Wizardry and Wild Romance by Michael Moorcock
Published 1987 · 208 pages · 55,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Wizardry and Wild Romance to read?
Wizardry and Wild Romance scores 50 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Lively polemical prose for informed readers rather than academic specialists.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- Political and aesthetic argument about what fantasy can and cannot do; requires engagement with literary history.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- Wide range of texts referenced; argument is dense with literary-historical context.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- Polemic; Moorcock's positions are stated emphatically without qualification.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- Critical prose; symbolic analysis of fantasy conventions is described but not performed.
- Ironic distance: 28 out of 100
- Sardonic about his critical targets; more combative than ironic in sustained register.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- The argument reaches clear verdicts; Moorcock does not suspend judgment.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Organized by tradition and author; chapters build a cumulative argument about the conservative tendency in epic fantasy.
How Wizardry and Wild Romance is regarded
Wizardry and Wild Romance holds a literary regard score of 58 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.