10 Great Fantasy Stand Alone Novels (Part 2)

Legend by David Gemmell

Ok so now we’re getting into the territory of what one might consider “proper fantasy”. Gemmell in his day was the big don-dada of straight up two fisted action adventure fantasy. While he did not write long interconnected series many of his books share a universe with the others. This one, Legend is but the first in a whole series of the  world of the Drenai, who are a sort of western coded people (though not specifically Greek or Germanic or even Celtic) and takes place at a pivotal moment in their long resistance to the incursions of the Mongol-coded Nadir tribesmen (which thankfully manages to dodge a lot of the dodgy orientalist tropes that one can get what fantasy decides to dip into that tainted well for inspiration).

It’s the story of the siege of Dros Delnoch, that last outpost of the Drenai on their northern frontier holding the gap between two great mountain ranges, a choke point that the Nadir must overcome before then can pass into the lands of the Drenai and is told from the perspective of the defenders.

So far so very so very much what one might expect from a fantasy novel, its Helms Deep but a whole book. What makes it special is what Gemmel himself was bringing to it. By all accounts he was a very genial and kind man, but he was a big dude and while he cut his teeth writing as a stringer on the local beat in his home town of Hastings, he was also a bouncer and grew up around a lot of other big tough guys for whom violence was a normal part of their lives like his beloved step father Bill. There’s a lot in here about masculinity of the decidedly non toxic variety. Also, I was not aware of this the first time I read it but on hearing about it made perfect sense; when Gemmell was writing Legend he had had a cancer diagnosis and legitimately didn’t know if this was going to be the only novel he would ever get to write. It was essentially a form of therapy, the siege of the fortress was him resisting the threat of a potentially life ending illness. The characters in the book, particularly the titular Druss The Legend (based on his stepdad) were his imaginative actualisation of the fighting spirits of those people and the lessons they’d taught him over the course of his life deployed against the existential crisis he was facing down.

Luckily for us, he got over the cancer and though he would die relatively young at 58 of heart disease he would go on to give us some absolute bangers, Echoes of The Great Song, Dark Moon and my favourites the 4 part Rigante series, the first two of which are his take on the Arthurian mythos. So if you read and enjoy Legend there’s a whole body of work of admittedly variable but mostly high quality fantasy for you to get stuck into. But Legend is the best place to start. If you are only ever going to read one David Gemmell book this is very much the one.

Weaveworld by Clive Barker

When horror authors jump genre they tend to bring a certain flavour with them. This fantasy novel from
the horror author Clive Barker who created Hellraiser and whose shorts inspired Candyman and The Midnight Meat Train definitely have a lot in them that is of the macabre and horrific. It’s a portal fantasy about magical beings hiding in a world contained, as the title suggests within the warp and weft of an intricately patterned carpet. Set in the Liverpool of the 80s, the shadow of Thatcherism and the radical kick back against that in that city with the poll tax riots and a Trotskyist faction running the city council add a lot of grit and a profound sense of place and moment to the world building. Our protagonists are all decidedly working class heroes, one of the villains seems to be the embodiment of capital and another is a bitter old cop.

Barker has also never been one to shy away from the intersection between the horrific and the erotic and while used sparingly there are definitely some passages in this that are on the spicy side of things so be warned, this is not for kids or anyone who isn’t comfortable with that type of thing. You will likely squirm at one scene in particular, no spoilers but suffice to say that it’s a memorable depiction of the monstrous feminine specifically the mother aspect. What you should get out of this is again a really good story that rollicks along and keeps you guessing as it unfolds with some great flights of fancy and Barker’s elegant and evocative prose.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Clarke came right out of nowhere back in the early 00s with Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell, a historical fantasy about rival magicians set in early 19^th century Britain. It was a darling of the critics and genre fans alike, one that both the literary world and genre fiction readers could really get behind, like a latter day Doris Lessing. If I had read it myself instead of just watching the apparently very accurate and faithful TV adaptation it might be on here, but I have not. I did read her long anticipated and much shorter though no less lauded follow up Piranesi which came out only a couple of years ago making this the most recent book on this list. Clarke unfortunately for everyone is a long term sufferer of CFS and only produces a book every decade or so, so it behoves us to appreciate them when she does, and appreciate it I did.

Piranesi is the journal of a man with a dodgy memory who finds himself in a huge Gormenghastian mansion which is half full of sea water and has its own tidal system referred to only as The House. As far as he’s aware, this is it, him and the mysterious and enigmatic figure referred to as The Other who shows up occasionally to speak to him are the only two living entities in the entire universe. The human remains of the dozen or so other people he finds around The House are the only other people that ever have existed. Without giving too much away, obviously we as the reader know that there’s something not quite right going on there, particularly as The Other makes to us what are clearly ominous references to places and things from the real world. It’s a short book and it gives up the goods in a nicely paced and well executed fashion so if any of that has you intrigued enough to look into getting a copy and having a look for yourself, you’re in for a treat.

Jerusalem by Alan Moore

Alan Moore is for my money the greatest living writer at least in the English language. After blazing a trail through the comics industry becoming the undisputed king of 80s/90s writers he, after a lot of provocation and bad deals took a sickner with that whole side of the cultural sphere and concentrated on writing fiction. 

His first novel Voice of The Fire was a psycho-geographical exploration of his home city from the first human settlers in that part of the world through to the present of 1997 when the books was written, which is essentially him writing in first person as he takes a walk around his neighbourhood. As great as that was, and indeed worth reading in its own right, it was but a taster for Jerusalem, in which he draws on local history, his own family history and such knowledge as he has gleaned from his own esoteric investigations (the man is a fully accredited practicing IRL wizard) he restates the case made in Voice of the Fire for Northampton city, and specifically his local district The Burroughs being not just the geographical centre of Britain but also of the world in general, indeed of life the universe and everything.

It’s a weighty tome, the longest book on this list by far and its not always an easy read. It is one which will sometimes require careful study to get your head around certain parts of it, especially the section where he’s in character as Lucia Joyce and goes full on Finnegan’s Wake with the prose (no one will blame you for skipping that section tbh), but it’s eminently readable and rewarding for those prepared to pull up their big boy smarty pants and make the effort. It is about a lot of things, the nature of time and reality itself. The Nietzschean notion of eternal recurrence, the degradation of life under what once were important and thriving urban centres by neoliberalism. Its about art and the necessity of making art, ever if its not something you’ll make a living off and its just for you (aka why I keep writing this fucking blog that nobody reads lol). It is rich, textured, funny as hell and if you’re in the right frame of mind for it may rewire your consciousness and cure your todesangst, if that’s a thing you’ve had to deal with in your life.

..........

And so we come to the last and by no means least book on this list. A few years ago I would 100% have had Coraline by Neil Gaiman on here and be talking about it right now but since all the stuff came out its just like nah. As much as the books themselves are all great and whatever weird shit he got up to in his private life very little of it ends up on the page, unlike other problematic authors, looking at You Marion Zimmerman Bradley (and yes I did read a pirated copy of The Mists of Avalon out of curiosity and after knowing what we know now about her, and fuck me as great as that book is in the abstract it is really hard going when you have the full context, genuinely uncomfortable and squicky the way horror fiction is meant to be and this was definitely not written as a horror novel). So yeah, Coraline, American Gods, Anansi Boys, Good Omens, which he did with Terry Pratchett are great stand alone fantasies and read them if you must but please for the love of god buy second hand, pirate or better still, shoplift a hard copy from your local non-independent big book chain retail store if you have to. Whatever it takes, just do not legally purchase a physical or digital copy because even if his numerous accusers are just money grabbing bitches who are exaggerating to fill their pockets (which funnily enough is exactly the same line taken by Rolf Harris about his accusers) if he only did the stuff that he’s admitted to himself, that cunt does not need nor deserve penny one of any residual sales from his work from now until the end of time. 

So with that out of the way, what to do? Like I do love Terry Pratchett and technically all his books in the Discworld series are stand alone but I’ve done a whole other long essay on here about him and his work which you can find here. The TL:DR being, if you’ve not read any of his stuff before, Small Gods, Guards Guards!, Wyrd Sisters or The Wee Free Men for younger and particularly female readers are all good.

Which brings us to someone who I am a massive fan of, haven’t written about on here before and at least to the best of my knowledge hasn’t fucked any of his twenty-something unpaid domestic servants and what I feel is the best jumping on point for him and his whole schtick

Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie

Joe, aka Lord Grimdark, writes much like David Gemmell, good straight up two fisted violent action adventure fantasy. For many people he’s the go to after they’ve read all the Game Of Thrones books. He, Like GRRM does morally dubious complex characters against a complicated and dark setting animated by a black humour (and he’s actually capable of finishing a series once he’s started so there’s that…). There are some horror elements and implied science behind the fiction so it's at least New Weird adjacent. I actually first heard of him through a hit piece by a highly strung traditional fantasy author kvetching about the turn away from fantasy with a firm Christian moral basis into the modern trend of nihilism. I can’t dig up the exact quote but it was something along the lines of: imagine if at then end of the Lord Of The Rings it turned out Gandalf was just as much of a dick as Sauron and only wanted the one ring destroyed so he could be the undisputed power in the land himself and Aragorn was just some useful dupe that he’d installed, to which my immediate response was That sounds dope as fuck, sign me up, and I have been on the Abercrombie train ever since, binging through everything he’d had out up to that point and reading every new book of his as they’ve released.

Joe writes in something like the traditional fantasy style, the main series set in the First Law universe is a trilogy, followed by three stand alone books set in other parts of the same shared world peripheral to the Union, the main setting of the first three, followed by a trilogy set a generation after and starring the children of some of the characters from the previous books and recurring characters from the stand-alones. As a fan and disciple of terry Pratchett he has purposefully written each book so that they really could stand alone and be read out of order, even the individual parts of the two trilogies, but probably better if you don’t tbh. No no, my recommendation is that if you just want to read one of these books to get a flavour of the world and see everything that Abercrombie can do as a writer go for the first of the three stand alone books Best Served Cold. Aside from a very light spoiler for some stuff at the end of the trilogy that doesn’t actually matter there’s nothing in here that’s going to take away from reading the previous books if you go back, hell one of the main POV characters from that trilogy shows up in one scene but its written delicately around it so you wouldn’t actually know unless you’ve read the previous books, but if you have it’s a lovely little Easter egg for you.

This is Abercrombie doing his take on the revenge thriller, it's his Count of Monte Christo or Kill Bill. It starts off our heroine(?) Monza Murcatto being defenestrated after seeing her twin brother murdered in front of her and left for dead by the Duke Orso for whom she’d been formerly employed as one of his top generals. She survives and gathers a rag tag bunch of misfits to seek her revenge, including a few characters you might have come across in the previous trilogy such as Caul Shivers, who shows up in basically every book in this setting aside from the first one and goes through one of the wildest character arcs in genre fiction, with this being the one he’s in the most and has his most pivotal moments. It also has fan favourite Nicomo Cosca, another memorable and well written character who runs the gamut from anti-hero, to hero to primary villain-antagonist in another of the books, though in this one he’s on the side of our main characters and very much on the hero part of that arc.

It’s a great meditation on the nature of revenge as what starts off as a righteous quest for vengeance gets increasingly murky as the collateral damage stacks up and Monza herself begins to doubt the validity of what she’s doing but also hammers home that once you start off on a certain path it can be very hard to get off.

This is Joe on absolute top form, the competence in his character work, world building and technical writing is off the scale. In the later part of the book there’s one of the most cleverly written sex scenes you’ll ever read, not just for the smut but for how he handles character perspectives. The action and battle sequences are characteristically visceral. There’s a great heist sequence. It’s just a good meal well served and you’re in the hands of a master.

And apparently there's talk of a film of this one in the works so if you want to get hipster points by getting in early and reading the novel so you can brag about it now's probably a good time :)

 

So there you go. If you’re looking to branch your reading into fantasy and don’t want to dive head first into a big chonky multi part book series that only starts getting really good 4 books in or whatever or may or may not at the time this is going out ever come to a conclusion, looking at you Patrick Rothfuss and GRRM, this should hopefully have given you something to chew on and possibly inspired you to take a peek at something listed above. I may or may not come back to this topic for there are indeed a few books of which I’m fond that would be considered stand alone fantasy that have been bubbling under and might have been in here if I’d read them more recently. Or I might do something about completed series / trilogies for people that liked A Song Of Ice and Fire and want something similar to get into while enduring the long and possibly unending wait for that next book. Lets just see where the mood takes me. Anyways, I hope you’ve enjoyed this, peace out and if you’ve read any of these and want to comment or especially if you’ve actually picked any of these up thanks to me do leave a comment or share, it would mean the world to me.

10 Great Fantasy Stand Alone Novels (part 1)

This is a thing I often see coming up on forums and Facebook groups dedicated to the fantasy genre. When one thinks of fantasy you tend to think of trilogies like the iconic Lord Of The Rings, big expansive series like The Wheel of Time, A Song Of Ice and Fire, Malazan The Book of The Fallen or even CS Lewis’s Narnia books which run to seven books. For people brought up on the genre who love it there’s nothing better than plugging your mind into someone else’s for an extended period of time, watching the world building unfold and getting nerdy about the lore. For many people though these big commitments are a little much of an ask, newer readers who might just be feeling their way into the genre, people who might not have as much reading time and many other people might just legitimately want a good stand alone book that can show off what the genre can do. 

So the question does often come up, and I’ve answered it enough times that I’ve settled on a list of ten solid rec’s that at least one of them should appeal to anyone who just wants a “one and done”. Some of these might be part of larger series or share universes and characters with other novels by the same author but are perfectly fine to read in isolation or out of sequence. I’m also going to give a short explanation of each, what people are looking for from a novel is going to vary so this is in the spirit of a fair heads up and much as why I rate them.

Some of these books are in my opinion among the best writing of any genre. They’ve ideas that will fire the imagination, prose writing comparable to the best of any literary fiction and some contain a sophisticated commentary on fantasy and the world in general.

So, in no particular order these are the first five:

 The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson.

This book is one cited by the noted fantasy author Michael Moorcock as Better Than Tolkien. In the context of the 60s when that statement was made, performatively dunking on the undisputed king of the genre was a spectator sport indulged in by the young revolutionaries working in the field who wanted to kick against the thing that very much defined the genre. It was a provocative statement then and will have many up in arms to this day, think Jonny Rotten’s “I Hate Pink Floyd” T.

But actually, the man has a point. Its interesting to compare with The Lord Of The Rings since they’re contemporaneous, the first editions of it and The Lord Of The Rings each dropping the same year, and they’re both original works of fantasy fiction that draw from the same well, the western European mythological canon and dark ages history. Whereas Tolkien takes inspiration from these works to create the complete world of Middle Earth with its own mythos, history, languages and even geology, what Anderson does is to read The Book of Invasions, Ulster Cycle, Mabinogion, Norse Mythology, the Sagas, Fairy Lore, The Tales of King Arthur etc. and treat them as a consistent and co existing Extended Universe and writes his own new story set at the end of the dark ages. As someone brought up on this stuff, to me it rings very authentic, it has the style, the feel and inhabits the morally ambiguous universe as the old pagan sources. Its also just a cracking read, much tighter than The Lord Of The Rings and many another which would try to imitate it.

It’s also of a certain historical significance in that it might be one of the earliest of the seminal genre works to be inspired by Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, we’re talking a good decade before Earthsea and two before Star Wars. I’m not quite sure if those were direct conscious influences or just convergence from working with similar resources along the same lines but if you are familiar with The Heros Journey, the idea of archetypes and specifically The Shadow Self from Jung you’ll see that in it.

So yes, if you’re getting into fantasy and have read and enjoyed Tolkien and looking something else that might scratch that itch, maybe give it a go and see if you come to the same conclusion as Moorcock and myself. Conversely if you have read Tolkien and maybe weren’t so fussed and would prefer something similar that’s a bit darker and spicier this could be something you’ll enjoy.

 

The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien

 This is some peak mid 20^th century Irish literary fantasy by one of the great unsung heroes of Irish literature. Flann, real name Brian Nolan, was a Dublin man who ran in the same literary and drinking circles as Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh. Though overshadowed by them in posterity in terms of the quality and brilliance of his writing he was very much their equal, arguably Joyce’s true heir. The problem is that he didn’t have such an expansive literary output, or not for his fiction anyway, as he was a journalist and wrote a daily column under the name Myles Na Gopaleen which took up most of his creative energies and was in all fairness one of the most popular and widely read in its day. He did leave us with a couple of short but excellent books and The Third Policeman is the one I would consider the most accessible. It’s a novella length story of a strange young man who is what we might today term a sociopathic incel that after plotting and carrying out a robbery with an associate finds himself in circumstances stranger than himself as he wanders into a distorted surreal version of the Irish countryside. Its kind of funny but also kind of horrifying. I’m not sure how appealing that sounds but I think the best way I could sell it is that it is beyond trippy, a fairy story for adults that will do things to your head you would normally need chemical assistance for, which is interesting since as far as we know O’Brien never indulged in anything more psycho active than the sup, which he was very into by all accounts. It counts amongst its fans Alan Moore and Blindboy Boatclub, the latter of who’s mother prays to the shade of O’Brien’s brother on his behalf for his continued literary success. It’s a short enough and quick enough read that I don’t want to give up the goods re the plot beyond what I have but lets just say that one of the most memorable sequences involves a dialectic of fractal infinity in the form of a series of little boxes each a perfect copy of the other and each fitting into the other perfectly until we reach the material limitations of the tools by which reality is perceived and manipulated. I mean if that alone isn’t appealing, I don’t know what to tell you.

 

Wizard Of the Pigeons by Megan Lindholm

This is an urban fantasy (and one of the seminal works that brought that subgenre into popularity) by the author who is much better known for writing epic high fantasy under her other pen name Robin Hobb. As Hobb she’s one of the big dogs of the modern fantasy genre along with George R R Martin, her Realm Of The Elderlings series in particular being one of the ones rec’d to people who liked ASOIAF and want something else to get stuck into, and its actually finished. This earlier work is as good as any of her better known stuff and has many of the qualities that make her epics great. She’s a great world builder and in this instance she captures her home city of Seattle of the early 80s.

If you’re familiar with the Terry Gilliam film The Fisher King you’ll be in familiar territory (like “very familiar” to the point where I’m surprised that no legal action was taken or even mooted) in that it’s an ambiguous fantasy whose phantasmagorical elements might just be the hallucinatory subjectivity of a psychotic unhoused person. The character writing is strong, the titular Wizard is a compelling and tragic figure who we feel and suffer along with as he uses his “cunning insight” (making him a true Wizard in the original sense of the word, a “Wise-ard” / wise man rather than someone in a pointy hat who can cast spells) to navigate the urban jungle much as you do with Hobb’s protagonists over the much longer stretches of her blockbuster series. There’s a strong anti-war subtext in that the wisdom the character has was hard won through being away to a traumatising war experience, a life hard lived ever since and deep connection to the psychogeography of the city.

 Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay

 Kay started his career in fantasy at the top as an associate of and worker for the Tolkien estate who would become with his own work one of those along with Tad Williams who would quietly revolutionise the genre in the 80s by bringing a critical and modernist sensibility into high fantasy. This particular story inspired by IRL cultural genocide (Kay cites Translations by Brien Friel, a play about the culture wars over the Irish language) it has one of the great central premises in the genre. An evil wizard – conqueror casts a spell to erase the name of an entire people from the collective cultural memory in a fit of pique after a particularly bloody act of defiance by them sees his son die in battle. Our heroes are essentially nationalist revolutionaries on a quest to rise the people in rebellion and break the spell so that the name of their country; ‘Tigana’, can be heard once again. You cannot tell me that if Bibi had wizard powers he wouldn’t be pulling this type of shit, like the Zionist lobby are doing essentially this with their insistence that “Palestine” was made up by the USSR in the 1960s. It’s a good rollicking fantasy yarn but this premise gives it thematic heft often lacking elsewhere in the genre. It is complex. Our “heroes” will sometimes do things that are of dubious ethicality for the cause, make great sacrifices of themselves or just fuck other people over. One of our POV characters becomes tragically enamoured with the antagonist, as some subjugated people do with their oppressors. Also, as someone who has studied modern history and was introduced to Carlo Ginzburg’s work in my 101 class at uni the bit where it segues into The Night Battles for a little bit was just *chef’s kiss*.

The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Micheal Swannick

A human child called Jane is taken to the land of faerie. A changeling, she becomes a child slave labourer in a place that makes the titular Iron Dragons. She will escape and eventually pose as a student in the faerie high school, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the modern high school of the late 1980s, gets a bit into some bad habits, as you do at that age, sex, partying, shoplifting, you know, typical teenage stuff. She’ll even go beyond that to Faerie university to do STEM (Alchemy) all guided by the ineluctable and sinister force of the Iron Dragon. 

We’re into some very deep and for my money well executed 'fantasy as social-commentary' here along the lines of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The Dragon factory is a shitty ununionized sweatshop, not unlike the “Special Economic Zones” in China or labour conditions in general in the tiger economies of South East Asia that were coming into greater public knowledge at the time, the high school beauty queen gets to be the top girl in her year before being Wickerman’d at homecoming, The Iron Dragon becomes the ambient corruption and environmental degradation innate to capitalist development, he has the local pixies doing their own Guerra Sucia at one point just so he can stock up on his fossil fuel reserves.

So this is clever stuff and as with the other books I’ve recommended, the clever world building is only there to add to and accentuate what is a cracking story and a good read. Taking Jane past the usual fantasy-bildungsroman trappings into adulthood is a nice touch, the relationship between Jane and the Dragon Melanchthon is one of the most interesting and memorable in literature. Its one I would be judicious in who I would recommend it to since it appears as a YA / kids book at first but really isn’t. What it is is extremely compelling and sometimes challenging, I don't want to give away the ending or anything but lets just say that there's a sequence late on which is reminiscent of the end of 2001 in being pointedly abstract and "trippy" in both the literal transportative sense and the other.

This book is also typically my answer to "if you could see any novel made into TV or a film what would it be". I would personally love to see it done with a load of animatronic puppets representing the faeries, like literally getting Jim Henson's creature workshop and Cosgrove Hall in on the production and shooting it on the sort of analogue video tapes they did all the latter's Narnia and The Borrowers adaptions to give it that '80s kids TV retro feel with only Jane and maybe the various incarnations of Testigus and the Baldwynn played by actual people. At least that's the way it comes through in my head when I'm reading it and maybe yours too if you think that sounds at all cool or interesting.

………………………………………

So that is all for the time being. The next one of these will include my favourite living author’s masterwork along with more of the best fantasy writing of modern times.

Cartoons Revolutionary Socialists should watch with their kids: The Return

When the mainline of a particular modern cartoon series was due to finish because of an early cancellation back in 2018, 7 years ago now (notwithstanding the four subsequent feature length episodes that delivered the real denouement to the series or the explicitly for adults sequel/successor that is currently in its second season) I made a bold claim on my socials. That was that the show in its entirety constituted one of the great works of narrative art of the modern age and ought to be studied in future years, centuries, millennia even the way we now study Shakespeare’s Theatre, The Canterbury Tales, Beowulf, The Táin etc. It was a bit of an extreme take but I stand by it now as firmly as I did then, even more so considering the excellence of the subsequent material from the team attached to the IP. 

So, before we get into the “whys” of all of that, lets have a quick word about why I’m writing about this now.

Fans of the blog may recall that in the distant past we had an occasional series wherein I would do a quick breakdown of children’s animated series and films from or adjacent to my own youth that contained progressive, even revolutionary, leftist themes and ideas. Little did I know in 2012 not having children of my own that the world of children’s entertainment was going through a minor revolutionary upheaval of its own.

What I had intended to do was after the most recent of these (name link) was to do a couple more and then finish on a particular series that wasn’t remotely political but had an incredible surrealist chaotic tip to it that I very much enjoyed and vibed to when I was a child. Unfortunately the creator and show runner of the series was subsequently outed as a creep of the highest order and I can no longer in good conscience support or platform any of their work. I wouldn’t even say the name of the person or the work that they are synonymous with. 

It was a blow and something that took a while getting over. Knowing that was on the horizon didn’t make me feel much like coming back to the series, even though it was one that I liked doing and a small part of the reason why this thing is so sparse. 

That said, we have up until a few years ago been living through what will probably come to be seen as a golden age in children and young adults animated media, especially long form episodic series for the small screen. From about the start of the 2010s to a few years ago when the Cartoon Network that was arguably the driving force for this shuttered, there was a marked spike in the quality and variety of these shows. The whole story of what this was and what happened to essentially kill it are a whole story and too long a one for me to want to go into right now, a post for another time probably. Suffice to say that I have got enough things to talk about to potentially keep me going for some time.

To begin with I’d like to start with what is in my opinion the best of these series, and also the foundational one of the era. It has proven to be both a masterpiece in itself and also a training ground for many other creators who would go on to do their own works which I will also be covering in future instalments.

So what time is it? 

Adventure Time!

(So at this point in these articles I usually split things into three sections, What’s It About, Why Its Good and What the kids will hopefully take from it. I have found that with Adventure time giving a reasonably explanation for what its about inevitably leads into explaining the others so I’ll just get stuck in)

Initially at least Adventure Time is about the adventures of Finn the Human and his stretchy dog Jake. They live in a tree house in the grasslands of the land of Ooo. The nearest civilisation is the Candy Kingdom where the candy people live ruled by the Princess Bubblegum with whom Finn has a romantic interest. There’s a Vampire Queen called Marceline who the MCs become friends with, along with other characters like Tree Trunks the elderly cute little elephant and the seemingly superficial valleygirl-accented Lumpy Space Princess. Their main antagonist is the Ice King, an Ice Wizard who likes to steal princesses who Finn and Jake inevitably rescue. Most of the stories in the first season are very simple stand alone fables, very straight forwards and just looking to entertain. The show is for young children but pitched in a way that any adults watching will get a good laugh out of the humour. 

That’s how it all starts, at some point though things start getting more complex. During the production of season one the tale grows in the making, an episode suggests that the world is not just a whacky fantasy that happens to have one human in it, but that it’s a post-apocalyptic wasteland on earth some centuries past a catastrophic “Mushroom War”. Between seasons 1 and 2 it’s decided that the silliness in the first season is actually building a world with a consistent cannon. Locations are returned to, throwaway gags become or are retconned into setup for stuff that happens seasons later. There is a subtle shift in the writing in that the characters start getting fleshed out and dimensions to otherwise pretty simple archetypes get added. The Ice King gets a backstory and becomes one of the richest and most interesting characters in the show. 

This MF'r

Around season 3 you start getting episodes that aren’t focused on Finn and Jake. Thank You is the first one of these and is told almost completely visually. We start getting episodes that are explorations of different ideas and concepts that the writers find interesting. As the series progresses the complexity in all senses levels up each year. It basically grows up with its audience. You get episodes in the late run that go from one week being an exploration of big brands and consumer capitalism to Crowleian Hermeneutics the next. Finn grows onscreen physically from the start, getting drawn a little bit physically larger as the early seasons progress. The voice actor was a literal child himself at the start, you can literally hear his voice breaking. The character also develops emotionally as we go on too. Some of the plots of the early episodes play his naivety and youthful enthusiasm and immaturity as a positive, in season three towards the end we get My Way which is a corrective to this and he learns that his particular approach isn’t always the best and that’s okay. This stays as part of Finn for the duration. Finn’s ongoing quest for romantic partnership is an ongoing feature of the show as well as his quest for identity as the apparently last human in a world thriving with other forms of life become drivers of the overarching season-long stories that we get later on. Marceline’s centuries long backstory which ties in to a lot of the backstory of the world itself is filled out in a 7-parter that is partially based on some of the major arcana of the Tarot and is some of the finest storytelling in the animated format ever. The real main antagonist of the series gets unleashed and our heroes end up travelling across space and time and into other dimensions to fight it. Jake becomes a Dad and the trials and travails of fatherhood become a feature of his story line. BMO, the cute little robot character that lives with Finn and Jake has a psychotic break. There’s a handful of episodes that are legit short horror and genuinely unsettling. 

We get episodes that are shorts compilations where you have to guess the theme that connects each of them. There’s the Fionna and Cake episodes where the characters are gender swapped. There’s even one of the shorts episodes set in the gender swapped universe where there’s a gag involving layers upon layers of layers of abstraction that is as mind blowing as it is hilarious.

The ruling classes, as per Adventure Time

The general sensibility behind Adventure Time is not quite overtly socialist but it is definitely anti-capitalist. Jake, when explaining how society works to Finn opines in a typically abstracted way what is a not unreasonable rendering primitive accumulation and the rise of the ruling class and the law in a way that is readily understandable to the target audience:

"The laws ain’t made to help earthy cats like us… Here on our planet, back in the old days—back in the real old days—it was just every man for hisself, scrooblin' and scrat-scrobblin' for the good stuff, the greenest valleys, and scrat-scrobblin'. And the strongest, meanest men got the best stuff. They got the green valleys and were like, "The rest of you, y'all scrats get sand. And that’s when they made the laws you see."

Jake The Dog, Season 6 Episode 12 ‘Ocarina’

The whole thing is definitely very much animated by a left liberal-hippy ethos. It is feminist, it’s very much pitched against the toxic masculinity you get in standard hero narratives. It’s very queer friendly, there’s a canonically homosexual relationship which builds from the midpoint of the series onwards. There's a lot of environmentalist messaging in certain parts too.

If you’re starting to watch it as a young-ish kid around the time of season 1 or 2 you were essentially growing up with the show. This is why I would personally recommend for any adults I know with young children that if you are going to follow my advice here and watch it with your kids that you stagger the seasons. I feel like if you’re starting off with it with children who are age appropriate for the first couple of seasons the later seasons are going to be a bit too weird and abstract, unless they’re precociously smart and this is the thing that’s going to unlock their media literacy for the rest of their lives, which it well could. If you’re starting with kids who are the right age for the later seasons they might bounce off the earlier more kiddie stuff in the first couple. This is why I would also personally advise you to get it on physical. The one legal streaming service that its on in the UK at least butchers or outright bans some of the episodes that have some of the darker or more implicitly adult humour. This shouldn’t be an issue for the home releases, though do check since some of the UK release randomly miss important episodes. 

There are 10 seasons of varying length and 4 40+ minute short films that fill out the run. These last were originally broadcast out of order, though they stand alone pretty well and it doesn’t quite matter what order they’re done in as long as you finish on Together Again as that was clearly intended as the capstone and canonical end of the series as it ties up Finn and Jake’s story and the themes of the whole show. 

We also got a spin off series called Fionna and Cake about the gender swapped universe that is explicitly for adults. It’s great, again it levels up in real time with the original audience of Adventure Time. It starts off in something approaching the real world with a 20-somethig Fionna living in a crappy apartment in an unnamed city with a seemingly perfectly normal cat going from one bullshit job to another. By the time we get to Ooo we see things we didn’t get to see in the show, like the characters bleeding after a fight and using money. The second episode is a self-conscious criticism and deconstruction of one episode from the old series about dealing with trauma. It is clever and playful as the show was at its best and is thankfully currently ongoing. I probably wouldn’t recommend it to anyone over 15 though.

That’s about as much as I think I can or want to say without going into too much granular detail. If I feel like it I might come back to the well and do some deep dive on particular episodes, like the aforementioned one about brands that is essentially No Logo condensed into a ten minute mostly silent childrens cartoon, or the Scrat Scroblin’. I really hope I haven’t over egged the more complex or adult elements of the show to the point where people have the impression that it goes too far or is ever not child friendly. For all of that it never stops being bright and funny. Even the horror episodes tend to end on a joke. It helps that each episode only runs for ten minutes. I think anyone whatever age will get a lot out of it.

Cartoons that all revolutionary socialists should make their kids watch, Part III Flight of Dragons

Flight Of Dragons (Animated feature, Rankin Bass 1982)

What its about:

As the age of magic draws gives way to the age of reason, the four Wizard brothers who are the guardians of the realm of enchantment meet to discuss what to do.  Carolinus the Green Wizard (whose domain is nature) argues that if man is to chose logic and reason over magic then the brothers should gather their magic together to create a haven for themselves and all the enchanted creatures in another world, away from the ravages of logic, in a place where they can live on in our imagination to inspire us.  The magic brothers agree to the plan, except for Ommadon The Red, the wizard of darkness and destruction who wishes to use the imagination of mankind and his darkest impulses to drive him towards self destruction, leaving the world free from logic for magic to rule again. So begins a quest to the dark depths of Ommadon’s realm to secure his red crown of power and make sure that his plans don’t come to pass.

Why its Good:

Well, to begin with, for 1980s Rankin Bass the art and animation is unusually good.  The art work on the dragons in particular is wonderfully detailed, showing the film’s origins in a book of illustrations of dragons.  The story is good, the plotting is tight and the quest feels suitably epic.  The voice acting is also brilliant, with James Earl Jones in particular shining as the dark wizard Ommadon with his deep baritone vocals, possibly projecting even more menace than he did as the voice of Darth Vader.  It has many moments of escapism and wonder and a good couple of really dark scenes, Ommadons speech to the wizards council and the Ogre of Gormley Keep’s attack on the Inn both stand out and definitely left a deep impression on me at least.

What the Young ’Uns will hopefully take from it:

One of the basic truths of the world that many people, indeed most adults I know, have trouble getting to grips with is the dialectic between reason and cold hard logic on the one hand, and the imaginative / intuitive / creative mode of thinking on the other.  This “left brain / right brain” divide (actually this has no basis in real physiological terms, but I like it because it’s a handy short hand for describing the relationship between the two) should be central to our way of understanding the world and the mental processes that shape us and it is precisely this that the film tackles as its main thematic material.  In the story Carolinus (who wanted to separate the two spheres) is told by the tree of knowledge to call on a person from our time (who shares a name with the author of the book the film was based on).  He is told to do this because in order to defeat Ommadon, who represents acquisitive self interest and nihilistic cynicism, you need someone with a foot in both worlds who can thereby bridge the gap between the two.  This is a very profound lesson to impart to anyone, especially the young but including the most hardened activists.  Gramsci talked about the mentality of a good Marxist revolutionary as “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”, and surely that’s more or less the same message?  It’s a good lesson and in this instance it is charmingly conveyed in a film that is enjoyable to adults and children.

Are the Lannisters the real 'goodies' in A Song Of Ice And Fire?

Tonight I did an introduction for the branch meeting of the Socialist Workers Party on the subject of Mark Fishers book Capitalist realism. I had intended to use the talk as the basis for a blog post about extending Mark Fishers analysis of 21st century capitalist ideology, possibly extending the general thrust of the book by looking at the peculiarities of Capitalist Realism in the context of Northern Ireland. Unfortunately I got a bit over enthusiastic and lent my copy of the book out to someone after the meeting forgetting that i had this in mind to do so I no longer have a copy of the book to quote from and without it my loose notes don't make much sense. I will do this when I get the book back so for now I'm going to repost a note I posted to my facebook ages ago which should probably have been a blog entry anyway.

Are the Lannisters the real goodies in A Song Of Ice and Fire?

Yes, that might sound a bit strange. They are incestuous, they kill people and start wars and the fact that one of them is Charles Dance is a bit of a give-away, but hear me out. In the context of Westeros, the Lannisters are on the side of history and progress, which is supposed to be a good thing, isn't it?

According to all available sources and GRRM himself, the events of ASOIAF are the product of the years he spent researching the 'Early Modern' period (historians term meaning roughly 1500s to the late 18th century, late modernism being occasioned by industrialisation, the enlightenment etc.) and the Wars of the Roses in Britain in particular. Speaking as someone who has had the pleasure of studying the economic and social history of Britain at undergraduate level I can say that the research was time well spent. The world of Westeros is well thought out and feels real enough. As a social historian I get the same thrill from the series as a natural scientist must feel when she reads a good bit of well thought out hard sci-fi where the science element is real and no-one contradicts the laws of physics. Looking for a moment at this time period as a historian of the long dureé what is it that characterises this period in history of kings, Royal successions and wars just before the reformation and the first wave of European imperialism? It is the crisis of feudalism and the shift to a mercantile capitalist economy.

Essentially, Feudalism was the organising principle of societies across Europe since European civilisation re-emerged from the Dark ages (which weren’t actually that dark tbh, but that’s a discussion for another time). Under Feudalism wealth in society was expressed in terms of land and social status and class largely depended on how much land you had, the resources it could produce and the number of people on it you could compel to fight for you. Lords, Barons, knights, kings etc, these titles were all measures of what level you were at under this system. Co-existing within this system was the nascent form of Capitalism, i.e. wealth expressed as an abstract in terms of gold and coin. This wasn’t the whole of the economy, it started out small but as the years progressed this form of wealth holding would prove more productive and eventually it would draw more power towards the social classes that were associated with it, who at the time were called by some “the middling sort of people” . Eventually this class would come to surpass then absorb and replace the land-holding ruling classes of the previous epoch.

Historical change like this does not happen without a fight. The first stage of this fight was the transformation from early feudalism into Market feudalism. This change wasn’t necessarily a revolutionary change that would bring about an immediate improvement to peoples lives. Anyone who really studies history should know better than to see everything as a unstoppable chain of progress and improvement. What happened in practice was that the cannier lords and kings began to consolidate power into a centralised state with themselves at the top. It is in this period that many of the nation-states that we know today first began to take form, Britain, France and Spain being some of the more prominent examples. With this period of consolidation came political absolutism and repression. But it was also the period of the renaissance, the rise of humanism as an alternative to Christianity and it was a necessary stage that society would have to go through to get to where we are today.

Which brings us to Game of Thrones.

Game of thrones and the Song Of ice and fire series of books it’s based on are, I believe, the imaginative recreation of this historical process against a background of a different biosphere to the one we know. The Baratheon and Stark dynasties represent the early feudal order. They are land owner – War lords whose personal power is built on military prowess and whose moral code is based on the feudal notions of tradition and fealty. The Lannisters in the other hand represent the passage into Feudal Capitalism. They are known for their wealth and their outlook is distinctly more modern. They prefer realpolitik to airy notions of duty and honour. Tyrion Lannister, in his own way, represents the progressive intellectual revolution that was as much a part of that process as the political repression that came with it, this time period in our world gave us the foundations of modern philosophy and the beginnings of the sciences. As such, the Lannisters are the ones on the side of history. They aren’t exactly nice, Joeffry is obviously a little shit and there’s the whole incest thing, but George RR Martin seems to have the historians’ eye for these things. We may personally prefer the Starks or even the Baratheons but they were warriors, paternalistic savages who maybe aren’t the best people to be running Westeros. The point is made in the series and books, Robert was running the kingdom into the ground and the state would fall apart without the Lannisters money holding it together. They put a lot of their own capital into the state coffers, do they not in some sense deserve to run things, or are they not at least more deserving than those who are merely good at beating other people up?

Well, my answer is no. The other plot line in the concerning Dothraki is a mirror to the events that unfolded in our world around the Mongols. These Barbarian societies were the chaotic yin to the yang of civilisation. It’s also here that you get the strongest fantasy element in GOT, the dragons. Yes, there will be Dragons.

That is why I for one welcome our new Dothraki overlords and wish the one true ruler of Westeros, Daenerys Targaryen a long and fruitful reign as god-empress.

Unless a John Ball type leader emerges later in the series who decides to agitate for turning the War of 5 Kings into a revolutionary war. I haven’t read the books yet so here’s hoping.

Only two months in and already resorting to filler and reposts. Next time it should be something more interesting.