A Thief in the Dying Earth

The description of Matthew Hughes's latest short story collection, 9 Tales of Raffalon, is simply: "A Thief in the Dying Earth." Hughes is a fantasy writer who has been working in the space of the "Dying Earth" subgenre, typified by authors such as Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe. While Hughes's prose will not stand up to the stiff test of those authors, Raffalon is a creation that should bring a smile to the face of any Vance fan. He is a thief in the vein of Cugel the Clever, continually finding himself (usually with good cause) in the crosshairs of strange wizards and mortal enemies while being rakish and clever about it.

I first found Raffalon by browsing for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which I pick up periodically because I enjoy short stories and enjoy the fact that there's still a magazine publishing fantasy stories. I found "The Prisoner of Pandarius" and immediately felt at home with Hughes's world.

The worldbuilding in Hughes is solid. He has created a very peculiar universe, full of interesting and arcane guilds with various restrictions and symbols, and characters who've learned to live right at their edges. The period Raffalon spends in "The Vindicator" working the offices of the Ancient and Honorable Guild of Purloiners and Purveyors is, particularly, a fun way to set up that story. If you want to have thieves' guilds or similar institutions in your game, this is a must-read.

Another area where Hughes shines through is in his description of magic effects. Magic is strange, and visceral, and really quite wondrous. The effect in "Wearaway and Flambeau" is a particularly fun one, as is the experience when Raffalon actually casts a bit of a spell in "Stones and Glass." It's described in a way that really takes the reader through the process and helps you realize why all the spellcasters in Hughes's stories tend to be arrogant and bizarre sorts.

This collection is an assortment of picaresque tales, and while there are recurring figures they don't form much by way of a grand narrative. Raffalon started at the end, in "The Inn of the Seven Blessings" written for the anthology Rogues, and he is pretty much an iconic thief from the earliest of his tales. (Hughes's new character, Baldemar, has more of an arc to his stories.) Raffalon is a bit more likable than Cugel the Clever, who is openly his inspiration, which is to his credit, though he's not as sharp-witted.

Among "Vancian" authors, Hughes does not mimic the decadent prose of The Dying Earth. His writing works fairly well for the stories but isn't just enjoyable on its pure merits. A short sample from "Wearaway and Flambeau":

A thief's credo is to avoid capture and punishment by any means necessary. But Raffalon had added a corollary to that code: when all is lost, at least go out with a bold face. He now set his features into as intrepid an arrangement as he could manage, and turned his gaze upward. He found himself staring, as expected yet hoped against, into the uncompromising visage of Hurdevant the Stringent.

That's about the level of writing you'll get; I find it fine, and it reads quickly, but I wouldn't want to disappoint someone looking for a Vance or, say, a Michael Shea in this anthology.

I enjoy these stories because they are what is advertised on the tin: short stories about a thief in the Dying Earth. It's just nice that after all these years of plumbing brick-length fantasy novels and finding them shallow, somebody is out there still embracing good old picaresque fantasy in the short story form.

9 Tales of Raffalon is available from Amazon or directly from Matt Hughes. It's recommended to anyone interested in dying earth fantasy, thieves and thieves' guilds, or just having some fresh short stories to pick your way through.

Appendices E and N

The 5e D&D Player's Handbook has an "Appendix E" that I think is worth at least mentioning. Looking over the list, I think there is some merit in talking about at least a few of the works listed in it.

Appendix E is a superset of Appendix N, but it also changes the latter by adding in recommended books for every author listed. Appendix N listed 9 authors "generally" with no specific works – essentially their whole writings. (Although in the case of H.P. Lovecraft, it literally recommends everything.) These thoughts focus on the additions.

• Ahmed, Saladin. Throne of the Crescent Moon.

This is one of several entries in the list that feels like it was just thrown in because somebody at WotC was reading it, and it helped give the list some "modern" credibility. Nothing against it, but nothing about it suggests D&D.

• Anthony, Piers. Split Infinity and the rest of the Apprentice Adept series.

This is one of the series Gary Gygax "added" to Appendix N when asked in 2007. I personally find Piers Anthony quite repugnant to my taste, but then de gustibus non est disputandum.

• Augusta, Lady Gregory. Gods and Fighting Men.

I kind of have to give credit for the authors sneaking some Irish myth into Appendix E. The Irish myth cycles are difficult to piece together and not as popular as Greco-Roman or Norse myth, but have some excellent heroic stuff going on.

• Brooks, Terry. The Sword of Shannara and the rest of the Shannara novels.

This novel is, literally, everything that is wrong with fantasy from 1977 onward. Its publication – Lester Del Rey literally chose it because it was the most like The Lord of the Rings – was the watershed moment when Extruded Fantasy Product began to overwhelm the burgeoning fantasy scene. It's not as bad as some EFP authors (Terry Goodkind is probably the worst) but it is directly responsible for their existence.

• Bulfinch, Thomas. Bulfinch's Mythology.

A terrific way to familiarize oneself with Greco-Roman, Arthurian and Carolingian mythology, if a bit dated in language. I've spent more time with Edith Hamilton's Mythology but Bulfinch is really good for the material in Age of Chivalry.

• Cook, Glen. The Black Company and the rest of the Black Company series.

Another, and in my opinion much more worthy, entry in Gygax's 2007 expansion. The only reason The Black Company wasn't on Gary's original list is that it hadn't been written yet.

• Hickman, Tracy & Margaret Weis. Dragons of Autumn Twilight and the rest of the Chronicles trilogy.

I have mixed feelings on this; on the one hand, this book did help me get into D&D (though within a few years, I had developed much better taste in fantasy novels). On the other, it is crappy Extruded Fantasy Product and did a lot of damage by pushing D&D in that direction.

• Jordan, Robert. The Eye of the World and the rest of the Wheel of Time series.

I read several of these books in college. I regret this fact. It manages to be derivative of both The Lord of the Rings and Dune while learning nothing positive from either series.

• King, Stephen. The Eyes of the Dragon.

What a weird one-off to throw in. I read this book when I was a teenager because my aunt and uncle had every Stephen King book in their house, and one time when we were visiting, I picked up the one book that had "Dragon" in the title. The poison that caused smoke to come out of the king's eyes was the only thing that stuck with me.

• LeGuin, Ursula. A Wizard of Earthsea and the rest of the Earthsea series.

Earthsea is probably my favorite Young Adult fantasy series. I actually had to read the first book in my freshman English class, and wound up loving the original trilogy. Le Guin is kind of known for her political bent, but Earthsea is just good bedrock fantasy writing.

• Lynch, Scott. The Lies of Lock Lamora and the rest of the Gentleman Bastard series.

See Ahmed, Saladin above.

• Martin, George R.R. A Game of Thrones and the rest of the Song of Ice and Fire series.

The only way to read these books is as a prolonged black-comedy parody on the epic fantasy genre. And they're too damn long to bother reading like that. I've come to hate the "grimdark" pseudo-realism of books like this.

• Pratchett, Terry. The Colour of Magic and the rest of the Discworld series.

Another Gary Gygax 2007 addition. If you like comedic fantasy, then this is better than most. I read a few in high school and it's just not my cup of tea.

• Rothfuss, Patrick. The Name of the Wind and the rest of the Kingkiller series.

See Ahmed, Saladin above.

• Salvatore, R.A. The Crystal Shard and the rest of the Legend of Drizzt.

I knew these books sucked when I was 14. They still suck now.

• Sanderson, Brandon. Mistborn and the rest of the Mistborn trilogy.

See Ahmed, Saladin above.

• Smith, Clark Ashton. The Return of the Sorcerer.

Gary was wrong to keep CAS off his list in 1977, and wrong to not put him on his 2007 revision. Having a list that includes Lovecraft and Howard but not Smith is like listing great Musketeers and having Porthos and Athos, but not Aramis. Yes, de gustibus, but it's a snub against one of fantasy's all-time greats.

• Wolfe, Gene. The Shadow of the Torturer and the rest of The Book of the New Sun.

This is one of the best additions that Appendix E makes. An excellent series, worthy inspiration, and a great pick as the last new entry.

There are a couple of entries in Appendix E that I'm not familiar with and have no particular comment on. But there's one omission that is really unforgivable. Catherine L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry stories are prime D&D material, written in the heyday of Weird Tales, and present one of the great heroines of sword & sorcery literature. She and her husband Henry Kuttner (who often wrote under each other's bylines) were titans of fantasy and science fiction back when there was no divide. Gygax can be forgiven if he was ignorant of Moore; Mearls and the WotC authors, in an age of the Internet and Google, can't. If you can dig up Stephen King's one mediocre fantasy novel, you can certainly spare an entry for one of the greats.

Appendix E, on the whole, probably has too many duds and too many books that are only on the list because they're popular to be a worthy successor of Appendix N. Really, the 11,000+ pages of Wheel of Time and 4,000+ pages and counting of A Song of Ice and Fire alone should disqualify it; The Lord of the Rings is the longest single work in Appendix N and it's less than a tenth as long as the Wheel of Time. Aside from Gygax's additions and a few others, I would be hesitant to put most of these books on the same level.

In Praise of the Short Story, and the Anthology

I was at my local Barnes & Noble today, and I decided to do something I often do: look about for "Appendix N" material that has snuck back into print. It's a sadly shrinking landscape, unfortunately. Only one volume of Howard appeared, with no Elric and for probably the first time I can think of it, no Andre Norton. Lovecraft and Tolkien are by far the best represented, and Roger Zelazny's Amber books are still in print. Skimpy trade paperbacks of the first three Mars stories by Burroughs are the only other material from actual Appendix N authors.

Until, of course, I went 'round to the beginning of the section and looked at the anthologies. One welcome surprise was The Sword & Sorcery Anthology, a wide-ranging tome that has several Appendix N authors (Howard, Leiber, Moorcock, Anderson) as well as a number who should be considered essential reading: C.L. Moore, Karl Edward Wagner, Gene Wolfe, Charles R. Saunders, and Michael Shea. It's wide-ranging and those are just the ones that I've read and enjoyed. (There's also a few authors in slightly different veins - Glen Cook and George R.R. Martin are the standouts.)

A second volume I found, American Supernatural Tales, is edited by S.T. Joshi, who has made a killing on this kind of thing. It features Appendix N authors Lovecraft, Howard, Derleth, and Leiber as well as several more must-reads: Robert W. Chambers, Clark Ashton Smith, Karl Edward Wagner, and Robert Bloch. It also has stories from people who should be read on general principle - the classics in Irving, Hawthorne, Poe and Bierce, to Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson.

Short stories and novellas have always been very special to me as a form. I've been reading a lot of them lately, mostly Clark Ashton Smith and Manly Wade Wellman (the latter thanks to Michael Curtis's Chained Coffin Kickstarter) and the form has always struck me as essential for fantastic literature. Of course, I love novels – whether Tolkien's dense epics or the light reads of Burroughs – but I find briefer jaunts are often more satisfying. The short story author has no time to spend on long descriptions or travelogues; a world must be sketched quickly and dynamically, and the point arrived at in brief.

When I got into fantasy short stories it was in the mid-1990s, my high school years; in a way it was a relief from overly long fantasy epics and tie-in novels. Short stories, by contrast, can focus on an incident or oddity without becoming tedious; they are great for shifting in mood. You can read a Conan story in the morning and a Lovecraft tale at night, and the next day switch to something in a science fiction vein, if you like. Even a single author can vary widely, such as the drastic shift from Lovecraft's "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" to "The Colour Out of Space." It's a day trip rather than a long vacation.

Sword & Sorcery's revival in the '60s was focused around short books, beginning with one called Swords and Sorcery and continuing with its follow-ups, The Spell of Seven, The Fantastic Swordsmen and Warlocks and Warriors. Edited by L. Sprague de Camp, these books are not terribly hard to find and really defined the subgenre at the time D&D was about to come out. They're a better guide to it than Appendix N; in addition to Howard, Leiber, Moorcock, Vance, Dunsany, Anderson and Zelazny (and the markedly inferior epigones, de Camp and Carter) they feature Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, John Jakes, and a few others.

The great thing in these sort of anthologies is the breadth of worlds that you visit. I think that the idea that everything today in fantasy is not only a novel but a series of novels manages to diminish that kind of breadth, exchanging it for depth in a single world. For a roleplayer, though, I think breadth of ideas is far more important. So it's good to see these kinds of anthologies back on the shelf. There's nothing wrong with extended stays, but it's good to be able to make day trips.