015–17)