I’ve been meaning to read some Peter Straub for awhile, and so last week I picked up his novel Shadowland, which tells the story of a couple of teenagers who learn about magic. It’s fairly dark, set in the 1950s, and pretty cool, in a hallucinatory stream-of-consciousness way.
Except.
About a third of the way through the book, one of the teenagers shows another one a list of spells that he might learn from his mentor. And I kid you not. The spells are divided into nine levels, with “sleep” and “light” among the first-level spells, and “maze” and “wish” at the ninth level, with magic jar and telekinesis and invisible stalker and stuff in between.
There’s no other mention of Dungeons and Dragons in the book: the spells are mentioned as if they’re Straub’s original creation.
Has anyone else heard about this? Has Straub apologized for this pathetic plagiarism? Did TSR sue him?
My guess is that Straub, writing this book in the late 70s (it was published in 1980) thought that no one would ever know about his source material, thought he’d get away with a little bit of laziness.
It kinda ruined the book for me, so I thought I’d see if anyone’s heard of it.
Daniel
I thought Shadowland was an incredible book, and at the time I read it I had never associated it with D&D. Now I want to reread it.
I haven’t read this in a long time. Was it integral to the tale?
It’s not plagiarism. It’s at most an “in joke” for D&D players. And TSR would have very weak grounds on which to sue him, since I doubt any of the terms he used were valid trademarks.
Realitychuck, I should say that I don’t think TSR would’ve succeeded in suing, but they were pretty lawsuit-happy for awhile (in the mid-90s, they famously told D&D fans that fan-created spells, monsters, etc. couldn’t appear on the Internet without risking a lawsuit).
It may be an in-joke, but it’s weirdly place if that’s it: the spells on the list show up throughout the book. When a magician gestures, and his surroundings change suddenly from a theater to the middle of a forest, it has a wonderful surreal quality to it; when one of the characters breathes, “Hallucinatory Terrain!”, it absolutely breaks the mood. The book was generally not very funny (a few truly bizarre passages aside), and if this is an in-joke, it doesn’t match the flavor of the rest of the book at all.
When I call it plagiarism, I’m not speaking from a legal standpoint; I’m talking about whether he was taking unattributed ideas in a lazy and kinda scuzzy way. It doesn’t make sense to me for it to be an allusion, since allusions generally refer to respected works, not to newly-published roleplaying games.
Daniel
Aye-yah-- it’s been almost twenty years since I read Shadowland, and it’s gotten a bit muddy.
That being said – D&D made such an initial buzz, I think Straub can be forgiven for making elliptical references, without telegraphing “I AM GOING TO EMPLOY A CONCEIT BY WHICH ‘REAL’ MAGIC APPEARS TO WORK IN THE SIMPLE, FORMULAIC WAY OUTLINED IN A POPULAR GAME.”
D&D had already earned a place in the public imagination. Hell, Intellivision’s AD&D was already out.
Save your contempt for “Mazes & Monsters,” which not only based its entire premise around D&D, but borrowed a page from the War on Drugs script and suggested that if you “experiment” you risk sacrificing everything else in your life. Oh, and it sucked.
Although I haven’t really read genre-fiction since my teens, Peter Straub struck me as a smarter, more literate alternative to Stephen King. I still get spooked by leaves blowing around. Thanks, If You Could See Me Now.
Interesting, Larry – I was a wee tyke when this book was published, and so I didn’t realize that the game had made such a big splash. If he was expecting his audience to recognize the spells, that makes it somehow more okay. Weird, but less scuzzy.
Daniel