Part One: The Introduction
The following is a review I really laboured over. I’ve joined a book group, and as part of that group’s activities we’re doing a bit of writing on the books over at a blog devoted to that purpose. Being a sort of informal, often drunk, slightly shouty book group, the blog hasn’t really been fully sorted out, and anyway, it’s purpose is to host the reviews of books.
About somewhere in the second draft of this review, I felt that the material I was throwing out was as interesting as what I was keeping in. On my own blog, I can bore the pants off you about deserted supermarkets as much as I want; I think writing for somebody else’s blog means sticking to a point, or at least agreeing to set of rules. Those rules are what makes blogs like Daring Fireball or Coilhouse great – focused entertainment. A topic, around which to circle about, diverge from, and return to. Both the audience and the writers know that there will be a pay-off for attention.
So the essay I was going to post on that site would have been shortened. It would have missed out some stuff that I really wanted to mention. Those topics will be mentioned briefly, as a list of links, in a third part. For now though, here is the review.
Part Two: Review of Warlock of Firetop Mountain
The nerdery levels of the 1980s were high. In the 1960s, and for a long period in the 1970s, Lord of The Rings had carved a massive swathe through popular culture. This wasn’t the same swathe that the movies would carve in the 2000s; instead, people read the books, devoting a huge period of time and mental energy to imagining – for themselves – Tolkien’s world.
Some people did it because it was the done thing. Some people did it because they were massive nerds who wanted to live in Middle Earth. And, I suppose, some people just wanted to read a good story (although I won’t get into the literary merits of LotR at this time). But if you ever wonder why Tolkien’s world of Middle Earth is a sort of ur-myth for fantasy, it’s because we live in a time when the nerdy kids of the sixties and seventies have worked hard, created art inspired by Tolkien, and in turn inspired others.
The range of Fighting Fantasy books is one instance of that inspiration. It’s authors were steeped in the subculture of roleplaying games, where nerdy individuals acted out fantastic stories. Contemporary roleplaying has been co-opted by the computer industry, but in the pre-internet eighties roleplaying was about meeting with some equally nerdy friends, rolling some dice, and acting out a story co-operatively.
What made the Fighting Fantasy books (and their American Cousin, the Choose Your Own Adventure series) such a hit was that they made the roleplaying experience a solitary one. As computers got better they replaced the need this unwieldy combination of book and game, and instead offered the same experience in an easier-to-consume package.
That experience is that of a person who acts. Somebody who does things. In the Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the things you do are an awful lot of killing. Mainly, you are killing the henchmen of the evil warlock. You act decisively and without regret, never thinking about the trail of devastation left behind you.
What is lost is twofold; both the original roleplaying experience (perhaps you would befriend the minions of the warlock, and – by play-acting with your friends – convince them to help you, like Frodo convinces Gollum in Lord of the Rings) and the experience of becoming wrapped up in a narrative.
This review is, therefore, not a book review. Rather it is a review of a book-like object; it has pages, but you do not turn them one by one, forgetting where you are as a story whisks you away. Instead, you shuttle back and forth between different numbered paragraphs, roll dice, and consider whether going “north” up the corridor is better than going “south”.
In truth, it doesn’t matter. Your character is alone in a maze of choices, trying to find that individual path to victory, and if you succeed you have succeeded alone. The experience is so unique that you cannot even discuss it with somebody who has also succeeded in the quest, because they will not have read the same parts of the book as you. You can discuss something similar, but without a joint entry into some other narrative, it isn’t a shared experience.
And without that commonality, there is nothing to review.
Part Three: An Appendix in the Form of Links
- One Book, Many Endings: an analysis of the American counterparts to Fighting Fantasy, using sophisticated animations to show how they progressed. Worth reading.
- Fighting Dantasy: a blog which reviews individual Fighting Fantasy books.
- Firetop Mountain iPhone App: the contemporary version. Reviews of this game often skip over explaining exactly what it is
- Enemy of Chaos, Leila Johnson’s witty and affectionate take on gaming books. I played it as an iPhone game, but it is also available as a real physical book-like object.
- Nethack, the venerable dungeon-crawling game, dates from around the same time as the Fighting Fantasy books.
- LotR in the terminal: type
cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.history | grep "LOTR"
at the command line of any Mac to see just how influential Tolkien was. When the basics of the computer age were being written, some neck-bearded nerd snuck in a lot of references to LotR into a file. They’re still there.
In her book about creativity, Twyla Tharp mentions the idea of “the Bubble”. This is when a creative person strips away all the extraneous stuff of their life, and commits themselves to making their art, structuring their life so that they focus exclusively on creation. Tharp gives the example of the writer Phillip Roth, who lived alone in the countryside, producing some of his most acclaimed work in a monastic existence.
