“Nifft the Lean is no longer among
us, and I have at last confessed to myself, hereafter, he never will
be...It is a bitter thing that each of must finally be blown out like
a candle , and have the unique ardor of his individual flame choked
off, and sucked utterly away like smoke in the dark. Do we ever
accept this in our hearts, any of us?”
So Michael Shea began Nifft the Lean
with a in-character, windbaggy eulogy to his eponymous
picaro. It
seemed morbidly fitting to me on hearing the sad news of Shea's
passing yesterday
from the irrepressible Robert Parker.
I've probably mentioned a few many
times on the blog how much love I have for Jack Vance's work and how
much I wanted to strike that tone in the Hill Cantons.
That particular authorial voice,
cadence of dialogue and turn of words is so elusive, so personal,
that I have never felt that I quite got there and I have always felt
the same way about the various attempts either through games or
stories to capture the feel of Dying Earth. Shea's attempt to do the
second Cugel with Quest for Simbilis (often forgotten since
Vance went on to knock it out of the park with his own sequel) felt
very flat to me, cringe-worthy even when it hit on Cugel's internal
voice.
It was lucky for me that I gave him
another shake with Nifft as it is such a wonderful book and something
really close with its picaresque turns and weird, richly imagined
fantasy to the tone of what I wanted to do with the Hill Cantons. In
fact I was moved even to do a little, direct homage (reprinting being
the highest form of flattery) in my write-up on the Amazon class.
When people talk about how D&D
never quite got right extra-planar adventures, I have a hard time not
thinking of the two outstanding episodes of raiding Hell and the
demonic underworld.(Planescape as the fierce-opinionated
players in the HC bull session opined almost gets there as a
setting.) The two novellas hit all the right literary notes to
me and make me hunger for something that can get that kind of
adventuring in strange dimensions right.
Hear, hear!
ReplyDeleteI had a first edition thief named Nifft back in the day. Never realized there were sequels, though...
ReplyDeleteVery sad news. A fine writer with a distinctive voice. "The Pearls of the Vampire Queen" should be required reading for anyone planning to play a thief.
ReplyDeleteI'm very sorry to hear about the passing of one of my favorite authors. He was a solid writer and from what I understand a great guy. Sigh
ReplyDeleteReading Nifft and In Yana right now. Great fun both. Shea died too young.
ReplyDelete