Lone Wolf--A Social Problem? (cont')

But gamebooks have always been looked down upon as the poorer second cousins to "proper" books. If you are past about 14 and you are still reading gamebooks, people think you are a little strange. They point to the market and tell you to go out and buy some "proper" books. But dare you do that?

Fantasy has gone through something of a renaissance in the past twenty years. And now people are bored of it. Every week more and more drivel is being put out by half-talented authors using second-hand characters living in unrealistic worlds following derivative storylines full of obviously sign-posted plot devices. Yet because they are released in hardback first, we are supposed to see them as "proper" books, the sort that grown-ups read. Because youth books have a much smaller audience, any long-running series is constantly in danger of being retired because it is no longer popular enough to generate sales of 20000+, which is an average print run. The smaller the number of books printed, the higher the cost of the book has to be to recuperate the overheads and make a "healthy" profit.

I have read with disdain many novels written by well-regarded authors and I feel cheated when I reach the end of a book to find yet another cliff-hanger. Perhaps I have been around the fantasy block too many times, but I scarcely even care what happens to the boring protagonists in these dry books.

Lone Wolf is different. Because I am Lone Wolf or Grand Master I care what happens. Because the world of Magnamund has been well developed over many years I am interested in where "I" adventure. Because Lone Wolf is powerful but not ridiculously powerful there is always a chance he/I will lose. In many of the Lone Wolf adventures I have been surprised at the plot twists--that rarely happens outside gamebooks these days. The development of Magnamund shows, I believe, that Joe Dever is not just interested in writing any old rubbish, but actually wants his readers to enjoy their dallyings in Magnamund. I get the impression that most authors do not care as long as they get the royalties. Just think: How many series' of novels end (Book 12) and then begin again and then switch to having a different protagonist (Book 20)? It is a risk to do either of those things--but it prevents the series from becoming stale and keeps it interesting.

The third reason is a much more insidious reason which reaches to the very core of society itself. We in the West just have too much money. I am not speaking for myself or any individual, but as a group we are too wealthy. This means that while we used to buy books, we now buy computer games and CDs. We teach our children that it is more important to win the lottery than it is to get a decent education. Perhaps that sounds a little hypocritical coming from a guy who is on the Internet, but I haven't lost my love of the English language. If Shakespeare had had pots of money, would he have written his plays? If Tolkien had been brought up in a climate of Street Fighter, do you think he would have come to love writing and words as much as he did? Would he have written The Lord Of The Rings--recently voted the greatest book ever in a poll in The Times? Would Lovecraft have devised his Cthulhu Mythos, or Robert E. Howard his Conan character, if people of their generation didn't need to buy pulp fiction to escape, they could buy videos instead?

And while computer games are becoming increasingly more affordable, the price of books (certainly in the UK) is skyrocketing. I remember that my first Lone Wolf book cost me 50p from a second-hand shop. I'd never seen one in the shops, but I thought that I'd give it a whirl. It was The Chasm Of Doom, and to this day it probably is still one of my favourites. The price on the back of it says £1.75. The price of it in a shop now is between £4.50 and £4.99. Remember, this is supposedly aimed at a young persons. Think of most adolescents you know--would they buy a book or buy a music CD? Or a computer game?

Books are by their very nature challenging. We have to visualise in our mind just what someone looks like, or how large the lajakeka is. With computers we are shown what everything looks like with our latest Voodoo 3 cards and our PIII 750MHz processors. But our brains are much more powerful than these bits of plastic and metal. We do a better job of visualising than any computer can do.

Unfortunately, what this means is the "MTV" generation are securing their place in society by ignoring all that has gone before. Soon there may be nothing left of our great learning, of proper art. Not the art of terrorism perpetrated by attention-seeking middle class twenty-somethings; music with a tune and lyrics--and lyrics that mean something at that. We are fighting what may seem to be a losing battle. But fashion is a fickle mistress. In five or ten years time, people will turn off their computers in boredom and say "I want to do something new." They will open up a book--hopefully a Lone Wolf book--and begin to read and become captivated by the beauty and the terribleness of its tale of heroism.

And perhaps that will lead to a better society. Perhaps.