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Wow, we’re almost done with this whole thing. Pretty cool! It’s been fun thus far, and I look forward to next year’s edition. I’ve only missed one prescribed day thus far, which was yesterday, but as the Challenge does not include Saturdays, I can catch up right here and then finish up with Y and Z tomorrow and Monday. As for X, let’s talk about magic words, of which XYZZY is one! XYZZY? What’s that, you may ask? Well, many moons ago, fantasy adventure games on computers had no graphics, so everything was done via text. (Insert voice of PeterDown the rabbit hole….

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Way back when, movies and teevee shows and books and whatnot used to be pretty much self-contained items. But nowadays, in a lot of cases, as specific movies and teevee shows and books and comics branch out into multiple sequels and spinoff series and all of their sequels, what becomes important isn’t so much the original story. Instead, the entire setting of the story takes primacy. Thus, a Universe is born. At what point does a fictional setting become a universe? Star Wars takes place a long time ago ‘in a galaxy far, far away’, but at what point didDown the rabbit hole….

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God, what a slog. I was really hoping that my original impression of this novel, way back when, wouldn’t hold true this time around. When I first read Feast, it had been a few years since I’d read A Storm of Swords, so a lot of the finer points of the various plotlines were not at all fresh on my mind. I chalked up my impression partly to that…but now that I’ve read the entire series in the last few months, I still think this book is a giant slog. Parts of it are really good. Parts of it areDown the rabbit hole….

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Direction is always important…and in a lot of fantasy, specific directions carry with them specific connotations. Such as North. North is often portrayed as cold and desolate and lonely. Just about every fantasy that I know is set in the northern hemisphere of its particular planet, so north really does tend to be a land of cold and, sometimes, a land of unknown. In some cases, the North is where Evil lives: Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Fionavar Tapestry puts Rakoth Maugrim’s fortress up north, just below the “Ruk Barrens”, which are endless lands of ice. In Tigana, he flips thingsDown the rabbit hole….

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One thing I noticed in all my years of reading Arthurian fiction was that Lancelot is an awfully hard character to pull off. Lancelot, for those not ‘in the know’, is the magnificent knight from France who comes to Camelot to serve King Arthur and sit the Round Table. Lancelot is the greatest knight anywhere (well, until Galahad shows up); no one can best him in any test of skill, and what’s more, he’s morally pious to the point that being around him is a real downer. At least, he’s those things until he meets the Queen, Guinevere, and fallsDown the rabbit hole….

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Books abound in fantasy and science fiction. The book is a central plot device or Maguffin or important element in so many stories that to catalog them all would be an exercise in utter futility. But let’s explore some anyway, in this entry. Behold the Incunablum! Strictly speaking, an incunabulum (plural incunabula) is a book printed in Europe before 1501. According to Wikipedia, this is an arbitrary distinction, which is why I can get away with it here. But it’s a cool word, and it kind of connotatively suggests not just any old book, but rather the types you seeDown the rabbit hole….

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If there’s an animal more suited to heroism and derring-do than the horse, I don’t know what it is. Horses abound in fantasy and in science fiction. If you want a big heroic moment, you can do it without having a horse there…but a horse or two really helps. Horses aren’t just well-suited to heroism. Horses lend themselves to tearjerking, too; if you want the audience to sympathize for the main character, well, just kill his poor horse, and that’ll do it. Dances With Wolves starts to become gut-wrenching when Cisco, John Dunbar/DWW’s horse, is killed out from under him.Down the rabbit hole….

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Stories have to take place somewhere, don’t they? In the best of tales, the someplace is almost as important as what goes on there. Heck, there are times like The Lord of the Rings when the setting is, or seems, more important than the tale. The rule of thumb holds: if the setting isn’t memorable, then the tale of the fantastic isn’t going to be, either. Conversely, if you have a really good tale, your setting’s going to be good. So, it stands to reason that one of the greatest of all tales – a tale featuring fencing, fighting, torture,Down the rabbit hole….

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There’s a certain subgenre in which existing, famous stories are retold from the inside-out. I’m not sure what this genre might be called, but when it’s done well, it can be a lot of fun. There’s a great example in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s “Tribbles and Tribulations”, which has the DS9 crew time-travel back so they are actually inside the events of the TOS episode “The Trouble with Tribbles”. The second Back to the Future movie does this as well. And then there’s the Tom Stoppard play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. For these kinds of stories to work,Down the rabbit hole….

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OK. I’m about a quarter of the way through A Feast for Crows on the re-read, and of course, I’ll have more to say about it when I’m done. But I’ve just read the chapter featuring Asha Greyjoy, and got smacked in the face with this (A ‘maester’ is a man who has undergone a high degree of formal education, so an ‘archmaester’ is an extremely learned man, in service to a King or Lord.): Archmaester Rigney once wrote that history is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. Fantasy readers will be put in mind ofDown the rabbit hole….