Another Day, Another Dungeon, 1990, Greg Costikyan
There was a time when the shelves of the “Fantasy/Science Fiction” sections in Waldenbooks and B. Dalton’s all across the country were stuffed to the brim with the “funny” fantasy novels. Robert Aspirin, Piers Anthony, Craig Shaw Gardner, John DeChancie, Terry Pratchett, Greg Costikyan and a host of others made, if not great money, at least enough money to keep writing by pandering to the oh so sophisticated comedic tastes of sci-fi and fantasy readers.
I think about the “funny” fantasy novel genre a lot when I go into a bookstore these days and see ten million books about psychic vampire detectives who are also half-fae wizards on the shelves.
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Hee hee hee, I love that you stuffed Terry Pratchett in there. Prepare to feel the full fury of the outraged internet fanboy collective.
Nowadays, the “funny fantasy” torch has been passed to a lot of hacky webcomics. Cough. Don’t click on my name, whatever you do.
I remember the day I was reading some Piers Anthony book and suddenly realized that it wasn’t good. That was the first day it occurred to me that just because something was labelled “humorous fantasy” didn’t mean it was going to be funny, and certainly didn’t mean I was going to like it.
This book must have come out after that, because otherwise I would have read it. I’m a big fan of Greg Costikyan’s RPG work.
Well, I know that you read Hogfather every Christmas, so…all is forgiven.
Monty- That same thing happened to me while reading Piers Anthony! I’d gotten a pile of his books from someplace, and if I were a slower reader I’d've noticed how bad they were before I finished them (most of them). Actually, the fact that I blew through them so quickly was a bit of a clue. I didn’t even get most of the puns, thankfully.
There was also Esther Freisner, though to her credit she did an interesting interpretation of Sherlock Holmes in one of her books.
You do realize that, in the neverending Wheel of Dharma that is the publishing industry and pop culture in general, this means after we’re done with the “psychic vampire detectives who are also half-fae wizards” fad (and, though I like a lot of the genre, I can’t say I’ll be totally sad about it) we’ll have a “retro” funny fantasy revival?
To realize I was only caught up in a late 1980s fad eases the pain of spending 6th through 8th grade writing stories about cowardly comic-relief paladins who land themselves in a wacky heap of trouble at pubs and deal with zany wizards.
John–Your comic-relief paladin stories were much better than mine.
Aw thanks but I liked yours too. If we were Millenials would we have written Twilight ripoffs? The alt-universe possibilities are kind of inspiring.
I’d love to see a genealogical chart of the Wacky Fantasy Genre. Infocom games like Zork would get their own branch. So would Piers Anthony, Robert Aspirin…wow the more i think about it wacky fantasy seems like it has more possibilities than vampires.
John–I doubt we would have written Twilight ripoffs, as we have penises. Do boys that age even read?
Fuck, I guess our YA efforts should be directed at girls then?
Also Prankster’s link is horrific.
Now, in the “Infocom games like Zork” branch, do the novelizations get their own sub-branch? There were two categories: the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style books (not very good) and the tie-in novels, which were also mostly not very good. Except for The Zork Chronicles, by George Alec Effinger, which was really good.