What's up in fantasy?

[RangerWickett]

The world evolves around us and through us. Our interests change, and what interests others changes us. Every industry, social group, and sub-culture has a continual edge of newness, and while we can comment on the change of those around us -- hip-hop music is getting a bit more blended with other styles; people are becoming comfortable with the interconnectedness the web provides; Japanese horror remakes are big in the U.S. -- it can be harder for us to see the changes we are making.

So, what's up in fantasy, nowadays?

I just finished reading Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson, and those of you who also have read it can probably guess why I'm interested in this question. Gibson's a sharp guy, and it seems that he does a lot of thinking on how the changes in the world are contributing to our anxieties. Me, though, I want to know how the changes in fantasy are affecting our pleasure and entertainment. What do we like that's new, and why do we like it? I mean really deep down, why? What about these new things are more entertaining than the old things?

I like that the RPG world seems to be mirroring the computer world. D20 is Windows, GURPS is maybe Mac, and HERO might be Linux. It makes me more comfortable thinking that games will keep drifting more and more into the lives of non-gamers. Games aren't arcane texts anymore, generally -- they're designed to be quick and fun, the way any game should be.

I like that video games are kicking the butt of tabletop RPGs financially, but that I know tabletop games are much more fun. It's the difference between watching the Superbowl and playing football with your friends, or the difference between buying a CD and having an impromptu musical number with two guys you meet randomly in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Computer games are for the folks who are really talented, folks who are good at entertaining lots of us at once, folks who will some day soon hopefully include me. But tabletop games are a hobby, something uniquely personal.

I like that Constantine is coming out soon, and that I get to go to an early showing in 16 hours. It's another indicator that everybody is starting to be willing to watch fantasy movies, to enjoy fantasy stories.

Why is that, though? The 80s had grit and violence the likes of Blade Runner and Aliens. The 90s had simultaneously flagrant paranoia and defiant optimism in the form of the X-Files. The new decade is just weird, though. People seem to have given up on distrusting the government -- we know they're doing bad things, but we figure there's no other way to do it -- but we don't think the world is a bleak place. We actually seem to find it funny. People seem to want to be entertained more than ever before.

Does that disturb anyone else? Fantasy used to be the province of those who were downtrodden by bullies in high school, or of older men for whom the slaying of monsters gave a measure of control that the depressing late 70s and early 80s made hard to get. But now, everybody likes fantasy. Is it that we want to be heroic and epic?

(I recently read an article telling Christian men to stop worrying about careers, and to start living their lives with daring goals. Having a family shouldn't be tedium; it should be something to test yourself against, to prove your manliness. Be individuals and have goals you can pursue to make yourself a hero in the eyes of your family. Interesting, no?)

Or is it that our lives suck? Maybe they're one in the same.

I recall a TV show on the Discovery Channel back in the early 90s called "Beyond 2000," and I watched it religiously. For decades, people had been expecting the future to arrive, to bring in its waves of flying cars, its space travel, its bold new frontiers. They had allowed the future to keep getting put off, certain that eventually it would come. But then we had the millennium, and we decided we were tired of waiting. The year 2000 was supposed to be the future. We were in the future, and our dreams had not been fulfilled.

So we turn to other dreams. We try to let others entertain us with fantasy, adventure, and magic.

I'm a writer, and I feel that my calling is to entertain people. But I don't want to just feed what I perceive to be this growing sense of directionlessness. What can I write in the realm of fantasy that is entertaining -- that makes the world seem appropriately meaningful -- without simply creating escapism? The Hero's Journey is classic, but how do I make its core story resonate with readers today?

What's up with fantasy, nowadays? What do we want?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Fantasy is crap, for the most part, since Dragonlance and its follow-ons showed that you don't necessarily have to be a famous writer or, in some cases, even a GOOD writer to be successful. So now fantasy shelves are filled to the groaning point with endless trilogies that read like something from a freshman creative writing course. That is, when they're not competing for space with gaming novels of all sorts, which at times make average fantasy novels look great.

Of course, the good writers are also riding this wave, with the writer becoming more important than the book they're writing. Who cares what the new Terry Pratchett novel is about, it's Terry Pratchett! Let's get our daily updates on the progress being made by George RR Martin and J K Rowling!

Having said that, it'll be a few years before Hollywood figures how much fantasy is crap (whoops, forgot about the D&D movie there for a second) since they have decades of good stuff to plunder, now that special effects are cheap enough to make even the most over the top fantasies doable, and relatively cheaply at that. Never again will directors need to fill huge arenas with people like they did for Spartacus or Cleopatra.

And, yeah, things are bad out there in the real world, and there's a feeling of paralysis in the electorate on both sides -- the polarization isn't nice, isn't healthy, isn't fun -- and turning to fantasy is a natural response. Every grim era in the 20th century meant a rich fantasy life in fiction and just flipping through the TV dial (well, scanning up and down in TiVo), it's pretty easy to see that things are pretty scary out there.

What do I want from fantasy? Well-written works that aren't another LotR-derivative. It can be Harry Potter or A Song of Ice and Fire or, well, anything. Tone and theme are less important than quality and having something interesting to say. If all I have to read are retreads, I'd rather haul out a decades-old book off my shelf or crack open one of the Dark Horse Conan reissues instead.

I pride myself on buying very little fiction nowadays; I have a crazy dream that if people only bought books they liked, instead of books that they're "collecting," the quality of said books would improve. So far, though, the theory doesn't seem to be catching on.

 

[mythusmage]

One thing I've recently run across is RPG influenced fantasy. Not RPG based, but fantasy that makes use of RPG tropes. Thomas Harlan's Oath of Empire tetrology for example, which features memes and tropes from the World of Darkness and the Cthuhlu Mythos, among others. The world of Kim Harrison's The Good, the Bad, and the Undead owes much to the World of Darkness as well.

 

[Wild Gazebo]

If you want to write a novel: write a novel. Don't ponder the merits of a stage. Don't pander to the lowest common denominator: audience. Embrace your frustration with white knuckled passion and throttle the out of your muse.

 

[S'mon]

The big successful & original fantasy writing in the past 10 years seems to have been in children's literature - notably the Harry Potter series and the His Dark Materials trilogy, I'm reading the latter currently and I can thoroughly recommend it to fantasy fans (unless maybe you're a devout Catholic or fanatic of any monotheist submission-based religion); its exploration of multiple worlds in particular is fascinating from a potential RPG perspective.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

If you want to write a novel: write a novel. Don't ponder the merits of a stage. Don't pander to the lowest common denominator: audience. Embrace your frustration with white knuckled passion and throttle the out of your muse.

No no, please pander away! There's too little pandering to the audience and too much spent pandering to the muse. The muse is often weak, the audience is always strong.

Only issue being that the muse is right there with you, all those endless poems and sculptures about the inaccessibility of the muse be damned, and the audience is hard to get at.

But then again, I love comedy, and, as we all know, it's harder than dying.

In fact, I would say that the best work being done in Fantasy today, or indeed ever, is satire.

Afterall, who is more worthy, Cervantes or the fantasists he claims to be parodying?

Not satire in the specific I'm making fun of someone I hate sense, but in the grand and huge tradition of Gulliver's Travels, Mennippus, and the Simpsons. A tradition where noone gets away unscathed.

I do think the hero's journey is probably something we need to get away from. Probably not so much the journeying or the hero but the thing all together.

On a more specific level, I think fantasy probably has to become more ensemble. More Illiad than Odyssey.

Martin and Pratchett are pretty firmly in that camp. Gaiman still has a lot of the hero to him, but the lesser characters are constantly in focus. Stephenson has gone entirely the way of the ensemble. I think the heroes journey has become one of many.

Were I to make a specific prediction for fertile ground I would peg the revolution. Revolutionary or counter-revolutionary narratives used to be the stuff of our reality, not to mention our most dearly held and vital fantasies. Now the very hope of it is foolish and ridiculous, if Tolkien found glory through championing the dead than here is corpse that could stand to be exhumed and exalted.

And the very proof of it's daring possibility is that I have no idea how someone could do this. I'm not a very creative fellow, but I am a lord Bishop of the derivative, if you can do it in rhetoric than it's been done before, and I tell you that this lack of mine is proof not of impossibility but its very opposite, the dreaded spectre of innovation.

But if the burden of fantasy is to see the virtue that needs help and Tolkien grabbed faith as it lay dying than surely the original post is proof enough that hope is in need of that service now. Look at Star Wars and the Matrix, the movies know enough to begin the story but lack the depth to finish it because they can not see a way for revolutions to run an end game in a world where the empire simply negotiates. Fantasy must show them, fantasy must bring the ending.

If you have the means than here is the way: find for us a new tale of resolute conflict and complicated resistance. Create for the world a new mythology of revolution, a new language of hope, and a tale in which cities are not merely rescued or founded but enjoy the best of both worlds in reform and reconciliation.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

(unless maybe you're a devout Catholic or fanatic of any monotheist submission-based religion)

riiight, fail diplomacy rolls much?

 

[Wild Gazebo]

Muse isn't internal. I DON'T recomend mindless belly-gazing. I think Dr. Strangemonkey and I share a few common grounds--save perhaps the idea of revolutionary mediocracy. The artist is a part of the audience and will reflect this by definition...so remain truthful.

Sorry about using the term 'muse' it has a personal meaning to me that could not possibly be as universal as I would like...and I sometimes forget that.

 

[S'mon]

riiight, fail diplomacy rolls much?

Well, not sure how to rephrase - wouldn't want to imply HDM would offend anyone religious but it's very much against certain forms of submission-based religion.

 

[Wild Gazebo]

Suggesting that anyone is a 'fanatic' involving their relegion if they take offence to an idea is usually considered bad form. It has nothing to do with suggesting that a book might offend.