Ignited My Blood: A Personal Essay
Words by Andrew Nathan Roberts
‘You like fantasy, yeah?’
It was a question my seven-year-old self did not know how to answer. My friend was holding a slim book in front of a pop-up library in the outer western suburbs of Melbourne, circa mid-90s.
The library was a rusted container on wheels filled with beaten shelves and books in not much better condition. It sat outside an old milkbar made from dark crumbling brick. The librarian was a middle-aged woman with a bright flowery dress and a bored expression.
My friend waved the book again. ‘Hey! You’ll like this, I swear. You can fight goblins in it. It’s cool.’
Fight goblins? What was he on about? I looked at the cover and its title: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. A white-haired wizard commanded a magic orb that shot out a fantastical dragon and a subtitle plastered underneath stated: ‘A fighting fantasy gamebook in which YOU become the hero!’
Seemed cool to me. It was my first foray into the world of the Fighting Fantasy ‘choose-your-own-adventure-style’ series of gamebooks created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone (co-founders of Games Workshop).
Though I never read them as you should: playing along with dice, pencil and eraser, noting down your stats and skill levels and engaging in Dungeons and Dragons style combat against goblins, ghosts and demons.
No. If there was a fight to be had, I skipped to the page number that was an automatic win. Because it wasn’t the gameplay element I was interested in. It was the world of the story.
Nearly all the fantasy-based books in the Fighting Fantasy series were set in the same ever-expanding world which had its own lore, recurring characters and fantastical creatures.
Thanks to my local library – which thankfully stocked many of the Fighting Fantasy titles – I explored the world of Titan and the lands of Allansia in great detail, often reborrowing the same titles like Forest of Doom, Island of the Lizard King and Caverns of the Snow Witch many times, exhausting the flimsy paperback covers until they came apart.
And the artwork. That ignited my imagination just as much as the words did. Ignited my blood. Like this great image that plunged me straight into its grim fantasy world:
I didn’t know who these orcs were (I might not have been certain what an orc actually was at the time) but I loved their gritty demeanour and sour-faced expressions as one drunkenly poured the other some orc brew (which I imagine to be suitably nasty).
The Fighting Fantasy books were filled with pulpy tropes that I now know to be common in the fantasy genre. I don’t mean that as a criticism (I do love a good trope), but they served their purpose for exciting a young child’s mind. These books introduced me to a new phase of reading in my life, resetting my expectations and sending me right into the arms of another classic book in the genre.
I remember the day fondly.
A Saturday. Overcast and a little windy. My friend from primary school had invited me over to play at this house. My parents had got me a GI Joe army truck and a Street Fighter action figure for Christmas, which I brought along with me as a kind of offering. We hadn’t been friends for long so I was thinking we were going to play with toys for the afternoon because that’s what I did with my other friends. Maybe plug in a Sega or Nintendo if I visited a friend who was lucky enough to have one.
I remember being dropped off and entering through the side fence like he had told me the day before. Concrete pavers lined with cracks led me to a backyard dominated by an enormous playground that resembled the deck of a pirate ship, complete with a small wooden steering wheel, weathered from cold Melbourne winters. The construction was surrounded by jungle-like ferns and vines that curled and twisted around the edges of the woodwork. It made you feel like you were in a different place, a different reality. Like anything could happen.
On top of the deck, my friend’s mum was reading the troll scene from The Hobbit to him and his younger brother. She was a soft-spoken lady, gentle in her reading. Her boys listened to her every word, enraptured by Bilbo’s daring rescue of his dwarven friends.
And I was too. I didn’t know what The Hobbit was. I had never heard of The Lord of the Rings or Middle-Earth. But there was something about the way the language flowed in those few passages that excited me. No: I was awed.
I felt silly holding my plastic toys. And while my friend and I did play with them afterward, I felt like something strange had unlocked in me, a tender unspooling of my mind that left me feeling stretched out (but in the best possible way), followed by a rush of internal joy.
This feeling would happen to me several times over my life. Like when another friend lent me three battered VHS tapes of the original Star Wars trilogy recorded from Australian television (mid-90s ads included). There is definitely a pre and post-Star Wars moment for many people who enjoy those films and I was not immune.
I was disappointed to learn there were only three films, though I soon discovered there were comics and novels to be read. I quickly filled my library book allotment with all the Star Wars books that had flooded the market in the 1990s after George Lucas had given a who’s who of sci-fi and fantasy writers at the time the all-clear to create stories in his expansive universe. Many were terrible, pulpy paperbacks with threadbare plots. But many were awesome, taking these characters I loved on new adventures that thrilled me. I especially loved the short stories collections like Tales of the Bounty Hunters or Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina.
You would think my excitement for fantastical worlds like Middle-Earth and the galaxy of the Star Wars universe would simmer down the older I grew. Especially with the onset of all the thoughts and feelings (and beautiful chaos) that puberty and teenage years can bring along as they trample and crash through your life. And while my interests expanded and I found myself loving distorted guitar and heavy music and playing in terrible goth-metal bands with pretentious names, I never stopped reading speculative fiction. I never stopped experiencing that wave of gentle but unmistakable euphoria that enters the bloodstream when you read a really good book.
That feeling came upon me again when I attended university as a twenty-one-year-old, nervous and unsure of myself. I was studying a diploma in professional writing and editing at what Americans would call a ‘community college.’ The walls were discoloured and the facilities verged on the negative side of ‘yeah, it’s alright’. Most of my class were middle-aged mums whose kids were finally old enough to take care of themselves. You had the occasional dropout and aimless wanderer. Part-time students looking to upskill their writing and language skills for better-paid positions. It was a mixed-bag of those of us primarily from the lower socioeconomic end of modern Australia, trying to explore creativity in a system that usually said ‘No. That’s not for you.’
We wrote short fiction pieces to share with each other as part of the course. After reading my work, an older student, who intimidated me with his beautiful poetry, told me: ‘Hey. You should read a book called The Windup Bird Chronicle. Your writing reminds me of Murakami. I think you’d dig it.’
It would take two more years before I found a copy of The Windup Bird Chronicle going for ten dollars at a closing down sale while I was waiting for a friend to finish work. The title had always stuck in my head like a strange melody and seeing it there amongst all these other discounted books with big red circles on them felt like a kind of calling.
This edition had a striking white-and-grey cover (with a splash of orange). It pictured a figure, possibly a young man, in the middle of some physical action. The grey and black spurts of cloud-like imagery reminded me of the cyclone in the film version of the Wizard of Oz. It made me think this young man was trapped in a furious storm of some sort – perhaps of his own making.
I had never read Murakami before and didn’t know anything about him. But by the end of that reading experience I was hooked. His version of Japan (surreal, dream-like, not-quite-right) was something I didn’t know you could do with modern speculative writing without having to justify every single strange occurrence. You could just let the strangeness sit and watch it simmer in the pan until it was ready. It was a wonderful reading experience.
There’s something about delving into a speculative world that drums up a feeling of possibility in me. Not only in igniting the desire to create my own, but something else, something beyond justified reason. Perhaps I’ll never understand why I equate possibility with the strange and odd, with the fantastical and futuristic. With two orcs drinking beer in a dimly-lit room with sour expressions, or a little hobbit trying to save his friends from a gang of vile trolls. Or a ride on the Millennium Falcon with Han and Chewie, or some quiet time in the deep darkness of an empty well in Japan.
Perhaps I don’t need to.