Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

🟊

I came to this book with high hopes. I usually try to avoid delving very far into a book's critical reception before reading it, unless I find out about a book via a book review. If a book looks interesting and passes a basic "smell test," I try to take the book on its own terms, only looking to see what others thought once I'm done with it and have formed my own opinion.

This book has made me wonder if I should reconsider that practice.

I hadn't heard of the book before it popped up as a heuristic recommendation ("try this, you'll like it?"), but the project sounded neat: a series of essays written about the various fantasy and sci fi works Gary Gygax listed as inspirational to Dungeons and Dragons with a view towards teasing out how each of the works influenced the hobby. I've read 90% of the books Gygax listed in Appendix N (in some cases because I was literally working down the list!), so I was excited about a more thoroughgoing literary history. For example, I was familiar with Gygax's specific debt to Vance for the magic system, but I thought it would be neat to see someone trace some additional threads of influence.

I was also interested because the stinger billed Johnson as a three-time Hugo award finalist. That struck me as interesting as I'd never heard of the author before, but I've been a little out of the loop on new sci fi and fantasy, so I just let that point pass (error #1).¹

I also made a quick pass of some of the online reviews just before purchasing, and some people seemed generally offended by the book, but I knew the author would be trying to engage with controversial authors (like Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft), and its hard to talk about some of those authors in 2019 without offending someone (almost any position is likely to offend their partisans, their detractors, or occasionally both). So I figured I'd give the author the benefit of the doubt (error #2).

When I cracked the book, I was expecting good things and had no particular preconceived notions. The foreword seemed mysteriously polemical in tone, and the early essays seemed to have a culturally conservative political agenda, but neither of those things are necessarily fatal in a historical work provided the author cites his sources (which he seemed to be doing) and makes good faith, logical connections to his topic (which he also seemed to be doing in the early pieces). It seemed a little undercooked in places, but the ideas were interesting, and I was actually excited to see where it went.

However, things took a sharp turn in the fifth essay (dealing with Edgar Rice Burroughs). That particular review wandered off into some kind of extended argument about Star Wars and the characteristics of the perfect "Space Princess" that had only the most tenuous connection to Dungeons & Dragons or fantasy role-playing, and just...never came back. This became a pattern in the following chapters, which began to seem less and less connected to the book's ostensible subject.

And then there were piles of errors, ranging from lazy grammatical or typographical errors ("Pierce Anthony" for "Piers Anthony"), to perplexing historical oversights (the author manages to write an entire chapter on Burrough's At the Earth's Core concluding that it had a limited influence on D&D, but never even mentions the later Hollow World campaign setting which adapted it for D&D more or less wholesale), to simple logical errors (in the review of Zelazny's Jack of Shadows the author launches a ranty critique of the work that seems entirely predicated on the author's misunderstanding of a passage and subsequent jumping to mysterious conclusions).

The author also has a really cramped view of what gaming is or can be like, which seems to be based on an assumption that his own experience is universal. This is puerile, but is a category error that most of us fall into once in a while (although one would hope that an author who, like yours truly, is old enough to remember what life was like before the internet would have learned better by now). Less forgivable is that the author has a similarly cramped view of what the world is like or can be like; he rejects or accepts contrafactual premises in stories for no discernible reason--a sun inside a hollow earth seems about as implausible to me as a tide-locked world where magic only works on one side, but the author views one as ridiculous and the other as mind-blowingly awesome.

And then there's the author's broader views about human society, which are omnipresent in the work. The author's views on women, for example, are, at best, juvenile, and at times, authentically creepy. Further, he's staked out a fairly reactionary position in the culture wars, which he is not even remotely equal to defending (Harold Bloom, he ain't). This part has been ventilated ad nauseam in other reviews (which I should have read before buying this book), and I have little new to add, so I won't continue to pile on here.

I got about two-thirds of the way through the book before quitting. In general, I take pride in not quitting books in disgust, and finish every book I start. I can suffer through a lot if I'm still learning something, and I like to expose myself to well-thought out differing opinions. However, the sheer volume of lazy errors, irrelevant wool-gathering, and unwarranted assumptions, combined with the author's tediously chummy style, was just too much for me.

I have read and loved almost all the works listed in Appendix N over my long reading career, and actually agree with one of the author's basic premises: that authors like Leiber, Vance, Zelazny--and even Burroughs and Lovecraft--still have something vital to offer a modern audience when appropriately contextualized. But this book is a farrago, don't buy it. If you already have a copy, some of the sources cited in the footnotes are interesting, but that's about it. You'd be better off reading literally any of the novels or stories listed in Appendix N instead of this book.