A Return to Darwath
As a general rule, I don't revisit stories. TV repeats make for comfortable background noise, but turning my focus to something I've experienced before is hard. I have whole seasons of shows on video tapes I really haven't watched more than a couple times. I know people who have read and reread books countless times, and that seems a bit alien to me.
There are a few exceptions. I've gone back to some open world games (Elder Scrolls and the last few Fallout games for example), because there are branching experiences to be found there (though often my interest will peter out after a while). I replay the original Deus Ex every now and then becaues it was pretty damn great. But I'll rarely go back to a novel, as the story comes back to me and robs me of any real drive or need to go through it again.
But after having a random impulse to seek out a book I'd read long ago based on wisps of recollection, I had to reread Barbara Hambly's Darwath trilogy.
What I remembered: a story where a female lead gets caught up with a wizard from another world in fighting against a alien enemy referred to as The Dark. The search was actually kind of challenging. I mean, do a search for "novel" and "the dark." Those are some pretty damnably generic terms that show up all over. I didn't remember any character or world names or anything distinctive. So I'm pretty darn lucky to have managed to track it back to The Time of the Dark (followed by The Walls of Air and The Armies of Daylight). I also didn't remember that another male character is involved in that world-hopping bit and ends up becoming the apprentice mage.
So I started rereading a book from the early 80's and got sucked into the trilogy (though I won't know if I'll read the follow-up books written a decade or more later). I'm a little surprised at how much of it I didn't remember, but it was very familiar, too.
In a technical sense, the books take me back to another era. This was a time of libraries and bookstores, when it felt like there were only a handful of prolific fantasy authors and a trilogy would clock in under 1000 pages. That's a far cry from what a search will turn up on Amazon today and books that are that long in an open-ended series. The first novel especially goes at a solid clip. There's very little filler, down time, or setting expansion where things aren't happening. Ingold Inglorion may be a bit archtypal as a badass wizard, though Gil and Rudy feel a bit more nuanced. There's a surprising amount of examination of a society on the verge of collapse, with politics and prejudice - which gets wrapped up a bit more easily at the end than perhaps it deserves, but being there at all adds a layer ot things. I also very much enjoyed (then as now) The Dark as an enemy that is very alien to humanity, but not as randomly evil as it may seem.
I also probably see some things in the books now that I didn't when I first read them (30-ish years ago? Gah!). Then I probably wanted to be the guy who goes to a fantasy world, learns magic, and falls in love. Now, I sympathize more with other aspects of the characters, and probably more with Gil than Rudy. I can also see that these books, and others like them, could very well have informed some of my current beliefs about people and society. That's... a strangely intense thing to see...
There are a few exceptions. I've gone back to some open world games (Elder Scrolls and the last few Fallout games for example), because there are branching experiences to be found there (though often my interest will peter out after a while). I replay the original Deus Ex every now and then becaues it was pretty damn great. But I'll rarely go back to a novel, as the story comes back to me and robs me of any real drive or need to go through it again.
But after having a random impulse to seek out a book I'd read long ago based on wisps of recollection, I had to reread Barbara Hambly's Darwath trilogy.
What I remembered: a story where a female lead gets caught up with a wizard from another world in fighting against a alien enemy referred to as The Dark. The search was actually kind of challenging. I mean, do a search for "novel" and "the dark." Those are some pretty damnably generic terms that show up all over. I didn't remember any character or world names or anything distinctive. So I'm pretty darn lucky to have managed to track it back to The Time of the Dark (followed by The Walls of Air and The Armies of Daylight). I also didn't remember that another male character is involved in that world-hopping bit and ends up becoming the apprentice mage.
So I started rereading a book from the early 80's and got sucked into the trilogy (though I won't know if I'll read the follow-up books written a decade or more later). I'm a little surprised at how much of it I didn't remember, but it was very familiar, too.
In a technical sense, the books take me back to another era. This was a time of libraries and bookstores, when it felt like there were only a handful of prolific fantasy authors and a trilogy would clock in under 1000 pages. That's a far cry from what a search will turn up on Amazon today and books that are that long in an open-ended series. The first novel especially goes at a solid clip. There's very little filler, down time, or setting expansion where things aren't happening. Ingold Inglorion may be a bit archtypal as a badass wizard, though Gil and Rudy feel a bit more nuanced. There's a surprising amount of examination of a society on the verge of collapse, with politics and prejudice - which gets wrapped up a bit more easily at the end than perhaps it deserves, but being there at all adds a layer ot things. I also very much enjoyed (then as now) The Dark as an enemy that is very alien to humanity, but not as randomly evil as it may seem.
I also probably see some things in the books now that I didn't when I first read them (30-ish years ago? Gah!). Then I probably wanted to be the guy who goes to a fantasy world, learns magic, and falls in love. Now, I sympathize more with other aspects of the characters, and probably more with Gil than Rudy. I can also see that these books, and others like them, could very well have informed some of my current beliefs about people and society. That's... a strangely intense thing to see...
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