BERBELEK, not Barabelek.

You really love that “Oh, here’s an awesome idea […] By the way, I didn’t make that up myself”-style, don’t you ;) That book sounds fascinating, but not quite fascinating enough to learn Polish. Well, at least I can check out The Book of the New Sun. Thanks, Karthik! I decided to recommend a German book as revenge, but it turns out that it’s been translated into English. Anyway…

“Rumo” by Walter Moers. It’s not quite serious fantasy, but, unlike Pratchet, Moers doesn’t parody fantasy cliches that much. Rather, he just churns out an endless stream of bizarre ideas. The book is thick with subplots, asides, stories within the story and other tangents that eventually turn around to join the main plot. The protagonist Rumo is a Wolperting. A Wolperting is a kind of dog, but some of them learn to walk upright and talk around the time they grow their first teeth. These ones become fearsome fighters and their main pastimes are sword fighting (because biting your enemies to death is not civilized) and playing chess (so that no one can say they are not cultured). They abandon their children in the wild, because chances are that they’ll remain animals, anyway. The other ones usually find their way back to the Wolpertings’ city state. Rumo spends his childhood trapped in the pantry of a group of cyclops. He is taught fighting by a shark-maggot to finally liberate the captives in the pantry. When he finds the city, he has become a kind of “battle nerd”, even for a Wolperting, who is rather awkward around others. When the city gets captured by the forces of Below-world (not Underworld), he is in his element again. The main plot is rather simple, it’s all the weird stuff around it that makes it interesting. There are gnomes with several brains that can bacterially transmit knowledge, a mechanical warrior who falls in love with a torture machine, a sword that is possessed by the souls of both a demon and a cowardly troll, …

Another book by the same author that I just bought today, but didn’t start yet is “The City of Dreaming Books”. From what I read about it, it takes place in a city where books are considered the most valuable things and mercenaries go dungeon-crawling in the catacombs below to find rare books – or murder other people to get their books.

@ Matt`:

Yeah, I know. Sorry. :P

@ Karthik:

I haven’t read it but it sounds really interesting. I would have said I’m going to put it on my Amazon wishlist (which is my “books to read” list essentially) but it’s already there. At some point I stumbled upon it, and decided it was worth picking up, but your recommendation just bumped it to the top of the list. :)

Luke, I have three observations:

1. The part about Hagelian philosophy sounds like Planescape, where belief is paramount and effects reality. This was worked brilliantly into the premise of the Torment game. Planescape itself was about as non-Tolkienesque as a fantasy setting I’ve seen.

2. You mentioned Anathem–but I skimmed everything after the spoiler warning (for obvious reasons) so I’m not sure–but I think Anathem works quite well as “hard fantasy” speculative fiction considering its frequent allusions to Plato (or whoever the Arbre version of him was) and its wider philosophical underpinnings.

3. Have you read The Book Of The New Sun by Gene Wolfe? It’s “science fantasy” at its best, set millions of years in the future in the ruins of countless human civilizations (under a green forested moon) in a medieval society where the ruling class has access to spaceships and more, with a commonwealth of states fighting a costly war against eldritch leviathans in the oceans (and their thralls). And that’s just stuff in the background, because the reader has to decipher everything said by a lying, unreliable, and possibly insane narrator. He never specifies if a “sailor” sails the oceans, the skies, or between the stars, for instance, because to him they’re all alien expeditions. The book really only makes sense on a second read, and actually works quite well if you read it back to front. I love how effortless it seems and how much trust it places in the reader to figure things out. Here’s a random quote:

“Dr. Talos leaned toward her, and it struck me that his face was not only that of a fox (a comparison that was perhaps too easy to make because his bristling reddish eyebrows and sharp nose suggested it at once) but that of a stuffed fox. I have heard those who dig for their livelihood say there is no land anywhere in which they can trench without turning up shards of the past. No matter where the spade turns the soil, it uncovers broken pavements and corroded metal; and scholars write that the kind of sand that artists call polychrome (because flecks of every colour are mixed with its whiteness) is actually not sand at all, but the glass of the past, now pounded by aeons of tumbling in the clamorous sea. If there are layers of reality beneath the reality we see, even as there are layers of history beneath the ground we walk upon, then in one of those more profound realities, Dr. Talos’s face was a fox’s mask on a wall, and I marveled to see it turn and bend now toward the woman, achieving by those motions, which make expression and thought appear to play across it with the shadows of nose and brows, and amazing and realistic appearance of vivacity.”

As far as I know there is no English version of the novel as of yet.

I was somewhat expecting that, but still… laaaaaaaame.