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So I've covered where a whole load of my basic concepts of fantasy and SF and narrative came from, and more or less closed out where I came across Terry Pratchett and Raymond E. Feist for the first time.
At some point in the summer of 1987, with my nine-year-old brain fired up from reading Lord of the Rings, I pretty much invented for myself the idea of LARP. I'm guessing I must have seen a bit of a documentary or read something somewhere, because the concept that I had was pretty close to what's now the Scandinavian form, albeit I was going for full-contact combat with boffer style weapons. I remember explaining this concept at length to my parents, who listened patiently and explained that taking over areas of forestry and building stuff there wasn't going to be allowed. I am retrospectively amused that that was the point on which they reckoned the project would fail, rather than anything else. I was less than a year out from finding out TTRPGs existed, via an article in a computer magazine, mostly likely Your Sinclair.
Pratchett and Feist were in 1988 or 1989, and I think it was in 1988 that I got hold, in a bookshop in Enniscorthy, of a book called The Riddling Reaver. That was a followup, technically, to Fighting Fantasy - The Introductory Role-playing Game, but because as far as I can make out, nobody in bookshops understood sequels in the 1980s, the first book wasn't there. Nevertheless, it was enough to be getting on with, and over the next year, I located the first book, and then the Advanced Fighting Fantasy books. As RPGs went, this was primitive, but it was available in paperback, sold through the same distributors as novels and choose-your-own-adventure books, and thereby available in rural Ireland. I must have scoured every bookshop in Leinster, plus some in Belfast, Galway and gods only know where else.
FF and its variations gave me a way to try to translate the stuff I was seeing in novels - and in late 1988 and into 1989, I was acquiring and reading fantasy novels at the rate of about two a week, which considering where I lived and my access to books was somewhat staggering in hindsight. Vartry Books in Ashford, across the road from my cousin Brian's house, was responsible for about 80% of that, I think. Because I could sell books back to them for half the price, I could turn £20 into about £37.50 worth of books and at prices like £1.50 to £1.80, that was a lot. This does mean that there is a period of about seven years - 10 to 17, say - where I don't know what book some concepts came from, because I read them once and sold them back. I know I got the concepts of animated statues from one of these books, and I'm pretty sure I had the notion of colonisation through time travel from Julian May around this point.
Oddly, I don't remember where I first got hold of an issue of Dragon magazine. I have a clear memory of acquiring one particular issue - 1991, issue #175, bought in Easons in The Square shopping centre in Tallaght, where I was on a school trip, but that was at least two years later, and maybe more. Dragon was my fundamental reader in fantasy and gaming, which probably gave me an odd perspective overall. I didn't acquire any of the actual D&D rulebooks until 1992, at earliest, and it might even have been later, although I had acquired Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, WHFRP, a bit before; universally referred to as "wuffrup".
For most of my teens, TV was not very much present. My father was never keen on the device, and used to put it in the attic during the summer, and on three different occasions, gave it away instead, reckoning on getting a new one for the winter, and sometimes even doing so. I wasn't much into it anyway; we could get three stations, and there was rarely much of interest on any of them. The X-Files appeared around 1994 or 1995, and I know I saw most of Twin Peaks earlier, although some of that was at the houses of friends. Most friends, where there was cable or satellite, had TVs permanently tuned to MTV anyway.
There were a few tropes of my teenage games and writing where I'm unsure of the origin, which all go together in my head: the infinite building (and the infinite library, specifically); the Multiverse; portals; personification of concepts; magical universities. All of these are widespread in fantasy, for sure, I'm just unsure where I first came across them.
And I'm still slightly surprised that there are no big successful fantasy series set at magical colleges or universities - The Magicians starts out at Brakebills, but doesn't really stay there, and it's the only example I can think of. There are a few single books - Pamela Dean's superb Tam Lin, Caroline Stevermeyer's A College of Magics, which even has a couple of sequels I need to track down, and which might prove the exception to the rule - but no big series. There are, of course, several bajillion Harry Potter clones set at boarding schools, many crossing over with the paranormal romance area. But third level just seems ignored, and secondary world universities unexamined.
The peculiar stuff about the teenage material, though, is that there isn't all that much that has had the lasting impact of the material I read as a kid, or of the material I read after I left home. I'll try to pick through some of that in the next such post.
At some point in the summer of 1987, with my nine-year-old brain fired up from reading Lord of the Rings, I pretty much invented for myself the idea of LARP. I'm guessing I must have seen a bit of a documentary or read something somewhere, because the concept that I had was pretty close to what's now the Scandinavian form, albeit I was going for full-contact combat with boffer style weapons. I remember explaining this concept at length to my parents, who listened patiently and explained that taking over areas of forestry and building stuff there wasn't going to be allowed. I am retrospectively amused that that was the point on which they reckoned the project would fail, rather than anything else. I was less than a year out from finding out TTRPGs existed, via an article in a computer magazine, mostly likely Your Sinclair.
Pratchett and Feist were in 1988 or 1989, and I think it was in 1988 that I got hold, in a bookshop in Enniscorthy, of a book called The Riddling Reaver. That was a followup, technically, to Fighting Fantasy - The Introductory Role-playing Game, but because as far as I can make out, nobody in bookshops understood sequels in the 1980s, the first book wasn't there. Nevertheless, it was enough to be getting on with, and over the next year, I located the first book, and then the Advanced Fighting Fantasy books. As RPGs went, this was primitive, but it was available in paperback, sold through the same distributors as novels and choose-your-own-adventure books, and thereby available in rural Ireland. I must have scoured every bookshop in Leinster, plus some in Belfast, Galway and gods only know where else.
FF and its variations gave me a way to try to translate the stuff I was seeing in novels - and in late 1988 and into 1989, I was acquiring and reading fantasy novels at the rate of about two a week, which considering where I lived and my access to books was somewhat staggering in hindsight. Vartry Books in Ashford, across the road from my cousin Brian's house, was responsible for about 80% of that, I think. Because I could sell books back to them for half the price, I could turn £20 into about £37.50 worth of books and at prices like £1.50 to £1.80, that was a lot. This does mean that there is a period of about seven years - 10 to 17, say - where I don't know what book some concepts came from, because I read them once and sold them back. I know I got the concepts of animated statues from one of these books, and I'm pretty sure I had the notion of colonisation through time travel from Julian May around this point.
Oddly, I don't remember where I first got hold of an issue of Dragon magazine. I have a clear memory of acquiring one particular issue - 1991, issue #175, bought in Easons in The Square shopping centre in Tallaght, where I was on a school trip, but that was at least two years later, and maybe more. Dragon was my fundamental reader in fantasy and gaming, which probably gave me an odd perspective overall. I didn't acquire any of the actual D&D rulebooks until 1992, at earliest, and it might even have been later, although I had acquired Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, WHFRP, a bit before; universally referred to as "wuffrup".
For most of my teens, TV was not very much present. My father was never keen on the device, and used to put it in the attic during the summer, and on three different occasions, gave it away instead, reckoning on getting a new one for the winter, and sometimes even doing so. I wasn't much into it anyway; we could get three stations, and there was rarely much of interest on any of them. The X-Files appeared around 1994 or 1995, and I know I saw most of Twin Peaks earlier, although some of that was at the houses of friends. Most friends, where there was cable or satellite, had TVs permanently tuned to MTV anyway.
There were a few tropes of my teenage games and writing where I'm unsure of the origin, which all go together in my head: the infinite building (and the infinite library, specifically); the Multiverse; portals; personification of concepts; magical universities. All of these are widespread in fantasy, for sure, I'm just unsure where I first came across them.
And I'm still slightly surprised that there are no big successful fantasy series set at magical colleges or universities - The Magicians starts out at Brakebills, but doesn't really stay there, and it's the only example I can think of. There are a few single books - Pamela Dean's superb Tam Lin, Caroline Stevermeyer's A College of Magics, which even has a couple of sequels I need to track down, and which might prove the exception to the rule - but no big series. There are, of course, several bajillion Harry Potter clones set at boarding schools, many crossing over with the paranormal romance area. But third level just seems ignored, and secondary world universities unexamined.
The peculiar stuff about the teenage material, though, is that there isn't all that much that has had the lasting impact of the material I read as a kid, or of the material I read after I left home. I'll try to pick through some of that in the next such post.
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