and all the children are above average.
There’s fantasy and there’s fantasy. Fantasy encompasses all fiction, including myths, legends, fables, utopias, and every other category that has existed over time.
What people seem to be talking about here is fantasy as a commercial genre, which is something new in the world. For all intents and purposes, whatever the hell they are, the genre of commercial fantasy began in the 1970s when the Del Reys, Lester and Judy-Lynn, created the genre for Ballantine and Del Rey Books respectively. Fantasy as we know it existed as a subset that sold very well and had mainstream prestige before then, but the Tolkien paperbacks issued in the 1960s diverted the field into deli meat: of various flavors but still identifiably deli meat.
Nothing particularly wrong with deli meat except that normally people do not confuse it with waygu beef and duck a l’orange. All meat products. They don’t “do” the same.
Fantasy always has been humanity’s attempt to deal with the unknown, the unfathomable, the creepiness behind a door, the shadows of past events, the smallness of an individual in a world vastly too large to comprehend. Fantasy cuts into the cruelness of an indifferent world, lifts the rock to expose what is underneath, drops burdens upon shoulders, yet also counters sadness with numinousness, rewards bravery with self-empowerment, imbues countries with joy, endows the ordinary with marvels.
Science fiction tells us we have the capacity within ourselves to satisfy all desires. Fantasy acknowledges that most people require the aid of a larger voice than their own. For all the wishes that come true in endings, fantasy is limited in a way science fiction is not. Call it a smaller infinity. It does what it does, and with timeless success.
I guess I don’t really get the question. IMO, fantasy does the same thing as other genres of fiction, viz., telling an interesting story with compelling characters and thought-provoking conflicts if it’s well-written, and failing to do that if it isn’t. I’ll buy that particular genres are sometimes especially suited to exploring particular types of questions, but that’s about as far as I’m willing to go even if the genre is something like mystery or romance, which at least has an identifiable, consistent plot structure. With fantasy, I feel like the defining feature is the setting, and the plot-types and moral conflicts can be all over the map.
I think this quote from George R. R. Martin is germane:
That’s beautiful. That is how I feel about writing.
I think you are right in terms of story types. Romance is a story type, Western is a story type, noir is a mystery in a dark skin, and fantasy and science fiction tend to be settings, but I think certain kinds of stories might work better than others in those settings. But hell, James SA Corey wrote military space noir so the sky’s the limit I guess.
After reading my quote in this thread, my husband told me I should write a noir romance and now my brain is percolating. I was working on a short story once about a succubus… I could warm up to this idea. Think Constantine. My hard-boiled PI writer friend is going to lose it. We enjoy each other’s work because we both like dark things and people on the margins of society. He told me one scene I wrote in my recently finished fantasy novel was straight noir. So I think I could do it.
I love that I wrote in the OP that I don’t “get” fantasy and here I go trying to write another one…
I would have thought Western is a setting.
I find it interesting that this is of import to some people like yourself. That’s not a dis by the way. My personal take if I think about it, is that it is not all that different the science-fiction in the broad sense, though I am enjoying reading a lot of the other suggestions being bandied about here.
But that’s not how I personally engage with fiction. It’s philosophic underpinnings have never crossed my mind while consuming it. It’s just entertainment and while I enjoy reading discussions about entertainment after the fact, when I am engaged with it all I care about is whether or not it entertains. It doesn’t need to have any purpose at all.
Is it important to you to categorize your fiction for it to engage you? For me it matters not a single bit - I never, ever think about it. I like some genres more than others, but I’m sure I can find something of interest in any genre.
There are plenty of downbeat fantasies (e.g. supernatural horror) and upbeat SF stories (you already admitted it with Star Wars and Star Trek).
But even granting your point, it makes no difference. SF is still fantasy that assumes a “Scientific” definition.
You’re adding an element that doesn’t change the definition. There are upbeat and downbeat stories throughout literature. And what makes a story are the characters reacting to the events,.not the label.
I’m not sure I ever really thought about it before, but consider Shakespeare; what’s the point of Hamlet? Yeah, I know: it resonates with people because of what it says about the human condition, with a guy responding as best he can to the tough situation he’s in — but what’s the point of the ghost? We get the mundane setup of a guy who lost his father and, by the time he got home, the throne; if it was a murder, it was a perfect crime with no witnesses and no marks on the body. Oh, and then a supernatural entity shows up: relaying useful insights while tasking a man with a duty to be performed.
What’s the point of Macbeth? Well, it’s about how ruinously far a guy might go for ambition, or something — again, mundanely framing someone upon killing with a steel blade instead of a magic wand or whatever. But: how to really spell out his mindset for the audience? Uh, let’s have some witches deliver prophecies, and show him reacting accordingly to that.
And so on. Sure, you’ve got tons of mundane story options about what a person would do if something happens to him; you can do a non-fantasy story where he gets drafted into the military, or comes into possession of some blackmail material, or battles drug addiction while trying to succeed in Hollywood, or whatever — and the real selling point, the approachable thing that’s going to click with people, is that a relatable human is dealing with that curveball scenario.
What changes if it’s a fantasy curveball?
The worst fantasy is tired tropes rehashed into an emotionally flat cookie-cutter narrative. Just like the worst literary fiction, and the worst romance, and the worst historical fiction, and so on.
But there are plenty of incredible, vibrant voices from the past quarter century. I’m gonna include mild spoilers from here on out.
Consider China Mieville, who uses the city of Bas Lag to explore class struggle, and has one of the most horrific metaphors for drug addiction that I’ve ever seen, in the slake moth.
Consider Anne Leckie, whose gods of stones and mosquitos render the natural world unfamiliar and who demands we look at them closely and consider our role in the world profoundly decentered.
Consider NK Jamisin, whose rigorously constructed magical systems give brutal insight into the mechanics of oppression.
Consider Marlon James, whose phantasmagoric semi-African Rashomonic trilogy uses mythology to explore similar themes of the mechanics of oppression. The image that remains with me most is the utopian nature society with automated ceiling fans and elevators and such, but the automation turns out to be people imprisoned forever in the walls of their buildings forced to manual labor.
Consider Caitlin Starling, whose Starving Saints are the most horrific take on the fae that I’ve ever seen, in the midst of a story about love and duty and the perils and promise of intellectual pursuits.
Consider Phillip Pullman, and his answer to CS Lewis in a corrupt church and in the reduction of the wonders of the universe to divine doctrine and strictures.
Consider Adrian Tchaikovsky, whose Tyrant Philosophers series is packed full of goodness; one example is the bitter, vicious god of absolute pacifism, who will cure you of all your wounds in exchange for a vow of nonviolence, and who will return all your wounds the first time you raise your hand in anger, and who despises his followers and his own restrictions. This raises questions, in the narrative, that would be harder to raise in other genres.
Consider Stephen Graham Jones, whose Buffalo Hunter Hunter is horrific historical fantastic masterpiece, coming at questions of historical atrocities sideways and using mythopoetic elements to examine the violence of vengeance on perpetrator and victim alike.
I love the genre when it’s done well, and don’t much care for it done poorly.
It is also, increasingly, a substitute for Mythology.
I’ve been meaning to write a reply to the OP for days, and am finally getting around to it.
This is pretty much my reaction to @Spice_Weasel 's OP, as well. Maybe I’m just not a deep thinker (it’s possible; I’ve wondered about this about myself for a long time).
I had started becoming a SF fan as a kid, through watching Star Trek reruns, and reading a fair number of young-adult SF books. 1977 was when I fell in love with Star Wars, of course, but it was also when I first encountered fantasy fiction: the Rankin-Bass cartoon adaptation of The Hobbit came out in November of that year, and my parents gave me a boxed set of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for Christmas, a month later. I instantly fell in love with those stories.
For me, a lot of the appeal of fantasy – again, based in part as Middle-Earth being my original touchstone in the genre – is that it’s quasi-mythological, and tells stories about things that can’t happen in our world. It has brave heroes (especially the unexpected heroes in the hobbits), fearsome villains and monsters, amazing locations, and a sweeping epic feel to it.
In recent years, while I don’t read fiction as much as I used to, fantasy still has that niche for me: there’s a whole lot about our world that dismays me and upsets me, and I’m not ashamed to say that going to Middle-Earth or a similar place (like Tatooine, for example) for a few hours is escapism.
I’d not read that before. That quote speaks to me, and why I love fantasy, a great deal.
This is, also, unfortunately true.
After I’d read Tolkien repeatedly as a young person, I wondered, “what else is out there?” And a lot of it was, frankly, authors who tried to mimic Tolkien.
Terry Brooks sold a whole ton of Shannara books. The first one, The Sword of Shannara, was so clearly stolen from The Lord of the Rings that even 13-year-old me realized it.
In the '80s and early '90s, one of the best-selling fantasy authors was a guy named David Eddings. I read all of his books, and at the time, enjoyed them. Much later, Eddings revealed that, in the '60s and early '70s, he had tried, and failed, as an author in other genres. He said that he had been surprised to discover how well The Lord of the Rings was still selling, and saw all of the knock-offs; he then bought and read the books, and decided to deconstruct them in an effort to “crack the code” on why they worked. He, too, sold a ton of books, but as I look back at them now, I can see that he didn’t choose fantasy because he wanted to write fantasy, or had a particular love for the genre; he chose fantasy because he felt it was a way for him to get published.
On the other hand, when I was in high school in the early '80s, and started playing Dungeons & Dragons, the original “Dungeon Master’s Guide” for the game contained a bibliography of various fantasy authors and works which Gary Gygax felt were inspirational in helping him create the game. He listed Tolkien, of course, but also Fritz Leiber’s “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” stories, Robert E. Howard’s “Conan” stories, Jack Vance’s “Dying Earth” stories, Poul Anderson’s “Three Hearts and Three Lions,” etc.: I took all of them out of the library, and enjoyed them all, even if they were very different from Tolkien. (All of them also largely, if not entirely, predated the fantasy genre becoming dominated by Tolkien and Tolkien-esque works in the late '60s and '70s.)
I think the difference between @Spice_Weasel and you two plus me, is that she’s seriously thinking about trying to write this stuff. We’re just trying to read it.
Huge difference in perspective. And a huge difference in the value of a deeper understanding.
Actually…
About five years ago, I had the thought that I might try to write a fantasy novel. I did a lot of background reading, bought several very helpful books (and workbooks) on writing fantasy fiction, and spent maybe six months working on creating the background of the world, its political structure, and how magic worked.
I’m pretty happy with how all of that turned out, but I wasn’t sure that I had an actual good plot for my story, and that’s where I struggled. I wound up setting it aside, but I may come back to it at some point. (Or, it might well wind up becomimg a setting for a tabletop RPG campaign.)
Imagine Lord of the Rings rewritten as science fiction rather than fantasy. Sauron is a billion-year old energy being with access to Clarke-level technology. The elves are parahuman colonists from another dimension. The dwarves were originally a genetic engineering project to produce a hyper-hardy alternative to humanity, and of course the Hobbits are an offshoot branch of the hominid line.
I did not know you’d done some workups as an author. makes sense with the rest of your skills and personality, but if you’d mentioned that before I’d not noticed it.
Ref this:
So sorta the opposite of this current thread:
That would not be The Lord of the Rings, it’s missing the point by a country mile.
For example: the elves are not “parahuman”, they are elvish, the important difference between Elves and Humans is not genetic, is spiritual.
That happens to all my attempts.
Side question: Do you find it hard to visualize scenes in general, like even in everyday life when someone tells you about their day walking their dog in the at the park or whatever? Or is it specifically a difficulty in imagining fantastical beings and scenes?
Like, is it any harder to visualize:
- A dog
- A dog on a leash
- A dog riding a sabertooth cat,
- A dog riding a sabertooth cat riding a dragon in the trenches of the Death Star, except the Emperor was on LSD and all the blasters are psychedelic colors and everything’s always in hyperspace. How close was your mental image of that compared to something like this?
I ask because as a kid, aside from reading a lot, I also played a lot of sci-fi and fantasy video games and read a lot of graphic novels. When I picture a sandworm, for example, it’s a chimera of real-world worms, Dune book covers, Dune video game depictions, Dune miniseries, Dune movies, and the parodies of them from Beetlejuice.
In other words, a lot of mental imagery is simply the recall and reconfiguration of imagery I’ve previously seen and remembered, imperfectly. If you write & read a lot but don’t get exposed to the same concepts in visual media as often… could that be part of it?