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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 2015503" data-attributes="member: 11760">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.</blockquote>

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