![]() ![]() I knew instinctively that this had to be Tad’s next project, whether he was ready to write it or not.ĭavid Barnett continued the conversation about the trilogy’s origins in The Guardian : “Williams didn’t just subvert the tropes of fantasy fiction,” Barnett said, “he asked readers to also question them, particularly the idea of a golden age, that ‘the past was brighter, more elegiac, more beautiful, that it’s a transitory state in a fallen world’. He said he had been thinking about this work for years. He wanted this work to be more multidimensional, more modern-Tolkien was only one of his many inspirations. He also mentioned that he didn’t want to write a Tolkien pastiche. Tad said this big project was his ode to King Arthur, to Lord of the Rings, to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, and to “all the great books that made me who I am.” He went on to say that it was about the sons of Prester John, and that it was, in some ways, about what happens when a great king dies. We talked, and the longer we talked the more excited I became. “Well, there’s this other project, but I’m not experienced enough to write it.” I was intrigued. Instead, Williams’ trilogy feels like a surgically-precise dissection of those tropes.īetsy Wollheim, Williams’ longtime editor, remembers his first ambitions for Memory, Sorrow and Thorn (then called “The Sons of Prester John”) in her introduction to the 2016 edition of The Dragonbone Chair: On the surface, Memory, Sorrow and Thorn sounds like a paint-by-numbers secondary world fantasy: there’s an ancient evil threatening the medieval-flavored land of Osten Ard, a boy with a mysterious past, a scrappy princess, an evil prince, a dying king, and more magic swords, dragons, elves and dwarfs thank you can shake a wand at (even if they’re referred to by different names.) It never eschews these tropes-though at the time they were less tiresome, as fantasy-readers reveled in the post-Brooks/Donaldson revitalization of secondary world fantasy. ![]() Williams’ trilogy ( The Dragonbone Chair, Stone of Farewell, To Green Angel Tower) is quietly one of the most influential fantasies of the past 30 years, and is, in large part, responsible for the resurgence in the mainstream popularity of fantasy via HBO’s Game of Thrones, the television adaptation of Martin’s hugely popular A Song of Ice and Fire novels-after all, Martin credits Williams’ books as a primary inspiration. Right smack in the middle of that group is Tad Williams, author of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn-an mid-’80s epic fantasy trilogy that breaks the mold created by J.R.R. Each of these authors impacted fantasy in ways that still ripple through the genre, influencing new authors who in turn reshape the genre and set imaginations whirring anew. Feist. Robin Hobb. Anne McCaffrey. George R.R. When I think of the evolution of secondary world fantasy through the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, familiar names come to mind: Terry Brooks. ![]()
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