Not-so-recent reads

Guardians of the Flame: The Warriors and Guardians of the Flame: The Warrior Lives, by Joel Rosenberg. I've been known to say that the writers of gaming-related novels are the pulp writers of our day. Like most of the stories churned out for Astounding or Weird Tales in past decades, their work gets little critical respect or even acknowledgement outside of the specific group of fans for whom it's intended.

Has anyone ever seen a review of, say, the Halo books by Eric Nylund and Walter Dietz, in any of the "literary" book columns, or even the professional library trade publications? I haven't. And yet they're some of the most quickly-circulating items in the library's collection, and have been on Locus's list of genre bestsellers for a year or more. R.A. Salvatore and Margaret Weis have made the big time, with impressive trade hardcovers of their books now available in most bookstores and even reviewed on a regular basis. But like a good many less successful gaming-related authors, they got their start writing stories, probably following editorially-determined guidelines, that were designed to tie in to existing gameworlds derived from Dungeons and Dragons or some other packaged product.

This is, I suppose, a long and complicated way of introducing a brief review of an older example of such writing, Joel Rosenberg's "Guardians of the Flame" series. I don't recall whether the trademarked phrase "Dungeons and Dragons" is ever specifically invoked in the story, but the book is clearly modelled on the conventions of D&D.

It begins as a fairly standard gamer's wish-fulfilment scenario: a group of college-age gamers are magically transported into the gameworld that their referee/gamemaster/dungeonmaster has been describing to them. Swordplay, clever strategems, and adventure ensue.

To Rosenberg's credit, he introduces a number of somewhat more sophisticated concepts as the story progresses. Karl Cullinane and the other "characters" encounter ethical, emotional and political quandries as well as the inevitable swordsmen and wizards, and deal with them in ways that are not always entirely successful and frequently have consequences that are all too permanent. I was surprised to find a degree of psychological realism in a book that was clearly packaged by the publisher as a purely escapist fantasy, but there it is.