swords / DKS
Dec. 7th, 2011 09:33 amThat one line in this year's tor.com First Lines Game wasn't actually from Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, but by the time I realised that I was ten pages into the book, so I just kind of went with it. And then I wanted something else with a Tom Canty cover (shut up), and ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
aamcnamara had put in Privilege of the Sword so that was already on my mind, so I picked up Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint.
Swordspoint has a sequel, The Fall of the Kings, by Kushner and Delia Sherman, set sixty years later and peripherally involving some of the same people. It's also got another sequel, The Privilege of the Sword, by Kushner alone, that takes place between the two. Normally I'm a strict publicationist when reading series (ask me about Narnia sometime if you want me to rant. Or better, don't) but for some reason I feel like I ought to read Privilege next and then Fall. I think it's because Fall feels so unlike the other two: it's got overt magic, and much less swordplay. Anyway, thoughts? [ETA: first reread for all three, so it's not like plot points will be spoiled for me or anything.]
(Tam Lin is about the small liberal arts college you wish you'd gone to and the college experience you wish you'd had, and it made me terribly homesick for things that never happened. The Riverside books... will probably get their own Medialog post.)
Relatedly, Darrell K. Sweet has died. If you read the Wheel of Time books, or any fantasy at all from the 70s through 90s, you knew his covers: medieval / Ren-Faire-ish, very busy, with bright colors and slightly muddy shading. At one time my bookshelf had more DKS cover art than not. I very much liked his Lord Foul's Bane, and his Lord of the Rings covers on my battered paperbacks are still what I think of when I think of "Lord of the Rings." He was... iconic, in a way that not many other cover artists have been. Canty, of course; Michael Whelan; Frank Frazetta, Rowena Morrill, Boris Vallejo.Midori Snyder Kinuko Craft, now, although she may be more of a niche thing as she mostly makes me think "Patricia McKillip."
(The other thing about DKS is that whatever the merits of his artwork, he read the books he was illustrating and his covers always depicted a scene from the book. This is rarer than you'd think it might be.)
My taste long ago drifted away from the things implied by a DKS cover on a book, but still... it's something from my past that's definitely gone now, with no going back.
aamcnamara had put in Privilege of the Sword so that was already on my mind, so I picked up Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint.Swordspoint has a sequel, The Fall of the Kings, by Kushner and Delia Sherman, set sixty years later and peripherally involving some of the same people. It's also got another sequel, The Privilege of the Sword, by Kushner alone, that takes place between the two. Normally I'm a strict publicationist when reading series (ask me about Narnia sometime if you want me to rant. Or better, don't) but for some reason I feel like I ought to read Privilege next and then Fall. I think it's because Fall feels so unlike the other two: it's got overt magic, and much less swordplay. Anyway, thoughts? [ETA: first reread for all three, so it's not like plot points will be spoiled for me or anything.]
(Tam Lin is about the small liberal arts college you wish you'd gone to and the college experience you wish you'd had, and it made me terribly homesick for things that never happened. The Riverside books... will probably get their own Medialog post.)
Relatedly, Darrell K. Sweet has died. If you read the Wheel of Time books, or any fantasy at all from the 70s through 90s, you knew his covers: medieval / Ren-Faire-ish, very busy, with bright colors and slightly muddy shading. At one time my bookshelf had more DKS cover art than not. I very much liked his Lord Foul's Bane, and his Lord of the Rings covers on my battered paperbacks are still what I think of when I think of "Lord of the Rings." He was... iconic, in a way that not many other cover artists have been. Canty, of course; Michael Whelan; Frank Frazetta, Rowena Morrill, Boris Vallejo.
(The other thing about DKS is that whatever the merits of his artwork, he read the books he was illustrating and his covers always depicted a scene from the book. This is rarer than you'd think it might be.)
My taste long ago drifted away from the things implied by a DKS cover on a book, but still... it's something from my past that's definitely gone now, with no going back.