High Fantasy verses High Magic

[Glade Riven]

Plus there is always a certain amount of bull in the fine arts - I know, I have a degree in it.

As any literary major knows, meaning is use. Use can change meaning, except in a certifiably dead language such as Latin (which was killed, with the candel stick, in the billiard room; possibly by a pope). Part of being a good writer is not only proper word usage, but having the ability to define word usage. Tolkien and CS Lewis, through the popularity of their works, have defined to the layman what High Fantasy is. Furthermore, every author that wants to be Tolkien and write the Epically Epic novel series has reinforced the concept of what High Fantasy is.

To a biologist an organism may be a Musca domestica; to the average person it is just a house fly.

 

[Salamandyr]

It should be noted as well that all terms, "high fantasy", "low fantasy", "epic fantasy", etc. are of relatively recent vintage, and thus don't really have settled meanings. After all, it has not been all that much time that fantasy has escaped enough from its pulp origins that the various literary panjandrums have deigned to notice it.

Within the fantasy community, of which gamers are a part, there does no absolute consensus as to what the terms mean, much less outside of it. As an example, Michael Moorcock was one of the first to identify what we know as "sword & sorcery" as its own category; and he wanted to call it "epic fantasy".

 

[Glade Riven]

EDIT: Accidental double-post. On a side note, anyone else getting serious lag on the site?

 

[havard]

I wonder if High Fantasy could be defined by the fact that these are stories about something that is more important than just the characters themselves. Low fantasy seems to be mainly oriented around the characters and what happens to them.

-Havard

 

[S'mon]

large chunks of the RPG audience also tend to talk literary theory about sci-fi and fantasy

I find that hard to believe.

I guess the obvious reason why RPG-theory discussions of high/low fantasy don't refer to invented vs real world, is that real-world-fantasy is a tiny subgenre of fantasy RPGs. Conversely distinguishing between different types of invented world is seen as important.

 

[Raven Crowking]

For what it's worth, the Encyclopedia of Fantasy (by John Clute and John Grant) defines High Fantasy as

Fantasies set in OTHERWOLRDS, specifically SECONDARY WORLDS, and which deal with matters affecting the destiny of those worlds.​

The same volume says of Low Fantasy:

The introduction to The Fantastic Imagination (anth 1977) ed Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski defines HIGH FANTASY and implies LF as an antonymic description of fantasies not set in SECONDARY WORLDS, nor elevated in their literary style. E.g., the Samella sequence by John Brosnan (1947 - ) contains determinedly low comedy about SEX, flatulance, and lavatories throughout, but its first book, Damned and Fancy (1995), is not LF since the action occurs in a FANTASYLAND, while the sequel, <<Have Demon, Will Travel>>(1996), is LF set in LONDON.​

(Bold, italics, All Caps, etc., as found in said volume.)

I have found this book informative, interesting, and mostly accurate. Of course, when I read their entry on Robert E. Howard, I find factual errors (ex., they say that the process by which Conan gained his throne was never described, but was probably usurpation, whereas REH has Conan boast of strangling the old monarch on his throne, and is quite clear about how Conan became King) and some statements that make me question whether or not the stated opinions are from reading the work, or from reading some disgruntled critic of the work. So make of it what you will.


RC

 

[garrowolf]

I think that the "invented worlds" phrase should be kicked out of this because any time you write or tell a story you are inventing a world where what you said happened. If it was just another world then it could very well be Science Fiction.

 

[Elf Witch]

I think that the "invented worlds" phrase should be kicked out of this because any time you write or tell a story you are inventing a world where what you said happened. If it was just another world then it could very well be Science Fiction.

I don't agree. For it to be SF it would have to be set on a world that either use knowledge we have or extrapolates from the science that we know.

I was at a panel at a con where Hal Clement a SF writer did a talk showing how SF stories using Jupiter changed as scientist learned more about the planet. You could see how the older stories became more in the realm of fantasy than SF.

 

[Glade Riven]

That can of worms again...

The difference between science fiction and fantasy is thinly veiled, usually with a bit of technobable and a ray gun instead of a magic wand. Unless you're talking about "true" science fiction, which is designed to explore the possibilities of human nature, usually under unique conditions. Granted, the Hardness scale for scifi is a bit more useful than the insistance on a simplistic definition of high fantasy, and hard enough scifi is more akin to realistic fiction than fantasy.

Personally, I prefer my scifi to be the consistancy of a soft cheese, with a slice of ham.