How Modern Fantasy Revived Itself After Decades of Tolkien Imitators

Shedding light on the most influential epic fantasy book series you might have missed.

We all know what a hit and cultural touchstone George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series has become, but you might not be aware that Game of Thrones was his first epic fantasy novel. He’d been publishing excellent science fiction, horror and other genre novels since 1976, but it wasn’t until 1996 that we got Game of Thrones. Prior to that, his last was Tuf Voyaging, a sci-fi fix-up novel.

So why the change? Writing something in epic fantasy had always been “at the back of his mind” but something had been holding him back. He told The Guardian in 2018, “Tolkien had an enormous influence on me, but after Tolkien there was a dark period in the history of epic fantasy where there were a lot of Tolkien imitations coming out that were terrible. I didn’t necessarily want to be associated with those books, which just seemed to me to be imitating the worst things of Tolkien and not capturing any of the great things.” Even after the first inspiration for Game of Thrones came to him “out of nowhere” in 1991, he thought it might just be a short story.

Certainly he’s an avid reader of history and it’s no secret that ASoIaF is largely inspired by the events of the Wars of the Roses – by way of the four-volume history of Thomas B. Costain’s four-volume history of the Plantagenets – and Marice Druon’s The Accursed Kings series about the French Monarchy in the 14^th century. Martin even wrote in The Guardian, "The Accursed Kings’ has it all … Iron kings and strangled queens, battles and betrayals, lies and lust … Whether you’re a history buff or a fantasy fan, Druon’s epic will keep you turning pages: it is the original game of thrones.” But why not take his inspiration from there into, say, sci-fi?

Here's the part I think most fantasy readers don’t know, a defining moment without which we might not have gotten Game of Thrones, or possibly even The Name of the Wind and countless others. Three years before Martin’s sudden inspiration compelled him to pen that first chapter about the Starks finding those direwolf pups, the first book of a series was published about which Martin later said,

“Tad’s fantasy series, The Dragonbone Chair and the rest of his famous four-book trilogy was one of the things that inspired me to write my own seven-book trilogy. I read Tad and was impressed by him, but the imitators that followed -- well, fantasy got a bad rep for being very formulaic and ritual. And I read The Dragonbone Chair and said, ‘My god, they can do something with this form,’ and it’s Tad doing it. It’s one of my favorite fantasy series.”

If you haven’t read the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series by Tad Williams, you’re absolutely missing out. I came to it late, myself, with my first read just last Fall. I knew I was going to love his work in the late ‘90s, though, when I first read the excellent anthology Tales of the White Wolf (1994), a collection of short stories based on the Michael Moorcock character Elric of Melniboné. I was already a big fan of Elric and Moorcock’s Eternal Champion multiverse by then and enjoyed the whole book… but Go Ask Elric was something special. Moorcock himself cites Tad in the introduction, writing, “What perhaps did surprise me was the originality, wit and imagination that so many of the writers here display – how many new angles they bring to the series and how much fresh inspiration they have given me (I’ve already asked Tad Williams if he minds me writing some more about the Gypsy Prince…).”

Note: Tad actually read the first half of Go Ask Elric aloud in a livestream during COVID lockdowns. If you’re an Elric fan, give it a listen here.

Sadly, college intervened soon after I read Tales of the White Wolf and keeping my nose to the grindstone made reading for pleasure little more than a fond memory for several years. But after I moved last year, I caught myself dwelling on the book again while unpacking. I googled Tad Williams and ended up ordering The Dragonbone Chair, the first novel in his first epic fantasy series set in the world of Osten Ard.

Without a doubt it was one of the best book purchases I’ve ever made. It’s fascinating that George RR Martin’s comments about post-Tolkien fantasy echo Tad’s own remarks about what he tried to accomplish in the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn books. He described initial conversations with his publisher about writing MS&T in an interview with Author Stories Podcast, saying “I was very influenced by The Lord of the Rings and I have a lot of complicated things I want to work through as to what’s happened post-Tolkien… that was really the beginning of my writing career.” In a reddit AMA, he talked about how “there was also an entire level of commenting on Tolkien and post-Tolkien epic fantasy.” But I think he put it most concisely in The Guardian’s 2017 profile when he said, “I was looking for originality and what I was getting was warmed-over rehashes of Tolkien. Eventually, it occurred to me: I can do better than this.”

If you’re unaware of the books, it’s possible you might read the blurbs on the back cover and think they’re pretty standard late ‘80s / early ‘90s fare. But Tad Williams was ahead of his time. The series has incredible depth and enthralling world-building. From the protagonist’s epic personal journey and the weirdness and wonder of Osten Ard’s magic to the race of mysterious elf-ish analogs and the hard-hitting finale you won’t see coming – and absolutely everything in between – the books of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn are a masterfully-told fantasy tale you don’t want to miss.

To give you a better idea of what I’m talking about, I want to quote a bit of Aidan Moher’s fantastic article about MS&T, which you should read in full.

“On the surface, Memory, Sorrow and Thorn sounds like a paint-by-numbers secondary world fantasy: there’s an ancient evil threatening the medieval-flavored land of Osten Ard, a boy with a mysterious past, a scrappy princess, an evil prince, a dying king, and more magic swords, dragons, elves and dwarfs than you can shake a wand at (even if they’re referred to by different names.) It never eschews these tropes—though at the time they were less tiresome, as fantasy-readers reveled in the post-Brooks/Donaldson revitalization of secondary world fantasy. Instead, Williams’ trilogy feels like a surgically-precise dissection of those tropes.

Betsy Wollheim, Williams’ longtime editor, remembers his first ambitions for Memory, Sorrow and Thorn (then called “The Sons of Prester John”) in her introduction to the 2016 edition of The Dragonbone Chair:

“Well, there’s this other project, but I’m not experienced enough to write it.” I was intrigued. I asked him to tell me more. We talked, and the longer we talked the more excited I became. Tad said this big project was his ode to King Arthur, to Lord of the Rings, to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, and to “all the great books that made me who I am.” He went on to say that it was about the sons of Prester John, and that it was, in some ways, about what happens when a great king dies. He also mentioned that he didn’t want to write a Tolkien pastiche. He wanted this work to be more multidimensional, more modern—Tolkien was only one of his many inspirations. He said he had been thinking about this work for years. I knew instinctively that this had to be Tad’s next project, whether he was ready to write it or not.

David Barnett continued the conversation about the trilogy’s origins in The Guardian: “Williams didn’t just subvert the tropes of fantasy fiction,” Barnett said, “he asked readers to also question them, particularly the idea of a golden age, that ‘the past was brighter, more elegiac, more beautiful, that it’s a transitory state in a fallen world’. He pauses, almost as if to consider this possibility. ‘But what if the idea of the golden age is false? What if it had its own secrets?’”

Tad Williams went on to write more Osten Ard books, including a four-book series that picks up many years after that first trilogy. For my part, I can’t wait to devour them… starting with The Heart of What Was Lost, which serves as a sort of bridge novel between the two big series.

MS&T may not be the only fresh take that pulled fantasy out of the formulaic post-Tolkien years, but it stands as one of the most significant contributions. If you’re a fantasy fan like me, your journey won’t be complete until you experience one of the most influential fantasy book series of the 20^th century, which George RR Martin credits with reviving modern fantasy after so many Tolkien imitators who couldn’t quite do what Tolkien did, and what Patrick Rothfuss called “groundbreaking.... Changed how people thought of the genre, and paved the way for so much modern fantasy. Including mine.”

To that end, I humbly suggest that you pick up a copy of The Dragonbone Chair and let it take you away to the lands of Osten Ard. It may move a little slowly at the start, but after a bit of setup (which, personally, I quite enjoyed) it takes you on an amazing and irresistible ride.

Have you read Tad’s MS&T books? What did you think of them? Let’s discuss!