What is Modern Fantasy Anyway?

[Ariosto]

But seriously ...

The "New Wave" (note the taking of the name of someone else's movement/school) of the 1960s-70s rattled the editorial cages to bring genre fiction more in line with "mainstream" literary standards.

That was a mixed bag, from frankness about sex to pornography; from depth of character development to masses of neuroses; from realism to dull "slices of life"; from examination of society to shrill ideological screeds.

Moorcock can go from the sublime to the penny dreadful almost in a single page, which is at least interesting in a way that, say, William Morris is not. (Morris has his own attractions, but they are far from "modern".)

The market was booming, so there was room for all sorts. But that was a bubble, and it popped.

In hard times, what sold? In the fantasy field, that would be Tolkien. Things resembling (at least superficially) the master's trilogy also sold -- witness the smash hit of The Sword of Shannara and the solid success of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

 

[Cadfan]

Music these days is just noise, too.

Your argument is strong on generalities and overblown prose, which serves well to make a demagogical point, but short on specifics or indeed actual reasoning, making your argument largely incomprehensible to anyone not predisposed to agree with you on aesthetic grounds and general suspicion of the new.

Frankly, your argument boils down to the following.

1. I define "fantasy" as fiction containing X.
2. Modern "fantasy" doesn't contain enough X.
3. Therefore it sucks.

Are you familiar with the term "boundary policing?" Its what academics do sometimes when they don't have anything more important to do instead, where they complain that this or that scholarly work isn't REAL *fill in academic discipline here.* This is rhetorically a strong thing to argue in front of people who believe that the academic discipline in question is some sort of abstract good, but of course it totally sidesteps the more important question, which is whether the scholarly work being critiqued is true, useful, correct, or insightful. Its the swift substitution for "one of us" in place of "valuable."

So lets try to set that aside.

Take the Elemental Logic series. Pretty light on blood. Downright pacifist, in fact- the greatest victory in the novels takes place when an unarmed woman knocks down a castle with a ballpeen hammer, ordering that no stone of its walls shall ever rest atop one another. The rocks spread out and roll for miles until not a single one is touching another, and generations later children still play with them, stacking them so they can watch them unstack themselves. So... not a ton of violence. And yet damn good books. Or what of The Sharing Knife series? They invoke a light sense of wonder, to be sure, but they're mostly about the interpersonal relations of the characters, prejudice, tradition, and loss. They would totally fail your criteria for "good fantasy," I'm sure, since what violence happens in them takes place largely off camera and entire novels go by with almost nothing but people just being people to one another. And yet they're great novels.

So lets call them Schmantasy, since you want the term "Fantasy" all for yourself. Ok, now that they're Schmantasy, they don't have to fulfill your arbitrary criteria for what makes good fantasy novels. So... what now? What explanatory use is your argument if we just change the name, and demand to be judged not on your allegedly ancient criteria for good fantasy writing, but rather on good writing in the abstract?

 

[Umbran]

I make my living, or part of it anyway, as a writer. For every guy who tells me I'm a Cro-Magnon prosifier, or stinking up the joint with my word dump, I got five or six who tell me I'm brilliant or some kinda genius.

Well, I would say neither, but I have a critique that I think is actually relevant to the discussion.

You claim to be in part professional - so you know that any writing should be tailored to the audience and purpose, yes? I note here that while your writing may have many technical merits, you seem to have failed to properly identify the purpose and audience for your work in this piece.

You are writing an essay for a discussion board. While such pieces should be interestingly phrased, they also need to be concise. You should be taking pains to make sure your audience gets your point fairly quickly and clearly. Instead, you have laden it with poetic prose in a nigh-Moorcockian purple shade, such that your readers don't need to merely dig for the meaning, but need to outright excavate. That is antithetical to the (assumed) purpose of posting it here - to generate discussion. Consistently, when you post like this, we cannot discuss your point first, as we spend an age asking if we have, in fact, figured out what your point actually is!

So, if you've failed to identify the needs for your own work, I suggest that for many pieces of modern fantasy, you've also misidentified their needs.

A great deal of "fantasy" today is actually multi-genre, or sub-genre, or has other particular needs. There's a great deal of romance-fantasy, chicklit-fantasy (sorry if that term offends - it is what my lady-friends call the stuff, and I don't have another word for it), humor-fantasy, and so on. In order to serve their own particular needs none of these should have the "blood" you call for. Similarly, there's a whole bunch of stuff that adults read that is actually originally intended for young adults, and "blood" of that strength is considered inappropriate for that audience.

 

[Mallus]

The "New Wave" (note the taking of the name of someone else's movement/school) of the 1960s-70s rattled the editorial cages to bring genre fiction more in line with "mainstream" literary standards.

New Wave SF certainly represented a move away from traditional SF themes (not too mention politics... although we can't mention that here, either, in much detail), but I'm not sure it was a move towards mainstream lit. More like a move toward experimental literature, which itself was outside of the mainstream (cf. some of Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius cycle, Delany's Dhalgren, some J.G. Ballard).

Also, borrowing names for your movement from somewhere else is pretty common. Call it the Law of Conservation of Critical Terms. Didn't Modernism/Postmodernism originally apply to architecture?

Moorcock can go from the sublime to the penny dreadful almost in a single page...

Wonderful description of Moorcock's writing BTW.

The market was booming, so there was room for all sorts. But that was a bubble, and it popped.

New Wave SF didn't really die in publishing bubble, did it? It's major authors kept publishing (Brian Aldiss, Roger Zelazny, M. John Harrison) and it's themes/techniques got incorporated into a wide variety of subsequent works (well, except for the really experimental stuff).

Things resembling (at least superficially) the master's trilogy also sold -- witness the smash hit of The Sword of Shannara and the solid success of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

They're an interesting pair... one's derivative almost to the point of plagiarism, the other is pretty much the antithesis of Tolkien's beloved triology. I'm not sure what point can be made from them.

 

[Ariosto]

Established authors certainly survived the contraction of the market. It's curious that the most respected can have a hard time selling (to publishers) outside the genre niche, even as "mainstream" writers get lauded for their plundering of genre tropes.

"Mainstream fiction" may be a misnomer today. I suspect that romance novels alone outsell all "non-genre" works.

Categories have broken down, and writers borrow freely from different traditions. Mailer's Ancient Evenings perhaps suffered from some critics' inability to appreciate it as fantasy. The science-fiction ghetto sometimes takes offense when its trappings are appropriated for works that are "not real SF." Some sword-and-sorcery / planetary romance fans rue the displacement of their "pulp fiction" by the Tolkien-inflected epic quest.

In the latter context, I mentioned Brooks and Donaldson together because there is in some quarters a tendency (whether with approval or disdain) to consider that sub-genre the definition of "fantasy today". Some might even focus on the category of game-derived novels, which shape and reflect popular notions not only about fantasy in general but about FRP.

The "Dark Lord and all that" business has certainly been prominent on best-seller lists, volume after volume in series that sprawl beyond the trilogy.

 

[Jack7]

You claim to be in part professional - so you know that any writing should be tailored to the audience and purpose, yes? I note here that while your writing may have many technical merits, you seem to have failed to properly identify the purpose and audience for your work in this piece.

You are writing an essay for a discussion board. While such pieces should be interestingly phrased, they also need to be concise. You should be taking pains to make sure your audience gets your point fairly quickly and clearly. Instead, you have laden it with poetic prose in a nigh-Moorcockian purple shade, such that your readers don't need to merely dig for the meaning, but need to outright excavate. That is antithetical to the (assumed) purpose of posting it here - to generate discussion. Consistently, when you post like this, we cannot discuss your point first, as we spend an age asking if we have, in fact, figured out what your point actually is!

Well, you gotta point if I were indeed trying to write a typical essay. But the difference is that on the internet the reader can instantly respond to the essay (maybe there needs to be a new kinda term for this kinda thing) so it really isn't an essay, but more like an Interactive Essay.

(You know I've never really thought about this before in the way you mentioned it, but what I've actually been trying to do for awhile is develop a new form of arguing out these things on the internet. You know sometimes you can set out to do something and not really understand exactly what you're shooting for til somebody else point sit out for ya. You kinda made it crystallize for me when you said that. Danke.)

So, that being the case I think with interactive essays the point is not to be pedantic, or even to express an absolute set of points, and then prove them, but to provoke in a sort of generalized set of terms and language points that imply what you mean but don't necessarily limit what you mean. So that the readers can then take up what is suggested and debate it out or wring it out among themselves, and maybe then come to a sort of conclusion or consensus about the definition of the thing. Maybe even develop a theory of it. At least a working one anyways.

So I'm not trying to define the contents, I'm trying to demonstrate the context (without necessarily proving it), and then let others see how they can (interactively? inter-reactively) work out the details. It ain't exactly a modern/internet Socratic method, then again it ain't a standard my point is A, and yours is B, and therefore here's my essay or thesis, like it or lump it. I kinda want the reader to come to their own points. I'm giving a point to push against. I can't of course take no position at all on some things or I really wouldn't have a point about anything. But I'm trying to leave it as open and loose as possible.

But you're right the language is definitely provocative and hyperbolic.
That's a good way to put.

You don't prove much by hyperbole, but it beats, "Salvatore sucks." As a method I mean. Maybe not as a truism. (By the way, I got nothing against the man, and don't even know him. Don't take my critiques of his writing, anybody, for saying anything about him. That's two separate issues, and that's the same for everybody as far as I'm concerned.)

Anywho you got a point, but I hope rather than just looking for my particulars as examples, you'll come up with your own and then say to others by thinking about it, "oh, so that's what fantasy is, or ain't."

Are you familiar with the term "boundary policing?" Its what academics do sometimes when they don't have anything more important to do instead, where they complain that this or that scholarly work isn't REAL *fill in academic discipline here.* This is rhetorically a strong thing to argue in front of people who believe that the academic discipline in question is some sort of abstract good, but of course it totally sidesteps the more important question, which is whether the scholarly work being critiqued is true, useful, correct, or insightful. Its the swift substitution for "one of us" in place of "valuable."

Thanks Cad. I did not know that. I've never seen that kinda thing before. In or out of university. You learn something new every day.

But you will admit won't ya that some things do indeed have boundaries? Otherwise anything becomes everything else merely cause somebody says it should be. I mean would you say that cardiac arrest is different from mad cow disease? What if I wanna call them the same thing cause I'd like too? Is it a pragmatic problem, or merely academic and aescetic?

I'm operating on the premise you mean contemporary fantasy works, and not fantasy works set in the modern era or some facsimile of it.

Parsing what you said (which while interesting as prose is less then effective in discourse) you basic complaint is that modern works are not as dark, gory, and violent as some (by no means all) older authors?

That's a good observation from my point of view. But a thing doesn't necessarily have to be gory to be really scary and dangerous. So that's one thing, but not necessarily the limits of the thing.

Personally I also miss real poetry, and a vocabulary that extends beyond, "fireball spell" and "goblin horde."

In any case rather than trying to just decipher what I meant maybe people can start thinking about what exactly constitutes fantasy for them, and what ain't fantasy, and why, and then test those points against each other.

Whew. I just barely got this finished. Anyways I gotta go meet my CAP squadron tonight. So, later.

Carry on.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

witness the smash hit of The Sword of Shannara

<snip>
derivative almost to the point of plagiarism,

Shannara was derived as much from the sources that inspired Tolkein as from JRRT himself- resemblance is inevitable- and even contains some elements that are virtually unique to the series. Calling it derivative of JRRT's work does not do the series fair justice, and the more you read of it, the clearer that becomes.

That said, I think there are some fine modern fantasy writers who still have a good touch mixing the fantastic with the mundane, who still manage to write tales with grit, sand and blood without venturing too far into the land of My Smurfy Pegacorn. Harry Turtledove's Darkness series, for one, is simply excellent and epic.

 

[Krensky]

Stuff.

Ah. I see.

This is rant as performance art, not literary analysis and discourse.

How sad.

 

[Cadfan]

Thanks Cad. I did not know that. I've never seen that kinda thing before. In or out of university. You learn something new every day.

Pay more attention to the humanities.

But you will admit won't ya that some things do indeed have boundaries? Otherwise anything becomes everything else merely cause somebody says it should be. I mean would you say that cardiac arrest is different from mad cow disease? What if I wanna call them the same thing cause I'd like too? Is it a pragmatic problem, or merely academic and aescetic?

What?

The problem isn't with having definitions or boundaries. Its with mistaking debates over the exact location of those boundaries with debates over the quality of material on either side.

The usual "boundary policing that totally misses the point" argument in the realm of speculative fiction is when someone tries to precisely define science fiction, defines it as inherently involving social criticism and analysis in an imaginary environment, and tries to claim that a significant portion of what we call science fiction really is really fantasy, and a significant portion of what we call fantasy really is science fiction, all the while insinuating that science fiction is somehow better.

So you get credit for coming up with a new one, I guess.

So I'm not trying to define the contents, I'm trying to demonstrate the context (without necessarily proving it), and then let others see how they can (interactively? inter-reactively) work out the details. It ain't exactly a modern/internet Socratic method, then again it ain't a standard my point is A, and yours is B, and therefore here's my essay or thesis, like it or lump it. I kinda want the reader to come to their own points. I'm giving a point to push against. I can't of course take no position at all on some things or I really wouldn't have a point about anything. But I'm trying to leave it as open and loose as possible.

Has it occurred to you that this tactic might be viewed as dishonest and manipulative? Or to put it another way, had I responded using the same tactic, perhaps by broadsiding you with a tirade about how fantasy is really the voyage into new realms of the imaginary, and someone like yourself simply isn't psychologically prepared or capable of understanding newer fantasy because your voyage has long since sailed? You might find that offensive. And if I defended it by saying that I didn't really mean it, I was just throwing it out there to start a discussion, do you think that would satisfy you or just sound like a smarmy attempt at justifying blatant instigation?

 

[DreadPirateMurphy]

To be more succinct, I take this overlong essay to mean that older forms of fantasy had deep intrinsic meaning to the individual, whereas the modern genre of fantasy entertainment is lacking. The theory is that we lack the aspects of struggle that historically drove great tales.

Pish.

Don't confuse the entertainment industry (which could only be supported in modern, wealthy times) with our actual fantasy.

We have urban legends. Conspiracy theories. Fringe religions. Ghost stories. Telephone psychics and pyramid power. Pop psychology. Celebrity worship. Alien abduction.

All of those things are about people figuring out where they stand in the world and where they want to go. One of the points Sagan made in The Demon-Haunted World is how much of it maps directly to the old legends.

Folks like Jordan and Brooks and King are part of the entertainment industry, where "fantasy" is defined as that portion of speculative fiction dealing with magic and the supernatural. Much of it, like all entertainment, is a retelling of the same tales with a slightly different filter. Much of it, like all entertainment, is targeted at the lowest common denominator. For every Oscar-worthy film, there are fifty slasher flick, teen sex comedy, derivative rom-com, and milking-it sequel films, and books aren't much different.