All posts tagged: David Gemmell

Fantasy warriors – Those who follow another path…

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herocollector.com Orc.  From The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien. Where else to start than the mythical warriors of Middle Earth, that we meet in the writings of Tolkien.  The term Goblin and Orc are actually synonymous in the world of Middle Earth, however Tolkien tended to refer to them as Goblins in The Hobbit, whereas by the time you reach The Lord of the Rings, the term Orc is more common. In Middle Earth, before the Dark Lord Sauron, there was Melkor – Sauron’s one time master.  It was Melkor who bred the first orcs, by corrupting enslaved elves, by the slow arts of cruelty and his malignant magic with which he infused his dark will.  This is because evil in Middle Earth isn’t capable of true creation, and so the orcs were born as a cruel mockery of the elves who they had first descended from.  The orcs then bred and multiplied in vast numbers, disgorging from the lands of Mordor to swamp Middle Earth with their cruelty and spite. Grotesquely malformed, …

Who will take Tolkien’s place?

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Over the past week and a half, I have posted several articles on the Lord of the Rings.  I don’t think anyone can deny the importance of Tolkien’s work to the fantasy genre, but maybe it is time to start looking beyond Middle Earth, to find the next great classic fantasy novel.  There have been several pretenders to the throne, various novels or series of books that for a time have come close to the popularity of Tolkien’s work, but so far, none have lasted the test of time.  I can’t possibly list them all as there are far too many but I will go through a few of the past, present, and future claimants to the throne… The Dragonlance series by Weis & Hickman – Back in the 1980’s, before computer video games hit their prominence, the game fantasy enthusiasts played was Dungeons and Dragons: a role-playing game played with character sheets, dice, and active imaginations.  The popularity of this game was in part fuelled by the massive popularity of the Dragonlance fantasy series …

Great Borderlands and frontiers in novels – Part 1 : Fantasy

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For the past week and a half I’ve been staying in a small cottage up in the wild hills of Northumberland, one of England’s two counties that lie on the border with Scotland.  Evidence of previous animosity between the two countries are all around, not just with Hadrian’s Wall that runs through the borderlands, but in the number of castles and fortified buildings that lie festooned over the countryside.  My own cottage that I am staying in still has arrow slits in the outbuildings, a relic from its past when the inhabitants needed to defend themselves from the periodic raiding parties from the Scottish North. This has made me think about borderlands in literature, and what a great location they are to set any novel.  Obviously history is full of hostile frontiers, and next week I will go through a few of those and show some examples.  But equally this works well for fantasy novels, and here are just a few great examples of fantasy novelists that have used this topic so well. Mordor, Middle …

David Gemmell – Legend

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Back in 2006 I heard the news the David Gemmel had passed away.  I was greatly saddened by the news, not just because I was an avid reader of all his novels, but also because his novels had come to personify everything that I love about modern fantasy writing.  Fast action, fascinating stories, outlandish worlds full of heroes and magic.  However, what separated David Gemmell from the crowd was the depth of the characters he created.  Not only were the main characters carefully thought out, every support characters life will have been carefully crafted and moulded into a believable character.  If the story required two sentries to be waiting on guard duty, he wouldn’t simply create two generic guards, ready to be bumped off when needed.  He would explain why they had joined the army, what motivated them in life, what their worries were – did they have a family?  Were they looking forward to seeing them that night?  It was this level of character development that made the worlds he created so real, so …