The fantasy genre is split into many sub-genres. You can imagine it as a sprawling country manor house with many stories and annexes. There's the high fantasy wing; the sword-and-sorcery suite; the sword-and-planet attic; and so on.
Over the other side of a 6-lane motorway traversable only by a narrow footbridge is another genre altogether: Fantasy for People Who Aren't Into Fantasy (FPWAIF), which is a mansion all of its own. There is a small amount of foot traffic between it and fantasy proper. But not much.
Because I have a young daughter Frozen and Frozen II have invaded my life. She hasn't seen Frozen II and only brief glimpses of Frozen, but Disney permeates the world of little girls like water to fishes, and so anything and everything are now to do with Elsa and Anna (when they're not to do with Belle, or Rapunzel, or Cinderella, all of which are also from films she hasn't seen but is nonetheless obsessed with). So, whether I like it or not - no guessing as to which - I have to know about earth giants and trolls and elemental spirits in enchanted forests. This is FPWAIF at its zenith: stuff that sounds like it would embarrass even the author of one of those awful Tolkien rip-offs from the 60s or 70s, Terry Brooks or David Eddings.
Confronted with FPWAIF, it is difficult for the bona fide inhabitant of the fantasy genre manor to resist turning into the comic store guy from The Simpsons. When the Harry Potter films were at the height of their popularity, I remember hearing Mark Kermode reviewing one of them (it must have been the sixth or seventh in the series) and lavishing praise on JK Rowling for coming up with the idea of a horcrux, which was a "completely original idea" in his view. I almost had an aneurysm: what is a "completely original idea" in the FPWAIF mansion is the oldest of ancient hats in fantasy manor; but, of course, for the Person Who Isn't Into Fantasy even the most hackneyed ideas are novel, and even JK Rowling's grab-bag of cobbled-together Fighting Fantasy cast-offs are a breath of fresh air.
(Not that this makes Harry Potter books bad, I hasten to add. I haven't read them, but I have watched and enjoyed the films, even though I will maintain to my dying day that the plots of the last handful make absolutely no sense and presumably rely on prior knowledge on the part of people who've read the stories.)
JK Rowling is FPWAIF mansion's most famous inhabitant, but joining her for dinner are a large number of more celebrated authors - people like Margaret Attwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie - who have dabbled in attempting to write SF or fantasy without any of real understanding or appreciation for the genres and their history, and who have ended up producing bland and old-fashioned claptrap as a result. For these people, it's enough to take a Sunday afternoon stroll over the motorway bridge and peer in a few of the windows at old fantasy manor, and be back home in time for tea.
It is interesting to speculate what will become of FPWAIF in the post-Game of Thrones age. Is the number of People Who Aren't Into Fantasy going to dwindle? Or was all that Westeros stuff just a flash in the pan? My money is on the latter, all things considered, but you never know.
I guess we differ a lot about this topic, especially as I don't think there's something like "Fantasy proper" or "FPWAIF". There's only good or bad fantasy/sci-fi in my mind and given the authors you mentioned and your views on them, I guess we also differ very much on the quality of their works. I am a bona fide inhabitant of the fantasy genre manor myself and I have no problems at all resisting to behave like an elitist gatekeeper of a genre that has been in real needs of writers that can actually write on a literary level like forever (sci-fi is not at all bad, but fantasy? At best, fantasy authors are excellent storytellers; so more Ishiguro, more Rushdie, more Mc Ewan, please, because those guys can actually write AND tell good stories.
ReplyDeleteOh, and by the way, the only thing that I hated about Frozen was that one song that, in my family, got constantly .sung by three different children over 6 years worth of time. Soooo glad, that Frozen II couldn't come up with the same kind of sung.
I'm not sure I understand why I'm a gatekeeper - I've got no gate to keep. I'm not a publisher.
DeleteFor me it's not whether those writers can write/tell good stories or not - it's more that they tend to unwittingly reproduce genre tropes. Because they don't know the genre very well, they think what they're coming up with is original when it's usually really, really old. That tends to make the results a bit trite and bland.
I actually rather like the Frozen songs even after hearing them a billion times. They are good "musical" music. Show tunes.
DeleteThough I think there's something to be said about SF writers being *on average* better than fantasy writers qua literary quality, I think it's also a questing-beggaring statement. Is fantasy empty of good writers? I'm unconvinced.
DeleteFor example (not accounting for taste here; merely listing people considered by some to have a "proper writing style"): Poul Anderson, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, N.K. Jemisin, Stephen Donaldson, Tolkien and Lewis (obviously, and yes, Lewis has an excellent style), China Miéville, Orson Scott Card, Susannah Clarke...
Of course some of those you or I might dislike (I have appreciated Donaldson but think his style too baroque, Jemisin has horrendously pretentious literary artefacts in her writing), but that's a non-zero number of fantasy writers - excluding magical realists! - with proper literary form.
I'm not saying fantasy is empty of good writers, I'd rather say it is nearly empty of excellent writers like Ishiguro and Rushdie are. It doesn't really matter because I love reading both. And I love reading fantasy (even from people like Eddings, Jordan or Salvatore), so I don't measure every book according to it's artistic value. But that's also why I kinda take exception to that "FPWAIF" thing. Because neither Harry Potter nor Frozen are such things. They just had the marketing and the wide appeal to also draw people in that normally don't care too much about Fantasy as a genre. But that's an added bonus, not the reason for their existence.
DeleteWell, that is kind of what I meant by fantasy for people who aren't into fantasy!!
DeleteI agree that SF writers do tend to be better than fantasy ones - or maybe I should say that there are more great SF writers than great fantasy ones. And the great fantasy writers tend to also write SF - Le Guin, Wolfe, Vance, being ones which spring to mind.
It infuriates me too when basic/hackneyed ideas are praised as original by critics who should know better. The Heroes TV series comes to mind. I'm not sure I'd lump Atwood in with Ishiguro et al. She has been writing genre stuff for basically her whole career.
ReplyDeleteShe has, but all the while has been at pains to make clear she's not an SF writer and thinks she's above it.
DeleteWhich reminds me of that great Pratchett crack about magical realism just being fantasy for writers who don't want to admit to writing fantasy.
Delete(I say that, whilst having some time for magical realism as a separate category...)
Yeah, but so did Harlan Ellison. Gotta call a spade a spade at some point.
DeleteDid he?
DeleteGene Wolfe wrote fantasy/SF and was an exceptional writer. So was Ursula LeGuin.
ReplyDeleteThough the exceptions might prove the point, I was also going to make this same addendum!
DeleteI agree, although I've always found Le Guin's books hard to get into.
DeleteIt seems to me that most current D&D players are also FPWAIF people. Most I know have read Harry Potter and watched Game of Thrones, and beyond that maybe some Tolkien (often just the movies) but that's about it. Hardly anyone is familiar with other classics in the genre, and stuff predating the 2000s doesn't really arouse any interest.
ReplyDeleteAlso muddying the waters is that for a lot of people their main exposure to fantasy is computer games.
ReplyDeleteDon't think it's unlikely that we'll see more stuff in the vein of GoT, after all The Witcher was a hit. Might see more like that.
Plenty of Super Hero fans who never read comic books. We'll just get more and more fantasy fans who've never read fantasy novels.
Yeah, the computer game thing is a good point.
DeleteThis is how vampires went from symbolic personifications of rape and sexual deviance to being sexy sparkling strangers or cosmic horror went from being about humanity's insignificance in the vastness of the universe to being about pasting eyeballs and tentacles on blobs.
ReplyDeleteThere's always been low-quality genre fiction, and it's not going to go away anytime soon. As I see it, there's not much use griping about it.
ReplyDeleteThank you for explaining this concept... I can now understand and explain why some popular "fantasy" entertainment leaves me just cold, or worse.
ReplyDelete