Richard A. Knaak’s Firedrake (1989), the first in his Dragonrealms series, is a atrociously written male fantasy that represents some of the worst excesses of 1980s fantasy fiction, perfectly captures the era's crisis of masculinity, and features an ancient empire of armadillo-people.
Tag: Pub Decade: 1980s
Reading “Land of Precious Snow” by Thaddeus Tuleja
Thaddeus Tuleja's Land of Precious Snow (1977) is a fantasy-adjacent historical fiction novel about religious and spiritual experience, disaffection with modernity, and an American adventurer seeking new meaning in 1890s Tibet—a novel that captures counterculture's dissident feelings toward life in postwar America.
Reading “The Fairy of Ku-She” by M. Lucie Chin
M. Lucie Chin's The Fairy of Ku-She (1988) is an expert work of historical fantasy, a fascinating, achingly beautiful, and brilliantly conceived novel that intermixes Chinese history, mythology, and fairy tale in an impressive tapestry that offers a wide range of critiques of genre, gender, power, and social order.
Sean Guynes 