With the exception of Gormenghast, and maybe The Black Company, that's all pretty standard stuff. Even Thomas Covenant, I'd argue. Only Gormenghast really ventures out of the realm of high fantasy. Check out Angela Carter. Read The Red Tree or The Drowning Girl, by Caitlin R. Kiernan. Read Samuel R. Delaney's Neveryon books. Read the Golem and the Jinn. Read Midnight's Children. I could go on and on in this vein, but the point is that if all you read is high fantasy, or works close to it, then all you're going to get is a lot of derivative pop-fantasy stuff, because that's mostly what the subgenre consists of.
The top 20 (which, if you're curious consists of 7 'Shades Of Vampire' books; 7 Harry Potter books, an omnibus edition of the first four Helicon Muses, a Discworld book, two other 'first books in a sure to be long running fantasy series' and The Man In The High Castle wondering what exactly it's doing there because it's historical fiction - Clearly a representative sample if ever there was one!) don't talk to the whole of a genre. You stress so hard that my idea of fantasy is wrong but your idea of fantasy seems to be heavily built around confirmation bias; find a few books that do something different and declare that thus ALL of fantasy is now something totally unique and special and none of it is reused schlock settings. Just as I originally said; I'm not claiming that all of fantasy is Tolkein-esque. What I said was that many fantasy writers either pander to fans of existing properties or are fans themselves who stick to a preconceived idea of the fantasy world. And to go back to your top 20; what do we see? Harry potter (which is just high fantasy with muggles instead of peasants) and a whole lot of vampires. Definitely very unique stuff. None of that changes their quality as books at all; I love Harry Potter to bit buts the setting is very much just the same old stuff. All crumbling castles and dragons and wizards who hide themselves away. And, just as I said, those fantasical elements are what stands out and that's why people deride the whole of fantasy because there are these immediate, easy parallels to draw between them. I totally agree with this. Another typical complaint against fantasy is that 'a wizard did it' kind of story telling that is often quite unsatisfying because it's a non-explanation. It's a common fantasy element. And no, that doesn't mean ALL fantasy is like that but it is still common and feels extremely unimaginative.
I think the point is not that high fantasy is all there is, just that it's still very common and very popular. Even you yourself call it 'pretty standard'. That's about the most damning thing you could ever call it. If it's 'standard stuff' then yeah, that pretty much represents the genre pretty well. If you have to go looking for 'the non-standard stuff' then that's clearly not representative of the whole genre. Of course there is more than just swords and sorcery but, for good or for ill, swords and sorcery is the benchmark of the genre. While there are certainly writers and directors making other kinds of fantasy around the modern world has been dominated by works like the LoTR movies and Game Of Thrones; chaps in armor, magic swords, the odd dragon. That's the standard.
To clarify - it's all standard stuff in terms of what people associated with fantasy, especially if they're not very familiar with the genre. Everything I mentioned above, with the exception of the Delaney works, are likely to be on the shelves at your local Barnes & Noble. Doesn't take much searching. But if you pick up the same sort of thing over and over then you're going to get the same sort of thing over and over.
@Steerpike You and I both know most people on this forum are not writing or even attempting to write the next Gormenghast. They are writing standard fantasy, which is what the title of the thread pertains to.
There's more to fantasy that elves, orcs, and kingdoms at war. Those are tropes, and can be good if written well more-so with some military research (Nothing like a good company!) I suggest checking out The Child Thief it's a rendition of the original Pan with a few liberties. It really shows you how f'ed up Peter Pan is. Yeah, lots of people on any forum or writing website are writing generic fantasy. They either like it, are inexperienced and use it as a starting point, or are trying to create something new. What's wrong with any of that? Should we all write literary fiction on 13th century France? Crime novels? Historical fiction (which is insanely popular lately, at least on TV) Yeah, much of the fantasy will be poop and generic. But then you have Scott Lynch, G.R.R. Martin (No matter your opinion, he wrote fantasy without going fantastical), and... umm.. Other people, I'm sure. Brent Weeks? Does he count? It's like m/m romance novels. 90% of them are werewolf erotica posing as "fantasy" 5% is sentient household items wanting to have sex with you and the other 5% is actual hands down good writing and story (like Richard Morgan) Now imagine all those generic fantasy writers suddenly switching to literary fiction. You know what we'd see? Lots of vikings without an ounce of accuracy and horned helmets. And a few foppish court intrigue romances. And there'd be thousands of them and all of them equally bad.
For all I know there are universes with fundamentally different laws but what are those laws and how do you derive them from the only reality we know? It's not very imaginative to just make up your own laws on a whim. What are the basis for your imaginary laws? Once you have a basis, you're no longer fantasizing, you're speculating. Also, it's contradictory to say, people in my world can spew fireballs from their finger tops because it's fantasy and I say so, but I'm going to follow my own internal logic system. You can't just pick and choose elements of our reality- I mean you can, but that's being unimaginative.
I've always had a hard time with how genres are currently defined. If it were up to me, we'd have a different system.
But if you have elements which are from our reality and elements that aren't, it requires imagination to speculate how they might interact. And that's a lot of the joy of fantasy. Often it's about how would humans (a very complex and varied element of our reality) react if they were in bizarre situation x. Speculation about how the situation scientifically came about in the first place, is just a different sort of speculation. - I don't buy that one sort of speculation requires more imagination than the other.
most fantasy novels are not thought experiments , but merely escapist vehicles. Even so, the imaginative part in what you described would be in imagining how the characters would react to specific changes, not the changes itself. You do this in all genres. The fantasy element itself, to which your characters respond, is in and of itself unimaginative, by definition.
Maybe it's generational, but building on what you said about video games, the trend started back in the late 1980s with text adventure games which were 95% fantasy based. Fantasy, for some weird reason, is a computer geek thing. In the computer clubs I was part of back then, almost everyone played them (they actually originated in the late 70s). Even then, I leaned more toward science fiction rather than fantasy, but I was one of the few.
I think you may be overstating my argument... I know, that makes it easier to disagree with, but it doesn't really lead to respectful discussion - so, to clarify, I'm not making any arguments or claims about all of fantasy, except to say that all of fantasy is a very, very broad group of stories. In terms of the books on the top 20 list and my confirmation bias - The Man in the High Castle isn't historical fiction, it's alternative history, which is traditionally classed as SF/F. And I'm not sure how you want the sample to be made more representative. I chose the Amazon top 20 because it seemed like a good way to get an idea of what's selling in the genre. Is there a different way you'd like to gather a non-curated sample? In your original post you said "Fans want to read more not-quite-Tolkein so that's what they write and what publishers pick up." But I can see why it might be a good idea to broaden that claim a little.
Most of the people on writing forums are still learning. Calling them unoriginal just discourages them from writing more and getting better. No one is going to write a masterpiece on their first attempt, or their first twenty attempts. If someone attempts to write a masterpiece from the very beginning, they'll probably fail spectacularly and just get discouraged. You're describing science fiction. Science fiction isn't about having a futuristic setting and a lot of special effects: it's about writing a story where the science of the world itself is a character of its own. If a novel with a medieval setting has science as an important focus, then it's a work of science fiction, or at least incorporates elements of the genre. But all fantasy doesn't have to be this way. Fiction is, at the heart of it, a lie. When you write "John walked across the room and opened the door," you aren't documenting a real event, you're telling a story. In a story, anything, including the laws of physics, are subject to change for the sake of good storytelling. So what if a magic system violates the laws of thermodynamics? Fiction isn't compiled and executed by a computer, it's read by a reader, whose goal is to enjoy it. In most cases, people aren't looking for insight from fiction, they're looking for entertainment. They're willing to suspend their disbelief for the sake of a good story. Even in the case of science fiction, the laws of physics are regularly violated for the sake of story telling. Faster than light travel, for example, is impossible under our current view of physics. That isn't a problem though, because there is one important element of science that I think you may be forgetting: science is about finding explanations for observed phenomena. If tomorrow, we discover FTL travel, then that doesn't invalidate science, it invalidates some parts of the theory of relativity. If magic existed, and the laws of thermodynamics could be easily violated, then the laws of thermodynamics would be incomplete. Scientists would need to write new laws that correctly explain the observed phenomena. Worlds in which FTL exists and worlds in which magic exists are essentially the same, because FTL is magic. In either of these worlds, the laws of physics are different from how we understand them. But in the real world, the same can be said to be true as well. There are many things we still do not understand about physics. There are laws we accept as true that are almost certainly not fully correct, in the same way as Newton's laws do not apply in all cases, but are very useful for solving most simple problems nonetheless. Science is not a collection of fun facts that we know about how the world works. Science is a method for discovering how the world works. A world that works differently from ours does not go against science, nor does it have a different science. It has a different set of laws of nature, which could be examined and explained with the same scientific method. This is true, no matter how irrational or contradictory the world. A lot of stories chose to explain how their worlds work, but a lot don't. It all depends on whether the author, as a storyteller, feels that those details are relevant and interesting to their story. The difference between Fantasy and Science Fiction is not whether their worlds are rational, but whether the author choses to include the details of how the world works as a key element of the story.
I hate this whole "series of novels" trend we're currently forced to endure. If the story can't be told in one book, then I'm not interested.
Well an evil overlord has commanded me to write a Fantasy novel. Though to be fair it is going to be Fantasy in a different definition to the one presented here. Should be interesting to pound the keys for this new evil overlord.
Oh not me at all! I love this actually, especially if it's good. It means I get MORE story. Plus I love collecting things, so a full bookshelf makes me so happy.
Hi, I have not read all of this, but I think my experience is interesting. My characters are controlled by facial hair, the more facial hair the better, but if it is Hitler hair they self-destruct. This is all obviously absurd but I love MichealP.
I'm with you there. I'm dying for Amazon to add a filter for 'standalone' books because it's sodding impossible to find them now among all the neverending series.
Maybe we could start up a petition?? I actually don't mind a series of about 3/4 books but longer series almost never get resolved to my satisfaction. The author always gets sidetracked *sigh*
Read Otherland by Tad Williams. It's a fantasy / science fiction hybrid that will blow your dick off. I struggle to find any books that interest me any more. Horror and crime and fantasy are all inundated with typical cliched garbage, or the popular books are at least. I have to read Weird Fiction for my fix of originality these days.
