2nd Book First: The Two Towers

the original tome, battered but intact

As a kid, I read what I could find. Thanks to the vagaries of bookstores and the limitations of libraries, there were at least four great fantasy series that I entered via the second floor, book number two, sometimes without even knowing I'd missed the actual entrance.

Yes, this is a story about olden days. 

The Lord of the Rings was my first missed doorway. My mother had the full unlicensed Ace trilogy. She wouldn't let me read it when I was in second grade, living in Heidelberg Germany, but that probably wouldn't have stopped me for long, except that our teen babysitter smoked cigarettes in our apartment and borrowed The Fellowship of the Ring. Cigarettes? Forgiven.  The Fellowship? Gone with a moving van when the girl's family got shipped off-base a couple months later.

Mom refused to buy a new copy of the book. I suspect that her arguments--the former babysitter's ongoing obligation to return the copy, and money--were screens for the fact that she just didn't want me reading Tolkien as a second or third grader. But it's also possible that we couldn't find a copy. We were in Germany, the Ace books were being outed as unapproved, and we certainly never shopped anywhere that had them for sale. About a year later Mom tried to get me to read The Hobbit, but that wasn't gonna happen, that book was for kids. Said me. 

So in fourth grade, still in Germany, I read The Two Towers. For me, the Lord of the Rings didn't start with Bilbo's 100th birthday party, hooded riders in the Shire, and hapless hobbits having to be rescued from trees and barrow wights. It started with three kickass warriors--an elf, a dwarf, and a ranger--chasing orcs across an endless plain. The orcs' hobbit victims felt less hapless, given that they (spoiler alert) eventually figured out how to cut themselves loose and run away. Riders of Rohan? Keeping score at Helm's Deep! Onward! There are people who dislike The Two Towers because it's a sequence of military encounters and landscapes, punctuated by ents. For me, growing up on Army bases, trying to figure out ways to play with my Airfix Roman and barbarian armies, a book of fantasy military encounters was exactly what I was looking for. I reread The Two Towers as soon as I finished the first pass, since the Frodo stuff at the start of Return of the King made me aware I didn't actually understand what was going on. 

We returned to the USA before I entered fifth grade. Our first week back, Mom went shopping at a big American bookstore and returned with a present: Ballantine's The Fellowship of the Ring. She cared that it was an authorized edition. The picture of the author on the back revealed that Tolkien smoked a pipe like my dad. We were home.

The Middle of Amber

I was going to write a blog post suggesting that people support the Lords of Gossamer & Shadow Kickstarter that is taking up where the Amber rpg by Eric Wujcik left off. The Kickstarter has about 19 hours to go, the game should carry on for years. And maybe I am still writing that blog. But I'm shifting the focus off the new game that I-am-looking-forward-to-and-think-you-should-support .... back towards the Roger Zelazny stories that created the path for the game.

By high school, Zelazny was my favorite author. The extent to which I loved his work has clouded my memory of how I first encountered him. It wasn't through Jack of Shadows or Lord of Light or Nine Princes in Amber. It was through The Guns of Avalon, bought second-hand in a musty used paperback store built into a weird indoor-outdoor mall that would soon go out of business when I was in 7th grade and my family had just moved out of the Army and into Oregon.

If you're familiar with Zelazny's work, you know that The Guns of Avalon is the second book in the Amber series. I missed that. I liked the cover illustration of two warriors battling chaotic hordes. Well, they looked like orcs. Inside it didn't go quite the way I'd expected. By that time I'd read the Lord of the Rings and Watership Down and Starship Troopers, but it's possible that The Guns of Avalon was the first troublesomely adult novel I'd read. The demon knocks on the window and he goes ahead and invites it in? The girl he fenced with and then slept with may be another demon who killed off the kindly family? He's walking through realities and getting stronger all the time? And now we're using guns in fantasy worlds? What?

I wasn't ready to deal with a story this loaded.

Skip forward a year, maybe less. I'm in Gandalf's Den and there's a big display of Zelazny books, a series of books in a new black cover design I like a lot. I'm looking at the books and I see something called The Guns of Avalon. Wait. This is the book I have with that other cover. Wait. It's the second book in the series? Ohhhhhhhh.

I bought Nine Princes in Amber. Loved it. Read The Guns of Avalon again, in the old weird cover that used the words 'another swashbuckling fantasy voyage to the kingdom of Amber' instead of coming right out and saying it was a sequel. I felt dumb. But happy.

So my introduction to Zelazny was as a magical force that blew in from nowhere, didn't quite synch up to my very-sheltered youth, and gradually became a beloved companion.

May the lords of gossamer and shadow continue the work.