In the early 1980s, fantasy role-playing games became a theme in the fantasy literature that had exercised such an overwhelming influence on those games. This development went hand in hand with the games’ growing popularity—above all Dungeons & Dragons, whose parent company TSR released its new Basic Set in 1981.
The pioneer in writing D&D-related fiction was the veteran fantasy and science fiction author Andre Norton, whose 1978 book Quag Keep drew on a session of D&D she had played with game creator Gary Gygax—not to particularly good novelistic results. Another early use of the gaming world as a fantasy device was Diana Wynne Jones’s dark YA novel The Homeward Bounders (1981). By the mid-1980s TSR would be producing its own series of novels set in D&D product worlds.
These developments were intertwined with the burgeoning of new media and technology, home computers and video games, as well as developments in film. The fantasy genre began a memorable movie run in the 1980s with Excalibur, Clash of the Titans, Dragonslayer, and Time Bandits, all released in 1981, followed in 1982 by such films as Conan the Barbarian and The Dark Crystal. In the movie Tron (1982), a man enters a video game world, while in the 1981 novel Dream Park, co-authors Larry Niven and Steven Barnes imagine a near future in which fantasy games are played live with the aid of technology, recorded and released as high-grossing movies.
Today the interpenetration of game and fiction takes such forms as the sub-genre known as LitRPG, with innumerable novels written in various languages (Chinese and Russian LitRPGs each have their own standouts) featuring protagonists who are characters in game worlds, mostly computer games. While many LitRPG books seem to be quickly produced hackwork, some are philosophically profound and satirically canny.
But to return to the 1980s, another milestone in the role-playing game to fantasy crossover was Joel Rosenberg’s 1983 novel The Sleeping Dragon. In that book, a group of university students find themselves transported to the world of their weekly fantasy role-playing game, inhabiting the bodies and memories of the characters they play, from brawny warrior, to axe-wielding dwarf, to spell-casting sorcerer.
No one would mistake the book for a fantasy classic like Lord of the Rings, or even for the better sword and sorcery pulps. The main character, Karl Cullinane, is a stand-in for a stereotypical teenaged boy’s wish-fulfillments and self-dramatizations. Attempts to complicate the other characters’ two-dimensional personalities are earnest but unsuccessful, and the sexual banter between Karl the warrior and his sorceress girlfriend—throughout his books, corny sexual banter is Rosenberg’s main way of trying to convey intimacy between men and women—is not as charming as the author seemed to think.
Yet Rosenberg’s book came along at exactly the right time to appeal to readers, mostly teenaged boys (like me at the time) and older readers who loved fantasy literature and loved D&D, and were intrigued to see them mixed together. The book became the first in a series of ten novels, the “Guardians of the Flame” series (1983-2003).
What is most pronounced in The Sleeping Dragon and its immediate sequels (I have only read the first four books in the series) is their relentless deromanticization of the medievalesque fantasy world. The world these college students enter runs on slavery, sadism, and brutal oppression. In a stomach-turning episode, the two female members of the group are captured by slavers and gang-raped. Another of the students is killed painfully with a spear.
The elves, rather than Tolkien’s beautiful spirits, are described here as looking “like regular people, stretched lengthwise in a funhouse mirror.” Regarding the hostilities between the fantasy world’s elves, dwarves, and humans, Rosenberg writes: “Racial prejudice was different here, but still every bit as firmly entrenched on This Side as back on the Other Side.” There is very little to love in this fantasyworld. The world is epitomized by the good dragon Ellegon, first encountered imprisoned in a city’s sewer system where it has spent centuries sitting in human excrement.
Led by Karl, who frees the dragon, the former students pledge themselves to ending slavery in this world. This is to be accomplished not only by attacks on the slavers but, more far-reachingly, by introducing technology as a replacement for an economy based on slave labor and magic. One of the characters was an engineering student in our world. In the fantasy world he is a wizard, but by the end of The Sleeping Dragon he comes to a realization: “There’s more magic in a suspension bridge than in all these books.” Indeed, his turn from magic to construction is also something of a protest against the direction of 1980s technology:
For more than four years, Lou Riccetti had been an engineering student in a world that really didn’t want things built. The days of great construction had passed from his world; the future of engineering was with piddling little electronic circuits, not big structures, not great things. There would be no more Brooklyn Bridges built, no more Hoover Dams. But here, it was different. A world to conquer. He smiled.
Karl, meanwhile, when not killing people or making sexual observations, is preoccupied with the requirements of free societies and how to create and maintain one in a fantasy world. “We keep the flame of freedom burning,” he vows. This libertarian focus is earnest, if not portrayed with much philosophical depth or socio-political complexity.
The greatest weakness of these books is that they are written out of an often haranguing insistence that they are tough-minded, realistic, not given over to the sentimentalities of fantasy literature or present-day liberal bromides—yet they are at the same time ego-driven wish-fulfillments of the most obvious sort: social and sexual popularity, coupled with the ability to solve problems with swords. “The world was not full of nice, clean, easy choices,” a character intones. “And wishing that it was would never make it so.” Karl asks himself during one mission, “Okay, hero, how would Conan do it?” And then he answers that it doesn’t matter because he isn’t in a pulp fantasy novel and “things just didn’t work out that way.” But he is in a pulp fantasy novel, if one less well-written than one of Robert E. Howard’s, and more soldered to the speech and mindset of its main character: “Baron, you’re an asshole, Karl Cullinane thought as he approached the keep.”
Rosenberg was Jewish, and one of the students in the series is explicitly so. Doria Perlstein is given a backstory that explains her sexual promiscuity as a psychological response to family conflicts. After she is raped by the slavers, she leaves the series, joining an all-female religious order called the Healing Hand that will help her recover from her trauma, and does not show up again until book four. This may suggest Rosenberg’s uncertainty about what to do with Jewishness in a fantasy world.
However, in a later series by Rosenberg, “The Keepers of the Hidden Ways” (1995-1998), the main character is a Jew named Ian Silverstein, who discovers that his Scandinavian college friends from North Dakota (where Rosenberg spent part of his childhood) are related to the Norse gods, and joins them on a journey into the lands of supernatural beings. Ian finds that his foil fencing lessons pay off when he defeats a fire giant in a duel, and he wins gold, fame, and a girlfriend along the way. The rendering of females has not improved much from the first series; here it seems to rely on shampoo labels: “Her hair smelled of roses and lemon.” “She smelled of flowers and sunshine, with just a hint of musk.” “Her tongue tasted of orange and mint.”
Ian’s Jewishness is accepted as a matter of course—one of the gods even tries out some Hebrew on him—although on the other side of the portal people tend to call him “Silverstone.” Ian’s main burden is his trauma from an abusive father, while the main burden for readers is Ian’s constant refrains of “asshole” about said father, as well as the shallowness that marks the earlier series. Again, we get the posture that other people don’t understand what real life is all about, as when Ian regards his Dakotan friend Torrie:
Torrie had been raised too gently, surrounded by people he could trust. He didn’t understand the way the world really worked sometimes, that you couldn’t always trust even the ones that you should have had every reason to believe meant well by you. Ian knew that. Benjamin Silverstein had beaten that into him.
And, again, “the way the world really worked” is shown to be heroic swordfights, willing castle maids, and bros doing sword practice:
Thorsen was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, thick white socks cushioning the sneakers he seemed to prefer for sword practice. He dropped to a mat and launched into a series of stretches, and after a moment, Ian stripped off his own clothes to slip on a fresh jockstrap that smelled of chlorine—the damn things were an invitation to crotch rot if you didn’t bleach them regularly—and then pull on a faded pair of walking shorts and a tattered T-shirt that read I Know That Shit Rolls Downhill on the front, and But Why Do I Always Have to Live in the Valley? on the back.
Definitely not Tolkien. Rosenberg also wrote two books a piece in two other fantasy series (D’Shai, Mordred’s Heirs) that I have not read.
What makes Rosenberg’s oeuvre more interesting than I have so far conveyed, and considerably deepens its Jewish resonance, is a sequence of four science fiction novels he published. These depict a future in which Jews live on their own planet, named Metzada after the ancient Jewish fortress that resisted the Romans and whose inhabitants finally chose mass suicide over Roman enslavement. The Metzadans exemplify a tough, Israeli-inspired military ethos.
The first book in the series, Ties of Blood and Silver (1984), approaches Jewish identity obliquely, yet determinedly. The Metzadans are only mentioned here, martial Jewish denizens of “Shimon Bar-El’s world. . . Shimon the Liberator [who] had been dead for centuries,” but do not enter the story itself. The protagonist of the book is not a Metzadan but a young pickpocket named David, the illegitimate son of a nobleman, consigned to live among the “lowers” on a different, rigidly class-based world. David is housed and trained (and sexually exploited) by an older criminal. David’s unhappiness and bitter solitude recede when he experiences a surprising bond with a schrift, one of an alien race dedicated to the crafting of precious metals and gems. Although human, David shares a special mental-emotional link with the schrift, that marks him as a member of the schrift’s schtann, a clan which, while scattered over many worlds and in time and space, functions as an interconnected family.
In this suggestive plot, Rosenberg seems to be purging Jewishness of antisemitic associations. The exploitative older criminal is recognizable as a Fagin character, yet he is not coded as Jewish. Meanwhile, the protagonist bears the Jewish name of David, and the alien schrift are coded as “Jewish” in that they are a scattered race of precious metal and gem workers, portrayed here from the inside as compassionate and sensitive beings with their own values and traditions (even if they eat humans when provoked).
In keeping with Rosenberg’s frequent theme of ambivalence toward parents, David learns that he is not a bastard, but the legitimate son of a nobleman, who brings him to live in the upper city. David does not feel he belongs in this decadent nobility, and returns to the lower city. When the schrift dies attempting to protect David from a sadistic nobleman, David is rescued by the other schrift, who take him into their jewelry-working tribe.
The book is, then, a fable of Jewish belonging and connection:
I felt Sthtasfth’s [another schrift] joy. It had worked long and hard on the pendant, taking scraps of silver and unworked jade, and then turning it into wonder.
And, in another part of my mind, I could feel the rest of the schtann—not just here but on worlds scattered across the sky—joining in my appreciation, basking in Sthtasfth’s joy at the work of its hands. I was with all the others: the living, the dead, and the yet-to-live. I wasn’t alone anymore.
The following year, Rosenberg published Emile and the Dutchman, about military scouts’ first encounters with alien species, and the military and moral calculations of when to order the nuclear destruction of a hostile race and when to risk oneself, one’s crew, and potentially the whole human race for the possibility of peaceful contact. “It’s a matter of either coming to terms with them, or being forced to commit genocide,” says one character. “Take your pick.” (Interestingly, the book was published the same year as Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, which also deals with the morality of genocidal interspecies conflict, and includes the stereotyped character “Rose the Nose,” a Jewish soldier in training.)
Emile and the Dutchman includes the first appearance of one of Rosenberg’s Jewish Metzadans. Crew member Akiva Bar-El is presented as the toughest and most deadly weapons officer the protagonist Emile has ever met: “when he looked at someone, Akiva Bar-El wasn’t deciding whether or not he could take them; he was deciding how.” Bar-El is respected but not entirely trusted by the crew, since all Metzadans are loyal to their Jewish homeworld over the pan-human federation known as the Thousand Worlds. Moreover, Emile is of Austrian descent, and at one point it is indicated that the Holocaust is an active and personal consideration for Bar-El. “In that moment,” thinks Emile, “he could have killed me without hesitation or regret. . . . in that moment, his people’s history was a very personal matter between Akiva Bar-El and me.” Yet Bar-El dies trying to save the other crew members from hostile aliens. The running theme of the book is the need to suspend sentimentality when one is responsible for human life, as well as the personal cost of doing so.
The third book in the series, Not For Glory (1988), brings us to Metzada itself. The planet of the Jews has no resources to trade, which is the reason why the Jews have turned themselves into a valuable commodity, becoming the most effective mercenary soldiers and military strategists in the Thousand Worlds. The culture of Metzada is an idealized version of Israeli military culture, with some important additions. For instance, the Metzadans practice polygamy and levirite marriage, although the rationale for this is not biblical religion, but instead the consequence of a population concerned with raising children under conditions of near constant warfare. Indeed, while Jewish religious observances are kept on Metzada, the characters eat pork offworld.
Rosenberg includes a number of Hebrew and Jewish references in the book. One character uses the alias “Diane Emmett,” which other Metzadans recognize as the Hebrew phrase dayan emet, while another character refers to the thirteenth century rabbi Meir of Rothenburg. Because of the Holocaust, some Metzadans feel a strong antipathy toward the Germans of the future, referred to as “Freiheimers,” yet this is presented not as a morbid obsession but rather as a desire to be acquitted for a grave historical offense to people and honor.
Why these future Jews live on another planet and not on Earth in the State of Israel is not explained directly, yet this grimly suggestive comment is offered:
Shimon had always figured that Operation Theda Bara and the events surrounding David’s Gift had closed the books on the Second Holocaust and the Sunny Musselmen—they took Eretz Yisrael away from us, for now; David Bar-El took their Ka’aba and their religion away from them forever.
No Arabs appear or are mentioned in the books.
Not For Glory takes the military ethos we saw dramatized in Emile and the Dutchman—the principle that, if you really care about life, you must be tough, not sentimental—and applies it to the Jews of the future in a manner clearly meant as a defense of Israel in the present. At the book’s conclusion, the Metzadan military leader Shimon Bar-El explains that loyalty to the Jewish people, the willingness to kill in order to protect one’s people, is his overriding value. The old punchline “Is it good for the Jews?” he takes as a moral ideal, outweighing even “all the lives on all the worlds on all the stars in all the galaxies.” It is “precisely the correct question, the central one, the only one that really counts. Not ‘what are my orders’ or ‘what is the Law’ or ‘what do I want to do,’ but ‘is it right for Am Yisroel, is it good for the people of Israel, is it good for the Jews.’”
This is followed by a brief epilogue that reframes this perspective even more sympathetically, as another character looks at his sleeping infant, and is told by his wife that the mercenary pay has allowed the planet to import medicine and immunizations for their children. He thinks: “We don’t fight for money. We fight, we kill, and we die, for the credits that keep Metzada alive. The distinction is important.” In Rosenberg’s fantasy novels, his appeals to toughness and “the way the world really works” sometimes make him sound like the Walter Sobchak of fantasy literature. But they possess moral weight and pathos in his science fiction.
The series comes to a close with Hero (1990), which involves a kind of interplanetary United Nations whose supposed peacekeepers will not protect Metzadan lives. (Plus ςa change.) The book continues the theme of the moral value of Jewish self-defense, with references to the Holocaust and to Arab terrorism as historical examples of what happens when Jewish survival is considered negotiable. At the same time, Rosenberg’s vision of future Jewishness is notably devoid of victimhood. He sets a science fictional Israeli military valor against a science fictional Germany’s in a context in which the Holocaust and antisemitism do not play significant roles. Metzadans and Freiheimers may fight soldier to soldier, national military against national military. Taking inspiration from Israel, Rosenberg imagines a Jewish identity without either defensiveness or apology for self-defense.
Rosenberg died in his 50s, survived by his wife and two children, and leaving behind a devoted readership that hoped for new books by him.
investigations and fantasies 