I wish I still loved Brandon Sanderson. I wish I still loved Fantasy at all. I yearn for that feeling you can only get by sitting with a massive hardcover all day and into the night—questing through impossible landscapes, casting magic from your very essence, fighting for your life in an epic battle so beyond you in scope as to be incomprehensible. If you’re lucky there will be some PG-13 romancing, and if you’re very very lucky the story will linger in you for years after closing the back cover and setting down the book with a thud. (We all have at least one novel that did that for us; for me it was Robin Hobb’s Royal Assassin, though of course The Name of the Wind comes in at a close second).
To his credit, Brandon used to reliably provide that experience for me. My disenchantment is no failure on his part but rather the result, I think, of a few separate threads coming together to strangle the fan I used to be. The most obvious one is that I’m old now—at least, too old to be entirely swept away. At 34 it’s simply impossible for me to experience a story the same way I did when I was in college. My blade has been blunted by too much real life. I believe in magic and mystery—in some ways even more than I used to—but lack the youthful optimism to see beyond its dangers.
Lately, if I read any SFF at all, it is of a distinctly darker, more Lovecraftian flavor, which while compelling in its own right can never offer the same sense of transcendent, romantic wonder of Epic Fantasy. To say nothing of the fact that now I am a professional, a husband, and a father of two beautifully wild werewolf princesses. I’m lucky if I get 30 minutes to doomscroll headlines, much less binge a 400,000 word novel.
Which leaves me at something of a crossroads. One leads to fairyland, the other to what I suppose passes for adulthood:
Cormac and Flannery. Donna Tartt. The occasional Literary Thriller. Penguin Classics paperbacks and Deluxe Edition hardcovers of Great Books, most of which I find insufferably dull, to be honest.
And the glittering spires and windswept plains and dark haunted forests awaiting me at the end of the other road? They are still there, unchanged yet always changing, hidden behind the veil of imagination and disbelief, where everything—every action, character, and feeling—is bigger than itself, represents something deeper, more ancient, something true in a way a cynical old codger like myself can never really believe.
I can’t see the way back from here, but I suppose there is always a chance that someday my path will lead me there.
—Cody
photo credit: Alex Moliski on Unsplash