Daughter of Regals, by Stephen R. Donaldson
Eight pretty much ordinary fantasy short stories
(Review posted 30 May 2005 01:08:25)

I'm not a huge fan of Donaldson. I read the first Thomas Covenant trilogy a long time ago, and I remember it as a crushingly depressing story set in a mostly cliché fantasy world with some novel dark touches. The cool thing about it, as I recall, was that it took the clichés somewhat off the rails: there were various Destinies lying around waiting to be fulfilled, but the (anti-)hero was such a miserable screw-up that he managed to throw monkey wrenches into some of them, and that was refreshing. (Although they did get him in the end.)

In the eight stories (really seven stories and one fragment) in Daughter of Regals, Donaldson doesn't really have time to introduce any monkey wrenches. Someone becomes a dragon to fulfill her destiny and unite a stock fantasy kingdom, someone else becomes a unicorn to bring humanity to a stock computerized dystopia, someone else outwits the bad guys to free a noble nature-loving woman from the stock puritan witch hunters, etc. The writing is nothing special, too full of "the third hour" and "hypoguns" and sweat that "ran from his brows as from an overlathered horse" and like that.

But they aren't bad stories. There's a reason that stock is called "stock": we need to have cupboards full of it (cardboard boxes up in the attic full of it) to give us the basic shared material to build on. It can't all be glittering and new. I spent a few quiet Sunday hours reading this book, and it reminded me of quiet hours in that attic, reading old Fantasy and Science Fiction and old bundled paperbacks. Imperfect, sure, even routine. But it's not a bad routine.