I’m honored to announce that my short story “The Many-Hued Land” will be appearing in Flame Tree Publishing’s Morgana Le Fay anthology! Check out the official announcement, cover reveal, and list of authors here. The book will be released in the UK in March, 2025, and in the US in April (just in time for my birthday).
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Fantasy is indeed a thing that exists
I often see two contradictory rhetorical moves in discussions about fantasy. The first move is to foreclose the question of “what is fantasy?” by saying that the term is meaningless; it’s nothing but marketing; fantasy was invented by Big Fantasy Publishing to sell more fantasy books.
The second is to claim that fantasy is the ur-genre, that Gilgamesh, the Bible, Medieval romance, Shakespeare, Kafka, Borges, and Marquez are all fantasy, and that the latest 1000-page, 10-volume extruded fantasy product is a part of that literary tradition.
The first undermines the idea of fantasy: nothing is fantasy. The second overmines it, attributing to it more significance than it can handle: everything is fantasy. Contrary to these two points of view, I want to argue that fantasy is indeed a thing, that it has meaning, it does something recognizable, that it comes from a particular strain of literature while being something distinct from its antecedents. It is a literature that arises out of certain assumptions and produces certain effects. That will be an ongoing theme of this blog.
Why does any of this matter? I think it ought to matter to readers and writers of fantasy. For readers, it helps to understand the historical genesis of the thing you’re into. This will smack of gatekeeping to some, but I’m not saying you can’t come into the castle unless you can name five fantasy novels from before 1960 not written by Tolkien. I’m saying you’ll have a lot more fun in here if you can.
For writers, understanding where fantasy came from, why you write it, and what effects it can produce will just make you a better, more thoughtful writer. A lot of new writers (totally not talking about myself here) think they’ve landed on a unique and revolutionary idea because they’ve only read contemporary novels and they don’t realize that what they’re proposing has been done over and over throughout the previous century.
So there are a few questions I would like to explore, directly or indirectly, through this blog:
- What is fantasy?
- Where does fantasy come from?
- How does fantasy produce meaning?
- What can fantasy do?
Some of these questions overlap; some are subtly different, like the difference between meaning and doing. The assumption that most of my answers rest on is Darko Suvin’s definition of science fiction. For Suvin, science fiction is “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.”
- Interaction of estrangement and cognition: We are looking at a twisted version of our own world (estrangement), and we are meant to understand that world intellectually (cognition)
- Imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment: something exists in the world of the text that does not exist in the world of the author.
We can create a definition for fantasy by making just one amendment: the alternative imaginative framework of science fiction must be presented as the product of science and technology situated in Earth’s own past, present, or future, rather than the product of magic, mysticism, or religion either on Earth or in an entirely imagined universe.
This distinction—that the alternative imaginative framework or “new thing”—is located within the text. Is the new thing presented as scientific or technological in nature? Science fiction. Is it presented as magical or mystical in nature? Fantasy.
I find this far more useful than the oft-repeated line, “Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible.” By this definition, Star Trek is fantasy, because warp drives, dilithium crystals, transporter beams, and tachyons are all impossible. Therefore, under the popular definition of fantasy and science fiction, Star Trek is fantasy.
This definition doesn’t make sense for something like Star Trek. The “imaginative framework” of the text lies precisely in the “interaction of estrangement and cognition”: we’re meant to understand dilithium crystals, tachyons, and warp bubbles cognitively, as things discovered by science and harnessed by technology developed out of the scientific method, not as inexplicable magic or the intervention of the gods.
It should be understood that this claim—“we’re meant to understand”—comes from an investigation of the text, not from something outside of it, like my own beliefs about science, the reigning beliefs of the period in which I live or the author lived, or the beliefs of the author themselves.
Magical realism, mythology, and other genres that collapse the natural/supernatural binary sidestep the question of empiricism entirely. Magical realism and mythology both do their own thing. I want to write more about this, because it is a contentious claim, but I gotta get my sh—my sources together first.
Does my definition result in a meaningful difference for the reader? Well, do you encounter a story about humans, the descendants of earthlings now living in another galaxy, with earth as a distant memory, waging war on an alien species differently than you would a story about a fantasy version of humanity living in a secondary world waging war on a race of monsters?
I would say that for most readers and writers, the aesthetic figure of the alien functions differently to the aesthetic figure of the monster. The scientist has a different literary function to the wizard. They are different means mobilized toward different ends, producing different textual effects. In short, the reason we have both is because we need both at this moment in history. They provide two different ways to understand ourselves and that which we see as other. Fantasy is indeed a thing, and it does things, and the things it does are different from the things science fiction does.
Controlling the Uncontrollable
Previously, I argued that “voiceless” fantasy writing (i.e. “transparent” prose) takes the fantasy out of fantasy in an attempt to control the chaotic, ambiguous, mythic power of the genre. The same desire for control over the uncontrollable leads toward “hard” magic systems.
TTRPGs and video games are many young writers’ and readers’ first contact with fantasy. Games certainly shape their expectations of the genre, not only in terms of magic systems but also character classes, factions, weapons, and the assumptions of what a fantasy world looks like and what kinds of stories the genre can tell. You could make a convincing argument that the systematized portrayals of magic we see in much of the epic fantasy of the past two decades can be traced back to role playing games. I think there’s still more to the appeal of “hard magic” than that.
For the past 40 years or so we (people who have the time and money to read fiction) have been living in an increasingly rationalized society, where everything is quantified, optimized, and analyzed, and now overseen by data collection and algorithms. It makes sense that the underlying assumptions of a society become the underlying assumptions of the art that society creates, expressed in fantasy as a desire for the systemization and rational explanation of magic. Magic systems are the triumph of logos over mythos, reflecting the elevated stature of STEM and the death of the humanities.
It could also be that as tropes become codified, readers want something fresh and writers want to work with these tropes in new ways. Blurring the lines between science and magic or deconstructing the science/magic dichotomy is one way to do it. So we get ancient, forgotten science that looks like magic to the characters in the story, and we get magic presented as something that can be investigated and understood scientifically.
Why do I find the former so much more satisfying than the latter? Why do stories that lean on the former end up being so much more rewarding, more rife with ambiguity, more thematically rich, than stories that lean on the latter? The one book that does “magic is science” well is Perdido Street Station because “crisis energy” is not hard magic. It’s far too weird and unpredictable. Though it is something that can be studied scientifically, its outcomes are as bizarre and unpredictable as any magic found in ancient mythology, Medieval romance, or folklore.
Another reason for the popularity of rigorously rules-based magic systems is that they make writing fantasy easier. Magic systems are to the inexperienced fantasy writer as “show don’t tell” is to the inexperienced writer of any genre. It’s a hard and fast rule for people who don’t have a full command of their craft yet; it’s an intentional choice for people who do.
For the inexperienced writer, creating rules for magic, laying them out in the story, and then following those rules (or bending them cleverly) is a good way to avoid using magic as a deus ex machina or creating situations that leave the reader asking questions like “why didn’t he just magic his way out of trouble?” Putting clear limits on magic puts agency back in the hands of characters and just helps make the world make sense to the reader. These effects, however, can be achieved without the kind of thing that the phrase “hard magic system” makes you think of, so for this this explanation to make sense to me, it has to be working in conjunction with some of the above explanations. A more mythic, surreal, mysterious, or metaphorical type of magic, on the other hand, is a lot more difficult to pull off, and even when it’s done well it can leave readers confused if they’re not the kind of person who finds enjoyment or edification in ambiguity.
So I’m back where I started, with hard magic systems as a creative choice, like “transparent” prose, that ultimately serves to limit what fantasy can do rather than expand it.
What is Fantasy and What Can It Do?
What is fantasy? What makes a novel a fantasy novel? Is it simply the presence of fantasy trappings and tropes? Can you, as Ursula K. Le Guin asked in “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,” write a fantasy novel in the same style you would use for a modern political thriller?
Does fantasy need its own “accent”? Is fantasy not just “a story with magic or a made-up world” but a way of seeing and experiencing a world? Le Guin would say, and I would agree, that fantasy takes you somewhere else, a place that is familiar but not, a place in which you cannot feel completely at ease. The displacement and estrangement of fantasy allows you to turn the same inquisitive eye back on your own surroundings, on the real world and your place in it, on your own psyche and the shadow within it.
This is not what everybody wants out of fantasy, which is good because most fantasy doesn’t attempt to do any of that. But if we are someone who wants fantasy to do those things, and it doesn’t, we wonder why the book left us cold.
I’m not advocating for a particular style. Conversations about “the authentic Elfland accent” often veer toward the binary of extremes: “purple,” ornate, overwritten, baroque, or flowery prose vs. “normal,” readable prose. Shakespeare vs. the voiceless voice of the contemporary mainstream novel. But the vocabulary itself isn’t necessarily the accent. It’s not about simplicity vs. complexity. It’s a question of the voice feeling inauthentic to the setting. There’s a disconnect between the story and its telling. Basically, the vibe is off. Whatever this author is writing, it’s not giving “fantasy,” no matter how much magic or swords or lords or weird creatures are in there.
Ultimately this is a subjective matter. I like fantasy that uses language to achieve that estranging effect Le Guin talks about. But the preferences of most readers, it seems, is for prose that “doesn’t get in the way,” that conveys information clearly and succinctly, that doesn’t ask too much of a reader. This is fantasy optimized for the busy neoliberal subject. Feed me narrative in its most efficient form because I have a lot of content to consume and I can’t have any philosophical conundrums slowing me down or bummers bringing me down. Ken Follett’s sentence you don’t have to read twice is, for me, a sentence I don’t have to bother thinking about ever again after I’ve read it. That’s not to say clear, simple writing can’t also be authentic writing. A clear and simple style is as authentic in the work of Le Guin as it is in the work of Elizabeth Strout. But while those authors are clear and simple, they are never boring or bland. Their simplicity is an aesthetic choice that lifts up their stories and their themes, not at attempt to avoid aesthetics.
To the writer of the kind of fantasy that eschews aesthetic considerations, it might not even be an issue. They might just be writing like this because they don’t think the telling and the story are the same and they’re just sort of reporting on the story playing out in their head. Or they might do it on purpose, out of a desire to demystify and de-exoticize.
The lack of the Elfland accent results in fantasy completely stripped of wonder, of the sense of actually being in an alien world, of any sort of mythic resonance. When we treat fantasy like it’s any other contemporary genre, or we forget the literary constructedness of a fantasy world, we concretize an abstraction; we literalize a metaphor, as M. John Harrison put it in his infamous worldbuilding article. Style isn’t merely adornment. Aesthetics are inextricable from meaning. To literalize the metaphor is to attempt to control something that is uncontrollable.
When we talk about escapism, we are talking about the opposite of escape: a total submission to the spectacle. Styles of fantasy that produce estrangement grant the reader a temporary reprieve from the all-encompassing spectacle of our increasingly unreal “real life” existence. For an instant, we become Tagomi in The Man in the High Castle, holding a piece of handmade jewelry—an authentic object in a world of reproductions—peering through the fictional world in which he exists to catch a glimpse of the “real” world.
Reading a book like this isn’t exactly “entertainment,” but it’s never boring. Consumption of content, on the other hand, often feels like a chore. There are all these books I need to read to stay current, to stay in the loop, to justify my identity as a “reader” or a “fan.” It’s exhausting and often disappointing.
These effects are the hallmarks of fantasy, even more so than the aesthetic figures we associate with fantasy. I would go so far as to say that this is what justifies the existence of fantasy as a genre. I want my fantasy to feel like a hallucinogenic trip or a religious experience: I’ve stepped out of myself to actually experience reality, which is far stranger than it appears, and I return home with a boon.
Come to think of it, that’s what I want out of any literary experience: something akin to ecstasy, whether the pharmacological or theological variety. I want the ego to fall away and for reality to be shown to me for a brief moment. Fantasy is not very good at this, but it should be.