Comments on: Didst Thou Suck It: Fantasy and the Human Experience

By: Stephen Deas

Stephen Deas — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 09:12:03 +0000

The new vs. old thing is rather depressing. The vocal (and reviewing) minority (and possibly the authors themselves – I had actively avoided books with dragons in until I asked to do so for exactly that reason, although in hindsight I’m quite glad they did) want to do something interesting and different; the majority of the book-buying public want something that they can relate to – i.e. more of the same (or similar, at least). Publishers are caught between the two – sales will probably be better for more-of-the-same, but only if the book gets any attention, and that starts with the reviewers who are generally hardcore genre fans who want something new and different.

But I digress. To distill your argument, Sam, are you suggesting that, to a gross generalisation, SF is concerned with consequences, while Fantasy is concerned with possibilities?

By: Sam Sykes

Sam Sykes — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 08:42:05 +0000

Of course, you raise an excellent point, Neth. There’s an immense amount of pressure to do something new, since you will be immediately decried as a fraud if you so much as mention something that’s been done before (ironically, though, there are a great number of people who will praise an author for doing the same thing time and again if he’s well-established). But there are also a lot of ideas that begin half-baked and rarely go much further than that for the sake of being new.

Really, though, I thought that using the familiar tropes in a new way would settle that. If you say “elf,” people know what it is and they’re listening. If you say “elf, who is ultra-civilized and a mage,” people drift off because they’ve probably heard that before. If you say “elf, who is ultra-civilized and a mage, but he’s using his magic that could save humanity to instead augment the size of his testicles because what the hell is humanity doing for him lately” then you’ve got peoples’ attentions. Some will love it, some will hate it. But it’s yours.

So, basically, if it comes down to a choice between doing something new and doing something well…don’t choose.

And Ros, who told you the idea for the finale of The Aeons’ Gate?!

By: Ros

Ros — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 14:56:25 +0000

I think the trick is to pick the metaphor you want to make of elves, dwarves, vampires, dragons, or whatever, and not be constrained by what other authors have used them for. Maybe it’s been done before, maybe it hasn’t. But if fantasy writers were overly concerned with retreading old ground all we’d get is extremely offbeat fiction full of half-bat-half-fish people who live in strawberries. Most people prefer something a little more familiar.

By: neth

neth — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 14:42:08 +0000

Sam, I disagree that you have to do something new with such common tropes as elves or orcs. Yes, doing something new is generally better, and if you don’t you open yourself to criticism, but it’s far more important to do something well than do something new – especially since there really isn’t much new left out there.

But otherwise I think you bring up some interesting ideas. Perhaps we should discuss Shivers over a beer or three sometime. When we disagree we can break bottles and determine things Roadhouse-style.

By: sam

sam — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 09:03:53 +0000

The issue with elves and dwarves is that you need to do something new with them. Yes, they’re metaphors, but we already know they’re metaphors. If there’s nothing new done with them, then we’re not learning anything new.

By: Adrian Faulkner

Adrian Faulkner — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 09:01:52 +0000

Very interesting discussion

I think this is why I get so pissy when I get told that dwarves and elves are done and no longer have a place in serious fantasy. They’re metaphors, elves for the intellectual, dwarves for the working class (though not exclusively, you can twist these metaphors however you want) and through them we have a shorthand to talk about race and class and society as a whole, while throwing in some decapitations for good measure.

And I think you’re onto something here (although I think it’s probably much more complex and nuanced). I mean, try talk about religious extremism these days and you’re on dicey ground because someone will always think you’re talking about THEIR religion rather than the concept of religious extremism. Translate that to a fantasy world, and it frees you up a lot more to investigate all facets of it without people getting pissy that you’ve unintentionally pissed off their god.

The big question I have (and I do not have the answer to this at the moment) is whether taking something like Lord of the Rings and setting it in space (i.e. making the races future branches of humanity, maybe even adding a few spaceships) would change the meaning of it in the ways you outline above. Converse to this, take something like Mark Charan Newton’s books, or (thou I’ve not read it) Ken Scholes’ books and you have a very SF setting. What is it that makes those Fantasy?

And then take a book like Richard Morgan’s The Steel Remains which some read as fantasy, others as SF.

I’d heard a comment that said (in general) SF was about change, whereas Fantasy tended to be about returning things to their previous state. I like that, not because I think it is universally true but because it’s generalised observations like that which make writers go “well I’m gonna go and break that” and in doing so, push the envelope of genres.