Serial Fantasy
2009-05-15 15:39 - General
Back in late August of 2007, I bought a Nintendo DS Lite. We held some mini Tetris tournaments at work, thanks to the wireless multi-player gaming the DS supports. It wasn't long after that I started playing it during my commute. I had no idea that it was so far back as 2007 that this might have started, until I just looked up the date, in order to write it above.
It's been quite a while, but I finally got back to reading. It was even before the DS, at the very beginning of 2007, that I grabbed a lot of 25 Stephen King books off of eBay. (Lots of used books on eBay are so cheap! That lot of 25 worked out to $1.60 each, including shipping.) I had read one or two that I had lying around, and liked it. I never finished all 25 of those books. And I had set the two (volume one and three) books in the Dark Tower Series aside. Partially because I didn't have the whole set, and partially because the two didn't match in the otherwise chronologically-sorted group.
I finally picked up volumes two and four and thus started reading through them. (Getting the rest through the library, later.) I'm not quite sure when, but I'll say mid last month. I'm now about halfway through the 6th book, and quite happy to be reading again. It was while I was working through this series that I serendipitously caught a reference to the term "Serial Fantasy" to describe it.
I've read the Wheel of Time series (12 books, averaging around 800 pages each) and enjoyed it. I also got, mostly through bulk lots on eBay, a lot of Piers Anthony books, including Xanth (32 books, I think I've read 28 of them), Apprentice Adept (7 books), Bio of a Space Tyrant (6 books), ChroMagic (5 books), Cluster (5 books), Geodyssey (5 books), Incarnations of Immortality (7 books), Mode (4 books), and a handful of other 3-book "series". Then there's the granddaddy, in my opinion, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (5 books). Plus of course The Lord of the Rings.
In my opinion, Fantasy and Science Fiction are but two aspects of the same thing: fiction, set in an impossible world. One has magical things, one has super-high-technology things, but it amounts to the same: a bunch of people who have abilities that we don't. And it's really these serial stories that get me. I like diving into a rich world, and staying there for a long time. Believe it or not, I've never read Harry Potter .. but I plan on rectifying that soon!
