I have seen dragons on the winds of morning
which is why I can't stand all this cynical corporate fantasy TV
*The original version of this post was published on Patreon on September 23, 2022.
It ought to be the best time imaginable to be a science fiction and fantasy fan: and yet, I find I have become a hipster. Of course art isn't somehow magically better when it’s enjoyed by a smaller percentage of the population, but niche status does help guard the things you love from being sold out and turned into big-budget mainstream monstrosities. That being said, not all adaptations/new entries into popular IP universes are bad: I loved Prey, and Harley Quinn, and although I think the new Star Trek shows are largely mediocre to terrible, I adore Lower Decks. Contrary to what we have come to expect, it's possible for popular intellectual property to be used thoughtfully and creatively.
But what’s largely happening—again with certain exceptions such as the ones noted above—is that science fiction and fantasy shows aren’t being organized by people who love them, but by executives who have finally realized (quite late) that audiences are crazy for this stuff, and that their passion is profitable. And because most of these endless adaptations and prequels and sequels are made without care and with total cynicism, relying on scripts that read like first drafts and indifferent directorial hands, armored in a performative diversity designed to dismiss all criticism as bigoted and detract from the fact that despite the small number of POC faces on the screen, the showrunners are almost entirely white men, often extremely underqualified and talentless white men…this is why House of the Dragon is pretty but uninteresting, why Rings of Power has a couple charms but is otherwise a bizarre, miswritten mess. These aren’t really fantasy stories in any sense: they aren’t beautiful and weird and thoughtful explorations of human nature filtered through the imaginative space of elves and dragons and magic. They’re just products you can buy, content cubes stamped with IP branding. Game of Thrones flavor, Lord of the Rings flavor, take your pick.
Somewhat paradoxically, I worry this is temporary: that as soon as the streaming services have squeezed every last drop of blood from every major and minor fantasy and science fiction franchise, they will declare these genres dead, forever, and move on. It’s like watching a whole town of dwarves quarrying and shaping gold for a dragon, knowing that the moment the dragon senses a larger hoard somewhere else, he’ll turn its head for a lazy incineration. I think a lot about Ursula Le Guin’s ruthless pan of the terrible 2004 SyFy adaptation of her Earthsea books: she called their homogenizing efforts “McMagic.”[1] I think even Ursula couldn’t have predicted just how lazy and cynical and routine these adaptations could get. A whole subdivision of fairy tale McMansions, standing in what used to be a forest, now profitably stripped of its trees.
Anyway, it all makes me think of Ged in the The Farthest Shore, the third book of the Earthsea series, who contemplates the potential disappearance of magic from the world and says that if the art of wizardry is to go away forever, “I shall make the best of it while it lasts.”
The Farthest Shore is my favorite novel. I can’t really explain why. It’s not as famous or critically well-regarded as the first Earthsea novel (A Wizard of Earthsea), or The Left Hand of Darkness, or The Dispossessed. It’s not an inaccessible book, but it’s not exactly accessible either. The Farthest Shore is hard and compact and nearly perfect: somewhat like “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” but longer and maybe even more harrowing. The plot centers around the aging archmage Ged (aka Sparrowhawk), who takes an impossible journey with the young prince Arren to figure out why the world of Earthsea seems to be falling apart at the psychic seams. The end of the quest takes our heroes into the land of death, a place guarded by a wall of stones, beyond which lies a terrible, sad city of the dead:
“[The dead] were not loathsome as Arren had feared they would be, not frightening in the way he had thought they would be. Quiet were their faces, freed from anger and desire, and there was in their shadowed eyes no hope.
Instead of fear, then, great pity rose up in Arren, and if fear underlay it, it was not for himself, but for all people. For he saw the mother and child who had died together, and they were in the dark land together; but the child did not run, nor did it cry, and the mother did not hold it or ever look at it. And those who died for love passed each other in the streets.
The potter’s wheel was still, the loom empty, the stove cold. No voice ever sang.”
Later in her life, Ursula would try to rewrite this part of the Earthsea mythology, softening this awful image of the afterlife. I respect the impulse, but I think she should have trusted her first instincts. The Farthest Shore is about how people who try to escape death only end up escaping life: they become like the dead, losing their art and their kindness. And then magic, the magic of being alive, bleeds out of the world, leaving behind only emptiness and dull resentment. The Farthest Shore is not, I repeat, an easy book. The first edition (which happened to be the one I read at the library as a proooobably too young child) has terrifying illustrations. There’s the piteous image of a man going mad from fear in a boat; and the empty eyes of the Unmaker, the wizard whose quest for immortality has punctured the hole in the balance of reality that everyone is now falling through.
But the book also has wonderful dragons, both terrific illustrations and exquisite prose descriptions of creatures who are not good or evil, but something much more interesting. "The dragons do not dream," Ged tells Arren. "They are dreams. They do not work magic: it is their substance, their being. They do not do; they are." Here’s Orm Embar, the best-named dragon of all time (apologies to Smaug and Glaurung, who are #2 and #3), making an absolutely unbeatable entrance:
“But the strangeness of that daybreak was not yet done, for even then, as the eastern rim of the sea grew white, there came from the north flying a great bird: so high up that its wings caught the sunlight that had not shone upon the world yet and beat in strokes of gold upon the air. Arren cried out, pointing. The mage looked up, startled. Then his face became fierce and exulting, and he shouted out aloud, “Nam hietha arw Ged arkvaissa!”—which in the speech of the Making is, If thou seekest Ged here find him.
And like a golden plummet dropped, with wings held high outstretched, vast and thundering on the air, with talons which might seize an ox as if it were a mouse, with a curl of steamy flame streaming from long nostrils, the dragon stopped like a falcon on the rocking raft.”
If this sort of description doesn’t make you yell in delight, like Ged does, then I don’t know what to tell you. This, to me, is what peak fantasy excellence looks like. The absolute delight in life and the strangeness of the world, which is held in contrast against the bleakness of death, the horror of the fact that everything we love will end. The resolution of the Balance is necessarily the acceptance of this fact, this hard thing: that the world is beautiful and difficult, and that we come to an end within it. Against this kind of wisdom I don’t know how to place the flimsy, shiny corporate cash grabs that just so happen to have dragons and other nonhumans in them: I don’t think they’re the same species of thing at all. I can’t abide the idea that magic could be replaced by McMagic, and no one will notice or care.
There’s not much to do about this, really—and certainly, the world has bigger problems. But if you haven’t read The Farthest Shore, please do so (you don’t need to read the other Earthsea books first). Again, in some ways it's a hard read, but well worth it for its poetry, its wisdom, and—above all else—its dragons. As Ged tells Arren, “And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.”
[1] It’s worth noting that one of Le Guin’s major critiques of the 2004 Earthsea adaptation was its lack of diversity: the SyFy channel took a story where most of the characters are supposed to be brown or Black and whitewashed it to oblivion. Supposedly a new and Le Guin family-approved adaptation of Earthsea is coming, but it seems like it’s been stuck in limbo since 2019 (I check on it regularly.) An adaptation of Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti series has supposedly been greenlit for HBO, but the most recent article I can find on the subject is a year old. TV development can move slowly of course, but it’s interesting that so far, diversity in many science fiction and fantasy stories has meant adding a handful of actors of color to European-based fantasies written by white men, rather than hurrying to adapt the novels where most of the cast is supposed to be Black or brown and the cultural source material comes from elsewhere. We’ll see what happens with the film adaptations of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy and Xiran Jay Zhao’s Iron Widow. It would be nice to see these actually happen, and to be done well! Certainly they should be much better and more interesting than watching Amazon get away with saying “hey we threw a couple Black people into this beloved but quite racist fantasy world, give us a hand (while we crush our unions with the other).”