The Speculative Divide: Fantasy

Well, if you thought the last post was long, just wait for this one. But first an announcement: I am changing my rules just slightly. Instead of making two posts a week, I have to make a post within three days of the last one. Don't ask me how that makes it easier to keep. It really doesn't. It may change to certain days of the week that I have to update it so that way I have an easier schedule to keep (I do well at keeping schedules), but I'll try this for now. So, I am setting the iPod to tell me to write the sci-fi genre analysis on the thirteenth (if I have not done so already, and here we go.

Fantasy. This is where I think my analysis might get a little over loaded and fairly tricky. Because there's a lot to fantasy. One could almost say that it's the oldest genre there is, although way back in the day, that was known as realistic fiction. I am of course speaking of mythology. (For personal reasons, I'm not going to get into Judeo/Christian writings, sorry). But let's look at the Greeks for a second. Of course you have gods, tremendous power and impossible circumstance and beings. If I could speculate I would say that it is the non-human that tends to make fantasy. After all, in Greek mythology you have beings who are like humans (the gods, demi-gods and half human creatures like centaurs, satyrs and Minotaur) that can perform acts that no human is able to do. They are meta human, or greater than the human ability. You also have completely non-existent, non-human creatures as well, such as dragons.

These factors are true of later fantasy fictions as well. Take for example, witches, wizards, fairies and other magic makers: beings who appear human, but somehow have greater abilities than an ordinary human being. An important factor of fantasy fiction is that these abilities seem to be natural, or rather inherited some how. There is a more biological, ie, never explained in writing. Then of course you have other creatures as well, unicorns, phoenixes, giant spiders and so on. These creatures appear to be natural too, if you will, seemingly evolved with other, non-magical animals.

That is not to say that humans are not a large part of fantasy fiction. After all in The Lord of the Rings (which we will be getting back to), it a human who can do such things as have power over the dead (Aaragorn). Humans also often serve as emotional anchors for the characters with magic, whether through family ties or love interests, or even in some legends become kings, create chivalry and go down in history for being full of awesome (King Arthur); the foil to that is, that they can also be power hungry rivals, easily manipulated and try and sleep with their father/uncle's wife, take over the kingdom, cause a major battle which leaves a lot of people dead and Britain easy prey for the Saxons (Mordred). In any case, humans, like magic makers and any set of characters also play various roles.

Which leads me back to this: why do people see speculative fiction as kiddy writing? After all, someone (I do believe someone out of The Late American Novel complied by Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee) said that no matter whether you write in the past or the future, you are really writing about right now. While this is more true of horror and science fiction, I believe this can on a level apply to fantasy as well. Even if the characters are interacting in a setting where maybe they are not quite human, or a dragon flies over head, it does not make it any less believable. I think the problem stems from the fact that people believe their are a lot of bad fantasy (speculative) novels out there, and so it pollutes the genre. This is absolutely true. I do not understand, however, why it should pollutes the genre so thoroughly that people could become so dismissive of it. After all, for every bad novel there is bound to be a good one. A well written story with fleshed out characters and an amazing idea. After all, there are a lot of terrible romance novels out there, but does that degenerate the value of the good ones, like Pride and Prejudice?


Anyway, back to fantasy. Now that I feel I have defined what creates a fantasy, let's talk about where it divides and crosses over into horror and science fiction. Firstly, there are two main divides in fantasy fiction: traditional fantasy and urban fantasy.

Traditional fantasy is categorized by the fact that it takes place in a completely different world. In such a world, things like magic and fantastic creatures are accepted as believable, if occasionally surprising. This fantasy also tends to use a more medieval, classical or a mixed historical influences in the setting. For this, think of Lord of the Rings, which takes place in Middle Earth, strange creatures are normal, magic exists (though it leaving the land), or for a more modern example A Song of Fire and Ice, which, while it does not use many fantastic creatures or beings, is set in an alternate world, and has some hints and leanings toward magic. The important thing to note about these stories is that, most especially in the case of The Lord of the Rings, which set a precedent for traditional fantasy, is that they resemble epic sagas or poems or classical, ancient and medieval societies. For Tolkien, who studied Norse epics and favored them, and who was trying to create a mythology for Britain, this was more intentional. For later fantasy novels, I cannot say for sure, but the better works, tend to denote their research and prior readings in style, plot and characterization.

The second major kind of fantasy is conventional/urban fantasy. These differs from traditional as it usually takes place in modern times, on Earth as we know it. These only have a few minor differences, which is why I lump them together. In urban fantasy the settings lean toward popular and large cities (why we call it urban), and this can occasionally, though not always mix with more action and adventure, usually culminating in large chase scenes. As a friend with more experience in these novels said, they also may include more negative aspects about urban life (drugs, decay, etc) and a little more adult content (sex, swearing, though on this your mileage may vary). For urban fantasy think: War of the Oaks by Emma Bull, Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman and Lament by Maggie Stiefvater. Contemporary is not so much focused in the setting, but more about the innovation, how it's different from previous novels.  The best and probably biggest example I can give you is none other than Harry Potter. Yeah, okay, it does have it's traditional fantasy leanings, but J. K. Rowling made a fine point of always showing the muggle world in her novels, and in the seventh book, we are not much in the wizard world at all. I should note that a few of my examples do make distinctions between worlds (Muggle and Wizarding of Harry Potter,  and London Above and London Below in Neverwhere), but it these are more societal divides than physically seperate worlds.

Now we come to the part where fantasy, horror and sci-fi tend to collide.

As I said in my post on horror, you do see a lot of early overlap with fantasy in the development of the horror genre. With fairy tales and early horror movies many of the evil/monstrous beings were fantastic, as they came from places that were not exactly explained, or explained by what was believed to be supernatural events. And speaking of the supernatural, it tends to be when contemporary fantasy crosses with traditional horror elements that you get the supernatural (sub) genre. I think I'll come back to that later, since there's much more that I want to say on it, and I'm not sure I want to get too much into in this post. I will say, though, that what we describe as the supernatural sub genre is mostly found in contemporary works, where as more traditional horror you would just say mixes genres. But these lines are fairly easy to notice and see where they cross.

With science fiction, the distinctions tend to blur much more. You have such distinctions as science fantasy, which creates an environment from possible scientific advancements with many more fantastic elements. Many times this includes deep space travel, or things that have some scientific elements, such as the use of machines, but use this to achieve an end that would not be possible for many years to come.

There are also many different degrees of combinations the two undergo. The Dragonriders of Pern comes to mind as a good example of this, as the early series within the saga indicate a more fantastic setting, what with dragons, but later on, the reader is introduced into a much more science fiction oriented setting.

Then there is alternate reality fiction, which can be any variety of integration between the two genres, as it can propose fantastic elements, such as a world with fairies, unicorns, magic and other fantastic elements, and where these things are more out in the open, but can also do certain things like suggest a change in historical events which led to different developments in technology, such as the SteamPunk genre (but since that falls more under the realm of science fiction, I'll get to that in my next post).

Another of the distinctive sub genres, comes from the superhero stoies, where a person can have inherited, magically developed, or mythic super-human abilities, but one can also use technology, scientific accidents and scientific atrocities to gain or perfect super-human abilities mostly for the sake of crime fighting. But even then the two genres mix together, and sometimes, a reader can be quick to forget the distinctions (guilty). It is the many different blurings of possibilities that make the two so hard to separate and distinguish from one another, and even label sub genres

One of the reasons I think these two mix well and seem so similar at a glance is that they both have spectacular outcomes, they are simply achieved through different means. I mean, if you genetically engineer a horse with a horn, or magically poof one up from a combination of horse/goat/rhino, you still have a unicorn. It makes it easy to see why people arrive at the conclusion that these genres are the virtually the same. But as many have said, it's not the destination, its the journey. How we got the unicorn is the important thing. The plot in a speculative novel, the means of the spectacular, really denote the differences in genre. With fantasy that means magic or the unexplained did it. With horror, something you want to kill did it. With science fiction....we'll get back to that later.


Thanks to Grace on this post who helped me clarify some things through discussion. She's the friend I mentioned above.