What is it?

This is a blog dedicated to literary criticism and reviews of the various pulp fantasy novels published by TSR, the makers of Dungeons & Dragons, in the 1980s and 1990s. Since there are so many and I’d like a tight focus for this project, I’m doing them setting by setting in chronological order. I started with the Forgotten Realms, a wildly popular line of novels and D&D game materials that began under TSR and continues to be published up to the present day, and have since moved on to Dragonlance, a setting that made a big cultural impact in the 1980s but has since faded away.

What made these D&D novels so successful that they were published steadily, hundreds of them, for nearly thirty years? Several reasons, I think. They were cheap paperbacks occupying a lot of shelf space in any bookstore, so they were easy to stumble into. There was a lot of cross-pollination going on where fans of D&D would discover the novels through the game and vice versa. But most importantly, I think they were the literary equivalent of eating at McDonald’s. It was a well-known franchise full of satisfying (if not necessarily technically excellent) stories set in a familiar world by a rotating stable of authors. You’d look at an aisle full of random fantasy novels in a bookstore but end up choosing one with the familiar TSR logo on it because, like a person stopping at a McDonald’s drive-through on the way home, at least you knew what you were going to get.

I remember them fondly, but as I’m very suspicious of nostalgia in general, I’m not sure whether I’m remembering them fondly because they were actually any good or because I was a different and less critical person back then. Chronicling the experience of rereading them from my modern perspective may be a good way to look back on them without being misled by nostalgia. And there are a lot of questions I’m curious to explore along the way. How does the media we absorb when we’re younger affect us? What messages do we absorb from it? How do pop-cultural works from three decades ago hold up against modern cultural sensibilities?

Why would you even do this?

Why not?

The inevitable response from some people will go something like this: “But they’re just trashy paperback novels! Why would you subject something so trivial to any sort of serious thought?” To which I’d reply: Nothing is so trivial that it doesn’t deserve to be considered critically. Every work, no matter how ostensibly silly, becomes part of our cultural consciousness and is worth thinking about. Thinking deeply about a work is a compliment, not an attack — I wouldn’t do this if it weren’t to some extent a labour of love.

Why these particular books?

A couple of reasons. First, it gives the project some much-needed focus, since the realm of “all pulp fantasy novels” is much too large. If I restrict myself to a limited list of books, it gives me a clear plan and keeps me on track.

Second, these novels were widely distributed and widely read, so they were a part of popular culture for quite a few people. Odds are there’s at least a few folks out there who will find this interesting enough to read!