On genre: fantasy

[StillStunned]

This is a thread to discuss fantasy as a literary/fiction genre. There's already a separate thread for the sword & sorcery subgenre, but maybe for now we can let this one be broad and inclusive. Perhaps if one or more subgenres lead to enough discussion they can spin off into their own genre threads.

So, fantasy. I've loved fantasy for as long as I can remember. I grew up with my dad reading books to me and my siblings, and those were often Middle-Earth, Prydain, Earthsea, Narnia. I latched onto Shannara when I was about ten, I think, and the surge of popularity that fantasy experienced from the mid-1980s to the 1990s was like a dream for me. Discworld, more Shannara, Dragonlance, Wheel of Time, Game of Thrones, Midkemia, and countless more.

And then suddenly there was a surfeit. The genre seemed to become a parody of itself. D&D fiction was never very good, and it led the charge of names like Y'zaethy'lyxia and Thyshandro'o. Everything became about saving the world, and series that had started of strongly dragged. It was as if each new book had to have an original theme, but often the theme didn't support a decent story. The characters started to feel flatter because they had to be unique.

I wonder whether anyone else felt the same during that time?

And feel free to share your own thoughts on the genre: what you enjoy, what you hate, what you try to emulate in your own writing.

 

[vales]

I understand what you mean, but there's also some really good new ones! I've really enjoyed Robin Hobb and Brandon Sanderson lately, you should check them out!

 

[StillStunned]

I understand what you mean, but there's also some really good new ones! I've really enjoyed Robin Hobb and Brandon Sanderson lately, you should check them out!

I know, and there was a big improvement starting in the early-2000s, I think. But I cut off my thread in the 1990s to focus particularly on that shift from fantasy lover's heaven to fantasy lover's hell.

 

[Rob_Royale]

I agree. After a while there's just so much blood you can wring out of a stone. After the first triology most stories loose their sense of intrique and uniqueness. I really did love all of Raymond Feist's Midkemia stories though because he did a lot of stand-alone stuff within that world. Sword of Truth, Shanarra, and Dragonlance, I lost interest in.

 

[BeechLeaf]

I am in despair at how the genre has become so dominant. Yes, as a young child I greatly enjoyed Enid Blyton's tales of the Faraway Tree, and then at twelve or whatever I encountered The Lord of the Rings, and the technical detail in that - the languages and history and so on - greatly influenced me. I read it as the same time as I read other adventures, Jules Verne and Rider Haggard and The Silver Sword. Well-told adventure stories. They don't require fantasy worlds. Or if you rejoice in the frisson of the fantastic, there's Joan Aiken: slight alterations to the real world.

What people now seem to take away from it is that you just throw in elves and monsters and magic swords and this epic saga somehow becomes . . . I don't know what they get out of it.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

This is a thread to discuss fantasy as a literary/fiction genre. There's already a separate thread for the sword & sorcery subgenre, but maybe for now we can let this one be broad and inclusive. Perhaps if one or more subgenres lead to enough discussion they can spin off into their own genre threads.

So, fantasy. I've loved fantasy for as long as I can remember. I grew up with my dad reading books to me and my siblings, and those were often Middle-Earth, Prydain, Earthsea, Narnia. I latched onto Shannara when I was about ten, I think, and the surge of popularity that fantasy experienced from the mid-1980s to the 1990s was like a dream for me. Discworld, more Shannara, Dragonlance, Wheel of Time, Game of Thrones, Midkemia, and countless more.

And then suddenly there was a surfeit. The genre seemed to become a parody of itself. D&D fiction was never very good, and it led the charge of names like Y'zaethy'lyxia and Thyshandro'o. Everything became about saving the world, and series that had started of strongly dragged. It was as if each new book had to have an original theme, but often the theme didn't support a decent story. The characters started to feel flatter because they had to be unique.

I wonder whether anyone else felt the same during that time?

And feel free to share your own thoughts on the genre: what you enjoy, what you hate, what you try to emulate in your own writing.

There was a shift at one moment, somewhere around the time Jordan and Martin started their series, from classical fantasy to a more modern approach. The classical approach was more about plot, more about telling the tale and events than focusing on character arcs and development.

Personally, even if I loved many classical fantasy books, I prefer the more modern approach. I like when characters have a strong presence, when there is a defined arc. Obviously, plot and world-building are very important too, but this is where I feel that the more modern books made an improvement.

 

[Britva415]

What I think about the post-90s stuff:

People who were viciously starved for good stuff made new dogshit like Eragon and His Dark Materials far more popular than they deserved.

 

[Nynah]

new dogshit like Eragon and His Dark Materials

I think that's a bit unfair to His Dark Materials; I rather enjoyed that series. I liked what it did with Christian mythos more than what Lewis did with Narnia. I agree that Eragon was lackluster and only got published because the author was a nepo baby.

Having read a lot of the "older" fantasy works, I've enjoyed how much the genre has expanded with newer authors demonstrating that fantasy doesn't always have to be about the same European-inspired settings with the same European-inspired characters and plots. Everyone in that niche will always be chasing ol' JRR anyway.

One my favorite series over the past few years is the Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. I love how she plays with magic systems and worldbuilding in ways that seem fresh and innovative. Her characters feel believable and change over the course of the series as they navigate the trauma and literal upheaval of the world around them. I'm not nearly doing it enough justice but it was a breath of fresh air in a genre where it's all too easy to put out the same kinda stuff over and over. The review I linked above does a pretty good job of summarizing the key points without spoiling too much. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who even has a passing interest in fantasy and wants to challenge themselves by reading something that's leaps and bounds better than anything GRRM has ever written.

 

[Britva415]

think that's a bit unfair to His Dark Materials

What he wrote was unfair to my sense of taste

This isn't even about his stance regarding Christianity or organized religion or whatever. I didn't enjoy the really snotty and negative attitude he allowed to color his writing. It just wasn't fun, reading stuff with so much anger behind it. It didn't make for good adventure or for good underdog-triumphs type energy. It was without finesse, and it was distasteful and unpleasant for me to read.

 

[Paul_Chance]

I think any date for either "after this sucked" or "before this sucked" or "between this sucked" is just opinion. It's more about where the reader was in their journey, then all of the wide variety of books released in any time frame. The release calendar is too wide for it to be pushed together.

 

[Blind_Justice]

I'm the odd one out. I hated Tolkien and his obsession with giving elaborate backstories to every fucking tree branch. I've been raised on my father's wall of random paperbacks which had all kinds of '70s sci-fi and fantasy. I've read Howard, I've read Moorcock, I've read Von Lustbader and, after discovering D&D, I've DEVOURED Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms books. R. A. Salvatore was the reason I started writing my own fantasy stories because he sucked so bad at believable character work. His "Hunter's Blades" trilogy is a nightmare and I wondered if it ever saw an editor. Anyone with a bit of sense would have asked "you sure you want to release that? You've just turned your main character into a spineless pussy." Also, too much convoluted sword fighting

I reject the notion that D&D fiction as a whole is bad. As with every medium, there are different quality levels and I've read more good than bad stories. That said, it's been twenty years (or the halfway point of 3rd edition) that I've picked up any new D&D novels, after "The Hunter's Blades" bullshit and the general direction the Realms were heading I looked elsewhere. Read the first few "Wheel Of Time" and "Songs of Ice and Fire" books. Didn't like the former, tried too hard to be Tolkien. Was impressed by how edgy the latter were and how shallow the story was under all the random brutality and incest sex. And people complained that the "Raven, Swordmistress of Chaos" books were just blood, guts and sex. GRRM does almost the same, he only needs ten times the word count.

The allure of fantasy, especially when writing it, is the ability to create and shape worlds just how I want them to be. I don't intend to convey deliberate messages, but a world without conflict is boring. So, even if I want to write the equivalent of a sexy action movie, I end up tackling issues of identity, racism, power and the abuse of it and, for some odd reason, religion. I've been raised in a very atheist home so I have no issue with people who believe in higher powers or sprituality but the divine has a habit of mucking with my characters in one way or another.

 

[Voboy]

I was a JJRT fan from way back (like, second grade), but later during the late eighties I got into the Thieves' World anthology series edited by Asprin and Abbey.

Being an anthology it was uneven in tone, but I really liked its noir-ish feel, overall. I could never really picture myself living in Tolkien's world, but Thieves' World? Oh yes. I could absolutely see myself on those streets, struggling to maintain my place in a confusing and unforgiving city.

When I wrote my own fantasy material, much later, I think I was influenced more by Thieves' World than by Middle-Earth. I added a certain degree of hardness, injustice, and antiheroism.

 

[deathlynx]

Lord of the Rings? Yes. Hobbit? For a very long time it was one of two books that I put down in the middle and never picked back up (though I finally forced myself to finish it about a decade ago). He just does not write children's books well. He dumbed it down too much at which point even kids would know they were being condescended. And GEEZE was Silmarillian hard to get through. I know he was trying for a biblical style to it, but I found the actual Bible easier to read.

For D&D I read a lot of it mostly as brain candy. Though I do really like R.A.Salvatore. Piers Anthony's Xanth was pretty formative for me, which isn't a surprise given that I read Chameleon for a book report in second or third grade. Other notable's as a kid were Lloyd Alexander's Prydain, Robert Asprin's Myth, Madeleine L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time (probably my first introduction to fantasy in a modern setting).

I read GRRM as they came out and lamented when/if the next would ever appear.

I liked His Dark Materials, well, the first two. The third he really leaned hard on the preaching and, although I'm not Christian and can sing his tune, it just felt too over the top. Eragon was more brain candy and completely derivative.

I'll put in a plug for Mickey Zucker Reichert, and the Renshai series. Norse/Viking themed. Swords and Sorcery (though arguably subverted not too far in). Interesting character development and great world building.

 

[SimonDoom]

One of the interesting things to me is how dominated the fantasy genre is by the medieval. It was a pretty terrible time to live, but for some reason its politics, monster legends, and technology level enjoy an unusual degree of popularity among fantasy authors and readers. For instance, how many fantasy stories feature democracies, as opposed to kinship? What's the reason? What is the romantic attachment?

I enjoy fantasy stories, but not as much, generally, as I do more realistic stories.

 

[StillStunned]

One of the interesting things to me is how dominated the fantasy genre is by the medieval. It was a pretty terrible time to live, but for some reason its politics, monster legends, and technology level enjoy an unusual degree of popularity among fantasy authors and readers. For instance, how many fantasy stories feature democracies, as opposed to kinship? What's the reason? What is the romantic attachment?

There's Ankh-Morpork, in the Discworld books, where the Patrician rules according to the principle of "one man, one vote".

More seriously: I think some of the Icewind Dale towns have elected officials (I recall Regis the Halfling abusing his powers), and in the Belgariad one of the kingdoms is ruled by someone whose ancestor was chosen by the people (and according to the strange laws of that world, all his descendants are still just as humble and down-to-earth).

Perhaps one reason why faux-medieval settings are so popular is that they were supposedly simpler times. Or morality at least was a simpler matter of black and white. Once fantasy fiction stops glossing over the day-to-day terribleness, you enter into grimdark territory, which I personally enjoy more.

 

[TheRedChamber]

@SimonDoom

I suppose one way to ponder this question is to ask whether, if Tolkien's epic had been set in an Ancient Roman or Ancient Egyptian setting, if the whole history of fantasy would have been different?

Another point to make is that Medieval covers a pretty wide span - it depends on how you define it, but naively taking the first result Google spits out says 500AD-1500AD or about half recorded history in Britain. After the English Civil War (1642-51) and especially after Culloden (1746) ends Scottish rebellion, there's not a lot of dramatic battles in Britain country. There's mostly a stable political organization and the expansion of the British Empire isn't exactly noble. Dragons are cool, and YouTube videos about at exactly what stage of technological development a modern army could take down a dragon with little to no bother can be fun, having your characters do it with a really fuck-off great sword is probably more genre-conventionally heroic. Even during the Victorian period, you have people moving into horror as a more 'behind the scenes' type of fantasy than orcs and dragons terrorizing the land, and that leads into urban fantasy where you have insipid relationship triangles between sparkly vampires and huggable werewolves. To some extent, fantasy is a genre label that is rooted in medieval settings - in many ways Star Wars and Dune have more in common with Lord of the Rings than they do with Star Trek or Blade Runner, but a quick glances files them into science fiction.

Obviously, there's a lot of works that fall outside the medieval period - for every Game of Thrones which is firmly based on the War of the Roses, you have a Harry Potter based on some warped verison of Victorian public schools - (although JK Rowling doesn't consider her work fantasy and I'm always happy also to exclude it) or say, Susanna Clarkes Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell which is high magic in precisely the Napoleonic Wars. Not everything that is labelled medieval strictly is. Conan isn't so much medieval as it is a fantasy pre-Roman barbarian world. But even within the medieval period you have a range from the Dark Ages to the Medieval.

If you want to model your fantasy world on specific time periods that gets trickier the closer to the source material you get - the more you talk about the senate and blood-sports in the colloseum, the more your audience is going to wonder why you are importing your own Gods and monsters into that world. On the other hand, if you want to work within the existing myths, then you're also constrained by people already knowing what Zeus got upto. In some ways, it's a lot easier to dump Christainity and make up your your own gods into a basic swords and castles fantasy framework.

As to why kings are more fun than democracies, remember that Henry VIII fancying a bit of Anne Bolynn literally changed the religion in a whole country. They make for great drama.

 

[onehitwanda]

What is the romantic attachment?

Swords, knights, queens and quests. You can blame it all on Mallory.

Speaking for myself, it's all my mum's fault. She taught me to read by reading the Hobbit to me (I was five, I think) and from then on they needed heavy construction equipment to get fantasy books out of my hands.

I've fangirled elsewhere about Eowyn, so I'll spare you all. But Sci Fi and Fantasy were my happy place when I didn't understand myself or the world around me.

I loved AD&D, so of course I read a lot of the books. They were largely awful, but I still loved them and the worlds they conjured, where Gods walked among men and women and women (cough Midnight cough) walked with magic. "I, Strahd" was somehow in our town library, and I and every other AD&D nerd there wore the pages out.

A friend introduced me to Gaiman after I'd already discovered Faerie through Zelazny and his Nine Princes in Amber. I read Memory, Sorrow and Thorn when I was twelve or so, and Tailchaser's song not long after that.

Midkemia
Earthsea
Middle Earth
Pern
Narnia
Thomas Covenant
Recluse
Krynn
Buck Duchy and the Mountain Kingdom

been there, done that, probably at a far younger age than I should have.

Oh, and Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrel was a delight - so weird, but it presented the Fae in a way that has (obviously) informed my own stories that touch on them.

A set of books I don't see mentioned much is Justina Robson's Quantum Gravity, which is weird and sexy and very, very dark at times. It's well worth reading the first couple of books.

---

And now, Wanda's list of pet fantasy peeves:

1. please don't write Wheel of Time. One was bad enough.
2. please don't try to write The Lord of the Rings - it's been done so many times, and the first will remain the GOAT
3. please don't confuse elves and pixies. If you're going to do elves, either Tolkien Elves or Pratchett Elves, don't invent some new thing where they're wee folk.
4. don't make magic free. Be like Ursula le Guin, make magic a bad last resort used when all other tools have failed.
5. don't make a Dark Lord. Melkor's already in the canon, and Sauron was at best a minor footstool for the Lord of Terror.
6. please don't make me need to read for a thesaurus to pronounce your character names. Just fuck off and be normal.
7. please don't be GRRM and get off on torturing your characters. There's still a dent in my wall because of Shireen Baratheon.

There are other laws, but they're more nuanced.

 

[SugarStorm]

don't make magic free. Be like Ursula le Guin, make magic a bad last resort used when all other tools have failed.

Are you saying magic should come with a cost, or more that it shouldn’t be overused as a storytelling tool?

 

[StillStunned]

And now, Wanda's list of pet fantasy peeves:

1. please don't write Wheel of Time. One was bad enough.

I think that WoT showed us how wonderful proper worldbuilding can be, and how awful it is when it becomes a crutch for poor storytelling. Or worse: when the story disappears and all that's left is the worldbuilding.

1. don't make magic free. Be like Ursula le Guin, make magic a bad last resort used when all other tools have failed.

I agree entirely. One thing I hate about D&D fiction is how it made magic a commodity. Far too many fantasy works now have magic that's lost its magic, as it were, and has become mundane.

1. please don't make me need to read for a thesaurus to pronounce your character names. Just fuck off and be normal.

And don't give everyone down to your beggars and thugs and mudgrubbing peasants names like "Shayana" or "Elyssia". A farmgirl called Elyssia will be "Ellie" two days after she's born and "our Ellie" by the time she's six.

 

[onehitwanda]

A farmgirl called Elyssia will be "Ellie" two days after she's born and "our Ellie" by the time she's six.

Elyssia will be "Pig Girl" within a day, and "Piglet" within a week.

 

[onehitwanda]

Are you saying magic should come with a cost, or more that it shouldn’t be overused as a storytelling tool?

Both.

"Magic" in the Farseer books and in the Earthsea books is used sparingly if at all because it has a real cost to the user - both in terms of damage to themselves, but also (particularly in the Farseer books) in terms of reputation and social acceptance.

Most problems cannot be solved by flinging a fireball at them, and both Robin Hobb and Ursula le Guin were masters (mistresses?) of demonstrating this - both, incidentally, through the use of Dragons, which I guess speaks the place of Dragons in our mythology.

Magic should not be easy. Magic should cost the caster. Eddings, for all his faults, at least made the "Will and the Word" cost as much if not more as doing the same thing physically. Magic in the world of Kvothe is deadly if you make one small misstep.

One of my biggest issues with the world of Harry Potter is how every single witch or wizard isn't too terrified to cast magic because every other magical person they've eencountered should have been dead before the age of ten due to innocent mistakes that turned them into rapidly-expanding spheres of viscera.

piles her soapboxes higher

MAGIC. SHOULD. COST. THE. CASTER.

 

[ColtonWrites]

MAGIC. SHOULD. COST. THE. CASTER.

Terry Pratchett, for all the comedy, handles this well. "Useful" magic is almost never done because creating real things or doing real work takes as much magical effort as doing it the regular way.
So doing something "real", like moving a person a long distance, takes several trained wizards and a lot of care. Moving a single item a short distance can be done by one person but the narrator warns us that if the wizard doesn't do it right, he ends up using his own brain as physical leverage. (Ewwwww....) But creating a fancy illusion or light show or fairy gold that disappears in the morning is easy because that's not "real".

And the witches mostly do magic that could be mistaken for coincidence, luck, or herbalism....right up until it isnt.

 

[StillStunned]

In my sword & sorcery series "The Rivals", one of the characters is Sligh, a scholar and conman. He generally carries small magics around: a stone that detects magical traps, runes that make him invisible for a few seconds, that kind of thing.

But at the series progressed, and the main POV began to shift away from him and more to Avilia, his "small magics" started to become more and more like Batman's utility belt, as @Djmac1031 put it. It's easy to let those things run out of control.

My only defence is that they're always tools, never the solution. Sligh might give Avilia a charm to protect her from a dragon's aura of fear, but she still has to go and stick her spear in it. He can find and open a secret door, but if there's a demon behind it, then it's time for swords and daggers.

Even so, I'm very much more aware of the issue now. I want my characters to earn their victories, not pull them out of their arses. If nothing else, the question then would be why nobody else has done what they did.

 

[ColtonWrites]

In my sword & sorcery series "The Rivals", one of the characters is Sligh, a scholar and conman. He generally carries small magics around: a stone that detects magical traps, runes that make him invisible for a few seconds, that kind of thing.

But at the series progressed, and the main POV began to shift away from him and more to Avilia, his "small magics" started to become more and more like Batman's utility belt, as @Djmac1031 put it. It's easy to let those things run out of control.

My only defence is that they're always tools, never the solution. Sligh might give Avilia a charm to protect her from a dragon's aura of fear, but she still has to go and stick her spear in it. He can find and open a secret door, but if there's a demon behind it, then it's time for swords and daggers.

Even so, I'm very much more aware of the issue now. I want my characters to earn their victories, not pull them out of their arses. If nothing else, the question then would be why nobody else has done what they did.

Yeah something like that runs the risk of being Q having just the right gadget somehow (Suzy Eddie Izzard does a wonderful bit on James Bond magically having exactly the toolkit he needs for a weird series of events).

I guess one way to prevent that is to have a "standard" set of small magicks that your character is always carrying (start fire, create water, prevent burn, shield, whatever) and then he researches (had already researched, if he's not POV and you don't want to spend narrative time on it) what he might need for a specific adventure?

 

[SugarStorm]

Both.

"Magic" in the Farseer books and in the Earthsea books is used sparingly if at all because it has a real cost to the user - both in terms of damage to themselves, but also (particularly in the Farseer books) in terms of reputation and social acceptance.

Most problems cannot be solved by flinging a fireball at them, and both Robin Hobb and Ursula le Guin were masters (mistresses?) of demonstrating this - both, incidentally, through the use of Dragons, which I guess speaks the place of Dragons in our mythology.

Magic should not be easy. Magic should cost the caster. Eddings, for all his faults, at least made the "Will and the Word" cost as much if not more as doing the same thing physically. Magic in the world of Kvothe is deadly if you make one small misstep.

One of my biggest issues with the world of Harry Potter is how every single witch or wizard isn't too terrified to cast magic because every other magical person they've eencountered should have been dead before the age of ten due to innocent mistakes that turned them into rapidly-expanding spheres of viscera.

piles her soapboxes higher

MAGIC. SHOULD. COST. THE. CASTER.

I think magic is too much fun to play with to limit it too severely.

Yes, I'm part of the problem.