Is Fantasy changing?

[Mystery Man]

Second - the genre does not have "integrity". The genre is merely a collection of stories that share in a very vaguely defined set of thematic elements. There is no promise of any integrity in that.

Sure it does, otherwise there would be no reason to publish anything at all because it would be 100% garbage (rather than 90 )the the entire genre would fade into obscurity. The authors of yesterday that maintained the high standards of writing and not bowing to the "schlock" are still read and talked about to this day. The mediocre are out of print and forgotten.

What you find maintains integrity others may find incredibly dull.

I think I see your point now.

What I personally find maintains integrity doesnt matter, I certainly don't presume that what I think of a peice of work is going to matter one hill of beans to the entire reading audience. It's what is produced and stands the test of time that matters.

 

[Dogbrain]

The newest Dragon editorial mentions that the Fantasy is changing. Younger fans think fantasy is Pokemon (and maybe Magic: The Gathering).

Of course Dragon would say that. One would expect them to shill for Pokecrack and Magcrack, the addictioning.

 

[Greatwyrm]

I'm not so sure fantasy is changing, but the preferences of a new generation are almost always different from the previous ones. Look at how music changes. I can't stand better than half of anything from the 70's or most of the stuff on the radio now. 13 year old kids today look at me like I'm the "old guy".

At the same time, really good stuff will stand the test of time. There will be a demand for LotR and Conan for quite a while. These aren't necessarily things that will draw in a new audience. Whether you like them or not, games like the recent Final Fantasy installments and Arcanum are what fantasy is to lots of people. They may eventually come to appreciate the 'classics' like we do, but the classics may not get them to the game table in the first place.

 

[Desdichado]

Yeah, sure. I don't know that Magic and Pokemon are defining the change, though. Rather, it's novels that sell really well like Wheel of Time or Harry Potter or movies that do really well like Lord of the Rings or T.V shows like Alias or Buffy, that while not traditional, are certainly fantastic, that are more likely to change the genre.

As Umbran said, though, how can a genre not change that's been around as long as it has? If nothing else, a puncuated equilibrium style of evolution would occur -- fantasy would settle into routines that would sporadically be shaken up by some writer with a new idea that would redefine the genre. However, I believe that the fantasy genre has become big enough that rather than sporadic changes, someone's writing that redefining book literally all the time.

However, if fantasy means simply D&D and D&D novels to you, then yeah, I can see how you'd think fantasy was changing. I guess that's the rub; does Dragon refer to fantasy as a literary genre, or fantasy as a RPG genre?

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

what?

I cannot make any sense of this? Maybe I am just too tired?

Or maybe I was. The grammar of my statement certainly wasn't worthy of me on a good sleeping schedule.

My point was that fantasy originally drew its inspiration from historical, cultural, and literary sources that I don't think are nearly as relevant to fantasy's audience as they once were.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Off the top of my head, I'd say the two major fantasy trends over the last few decades have been the growth of slipstream / magical realism / whatever you want to call it, and inbreeding--that is, fantasy derived from fantasy, rather than from real world sources.

And the above would be, more or less, the corallary to what I was trying to say.

 

[S'mon]

I agree with the "90% of anything is garbage" analysis - although garbage can have its fans (heck, I'm a huge fan of Prisoner: Cell Block H, and not just ironically). I disagree somewhat w the idea that the 10% is purely subjective - eg there's a high degree of consensus among those who've read Fritz Leiber that he's a good writer. There's considerably more controversy about RA Salvatore, say.

I definitely think it's false to say that everything in the good old days was good, everything now is bad. Personally I haven't read much recent fantasy I like, if anything I've been going further & further back in search of good stuff to read - William Hope Hodgson was a recent revelation, his "Boats of the Glen Carrig" is a classic D&D monster-hack scenario featuring oozes, carnivorous plants, giant flying man-eating fish, giany aquatic spiders, weird squid-men beings and countless other horrors, confronted by a sturdy band of 18th-century boat-hook wielding sailors. It was written in 1906.
Good stuff currently can be found on television - US television has gotten fantastic over the past 15 years or so. I'm sure Buffy The Vampire Slayer will be remembered as a classic, and Angel to a lesser extent. IMO these shows have a similar relation to the likes of 'Charmed' as Leiber did to his deservedly forgotten hack contemporaries.

 

[MonsterMash]

Thinking about how popular Harry Potter is, makes me think about the fact that it combines several existing traditional genres of childrens stories: fantasy and the real world interacting (C.S. Lewis' Narnia Stories mix going from the real world to a fantasy world), the boarding school story (huge number of authors in the UK, notably Frank Richards writing about Billy Bunter), and the orphaned hero/heroine (too many examples to name).

With different generations liking different things, you often get backlashes against the previous generation by going back, e.g. the endless 40's, 50's, etc revivals in clothes fashions and music. But it is true to say that things are more fragmented now - after all many of us probably have 10+ TV channels available, plus video/dvd when 30 years ago in the UK we had 3 TV channels and home videos were pretty much unknown. This and the knowing/ironic approach have changed all culture greatly, but popular culture changes far faster than 'high' culture so its no wonder that fantasy like any other genre has more subgenres than ever before.

 

[Desdichado]

Thinking about how popular Harry Potter is, makes me think about the fact that it combines several existing traditional genres of childrens stories: fantasy and the real world interacting (C.S. Lewis' Narnia Stories mix going from the real world to a fantasy world), the boarding school story (huge number of authors in the UK, notably Frank Richards writing about Billy Bunter), and the orphaned hero/heroine (too many examples to name).

That's probably another "recent" trend in fantasy -- the combination of multiple genres, of which fantasy is one.

Another good example is Perdido Street Station which is often widely hailed as a completely revoluationary book. In my opinion, though, it's merely William Gibson meets fantasy, seen through a Lovecraft/CAS/Weird Tales lens. It's not really revolutionary in the sense that it does anything genuinely new, moreso in that that specific combination had not been tried.

 

[JDJarvis]

Thinking about how popular Harry Potter is, makes me think about the fact that it combines several existing traditional genres of childrens stories: fantasy and the real world interacting (C.S. Lewis' Narnia Stories mix going from the real world to a fantasy world), the boarding school story (huge number of authors in the UK, notably Frank Richards writing about Billy Bunter), ....

Passing from the safe world of childhood/community out into the wider/supernatural world is a common literary and mythic story telling device it isn't necessarily the mixing of genres: Kansas to Oz, Home to the Hundred Acre Wood, England to Wonderland, Ithaca to Troy to The Sea to Ithaca, Shire to Mordor(and the rest of middle-earth).