Question of the week: the first fantasy novel
It’s time for Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics.
This week’s question: what is the first fantasy novel you remember reading? After all, if you’re hanging around the website of Jonathan Moeller, Pulp Writer, there’s a non-zero chance that you enjoy fantasy books, so it seems like a suitable question.
For myself, the very first fantasy novel I read was MAGICIAN: MASTER by Raymond E. Feist. What got me into that was the BETRAYAL AT KRONDOR computer game, which was a classic. After I finished the game, I did some reading (remember this was way before the Internet, so you couldn’t find out anything you wanted whenever you wanted), and I was astonished to realize that KRONDOR was based off an actual novel series. So I got MAGICIAN: MASTER and started reading it.
Fun fact: years later I realized that MAGICIAN: MASTER was in fact the sequel to MAGICIAN: APPRENTICE and went back to read the first book.
-JM
Believe it or not, the first fantasy novel I read was The Hobbit. My older sisters had pooled their money to buy the paperback version of The Hobbit and the LOTR. I saw them reading it, and since my sisters were for once not being nasty to each other and reading together, it had to be good. After they finished The Hobbit, I asked to borrow it, and was allowed to read it as long as I didn’t leave the living room and washed my hands first. I was eight.
The Hobbit and LOTR definitely seem to be the most common answers.
You can remember?
(I can remember my first reading of Hobbit and LOTR. It was by no stretch of the imagination my first fantasy novel.)
Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings.
When I was younger, pre teens, I loved adventure books like the Hardy Boys and the Three Investigators. I didn’t really read much in the coming years until one day it was raining outside and being bored I made a nuisance of myself when my older brother was trying to watch TV. He finally snapped, told me to shut up and threw Pawn of Prophecy at me and told me to read that.
The rest as they say is history, I went from Eddings to Feist and Gemmel then on to Jordan etc. I will always have a soft spot for the David Eddings books though.
Does the Magic Treehouse series count? If not, Chronicles of Narnia.