The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip
217 pages
Published 1974
Read from June 14 to June 15
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
I have something of a quixotic quest: finding "lost classics" of genre fiction. The internet is full of lists of the best SF novels and the best fantasy novels, ranging from useless ones crowd-sourced from internet polling (thereby skewed, inevitably, in favor of Ayn Rand and Terry Pratchett), to dedicated websites compiling the tastes of their forums users, to Buzzfeed listicle/quiz hybrids, but all such endeavors have two failings in common: none of them reflect the current literary revolution in fantasy, and they all draw from the same muddy well of epic fantasy series that, frankly, aren't any good. If one were to believe most of these lists, fantasy fiction consists primarily of Terry Goodkind and Robert Jordan, with the occasional Ursula K. Le Guin or Robin Hobb thrown in to make it look less like a poorly written sausage party. From my own readings I can testify that any list-maker who includes some stale multi-volume Tolkien imitator from the '90s at the expense of Catherynne M. Valente, Jo Walton, or Sofia Samatar probably thinks Star Wars novels are high literature.
For more recent fiction, I have (or had) io9 and Goodreads to give me more recommendations than I could possibly keep up with. But I have this conviction that the Goodkinds, Jordans, and Anne McCaffreys of the world weren't the only fantasists of the '80s and '90s worth remembering, and I've made a conscious effort to uncover authors and novels forgotten by mainstream fantasy fans -- making me something of a fantasy fiction hipster, I suppose. I've had a couple successes discovering lost classics. Wizard of the Pigeons and War for the Oaks both were thoroughly enjoyable; Swordspoint was excellent; Sideshow was good enough to redeem an entire trilogy of mediocrity before it. Long before I began keeping a reading blog, I happened upon A. A. Attanasio's Last Legends of Earth and found myself bedazzled by its structure and vocabulary (though whether I would be quite so impressed nowadays remains to be seen -- I plan on reading Attanasio's Radix tetrad sometime this year). Goodreads is not so useful for finding more books from a particular phase of the genre's evolution; I can't really type in "find me more books from the early years of urban fantasy or the New Romantics movement, something with that ineffable Thomas Canty/Siouxsie Sue vibe" as a search term.
One obvious recourse: lists of award-winning novels! I'm toying with the idea of reading through all the World Fantasy Award-winning books (and possibly even the more promising runners-up). Which is an exceptionally long-winded way of introducing this book, winner of the first-ever World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.
The fantasy of the 1970s is a weird beast, a transitional form between the Tolkien/Howard/Leiber/Unknown school of the 1930s-60s and the New Romantics/Epic Fantasy Trilogies/new urban fantasy of the early- and mid-'80s. Most of my exposure to the decade has been via Lin Carter's largely abominable, occasionally brilliant Year's Best anthologies (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), with a smattering of Earthsea. Nonetheless I've gotten a general sense of some '70s fantasy trends. Much of it is still anchored to rusty cliches of heroic fantasy -- wizards and swordsmen, sketchy old gender norms, musty or stilted prose, fantastic beasts that risk verging on the corny, and of course naming schemes cornier than a field in Iowa. The better stories struggled against the limitations of this vocabulary, but few at this stage managed to kick free of it entirely.
Some spoilers ahead.
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld is a fairly standard '70s fantasy in this regard, though hints of something deeper and more ambitious twist and tense beneath the surface. Gender norms are toyed with (the central character is a powerful woman of magic; the central conflict is instigated by an obvious metaphor for rape and the violence of gendered subjugation) but never seriously challenged (the powerful female wizard, age 16, can't resist the allure of taking care of a baby; a strong man who listens to his romantic "needs" instead of her emphatic "nos" turns out to be her happy ending). Questions of love and hate, revenge and forgiveness, are contemplated with more sophistication than I would have expected. The denouement cleverly averts a war by spiriting away the warlords, leaving the land confused but peaceful. The fact that this was marketed as a juvenile novel at the time (as were the earlier Earthsea books) makes it all the more remarkable.
Overall, the limitations of '70s fantasy drag Beasts down, but I appreciated the nascent complexity and ambiguity, and I'm always pleased to have another datum for my mental picture of how fantasy fiction evolved and became how awesome it can be today.
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