Tag: Forgotten Realm

I ran into an old friend at Wegman’s yesterday (hey Scott!), and of all the things to talk about in the middle of the canned goods aisle, we ended our brief talk on blogging and trying to do themed days. So, in a nutshell, I bring to you A Forgotten Realms (let’s hope this isn’t the only one, in which case it will be really forgotten). It is my hope to bring you, once a month, a forgotten realm in fantasy and science fiction that is due more attention than it has received with the passage of time. I’m hoping by starting off monthly, I’ll have the time to read and draft these better. That’s the hope anyway.

This month’s Forgotten Realm is…Mithgar! Writer Dennis L. McKiernan created the lands and people of Mithgar for us back in the 80’s, putting out a dozen or so novels over the course of the next few decades, including his most recent release just a few years ago, City of Jade: A Novel of Mithgar. I literally stumbled on McKiernan’s books by accident recently while wandering around the local library branch. The Spotsylvania branch has five out of six books in one of his series – of course, it is the first book that is missing. But since the other books looked intriguing, I did a little bit of research, some of it involving standing in bookstore aisles leafing through books, most of it online browsing websites and cover art.

Which is when I realized that I was no stranger to Mithgar.

In fact, I had traveled this land before, and rather extensively. It was the cover art that led me back, bringing back memories of cold nights and tales of forgotten legends fighting it out. What McKiernan did that was so nice was that he took the common elements of the 80’s fantasy novel – elves, quests, dwarves, all of the trappings Uncle Tolkien left us – and told them like with a rich depth most ignored.

Drawing on ingredients we all would recognize as fantasy stories, McKiernan’s stories are fresh undertakings. In science fiction writing, there is generally a distinction between hard and soft science fiction. Hard science fiction tends to be more about the science, and the stories revolve around that attention to detail. In soft science fiction, the science is usually less important than the story of the people involved.

The same is true in fantasy books. In your soft fantasy, elves are just people with pointy ears and dwarves are just short guys, and the story is more focussed on the adventure they have than in paying attention to any particular details. Hard fantasy, as it were, keeps those lines well defined and drawn, and there is no doubt that an elf is nothing like a man, or anything else for that matter. McKiernan’s stories tend toward the hard side, with each species having more than a cosmetic distinction from the others.

So if you’re looking for some fantasy that is reminiscent of epic quests in a well thought out world, you can’t go wrong by trying out some of McKiernan’s works. Happy reading!