Wednesday, June 23, 2021

Ubiquitous Fantasies of the late 1970s

When Del Rey published Terry Brooks's The Sword of Shannara in April 1977, they launched it with an unprecedented marketing campaign for a fantasy novel. Thus it reached the bestseller lists, a triumph of marketing over content.  Other publishers saw the opportunity for large sales of fantasy novels.  I remember a handful of books that were omnipresent for many months in every bookstore I visited during the wake of the success of The Sword of Shannara. These are the ones I recall. 

Niel Hancock's first tetralogy "The Circle of Light" sported covers by Gervasio Gallardo, which deliberately evoked the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series (for which Gallardo did many covers) which had ended a few years earlier. 


The first of the quartet, Greyfax Grimwald, came out in April 1977, followed by Faragon Fairingay in June, Calix Stay in August, and Squaring the Circle in October. These were followed by two further tetralogies, "The Wilderness of Four," in 1983, and "The Windameir Circle," in 1985-1991, along with a standalone volume, Dragon Winter, in March 1978 (which has a faux-Gallardo cover). The second quartet also had real Gallardo covers, as did the first volume of the third quartet. But sales must have diminished as the series went on, and the books went out of print. Tor's Starscape imprint, for young adult books, revived the first quartet in 2004, with silly, off-putting covers, and they sank without a trace. 

Richard Monaco's Parsival, appeared in hardcover and trade paperback in November 1977. The cover and interior illustrations are by David McCall Johnston, another cover artist of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. It was followed by The Grail War (hardcover and trade paperback, 1979) and The Final Quest (hardcover 1980, mass market paperback 1983).  A fourth volume, Blood and Dreams, appeared as a mass market original in 1985.



Stephen R. Donaldson's trilogy of "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever" came out in hardcover in October 1977, but weren't ubiquitous until the Del Rey mass market paperbacks appeared, Lord Foul's Bane in August 1978, The Illearth War in September 1978, and The Power That Preserves in March 1979.  With static covers (by Darrell Sweet), Del Rey again reached the bestseller lists with these books, despite the main character being an unpleasant leper who refuses to believe in the fantasy world in which he finds himself. It was another triumph of marketing over content.  Donaldson went on to publish a second trilogy, "The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever" (1980-1983); and a third series, expanded to a quartet, "The Final Chronicles of Thomas Covenant" (2004-2013). 

 And finally, there is Nancy Springer's The White Hart, published in December 1979 (cover by Carl Lundgren). It was the first of a five book series, later named "The Books of Isle" (1979-1983), though the second volume, The Silver Sun, is reworked from an earlier volume The Book of Suns, published in June 1977 and marketed as general fiction rather than as fantasy (cover shown below for comparison). 

 These are the books I thought of as ubiquitous between 1977 and 1980. Any one have other candidates?



13 comments:

  1. Was "Urshurak" ubiquitous? It was around in that period.

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/974764.Urshurak

    Dale Nelson

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    1. For a short while. And then it sank without a trace, never to be revived!

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  2. Piers Anthony's Xanth novels were all over the place at the time (I was in high school)

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    1. That's the big one I was thinking of. I actually have an article coming out on A Spell for Chameleon in Mythlore later this year.

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    2. Okay. I had thought the Xanth series began earlier (at least Anthony had books published in the 60s, e.g., Chthon in 1967, and was fairly prolific), so I didn't think of him as a new author. But _A Spell for Chameleons_, the first of forty-some (and counting) Xanth novels, came out from Del Rey in September 1977, so it should certainly rate a place in this list!

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    3. Yeah, he wrote entirely SF before SPELL .... funnily enough, he was blacklisted by Ballantine's in the 1960s, and only went back to them after a management change and Del Rey began their fantasy line. Anthony reports that he initially couldn't take the idea of fantasy, which is partly why he threw every fantasy creature he could think of into the Xanth books ... he just didn't give two damns about world-building consistency.

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  3. They probably were, though I blocked them out of my consciousness!

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  4. Wasn't Monaco's Parsival the book with a blurb which read "In the tradition of The Lord of the Rings, Siddhartha, and Watership Down"? I figured that strange grouping was the first three fantasy (or fantasy-adjacent) books the blurb writer could think of.

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  5. Close. It's not on the cover, but on the first page of the book: "Like _Siddhartha_, _The Lord of the Rings_, or _Watership Down_, Richard Monaco's _Parsival_ is a remarkable novel about the quest for innocence and the struggle against evil." It sounds like the blurb-writing was a task delegated downwards to the lowliest intern who hadn't read the book.

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  6. I love the phrase "a triumph of marketing over content" ... it's definitely true of Brooks.

    Although I wouldn't apply it to Donaldson .... admittedly, I'm a total Donaldson fanatic, but he's probably the most "literar" of the post-1977 genre fantasy writers, I'd argue.

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    1. Thanks, Dennis. But I do think it applies to Donaldson because the content is so difficult to sell, that a marketing miracle brought it to the bestseller lists. Perhaps in comparison I should have described the Brooks success as "a triumph of marketing over lack of content" (or pilfered content)!

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