I think The Earthsea Cycle will always have a place in my heart. The three key fantasy novels/series that I am heavily influenced by are The Lord of the Rings, The Last Unicorn, and The Earthsea Cycle. And because of the accidents of time and space, I think I will never escape the popular culture influences of “Star Wars” or of the Harry Potter series. Not that the latter two don’t have any merits. It’s just that I simply don’t consider them to be in the same class as the first three.

The Lord of the Rings is undoubtedly a trite reference. Any fantasy writer born in recent times cannot help but be in debt to this master work of world creation. I mean, I guess I can see the point of people who don’t get much out of LotR, though, because the best parts of the magic are in Tolkien’s mythology, which he casually tosses tidbits of in the trilogy. Places like Gondolin, people like Fëanor and Ëarendil, stories like the tale of Beren and Lúthien, the lost land of Númenor. This stuff was gold. And these were just small crumbs of the entire legendarium. If you were so inclined, you could dig through strata after strata of interwoven legends, stories, and prophecies. Entire histories of ascendant and fallen nations. I mean, seriously, it has taken me nearly two decades to read through a good chunk of all the stuff he came out with, and I’m still not done. So no matter what, this will always be my point of reference, for good or for ill.

The Last Unicorn came out of the blue for me. I don’t really remember how exactly I came to read this book. It may be simply because Peter S. Beagle wrote the foreword to the first copy of LotR that I ever read. There is a chance that I might have watched the animated film first, all because of my sister, who naturally had a thing for unicorns and flying horses and ponies. (Think “Rainbow Brite” and “My Little Pony”. Disturbingly, there was a point in my life where I had a dream that melded plot points of “Rainbow Brite” with those of “Robotech” and “Voltron”. Which, in retrospect, might not make a bad story, though…) But Schmendrick is definitely one of my favorite magicians. And the story of Prince Lir, and even King Haggard, get me right there.

Even to this day, I keep learning new things about this story. First off, Beagle started off entirely in a different direction, more akin to the magical realism embodied by, say, Neil Gaiman, or (surprisingly) Douglas Adams (in his Dirk Gently series), or even J.K. Rowling. For starters, the Unicorn finds herself in present day England, wondering what the hell happened to all the other unicorns. She meets up with a two-headed demon expelled from Hell, and they run into other demons who resemble nothing less than cruel, heartless, calculating corporate types and marketroids, or perhaps members of the current Bush administration. I think it would’ve been interesting to see where he might have gone with that, but, then again, I guess we wouldn’t have the classic tale that he ended up giving us.

And, naturally, when I first ran into the story, I didn’t think much of the budding romance between Lir and Amalthea. But lately, I think about it, and it seriously just gets me right there. Talk about not being meant to be.

Which makes it all the more poignant in Beagle’s novella ”Two Hearts”, which brings us back several decades after The Last Unicorn, and King Lir is an old man who cannot remember where he is. The fact that the Unicorn still loves him, despite the fact that unicorns do not, cannot, fall in love with mortals, broke my heart.

But this post is getting overly long, and so I’ll stop here and talk about Earthsea later.