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The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
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JOKES are against the rules.
A tour of nineties Fantasyland, with stops along the way in California, Minnesota, Shannara, Valdemar, Derkholm, Dalemark, and the 'Maggots' entry in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997).
Transcript available here, and our next (and last) bonus episode for the season will be our overview/Q&A, which we'll be recording in early July.!
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Transcript
Introduction to the Bonus Episode
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to our second bonus episode for the third season of Eight Days of Diana Wynne-Jones. I'm Rebecca Framo.
00:00:20
Speaker
second bonus episode for the third season of eight days of diana winjones i'm rebecca framo And I'm Emily Tesh, and today we are talking about The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.
First Impressions of 'The Tough Guide to Fantasyland'
00:00:32
Speaker
Which I had never actually read before. You've read several times over the course of this very podcast. Yeah, um but I reread it very recently ahead of Dark Lord of Durkholm, which was funny because the plot of Dark Lord of Durkholm is in The Tough Guide. You can see her having the idea in real time.
00:00:49
Speaker
This book is not a novel. No. This book is straight up a parody. Well, the specific there are two specific things I think this book is a parody of, and one of them you just figured out literally five seconds before we jumped on the call. Which is embarrassing.
00:01:07
Speaker
This is, of course, a parody of The Rough Guides. company producing travel guides around the world founded 1982 selling a million books a year by 1995 still very popular and successful uh you can still find them in UK bookshops all the time I don't know if that's so much a thing over the water I don't think as much of the water listen to me what does that even mean on your side of the Atlantic why am I talking like a hobbit okay go on It's very easy after reading this book to start talking like a hobbit, I think. It is. Although hobbits are the only ones allowed to make jokes. Yes. Hobbits and occasionally members of the Thieves Guild, which I think maybe is a joke about Terry Pratchett. I think there might be...
Inspiration Behind 'The Tough Guide to Fantasyland'
00:01:51
Speaker
I think it's a joke about David Eddings. Yeah, we're going to be talking a lot, I think, about who's over the water and about Brits and Americans over the course of this recording. So isn't it lucky you've got one of each of us?
00:02:05
Speaker
But the other thing that this book is a parody of is I'm actually just going to read her description of how this book came to be, which is at the back of my my revised copy, which says, late in 1994, I was recovering from surgery, a situation I found myself in rather often during that decade.
00:02:22
Speaker
This time, I was more than usually bored and impatient. Knowing this, John Clute suggested that I might help Chris Bell work through the projected entries for the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, which he was then compiling with John Grant.
00:02:33
Speaker
It was the perfect occupation. i lay in bed. Chris arrived every morning with an enormous sheath of printouts, for there were many more proposed entries than actually appeared in the finished encyclopedia, and we both got to work. Our job was to decide whether each entry was necessary, to suggest new ones, to discuss whether some of the entries made sense, many didn't, and to provide examples in support of what each entry said.
00:02:54
Speaker
Well, we had after a week or so reached the letter N and the entry for nunnery when I realized we had for most of the time been speaking in chorus. We knew most of the books concerned so well. Then we said in unison, nunneries are forsaking.
00:03:06
Speaker
There is usually one survivor. And we both burst out laughing. I said, you know, most of these books are so much the same that I could write the guidebook for the country they happen in. Chris said, yes, but we're on O now. Do we they really need this entry called Obsessed
Critique of Fantasy Tropes
00:03:20
Speaker
Seeker? I forget what I answered. I was too busy realizing that I could and should write the guidebook to Fantasyland.
00:03:26
Speaker
I started the Tough Guide a few days later and became so immersed in it that I am, to this day, a little vague about the later parts of the encyclopedia and almost forgot to do my own entry for it on magic.
00:03:37
Speaker
John Grant, for a very patient man, became almost impatient with me, but I think he forgave me when he was asked to be copy editor of the first edition of the Tough Guide to Fantasyland. So this book comes 100% out of the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, which Diana Wyn Jones wrote one single entry for, the entry on magic, that contains what I think is probably the bibliography for Tough Guide to Fantasyland. And it's quite a long list. We did, using Becker's powerful librarian skills, find um a copy of the encyclopedia and read the entry on magic. And I read some other entries as well. One thing that really jumped out at me is...
00:04:20
Speaker
Jones is so well read. Jones has this really, really, really thorough understanding of both the state of the genre contemporary and also its history. Jones can go via Chaucer and Hope Mealy up to, I think, the most recent book that she's read probably is mercedes lackey storm warning 1994 yep so she's got this really really wide sweep of understanding of what magic in fantasy is uh but also you can see her getting annoyed oh you can see her getting annoyed yeah in a single paragraph she'll go from nesbitt
00:05:00
Speaker
to a book from 1967, to Xanth, and be annoyed at all of it. And in a single paragraph, she'll go from ah George Jeffrey Chaucer to The Princess and Curdie to Cloud Castles, 1993, and Catherine Karen Terry Pratchett. Praise all of it in kind of the same breath. And in a single paragraph, she'll go from...
00:05:19
Speaker
the Belgarian, which I think it's clear that she didn't like very much, to her own ah fire and hemlock and talk about them in the same way as and describe them as doing the same thing. I think she sees the sweep of patterns and I don't think when all the things that she's making fun of in Tough Guide, she's not not making fun of herself. There are definitely points in Tough Guide where she's talking about things that she a hundred percent does.
Parody and Humor in Diana's Works
00:05:43
Speaker
Yeah, and one of the things that came out of our reading this time is we we both said, well, we know Dark Lord of Darkholm is a tough guide book, but Crown of Dalemark is also very much a tough guide book. Yeah, I think it's really interesting reading Crown of Dalemark in light of what she's thinking about in the latter half of this decade, because Crown of Dalemark is, I think, in many ways, her most traditional quest fantasy, and a lot of what she's the things that she points out as sort of being parts of the inevitable touristy quest fantasy. Someone from our world goes to another world, finds a hidden hair, hidden hair hidden air has to collect a series of magical MacGuffins, has to visit every place on the map. Like that is what Maewyn is doing throughout that book. I think we talked maybe all the way back in season one or early season two about the way Jones sometimes seems to write the same book twice.
00:06:36
Speaker
wants as tragedy, wants as farce. And I do feel that the tragedy farce divide might apply to Crown of Delmark versus Dark Lord of Dirkholm and might explain some of what we were confused by, the determined lightheartedness of Dirkholm, even when it doesn't make sense.
00:06:52
Speaker
Yeah, because Delmar, I mean, looking back at the, again, looking at the jokes that she makes in Tough Guide allows you to see some things in Crown that are obviously jokes. You pointed, we pointed out the bicycle at the time. I think my favorite new one that I i turned up while reading Tough Guide is, makes quite a point of how ah all of, all the hidden heirs are always in the care of like ah good-hearted large blacksmiths. And Mitt's got two of those. Mitt's got two large blacksmith foster dads, which is how you must know to start with that he's a hidden heir.
00:07:26
Speaker
But underneath it, you know, the Dale Mark, I think, you know, i think I said maybe in our very first episode, the first time I read the Dale Mark books when I was a kid, I didn't like them as much because they weren't as funny. Dale Mark has this very consistently kind of numinous, wistful tone that stands out, I think, in contrast to a lot of her other children's books. it certainly stands out in contrast to Durkholm. And while the things that happen in Durkholm are arguably worse than the things that happen in Crown, Crown is taking them emotionally seriously at every point.
00:07:57
Speaker
Yes. I think we talked a bit about this in advance as well. For Jones, the jokes are often mission critical. They are not the um what what is it the oil that makes the bicycle go, the deep secret analogy. They are core and they are structural. You cannot have the book without the jokes. Yeah.
00:08:19
Speaker
Except Crown, which is doing something different. Yeah, except the whole Dalemark trilogy. Totally. Quartet. That many books. I do think another thing we talked in our last episode about some of the strangeness of the guide to Dalemark in Crown.
00:08:35
Speaker
And the guide to Dalemark is written 1995. Tough Guide So obviously she's thinking about these things at the same time. The guide to Dalemark, I think it has to be informed somewhat by the Encyclopedia of Fantasy Experience and the guide to da the Tough Guide Experience. And one of the things that's in the Tough Guide is this entry on Legends.
00:08:57
Speaker
Legends are an important source of information of true information. They always turn out to be far more important than history. Listen and attend carefully if anyone recounts you a legend, no matter how improbable the story. It will always turn out to be the exact truth, and only by following it accurately can you hope to succeed on your quest. The management will never allow anyone to tell you a legend, unless it is going to be important for you to know. So then we have the guide to Dalemark, which is full of
'The Tough Guide' and British Comic Fantasy Satire
00:09:26
Speaker
legends of really ambiguous truthfulness and that are completely unimportant for you to know. Dalemark as a whole is full of legends that, broadly speaking, are not that important for you to know.
00:09:38
Speaker
They're there to give you a sense of sort of the richness and ambiguity of the world, and they are not there to give you any clear answers about what is going on with the Undying and what's happened to any of the people that we knew in the far distant past. You have to kind of bring that yourself. And it feels like such a deliberate attempt to say, all right, I'm doing the quest fantasy, but I'm not doing this.
00:10:04
Speaker
I'm doing something that feels real and that that that has... i'm I'm making a world. I'm not doing this sort of hollow thing that I'm making fun of in the tough guide. I think hollow is a key word for what's driving the tough guide. What what it Tough Guide is satire, right? And I think sits in a tradition of British comic fantasy satire. There were several points where we both like, is she making fun of Terry Pratchett? Or is this just convergent joke evolution where they are making the same joke because they have similar the senses of humor? The Assassin's Guild entry struck caught my eye and also the entry on Invisible Colleges of Magic. i was like, are we mocking Discworld?
00:10:45
Speaker
Or oh is is there a shared source here that were that we're both mocking? Right. I was like, I've never met an invisible college except the Unseen University. But surely there is. the Unseen University is clearly a joke. Right.
00:10:59
Speaker
On what? I'm feeling my lack of wider reading now. Clearly I'm missing some reference. There's a part of me, and I'm not going to do this because it would be the stupidest thing to do and I don't have time, but there is a part of me that wants to go through her whole list of things in the magic entry and read all of them. And I'm not going to, especially because many of them are very bad. We have been asked, could we build a Diana Wynne Jones reading list off this podcast? And the answer is yes. But there would be an awful lot on it, and not all of it would be good. And half the entries would come from Fire and Hemlock, and the other half would come from here.
00:11:35
Speaker
Terry Pratchett did blurb this book, by the way. He calls it an indispensable guide for anyone stuck in the realms of fantasy without a magic sword to call their own. My copy also has on the back, would have been a lot more use on the quest than three elven hares. Signed, Gimli, son of Gloyne.
00:11:52
Speaker
That's really cute. ah that The Tolkien-ness of it all does sort of... You can't escape from the Tolkien-ness of it all, including in the front matter, which provides a list of other fake guides that obviously don't exist. I haven't got that bit. You don't have the other tough guides?
00:12:10
Speaker
No. All right. that's part of the revised version you've got. Yeah, I've got the revised version, which includes the tough guide to Saturn, rings excluded, The Tough Guide to Boating on Mars, The Tough Guide to Flat Worlds, The Tough Guide to Transport in the Multiverse, mostly by telephone box, The Tough Guide to Time Warps, Outlast Century, The Tough Guide to Broomstick Flying with Free Gift of Pointy Hat, Kobe's Tough Guide to Space Opera, and the one that I was actually about to reference, Gandalf's Tough Guide, includes instructions on how to lead tourists into dark places and then leave them stranded.
Cultural Influences in Fantasy Writing
00:12:43
Speaker
Plus the Tough Guide to the End of the World coming soon, and the Tough Guide to Black Holes Unaccountably Missing. Yes. this didn There is no joke left on the table here. This is book is nonstop jokes.
00:12:55
Speaker
Some of them are laugh out loud funny. a lot of them are more cynical chuckle funny. yes One of the things that ah really jumped out at me is the Pratchett comparison makes itself. The other famous satirist in this tradition is Douglas Adams.
00:13:10
Speaker
And it's a British comic fantasy writing tradition that was hugely influential on a style I would call Anglophone millennial on the internet.
00:13:21
Speaker
all of Tumblr writes like this and a good chunk of Reddit writes like this. It's not funny unless you're good at it, which most people are not. But the the cynical tone, the constant all illusion, the mad, slightly forced wordplay.
00:13:36
Speaker
Yes. There's the the entry on heraldry where she remarks that heraldry is rampant, passant, and even cushant. And oh, Diana. was like, I'm pretty sure I also saw Pratchett make that exact joke yeah somewhere.
00:13:51
Speaker
And I was trying to think, we were having this conversation about British and American fantasy because so much of this book is sort of, you know, at this time, Diana Jones also written essays about this. She's noticing this sort of strain of what she calls California fantasy, which is yeah the David Eddings, the Robert Jordan, the Terry Brooks, the sort of these big sweeping epics out from American writers in the style of Tolkien.
00:14:19
Speaker
but without kind of any of the depth of understanding or connection or originality that made Tolkien, Tolkien. And I was trying to think if we in the American tradition had an equivalent comic fantasy writer like Pratchett or Adams, who's doing something over, you know, in that vein.
00:14:39
Speaker
And unfortunately, i think the biggest one at this point in the 1990s is Piers Anthony, which doesn't speak very well of us. Well, it's interesting. I think, I often find myself automatically, when dealing with the over-the-water problem, reaching for, but they get stuff wrong, which I think is a very actually shallow and thoughtless criticism. ah Example, by unnamed author, a dark academia book set in Cambridge, because that's kind of like Oxford, and loads of places done Oxford, right, talks about walking the the rolling hills of Cambridge, which... I went to university there. It is famously one of the flattest places in the country. There is one hill. um But it's this kind of thing that that that makes your English reader go, yanks.
00:15:31
Speaker
Sorry, universally, all of you, we're not making distinctions. No, I understand. I am a yank, so... Yeah. Oh, yes, you are, aren't you? There is a distinction, but I don't know it very well. yeah topic but But, but, but, but, this is, I think, actually not an interesting reaction, not a meaningful, critical engagement with this tendency, which is a lot of American fantasy writers find English history and also Irish, Scottish, Welsh history good to think with.
00:16:03
Speaker
not necessarily accurate history. That's not the point. is It's an image. It's an idea. it's Maybe the word I want is mirage. There is a shape of history-esque fantasy which seems to appeal to people from you yanks yeah well i mean i think and i was thinking about this too this guide is written as if to a tourist and i think that diana wynne jones in in describing tourist is sort of implying both the actual portal fantasy of it all you know someone comes from our world and goes to another world And the sort of wide-eyed, naive protagonist who ostensibly is part of the quest fantasy world all along, but has to sort of travel around and learn about it and discover their place in it. This too is the kind of adventure that she's describing. But to the American writer...
00:17:02
Speaker
All of this sort of British tradition of fantasy is fantasy land, right? This this long ago and far away, this this place that much of our culture came from, but is no longer. We are tourists there. And I don't think that's wrong to say necessarily, but I do think that's a lot of sort of what drives this particular framing, because I think it's not really until, with with some exceptions for sure, but I think it's in the ninety s and 2000s that this sort of backlash against unconsidered Euro fantasy from American writers, this sort of drive to maybe set fantasy land in known places, starts to hit him.
00:17:45
Speaker
but I mean, I remember for some reason recently I was rereading The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. And I got, I think, into the second book and was really shaken by the weirdness of what was clearly Euro fantasy in like structure. And like we're going to this village and that village and whatever in what was so very clearly an American landscape.
00:18:07
Speaker
yeah Like where Jordan writes landscape at all, and often he does not. He writes ah what is pretty visibly to me like the, you know, the famous artist's renditions of national parks. Yeah. um And it's empty.
00:18:22
Speaker
And this is really striking in ah in a Euro fantasy, of course, because one thing Europe is really not is empty. Unless you're doing Tolkien, who's post-apocalyptic, but but that that's it.
Thematic Depth and Critique in 'Crown of Dalemark'
00:18:33
Speaker
Whereas the the emptiness of this beautiful American landscape was like, oh, we're doing the that we're doing the West. i think Well, and that's very specifically the thing that a lot of these...
00:18:45
Speaker
ah big epic fantasy writers are doing or alluding to, right? Like Terry Brooks does this too. It it is fascinating to read the Shannara books, which I did read when I was younger, which are very clearly doing Tolkien, you know, small villages, small people wandering around kind of across this imagined landscape that is linked directly, eventually he does this to his post-apocalyptic American, I think they're set in New Orleans or wherever, books about the end of the world. And at some point he makes the connection that his sort of very Tolkien-ish Euro fantasy far future is the post-apocalyptic far future of this place where he's writing American near-future fantasy.
00:19:27
Speaker
And those things are connected somehow. Those things are the same, even though it doesn't make a ton of sense that they would be the same. Going back to The Tough Guy, one entry that jumped out at me, a couple actually, early on, Birthright, which...
00:19:40
Speaker
This is what at least one of the party on the tour will be looking for, and it may indeed turn out to be the main quest object. It is a little on the lines of people from North America and Australia coming to Europe to find out about their families, but more complicated. And then it turns out there's either magical birthright, or it might be that you're secretly royalty and you need to find out about that.
00:20:00
Speaker
Yes. And the other one that jumped out at me on this sort of California fantasy note is the entry for Chilblains. Let me grab it. I have, in fact, I'm just flicking through the book. Becca always take takes sensible notes and I just flick through the book like a mad person. Well, it's easier to do with this one than with many of the others because it is alphabetical.
00:20:18
Speaker
Yes. Chilblains are unheard of, however inclement the weather. This is probably because the management lives mostly in California. Yep. And I think the other one in this vein that it's important to mention is her specific call-out. I think the only real sub-genre of fantasy that she calls out at this point as really distinct from the broader sort of big fat fantasy trope is pan-Celtic fantasy specifically.
00:20:44
Speaker
And I looked at that. And I said, I bet that is ah Patricia, oh, what's her name? Keneally Morrison's Keltyad series, which I've not read, but have, you know, used to see in stores all the time when I was a kid and have actually recently had a conversation about it. I've never heard of it.
00:21:01
Speaker
It's like fantasy, science fiction. All of the covers always featured like people in kilts and with tartans and red hair. i think that I think this is not the only thing in this vein, but I think it's clearly it's listed in her magic entry. it's I think it's, there are a couple instances throughout the tough guide where she's presenting this as something that always happens. But I'm like, there is one thing that you're thinking about. And I think in this instance, this is the thing that you're thinking about.
00:21:26
Speaker
Yes, it is very easy to get caught up going, oh, she must be talking about X or y But in fact, she is talking about a lot of books. Oh, yes. at the time. But occasionally you're like, there was another one where you were like, this is just Mercedes Lackey.
00:21:41
Speaker
Yes, I read the the entry on Mage Storms and I was like, I don't think this happened all that much, Diana. I think you were just reading Mercedes Lackey's Mage Storms. And then I got to the magic entry and indeed the one Mercedes Lackey book she mentions is ah the Mage Storms trilogy. And I'm like, I knew it.
00:21:58
Speaker
I knew that's what you were thinking of. I'm pretty sure the gay mage entry is also a Mercedes Lackey nod. Yeah, yeah, I think that is specifically a cut out of Vanille. Now I did wonder if she's got the the one about elves going to the West and ending up in California and Minnesota, which I thought originally might have been also a Mercedes Lackey race car elves, but I think it's actually Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, because that's very specifically Minnesota. And there's no other reason that i can think of that to be Minnesota.
00:22:30
Speaker
Anyway, this is some of the fun of the tough guide is trying to spot spot the original, but I think doing that too much can lead us into the weeds without saying anything interesting about the tough guide as a piece of work. But I do think that like you know thinking about the Americanness of... the The way that she has focused much of her critique on the Americanness of the fantasy scene is relevant.
00:23:00
Speaker
to some of the places that she places her attention. And I also think thinking about Dale Marks, so one of the other things that I'm pretty sure that she's talking about at a specific point, when she's talking about bards, she calls out, you know, the the change in bards, actually, which I think is...
00:23:18
Speaker
Pretty interesting. Let me see if I can find the entry. Yeah. ah So she says, bards are best thought of as musical magic uers on former tours they tended to be diffident people forced to roam the continent in ragged finery scraping a poor living by playing and singing in inns and fairgrounds they were not always honest when their music proved to have enormous power they were naively astonished and usually blamed their harps This, again, i think is pretty specifically Flutter Flam from the ah Lloyd Alexander's Black Cauldron books. This is, again, an American author writing Welsh fantasy that predates Delmark. And when we were talking about Delmark, I remember reading it and being like, I think there's some Lloyd Alexander in here, or at least I think that there's there's something to be said in putting these two series against each other and having them converse with each other. And the ways in which Diana Wynne-Jones uses her harper, her harpers, ah her musicians, are her traveling singers is really not that dissimilar from what she's talking about here.
00:24:15
Speaker
Yes.
Diana Wynne-Jones in the Fantasy Community
00:24:16
Speaker
Then she says, and I think this is one of the few places that she talks about shifting trends in fantasy. Nowadays, management is alerted to the powers of bards and has taken to collecting bardic youngsters into halls or troops under a master for stringent professional training. um This, ah as you guys know, I've been listening to the Pern podcast. The Pern podcast thinks that this is Anne McCaffrey's fault, that Anne McCaffrey's Harper Hall is sort of the er trope here. i wouldn't be surprised. I do think McCaffrey's...
00:24:46
Speaker
science fantasy ever so slightly disguised is a form of of euro fantasy she's she's very specifically doing ireland yes uh and again this is i think she's so influential yeah it's it's incredibly unbelievably influential like you get to the you dig deep enough in any sort of bit of modern fantasy or science fiction you'll find anne mccaffrey somewhere in there But again, this is both, I think, sort of what Dinamo Jones is thinking about in terms of the prevalence of pan-Celtic fantasy, why this is the thing that she singles out as a specific flavor of Tor. But also, again, something that she herself is doing. Crown of Dalemark features the transition of Morrill from ragged singer wandering around, who's usually astonished and blaming his instrument when he does great sources of magic, and gathering the singers together into halls or troops under a master for stringent professional training. Morrill does this in the course of that book. You're right. She does this. She does exactly this.
00:25:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think all through the 90s we've seen Diana Wynne-Jones aware of herself as a fantasy writer in a community, in a tradition, and much more in a community than before. i think her early work, the 1970s, the early 1980s, she's more interested in in positioning herself against a tradition yes um of talking to the heroic ideal, say. But
Satirical Critiques in Fantasy Worlds
00:26:09
Speaker
1990s Jones feels like she is talking to The crowd, everyone around her, culminating in deep secret where she is as she is putting all her friends in the book. Yes. And, you know, I think it's the transition from from Crown of Dalemark, which is here is me coming back to my fantasy series from the nineteen seventy s
00:26:32
Speaker
and saying, all right, this is what we're doing now. This is the quest fantasy we're doing. Here's my entry into it, and I'm doing it my way. She does do it seriously. She takes it seriously. I think this is part of what works about the satire of Tough Guide, is Diana does, in fact, like fantasy.
00:26:49
Speaker
Yes. she she She does is not that she thinks all this is rubbish and can't be any use to anyone. There is a lot in here that she is fond of, that she enjoys. She she delights in sending a person from the modern world back in time to go around collecting orbs and scepters. Yeah.
00:27:06
Speaker
And there's even like little things that like one of the first entries that made me sit up and think, yeah, you're putting this in here because you like it ah is alligators. And she talks about the mummified alligator hanging from the rafters of a wizard's workroom. i'm like, oh, you just did that. And Christopher Chant, you did that like three years ago because because you think it's fun.
00:27:25
Speaker
So there's a lot in here that's like just because you think it's fun. And then there's a lot in here that is really pointing out sort of the emptiness at the center, the way that when it's used shallowly and ah without, you know, thinking about the broader context around it, that it feels just completely empty. Right, I think coming back to the idea of hollowness, yeah um Diana Wynne-Jones likes fantasy and therefore she is angry when you do it badly. And I think what really frustrates her and what comes through in the tough guide is how much standard fantasy
00:28:01
Speaker
fantasy world writing is thoughtless, falls apart when you look at it for more than a second. Like, the bales. the ba out The bales. bales. Because I think actually, although it's quite an early entry and maybe not the most obvious one, it kind of sort stands for the whole...
00:28:21
Speaker
Bale. Noun. Merchandise of any description, although the management seldom describes it, is always in bales. Presumably waterproof, since you will mostly see bales on a wharf.
00:28:34
Speaker
Crates are almost never used. This is peculiar, as timber seems readily available more so than waterproof fabrics, see buildings and cloaks. We put this down to custom or rules.
00:28:48
Speaker
Bales on wharfs are always being unloaded by very noisy dock workers of all sexes. Okay, here's what she's annoyed about. Why are things in bales and not in crates, if you've already got wood?
00:29:01
Speaker
What's in the bales? Who is trading it? Who's unloading it and what for? and Why? And it's clear that what's frustrating here is that you've got a kind of a default dockside scene where nothing really means anything. There isn't an economy underpinning this. There isn't a logic. There isn't a system.
00:29:22
Speaker
ah There's several references through the tough guide to trade, as in, you know, the the merchant feudalists are constantly trading, but who knows with whom because nobody else seems to have any money. Right. I think the entry that does this most directly, just sums this up sort of at the end, is work.
00:29:38
Speaker
Which says, work is seldom done in fantasy land. When it is inevitable, it is always known as toil. But few dwellers, with notable exceptions of innkeepers, healers, and the occasional ferryman, actually have anything like a job or gainful employment. They just sort of live. And it is a rule that no member of a tour party has a job of any kind. They are all in various ways out of work. No one is doing anything.
00:30:01
Speaker
Nobody is making any of the things that go into bales. You know, she points out that there's embroidery all over the place, but who is doing it? Only occasionally noblewomen who cannot be doing it at the scale that embroidery is turning up on everybody's clothing. Well, the entry on the economy.
00:30:17
Speaker
most areas seem self-sufficient in a hand-to-mouth depressed way and very poor since weather and magical pollution regularly cause a shortage of food crops it is hard to know where trade comes from pirates on the open sea in the inland sea make make sure few ships arrive at their destination on land bandits intercept mostst caravans neither pirates nor bandits seem to recirculate the wealth they acquire yet there is considerable wealth in places for the thieves guild is never out of business cities where the guild operates all seem to thrive. Where does this wealth comes from?
00:30:49
Speaker
One has, yeah, the climax of this entry is the plot of Durkheim. One has to suppose that regular paying tours from other worlds secretly support the whole tottering edifice. Yeah, this is it. this is it there's There's no economy. there There's there's,
00:31:02
Speaker
There's no productive labor. i think actually one of the things Fantasyland is asking is, has any anybody read Marx? yeah and Which I do think is really funny. In the middle of ah Diana Wynne-Jones' What If There Was a rich Glorious Return of the King decade? Because she's quite sharp about, you know, um hang on, let me find the entry on King's.
00:31:27
Speaker
Kings? Kings come in four kinds. Right, there it is ah Puppet kings, these are evil. Bad kings, they're hard to detect because they often have the air of quite pleasant people and indeed have some good traits. The main way of discovering how they are bad is to see how polite they are. Truly evil kings are very polite.
00:31:45
Speaker
Then there are good kings who are rough diamonds and the salt of the earth and long lost kings. These are kings who have been hidden or mislaid soon after birth. I am skipping large chunks of this very long entry we can't just read you the tough guide. But the other entry I was looking for, I remember it's not kings, it's aristocratic feudalists, which has the difference between aristocratic feudalists under bad kings and good kings. And points out that in both it has exactly the same setup.
00:32:12
Speaker
And under the good king, the lords are therefore honest, polite, and kind to their underlings, and the underlings are prosperous and jolly and do not mind pulling therefore lots to the gentry, but otherwise identical.
00:32:23
Speaker
She also has indifferent, has the same setup, but the king is a non-entity and the peasants will be poor because of crop failure. So... It's like she she knows that this whole aristocratic feudalist setup is very silly and that people are not going to be happy about it.
00:32:40
Speaker
And then she spends the entire rest of the decade being like, but what if the king was really good? Okay, I'm thinking about that. The deep secret, it's um not so much the return of the king as the return of the god.
00:32:54
Speaker
Yes. Korathos is is is a divine figure an archon so there's kind of like the entry of the numinous into the world involved maybe yes with both mitz ascension to the throne and um mordian and co becoming reigners it's more of this situation is a disaster and you have to fix it which i guess is the the return of the good king but it's a modernization project not a return to the good old days project Yes. and But by God, she does enjoy the return of the king, doesn't she?
00:33:27
Speaker
And I do think it's quite funny that she points out various kinds of stereotypical nobles and, you know, what what happens when you meet a baron, what happens when you meet a duke. It doesn't tell us what happens when you meet an earl. You've got to read Crown of Delmark to find that out.
00:33:42
Speaker
But the other thing I think that she's really angry about, and that is really interesting to think about in context of Delmark, is the absence of art The unimportance of art or of music or of any sort of creativity, except as a tool to move the plot along.
Ecological and Creative Realism in Fantasy
00:33:59
Speaker
Music is important, but only because it does magic. Yes. For its own sake. Yes. In the music entry. Yes. Music is very important. Always good and probably magic, especially if played on a harp.
00:34:14
Speaker
The tune will never matter, only the words. And then in the entry on insigns, she says, insigns are always crudely painted.
00:34:25
Speaker
Art, except the sort of obscenely decadent art you may encounter on a temple's wall and turn away from with an embarrassed wince, does not seem to be studied by the inhabitants of Fantasyland, possibly because they are usually so busy fighting and coping with magically induced cataclysms.
00:34:38
Speaker
No one's doing art. No one's doing crafts. No one is making stuff because they are all either grimly surviving or going off on magical quests and using if they the stuff is always magic. That's the import of the stuff.
00:34:53
Speaker
It's magic jewelry. It's magic music. Yeah, I think there's, some I guess it's a kind and an implied arrogance or selfishness on the part of name withheld management ah in which the only creative work in fantasy land is that done by the author showing you around. Yeah, yeah.
00:35:14
Speaker
It's, I mean, even, i think these days Diana might have something to say about the prevalence of fantasy about writers.
00:35:25
Speaker
and the importance of word magic and people who are doing word magic and the power of writing. She does this herself. I find it so embarrassing though. The thing is you can do anything if you're good, right? that Diana does do this herself and she is good, so she gets away with it. But there is actually a, what's this? want to think of it as librarian-mate fantasy. You're like, this is a book about how books are important. Yes. I'm going to send it to people who like books. Yep, we've got a lot of those. She doesn't talk about those at all in the Tough Guide, and I don't know how much we had them in the night Well, we did definitely have them in the 90s. They were there in the 90s. I was reading them. hu
00:36:01
Speaker
Did they work? On me when I was 12, sure. Can't speak to it now. The other thing that is hollow in Fantasyland is the ecology.
00:36:13
Speaker
So he these are two things that that Jones is specifically calling out as failures of world, failures of imagination on the parts of these of these fantasy authors.
00:36:24
Speaker
The economy, the work, the labor, the toil, related, I think, creativity, the artistic work, but the ecology, the natural world. Yeah, it's just not there. My favorite.
00:36:36
Speaker
that She goes on for three pages about the absence of the ecology. The no birds except for the big black crows that evildoers use to carry messages and the leathery winged avians who are not evolving as they need to to fill the missing ecological niches. the pollinators No pollinators. No pollinators. No bacteria. No one's ever getting sick except for the inevitable plague that you'll pass through and will not catch. But otherwise, normal sorts of sickness don't seem to occur because there are no bacteria. The joke ends, or the entry ends, with one of my favorite jokes.
00:37:13
Speaker
Eventually, Fantasyland will become filled with aggressive- you know she's talking about the mutant creatures evolving in areas of stagnant magic. She says this is quite encouraging. Eventually, Fantasyland will become filled with aggressive plants and vicious animals. Humans will find themselves near the bottom of every food chain. All will be well. Unfortunately, it will be several hundred years before this happens. Fantasyland would be improved if it were taken over by these horrible monsters and they actually lived. Right, exactly. As opposed to these, I mean, the humans are living, she says they just kind of live, but they're not creating a world. They're standing around to be set pieces.
00:37:51
Speaker
All of this is just standing around to be set pieces. Right, they're scene dressing, they're um local colour. Yes, everything is local colour. One other thing that I think she's quite sharp about, and or at least paying a lot of attention to in The Tough Guy, is where are women and what are they doing?
00:38:09
Speaker
I like how many of the entries on the various standard fantasy peoples you may you meet end with, and the women do nothing much. yeah So you meet the Anglo-Saxon Cossacks or the eerie people.
00:38:22
Speaker
But again and again, the men do this and that and the other, and it's all very exciting. And the women sort of sit around in skirts. Yes. The one exception to this is desert nomads who allow their women to do everything the men do.
00:38:34
Speaker
Which, I don't know if this is, there there are times that I'm reading this and I'm like, I don't know if this is 100% true. them are true. I think those desert nomads possibly are direct from Robert Jordan. Yeah, yeah. um Where there are indeed some warrior women. Yes. And she has a whole entry on warrior women. She has several entries on warrior women.
00:38:55
Speaker
She has an entry on warrior women in general. Rumor is that they're all gay and sex with a warrior woman should not be missed on a tour by either men or women. She has an entry on the female mercenary who will be one of your tour companions.
00:39:07
Speaker
She has several entries on crones and old women, or she has a specific entry on crones. And then she has another entry on tour mentors in which she sort of includes the subcategory of crones as a possible tour mentor. Right. And as as she is so wise, you'll want to hit her. Yes.
00:39:26
Speaker
crohn's also in The entry on crones also points out that the crone will always be knitting in a public execution. But since since knitting is not a normal mortal skill and we never see anybody else knitting in Fantasyland, it's clear that the old lady is an aspect of some goddess or other.
00:39:39
Speaker
I like the entry on sex, I think, is quite pointed. Sex is obligatory at some stage in the tour. The rules differ according to whether you are male or female. If male, your partner will be an ever-youthful witch or some other beautiful and obliging female, possibly a female slave.
00:39:55
Speaker
See the entry on female slaves for what happens to this poor girl afterwards. In any case, you will not be obliged to feel any emotion and no offspring will result. If female, you are required to have strong feelings for your partner, who will usually be worthy of your regard. Again, there will be no offspring.
00:40:11
Speaker
Female tourists should note that they will not menstruate during the tour. Both sexes will be glad to know that sexually transmitted diseases are unknown.
Diversity and Innovation in Fantasy Narratives
00:40:19
Speaker
See also bath, which is of course where sex happens. Right, of course.
00:40:25
Speaker
Yeah, she's paying really close attention to what women are and aren't doing in fantasies of the 90s. What kinds of roles they've been allowed to have, what kind of adventures they're allowed to have, what kind of emotional landscapes they're allowed to have. The nunnery entry ends with, you know, the nunneries are for sacking, but you might find one survivor who will usually turn out not to be as nunnish as you thought.
00:40:50
Speaker
This entry that kicked off the whole tough guy doesn't actually make it into the encyclopedia of fantasy, possibly because they went back to John Clute and were like, nunneries are for sacking, and he was like, right, well, don't know.
00:41:01
Speaker
I don't know if that's someone that needs to go in. But talking of slavery, i think that is a point where the tough guy sort of falls down, is as much attention as it's paying to gender.
00:41:15
Speaker
There's a sort of willful blindness on the topic of race. I was really struck by this. And then I thought, does the Encyclopedia of Fantasy have an entry for race?
00:41:28
Speaker
So I went and had a look. It has an entry for gender, three pages. It does not have an entry for race. And I thought, this is odd because I'm pretty sure race had been invented in the 1990s. So i had I had little search through for racism, which is mentioned a few times, usually in reference to a specific work of fantasy or or a fantasy film, usually. Mm-hmm.
00:41:53
Speaker
And comes up briefly at the end of the Tolkien entry where the ah entirely correct encyclopedia editor points out that Tolkien can be criticized as ah having a racist construction in in his hierarchy of variously moral races in Middle-earth. And then it comes up in an entry titled Maggots. Uh-huh.
00:42:16
Speaker
Now, I personally, if I were looking to learn about racism in fantasy, would not start with maggots because I would assume that was about maggots. right yeah But it wasn't. Maggots was used as a code word by the dictionary for nonsense or discredited ideas that for some reason linger in contemporary fantasy.
00:42:36
Speaker
And almost the whole entry is about pseudoscientific racism. with it's It's a really good entry. um It's really thoughtful, really detailed, lots of examples, lots of evidence. And I was like, why was this just not the entry on racism?
00:42:53
Speaker
It's useful and scholarly and interesting information. ah good overview of where to start. And also, you know, race has been a key fantasy word since Tolkien, and especially since Dungeons and Dragons. Yep. And in 1993 is when Terry Pratchett's Men at Arms comes out, which very specifically uses the idea of races in fantasy as presented in concepts like D&D to talk about as an explicit metaphor for real world racism. Does he 100% succeed at that?
00:43:26
Speaker
Probably not. But he is trying really clearly to do it. And he is one of the sort of most visible writers of fantasy at this time. So it's clearly something that was in the conversation, but it's not in the encyclopedia.
00:43:39
Speaker
Nope. And it's not in the tough guide either. No. In a way which feels really strikingly cowardly. So Diana has an entry on color coding.
00:43:51
Speaker
And this is one of the entries that I think feels falsest to me, or again, sort of most, most woefully oblivious. So she's talking about the color coding talks about clothing. It talks about hair. Then it talks about complexion.
00:44:04
Speaker
Corpse white is evil and it grays from there. Pink faced folk are usually midway and pathetic. The best face color is brown, preferably tanned, but it can be inborn. Other colors such as black, blue, mauve, and yellow barely exist.
00:44:19
Speaker
Diana, what are you talking about? The best face color is brown, preferably tanned, but it can be inborn? Where? Where are you getting this? Yeah, i can't I can't think of a source unless possibly she's drawing on Earthsea.
00:44:36
Speaker
Like Le Guin is genuinely the only major a major white writer I can think of yeah who is writing brown main characters. Which is not to say that nobody is doing it in the 90s and before, rather that it's not getting the visibility Yeah, I don't think anybody on Diana Wynne Jones's list of reference for the magic entry of the encyclopedia is doing it, at least not that I'm familiar with. And something that's really clearly missing from this entry is ah sort of beautiful pale maidens, which we know that there were a plenty in fantasy land at this juncture.
00:45:18
Speaker
um So to say corp white is evil and pink faced is midway and pathetic. feels like not wanting to look at or talk about the colorism that is present in fantasy and replacing it with something innocuous and untrue.
00:45:34
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, I think that is a fairly neat summary of what's happening here. It's also, I think, pretty pointed that in the entry on... She has a long entry on slaves. She has an entry on... She talks quite eloquently, again, on the distinction between female slaves and male slaves. She doesn't talk at all about race in terms of slaves or slavery, except in as much as it comes in in the official management terms.
00:46:01
Speaker
Bad kings and fanatic caliphates always have their male slaves in matching sets, as in a litter borne by four gigantic ebony slaves, fanned by two beautiful young boys, a troop of slender young acrobats, the door guarded by two seemingly identical barbarian slaves, etc.
00:46:17
Speaker
these This is in the terminology. She sees it, she puts it in verbatim, but she doesn't talk about it, she doesn't apply it back to the color-coding entry, she doesn't want to think about it.
00:46:30
Speaker
Yeah, that it it comes across as the book not wanting to think about it. And the last thing that I will point out is there's an entry on cannibals. The entry on cannibals describes them as... oh no, it's not filed under C for cannibals and now I don't know where gone.
00:46:48
Speaker
a Ape-like cannibals. Right, it's filed under A for ape-like cannibals. Small, weak, white, and horrible, but where they exist they occur in great numbers all bundled together like maggots, which probably doesn't link back together to maggot in the encyclopedia for racism. um But again, the fact that she's like cannibals, ape-like cannibals are small and white.
00:47:12
Speaker
In what context? where Where is... can't I mean, this is already a description, this this a racist entry. She says they have the look of degenerate humans.
00:47:24
Speaker
But how do you look at the landscape of fantasy in the 80s and 90s and say, well, cannibals are white? Right. yeah Thinking back to the Cannibal episode and Homeward Bounders, actually. Yeah.
00:47:37
Speaker
Yeah, an episode that seems to say, well, this isn't a racist episode because these people aren't any color other than other than white. So how can this cannibal, how can these jungle cannibals be racist? They're white people wearing nice suits.
00:47:50
Speaker
Yeah. There's, on a, you know, sort of less critical note, I think there is quite a lot of homeward bounders in this text, maybe more than any of the other 80s books, in the way she talks about rules and the way she talks about management. um and sort of impose tropes on your adventure.
00:48:07
Speaker
Taboo is something that is so sacred and so terrible that it cannot be changed, touched, or mentioned. This is why you will find no entry in the guide for the rules.
00:48:18
Speaker
yeah um The rules are mentioned over and over in the guide, as in the rules require this, the rules require that, the rules expect the other.
00:48:28
Speaker
So and so is always this way, always that way. The rules are the the assumptions of Fantasyland, the ways that authors of fantasy... imagine this world must be and cannot imagine otherwise and will not question and i think actually it's that refusal to question which she finds which the book the text seems to find frustrating ah which is part of why the book's hesitancy over asking questions about race is frustrating because the rest of the time it may asking some very pointed questions about gender about economy about the natural world uh about politics about how it works about yes
00:49:08
Speaker
But there's there's this one thing that she she doesn't touch. One of the things I think speaking of rules is quite interesting about her entry on magic in the encyclopedia is that in, I think the second paragraph, one of the first things she says is that attempts to write to a system or define the rules, and then she gives a bunch of examples, can produce shallow and simplistic fantasy, rationalized fantasy.
00:49:29
Speaker
And then she sort of gives a counter example about things that tangle and melt and magic that doesn't necessarily apply to clear rules. that has multiple driving principles, that doesn't have anything so kind of rigid as a system, which seems to be her much preferred method.
00:49:45
Speaker
Which is hardly surprising if you've read her books. Yes. But do you note that ah Diana Wynne-Jones would not enjoy progression fantasy and its various contemporary cousins, or indeed anything with a a system of clear rules, and perhaps I would not hand her a Brandon Sanderson.
00:50:03
Speaker
No, I think very unlikely not. Very likely not. Very unlikely that she would. And, you know, I think the the rules also come up pretty frequently when she's talking about the mandatory structure of these plots.
00:50:21
Speaker
the The ways in which you have to sort of, yeah, it's progression fantasy before progression fantasy. You have to travel about. You have to have your prescribed encounters. The rules say that you do before you can get anywhere.
00:50:34
Speaker
Yes. And the way that the fights and confrontations start with little ones and work up to big ones. The Dark Lord never comes down on you with his full strength three days in when it would be very easy for him to win. He always leaves it until the end of the third tour. He waits until you've been, you know, the entry on ambushes, which I think you talked about when we were talking about ah Dark Lord. ah It lists all the sorts of ambushes that you're going to experience.
00:50:58
Speaker
And then it ends with, by, you know, at the end of the tour, you will be the ambusher, because at that point you will have experienced all of the obligatory ambushes, and you will have learned how to deal with them.
00:51:08
Speaker
You will have now considerable experience of ambushes. You will be able to ambush the enemy and attack and finish them off. ah This will be one of your first victories against the forces of evil. You will throw up afterwards, but basically you will feel good.
00:51:21
Speaker
You will have checked everything off on your sheet. And completing the ambush and killing of other people will make you feel good because that's the obligatory beat.
00:51:33
Speaker
It's in the rules. Yeah. Similarly, the entry on the School of Weapons, where you are going to turn out to be remarkably talented. ah You, the tourist, are going to be befriend the the weapons master and ah find him a very useful companion who will teach you everything he knows. This idea that of the the tourist's growing power, which...
00:52:00
Speaker
is always to be relied on. The tourist will always be strong enough to face whatever's coming. You will always be able to kill the assassin who's sent to kill you. He will die protesting that you broke some rule or other.
00:52:12
Speaker
But of course the actual rule is the protagonist can't lose. Yes. Protagonist-centered plot. You are always, the tourist is always the most important person in the world.
00:52:23
Speaker
And the book is centered around their experience and satisfaction.
Concluding Reflections on 'The Tough Guide'
00:52:29
Speaker
And that's why everyone is always right. Customer is always right. And that's why everything else feels so hollow.
00:52:35
Speaker
That's why, you know, jewelry and music are always for magic and why nunneries are always for sacking and why bales are always for looking picturesque, but never for actually getting anywhere or participating in anyone's actual economy.
00:52:47
Speaker
Yeah. I think we hit most of the beats that we wanted to hit. I think we should call it there. We might have actually managed a mini-sode this time. I was going to ask you before we wrap, your favorite joke in the Tough Guy. Oh, oh, easy. Under E, you will find Eternal Quest.
00:53:02
Speaker
And the entry says, See Quest Eternal. So you click through to Q. And you see, Quest Eternal. See Eternal Quest. Yeah. And I hit that and I just lost it. It's such a stupid joke.
00:53:18
Speaker
It's so good and it's so dumb. Again, never leaves a joke on the table. Yeah. What about you? Favorite joke? Oh, no, you took mine. That was the one that I was going to say.
00:53:29
Speaker
No, that's mine. Too late. The other the other one that I love is ecology, but I already read it out loud. Oh, I like also the horses that breed by pollination because they they otherwise don't behave like horses at all. They must be some kind of vegetable.
00:53:46
Speaker
my God. This is one thing that I wish she had. She couldn't put all of her really good jokes in Dirkholm because eventually it had to have a plot that fit together. And so some of the things that she's identified as the rules in Tough Guide or identified as world building beads in Tough Guide, like the horses that breed by pollination, ah just don't get in it because she it would distract from everything else that she's trying to do. ah But I do wish that she'd gotten some pollinated horses in there.
00:54:13
Speaker
It would have made me laugh. The good news is that Dirkholm has a sequel. That's true, and we'll be getting there next season, so get excited for that. We're going to be doing one more mini-sode, or mini-sode, probably won't be a mini-sode given the number of questions we've already had. One more bonus episode ah for the summer.
00:54:32
Speaker
This is going to be our overview just for the whole season and also our Q&A. So this is your last chance to send us in questions. We're going to be recording in early July. So send us in anything you want to ask us by the end of the month, if you can. And we will see soon.
00:54:48
Speaker
See you soon. Bye. Bye.
00:54:56
Speaker
Oh