The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones

I may have picked this book back up because I've been playing Skyrim lately, and some clichés seemed very familiar. Or maybe I only realized that while reading: I don't remember, exactly. But Diana Wynne Jones's dissection of epic fantasy tropes is not only applicable to book-format works: this is what I'm saying.

Anyway, I re-read The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, for what I think is the third time. If you read fantasy at all, I hope you've already heard about this book. If you read fantasy more than occasionally, I hope you've already read it. If not: you're in luck. It's not very long, it's funny on every page, and it's true in ways that will sour bad books for you forever - which is a good thing, since who wants to waste time on bad books?

(I saw - and will not link, since I don't want to pile on - a very very long "review" of this book on Amazon by a would-be writer who is exactly the kind of person Jones was writing about, who has completely missed the point of the book, and who complains that it doesn't have a middle or an end. So I can safely say that the reason for this book still exists.)

The origin of this book is legendary, and retold in a short afterword in the edition I read (a book-club edition of the 2006 Firebird revision). Jones was part of the editorial team for the first edition of Encyclopedia of Fantasy in the early '90s, and was getting fed up by the way that so many books were essentially the same. So she decided to write the travel guide to the country they all seemed to be set in: Fantasyland.

As that sad Amazon reviewer did not realize or appreciate, it's formatted as a travel book: map up front, then instructions on how to use the book and a page of helpful icons, then the main body of the book, in a series of alphabetically-arranged entries from Adept to Zombies.

For example:

Caverns are large underground systems with RIVERS running through them,. They can be entered from SECRET PASSAGES, behind WATERFALLS, and from holes in the hillside. At first there will be large grottoes with stalactites, followed, when your torch fails, by areas that glow on their own. Shortly you will come upon a major centre of population, which can be of Other PEOPLES or of troglodytic humans. Here you will be prudent to buy a BOAT (or steal one if the Cavern Dwellers are hostile), load yourselves, your wounded, and any provisions aboard it, and set off down the underground River. Your least favorite COMPANION will probably die at this point. After quite a few days you will come out in a Hidden VALLEY, often occupied by DRAGONS. This is the main way in which male Tourists get to meet Dragons and you should not miss the experience. Even if there are no Dragons, all Tourists must expect to spend some days in a Cavern at some point in the Tour. (p.32)

Jones keeps that tone crisp and precise throughout: she's authoritative and detailed while still keeping things short and punchy. The wit is dry and understated - that afterword refers to "jokes," but I wouldn't characterize most of the humor in Tough Guide that way: they're observations and pointed asides and cruel examples. Oh, let me throw in another bit I really like:

Missing Heirs occur with great frequency. At any given time, half the COUNTRIES in Fantasyland will have mislaid their Crown PRINCESS/PRINCE, but the Rule is that only one Missing Heir can join your Tour at a time. Yours will join as a COMPANION selected from among the CHILD, the TALENTED GIRL, or the TEENAGE BOY, and as part of your QUEST you will have to get them back to the Kingdom where they belong. This can be a right nuisance. (p.126)

Many readers will not realize that Tough Guide is satirical. Again, those are the people Jones is complaining about, particularly when they come to write seven-volume trilogies full of names punctuated by apostrophes and mountain ranges ignorant of rain shadows.

I suspect that the fantasy novel has changed and altered in the years since Jones published this in 1996. There may not be quite as much epic fantasy yardgoods now as there was in the '80s and '90s, or the clichés may have shifted in ways I haven't kept up with. So this might not be quite as obvious and pointed as it was at publication - or maybe it is; bad writing springs eternal. In any case, it's funny and smart and relentless in stabbing all of the stupid thoughtless ideas of bad fantasy writing of its era; it's an important book as well as a deeply entertaining one.