I went to a family gathering this weekend, about two hundred miles from the places I call 'home'. This is actually the first time this decade I've been that far from home (I don't get about much). The journeys there and back were seven and five hours respectively in a car, and were the longest car journeys I've been on in the same period.
Travel is starting to become a theme of my writing about video games. Many of my favourite in-game moments have to do with travelling through virtual worlds. A big part of my excitement for upcoming games like Tales of Zestiria, Xenoblade Chronicles X and Final Fantasy XV is that they offer vast new worlds to explore.
By contrast, I really don't like to do anything in the real world that's vaguely analogous to my virtual explorations. I don't like hiking, I don't like driving (or being a passenger, since I can't legally drive myself anywhere), and I generally don't like to travel. There are a variety of reasons, but the biggest is quite simply that real travel is a lot of effort.
I want to see mountains like the ones my dad likes to climb without getting sore feet. I want to experience the vast sweeps of landscapes like the ones we drove through this weekend (some of which were very pretty) without the steadily-hardening crick in the base of my spine. I want to float through the world as effortlessly and intangibly as a videogame camera.
And I thought until this weekend that there was no harm in this, provided I kept to my lane and didn't get too whiny when I actually do have to travel. But Actually Travelling, and looking at the landscapes I travelled through with the same critical eye I've been training to look at videogames with, put me ill at ease.
Games, by the limits of their technology and the demands of their audience, compress distance. Sure, you can walk for some hours in a straight line without touching the sides of some recent games. But you could walk the real world for the same length of time and in many places not even leave the valley you start in. I found myself wondering, as we drove over the crest of a hill and the horizon retreated on Friday afternoon, how dishonest it is to indulge in this, and how harmful.
It would be a pretty shallow critique to say that the shortening of distance in games is straightforwardly misrepresentative and creates harmful expectations of travel - no better than tired old arguments that the mere presentation of violence is sufficient to induce people to be more violent. It's more complex than that.
But games are so often about the mastery of space, the individual eventually rising to an effortless, unchallenged mobility. There's no better example of this than the 'airship moment' in JRPGs, the point at which you've explored most of the world on foot and, to avoid forcing you to retread old ground, you get a tool that allows you to hop or float to wherever you want, bypassing even the abstractions that are supposed to add labour and time back into the earlier compressed journeys.
This is all a bit unfocussed and musing-y (which is why it's here and not on my actual games blog). The problem probably has more to do with the way games construct mastery than the way they handle travel and distance. But this weekend, looking out at the same sweeping vista for twenty miles and realising it would take ten times as long to walk it on foot as in-game, I had a moment of very sharp discomfort. I hope I'll be able to hold that in mind as I develop my critical ideas on this theme.
Showing posts with label fantasy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fantasy. Show all posts
Monday, 20 July 2015
Monday, 28 January 2013
High Drama (part 2)
Remember this? I do occasionally come back and tie off loose ends...
In that blog post, I talked about a problem that arises when we try to define 'fantasy' as a genre; specifically, that it's hard to pick out the essential component of something being 'fantasy', when stories with fantastical trappings - dragons, swords, magic etc. - can vary from A Song of Ice and Fire to The Lord of the Rings to The Lies of Locke Lamora and all the way back again.
I phrased this in terms of a concept drawn from video game theory, the concept of a core aesthetic - defined as the underlying emotional reason that we go to a particular genre or category within a form. A core aesthetic is, ultimately, the experience we go to a work of art in search of. Today, I plan to outline what I think the core aesthetic of fantasy (literature) is.
First, though, two things it's not. In the first part of this post, I linked to this video, which outlines the theory of core aesthetics in videogame genres. Now, they actually offer a definition of fantasy as it applies to videogames, which is that fantasy is vicarity - fantasy, in videogames, is what allows you to become something you are not; a soldier, or a gangster, or a pilot etc. etc.
That works very well for videogames, but it's much harder to do in literature. Because when reading you don't have control over the choices that the characters make, it's very rare to find fantasy literature which involves fantasy in this sense. There is a degree of vicarity, to be sure, in our enjoyment of the heroic and exciting deeds of protagonists in all genres, but in literature I think vicarity is the province primarily of horror and (erotic) romance, which are the most visceral, experiential forms of writing - the genres most focussed on making you feel what the characters are feeling.
But, intuitively, lots of things that are quite definitely 'fantasy' aren't primarily about vicarious enjoyment - there's no better example than A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones. No-one's getting any pleasure from vicariously living in that world (okay, psychopaths notwithstanding). Similarly, there are things that intuitively don't seem to be fantasy which are deeply vicarious - the aforementioned erotic romance, for example.
So vicarity doesn't make a good definition of fantasy. Quite separately, we need to make clear the distinction between 'fantasy' and 'magical realism'. Tempting though it is to uphold Terry Pratchett's charming quip that magical realism is 'like a polite way of saying you write fantasy', there is a key difference, and it's an illuminating one to discuss.
In essence, the difference is this: in a magical realist story, when the ghost or spirit or monster or whatever turns up, no-one worries too much about why, or how it works, or what the logic that governs its behaviour should be. No-one pays any attention to the system of the magic.
In fantasy, however, one key element is showing that there is some system to the magic. So, whereas in a magical realist story, a ghost would just be a character who was dead, when I wrote Heaven Can Wait, my fantasy novel about a ghost (which is coming back soon, I fervently hope), the story explored the mechanics of being a ghost and the spiritual implications of life after death just as much as the character dynamics of the protagonist trying to relate to the life he'd left behind (which would be the sole focus in magical realism).
That's not to exclude fantasy stories where the magic isn't what we call 'rules-based'. Heaven Can Wait is a rules-based magic story; what this means is that the reader should be able to figure out and sometimes predict things the magic system makes possible before they actually appear on-page (in fact, the very best rules-based magic systems will leave the reader thinking about all the cool things you can do with magic which there wasn't time to fit into the book). The Lord of the Rings, by contrast, doesn't have rules-based magic. Tolkein never explains how Gandalf's powers relate to or differ from those of the One Ring, for example.
But The Lord of the Rings definitely is fantasy, not magical realism. Why? Because things we know about the magic itself - that the ring is corrupting, that it must be destroyed to curb the power of Sauron - are significant to the plot. Put simply, there is a relation between character and setting which is essential to fantasy but not essential to magical realism.
Therein lies the key. Fantasy is about what fantastical settings allow you to do with characters, not in general (because other genres, like sci-fi, horror and magical realism also rely on setting-character interactions) but in respect of a particular core aesthetic, which I call high drama.
By high drama, I mean a particular feeling you get at the climax of a fantasy novel. Think about Frodo and Sam as they stand on the edge of the precipice in Mount Doom, as Frodo finally succumbs to the Ring's power. (Those of you who've read the final volume of the Wheel of Time, think about Rand at Shayol Ghul - this is probably the best possible example of what I'm talking about, but slightly less well-known as yet than the climax of LotR).
It's that moment where the whole world hangs in the balance of one character's decision; that is high drama. It puts the character under a microscope, shows you how all the stresses of a lifetime can shape morals and wisdom. It can be achieved any number of ways, in the everyman who finds a lost artefact of power (Frodo), or the destined hero who faces up to the ultimate trial (Rand in the Wheel of Time), or the crook who stumbles over a sinister plot (Jimmy the Hand in Raymond Feist's Riftwar trilogy), or the ruler who faces up to the corruption of her government and/or nation (Mara in Feist and Janny Wurts' Kelewan trilogy) and so on.
The heart of the matter, and the reason genre fantasy books and series end up so long, is that to give that one moment of decision weight, you have to feel the character's life adding up to it. Whatever the reputation of the genre for shallow, stereotypical characters, when done right it is more character-focussed than any other form of literature.
I can't think of a fantasy story that I've read that didn't supply this core aesthetic. I can think of books with magic in, some of them very fine (Balthasar's Oddysey by Amin Maalouf, arguably), which don't do this, but they don't feel like fantasy to me. Dragons, swords, stupid character names and hypersexualised she-demons (naming no names, Cersei Lannister) have nothing to do with it.
(Addendum: I realised after writing this post that high drama doesn't have to be reserved entirely for the climax of an entire series - there can be other moments of high drama in a series, as for example at the climax of season 1 of The Second Realm or even, arguably, in the red pill/blue pill choice in The Matrix. It's still that sense that everything we know about the character has a part to play in this crucial decision that he/she is making. I might need to do a full post expanding on this point at some later date; there isn't space to do it justice here.)
In that blog post, I talked about a problem that arises when we try to define 'fantasy' as a genre; specifically, that it's hard to pick out the essential component of something being 'fantasy', when stories with fantastical trappings - dragons, swords, magic etc. - can vary from A Song of Ice and Fire to The Lord of the Rings to The Lies of Locke Lamora and all the way back again.
I phrased this in terms of a concept drawn from video game theory, the concept of a core aesthetic - defined as the underlying emotional reason that we go to a particular genre or category within a form. A core aesthetic is, ultimately, the experience we go to a work of art in search of. Today, I plan to outline what I think the core aesthetic of fantasy (literature) is.
First, though, two things it's not. In the first part of this post, I linked to this video, which outlines the theory of core aesthetics in videogame genres. Now, they actually offer a definition of fantasy as it applies to videogames, which is that fantasy is vicarity - fantasy, in videogames, is what allows you to become something you are not; a soldier, or a gangster, or a pilot etc. etc.
That works very well for videogames, but it's much harder to do in literature. Because when reading you don't have control over the choices that the characters make, it's very rare to find fantasy literature which involves fantasy in this sense. There is a degree of vicarity, to be sure, in our enjoyment of the heroic and exciting deeds of protagonists in all genres, but in literature I think vicarity is the province primarily of horror and (erotic) romance, which are the most visceral, experiential forms of writing - the genres most focussed on making you feel what the characters are feeling.
But, intuitively, lots of things that are quite definitely 'fantasy' aren't primarily about vicarious enjoyment - there's no better example than A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones. No-one's getting any pleasure from vicariously living in that world (okay, psychopaths notwithstanding). Similarly, there are things that intuitively don't seem to be fantasy which are deeply vicarious - the aforementioned erotic romance, for example.
So vicarity doesn't make a good definition of fantasy. Quite separately, we need to make clear the distinction between 'fantasy' and 'magical realism'. Tempting though it is to uphold Terry Pratchett's charming quip that magical realism is 'like a polite way of saying you write fantasy', there is a key difference, and it's an illuminating one to discuss.
In essence, the difference is this: in a magical realist story, when the ghost or spirit or monster or whatever turns up, no-one worries too much about why, or how it works, or what the logic that governs its behaviour should be. No-one pays any attention to the system of the magic.
In fantasy, however, one key element is showing that there is some system to the magic. So, whereas in a magical realist story, a ghost would just be a character who was dead, when I wrote Heaven Can Wait, my fantasy novel about a ghost (which is coming back soon, I fervently hope), the story explored the mechanics of being a ghost and the spiritual implications of life after death just as much as the character dynamics of the protagonist trying to relate to the life he'd left behind (which would be the sole focus in magical realism).
That's not to exclude fantasy stories where the magic isn't what we call 'rules-based'. Heaven Can Wait is a rules-based magic story; what this means is that the reader should be able to figure out and sometimes predict things the magic system makes possible before they actually appear on-page (in fact, the very best rules-based magic systems will leave the reader thinking about all the cool things you can do with magic which there wasn't time to fit into the book). The Lord of the Rings, by contrast, doesn't have rules-based magic. Tolkein never explains how Gandalf's powers relate to or differ from those of the One Ring, for example.
But The Lord of the Rings definitely is fantasy, not magical realism. Why? Because things we know about the magic itself - that the ring is corrupting, that it must be destroyed to curb the power of Sauron - are significant to the plot. Put simply, there is a relation between character and setting which is essential to fantasy but not essential to magical realism.
Therein lies the key. Fantasy is about what fantastical settings allow you to do with characters, not in general (because other genres, like sci-fi, horror and magical realism also rely on setting-character interactions) but in respect of a particular core aesthetic, which I call high drama.
By high drama, I mean a particular feeling you get at the climax of a fantasy novel. Think about Frodo and Sam as they stand on the edge of the precipice in Mount Doom, as Frodo finally succumbs to the Ring's power. (Those of you who've read the final volume of the Wheel of Time, think about Rand at Shayol Ghul - this is probably the best possible example of what I'm talking about, but slightly less well-known as yet than the climax of LotR).
It's that moment where the whole world hangs in the balance of one character's decision; that is high drama. It puts the character under a microscope, shows you how all the stresses of a lifetime can shape morals and wisdom. It can be achieved any number of ways, in the everyman who finds a lost artefact of power (Frodo), or the destined hero who faces up to the ultimate trial (Rand in the Wheel of Time), or the crook who stumbles over a sinister plot (Jimmy the Hand in Raymond Feist's Riftwar trilogy), or the ruler who faces up to the corruption of her government and/or nation (Mara in Feist and Janny Wurts' Kelewan trilogy) and so on.
The heart of the matter, and the reason genre fantasy books and series end up so long, is that to give that one moment of decision weight, you have to feel the character's life adding up to it. Whatever the reputation of the genre for shallow, stereotypical characters, when done right it is more character-focussed than any other form of literature.
I can't think of a fantasy story that I've read that didn't supply this core aesthetic. I can think of books with magic in, some of them very fine (Balthasar's Oddysey by Amin Maalouf, arguably), which don't do this, but they don't feel like fantasy to me. Dragons, swords, stupid character names and hypersexualised she-demons (naming no names, Cersei Lannister) have nothing to do with it.
(Addendum: I realised after writing this post that high drama doesn't have to be reserved entirely for the climax of an entire series - there can be other moments of high drama in a series, as for example at the climax of season 1 of The Second Realm or even, arguably, in the red pill/blue pill choice in The Matrix. It's still that sense that everything we know about the character has a part to play in this crucial decision that he/she is making. I might need to do a full post expanding on this point at some later date; there isn't space to do it justice here.)
Monday, 21 January 2013
High Drama (part 1)
(This is not the next installment of the series I've promised on WEIRDos - I'm planning to run that on Thursdays/Fridays, but there won't be one this week because the new Second Realm episode is out this weekend. It's also not the blog I was promising yesterday about my cock-up with Smashwords, which will run on Thursday)
Instead, today, before the moment fades, I want to start on a topic I've been prompted towards by the final volume of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, a fantasy epic I've been a fan of for over a decade. The final volume came out a couple of weeks ago, and I'm finally reading it (it's very good - and don't worry about spoilers; I won't be discussing it in detail, and I haven't finished it yet so I can't spoil any of the really juicy stuff).
The Wheel of Time captures what I feel to be the essence of 'fantasy' as a genre, and thus forms a very good jumping-off point for an attempt to define the genre. You might be thinking that you know how fantasy is defined - after all, there are sections in the bookshops for it (actually, and I feel this is a point in my favour, most of the bookshops I've been in lump fantasy and sci-fi together) - but I want to pose the question in a slightly new way.
This is a video about design theory for video games, and to those of you not literate in games, it may be a little bit dense, but it provides the basics of a framework for genre definition that I think we need to bring into the SFF world in books (I don't mean, by the way, that I want to use their definition of fantasy - I think it works just fine for games, but isn't what 'fantasy' is truly about in literature).
Put simply, the video lays out a way of analysing genre which cuts things up in terms of core aesthetics rather than superficial ones (the superficial aesthetics in games being the mechanics). The core aesthetics of a piece of art (for some legitimate-but-broad definition of 'art') are the things that we go to that particular piece of art for rather than any other.
The presenter claims that outside of the video game world, where art within a medium is broken up by genre, the genres are defined by core aesthetics. This is certainly true, I think, for cinema (which makes sense, since it's the field which has made most effective use of the concept) - it's easy to see that romance, drama, horror and so on are fulfilling different emotional/psychological needs. Something similar is true for most forms of literary genre - after all, you can tell what a person goes to erotica or horror for pretty clearly, but the same is generally true of literary fiction, thrillers etc. etc.
But there's quite a difference between the way sci-fi and fantasy are handled in films and the way they're handled in books. By way of example, despite all involving fictitious science, Armageddon is a disaster movie, while The Matrix is an action film and The Day The Earth Stood Still essentially a kind of political thriller.
By contrast, consider my favourite science fiction novel, Dan Simmons' Hyperion (actually, my favourite is the second in the series, but never mind that). Hyperion contains, in order, a horror story, an erotic romance (though not a massively explicit one), a bizarre cross between a reflexive meditation on art and a psychological thriller, a family drama, a Hollywood-Chandleresque detective story, and an unmistakably literary character piece tale-within-a-tale.
All of them have elements of fictitious science, with characters undergoing relativistic time dilation effects, or visiting dozens of worlds, or travelling through vast galactic computer networks, or being hunted by sinister automata, but the underlying stories are of vastly different types.
So what makes them all science fiction? Well, in a lesser collection of stories, the answer would be 'space ships and laser guns' - there are certainly many works of sci-fi which are really just thrillers transposed into a spacey context. In the case of Hyperion, though, every one of those stories involves an element of fictional science whose effect on the characters could only be achieved by that means - one character, for example, is made immortal; another sees his lover only a handful of times, between relativistic journeys that mean she ages through a whole life-span while he stays young.
The key to defining sci-fi, then, is this link between scenario and characters - this is what links all of Hyperion's stories with the much more precisely scientific sci-fi of Arthur Clarke's Earthlight or Greg Egan's Diaspora. We shouldn't fall into the trap of saying that everything set in space is sci-fi; Star Wars, for example, is just the monomyth in space, no different from the myth of Orpheus or, fundamentally, The Lord of the Rings. The space-ness of it doesn't add anything except visuals - superficial stuff.
So much for sci-fi, then. But this post is primarily about fantasy, and this raises a more difficult question. Think for a moment about cinema; is Bruce Almighty a fantasy film? What about Twilight or Evil Dead? Equivalent books could (and, indeed, do, at least in the case of Twilight) find their way into the fantasy section in a bookshop.
It might be tempting to say that fantasy is about worlds that are alternatives to our own, either in terms of being (like Harry Potter or The Chronicles of Narnia) worlds with a hidden magic element, or in terms of being secondary-world fantasies (like The Wheel of Time or A Song of Ice and Fire). But I've already discussed the absurdity that that leads to.
I hope that so far, I've shown that there's a problem here worth talking about. To put it bluntly, I feel like most of the people in charge of genre branding for books use the following decision process: 'Does it have magic in it? Okay, it's fantasy.' (and yes, magical realism blah blah blah, I'll come back to the topic of magical realism later). Okay, we now have various labels like 'YA fantasy' and 'Dark fantasy', which I suppose are steps in the right direction, but you still see a big lumping-together of stuff on the fantasy shelves.
One last example: Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson is a fantasy version of Ocean's Eleven - it's a heist caper (which, in cinema, is a surprisingly clear-cut and distinctive genre, albeit a quite rare one), with all the particular kinds of character interplay and authorial sleight of hand that implies. And yet it sits on the shelf right next to his The Way of Kings, which is unabashedly a straightforward epic. Okay, author branding makes it good to keep all his books in one place, and most bookshops don't have a section for capers (though they'd normally end up in 'crime' alongside a bunch of books better described as 'thrillers'), but the two books are very different in feel and style.
So there's a problem here. I'm going to split at this point (ooo, cliff-hanger ending), and next week, I'll pick up the theme and offer my definition of fantasy as a genre (and then I'll get back to that WEIRD stuff).
Instead, today, before the moment fades, I want to start on a topic I've been prompted towards by the final volume of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, a fantasy epic I've been a fan of for over a decade. The final volume came out a couple of weeks ago, and I'm finally reading it (it's very good - and don't worry about spoilers; I won't be discussing it in detail, and I haven't finished it yet so I can't spoil any of the really juicy stuff).
The Wheel of Time captures what I feel to be the essence of 'fantasy' as a genre, and thus forms a very good jumping-off point for an attempt to define the genre. You might be thinking that you know how fantasy is defined - after all, there are sections in the bookshops for it (actually, and I feel this is a point in my favour, most of the bookshops I've been in lump fantasy and sci-fi together) - but I want to pose the question in a slightly new way.
This is a video about design theory for video games, and to those of you not literate in games, it may be a little bit dense, but it provides the basics of a framework for genre definition that I think we need to bring into the SFF world in books (I don't mean, by the way, that I want to use their definition of fantasy - I think it works just fine for games, but isn't what 'fantasy' is truly about in literature).
Put simply, the video lays out a way of analysing genre which cuts things up in terms of core aesthetics rather than superficial ones (the superficial aesthetics in games being the mechanics). The core aesthetics of a piece of art (for some legitimate-but-broad definition of 'art') are the things that we go to that particular piece of art for rather than any other.
The presenter claims that outside of the video game world, where art within a medium is broken up by genre, the genres are defined by core aesthetics. This is certainly true, I think, for cinema (which makes sense, since it's the field which has made most effective use of the concept) - it's easy to see that romance, drama, horror and so on are fulfilling different emotional/psychological needs. Something similar is true for most forms of literary genre - after all, you can tell what a person goes to erotica or horror for pretty clearly, but the same is generally true of literary fiction, thrillers etc. etc.
But there's quite a difference between the way sci-fi and fantasy are handled in films and the way they're handled in books. By way of example, despite all involving fictitious science, Armageddon is a disaster movie, while The Matrix is an action film and The Day The Earth Stood Still essentially a kind of political thriller.
By contrast, consider my favourite science fiction novel, Dan Simmons' Hyperion (actually, my favourite is the second in the series, but never mind that). Hyperion contains, in order, a horror story, an erotic romance (though not a massively explicit one), a bizarre cross between a reflexive meditation on art and a psychological thriller, a family drama, a Hollywood-Chandleresque detective story, and an unmistakably literary character piece tale-within-a-tale.
All of them have elements of fictitious science, with characters undergoing relativistic time dilation effects, or visiting dozens of worlds, or travelling through vast galactic computer networks, or being hunted by sinister automata, but the underlying stories are of vastly different types.
So what makes them all science fiction? Well, in a lesser collection of stories, the answer would be 'space ships and laser guns' - there are certainly many works of sci-fi which are really just thrillers transposed into a spacey context. In the case of Hyperion, though, every one of those stories involves an element of fictional science whose effect on the characters could only be achieved by that means - one character, for example, is made immortal; another sees his lover only a handful of times, between relativistic journeys that mean she ages through a whole life-span while he stays young.
The key to defining sci-fi, then, is this link between scenario and characters - this is what links all of Hyperion's stories with the much more precisely scientific sci-fi of Arthur Clarke's Earthlight or Greg Egan's Diaspora. We shouldn't fall into the trap of saying that everything set in space is sci-fi; Star Wars, for example, is just the monomyth in space, no different from the myth of Orpheus or, fundamentally, The Lord of the Rings. The space-ness of it doesn't add anything except visuals - superficial stuff.
So much for sci-fi, then. But this post is primarily about fantasy, and this raises a more difficult question. Think for a moment about cinema; is Bruce Almighty a fantasy film? What about Twilight or Evil Dead? Equivalent books could (and, indeed, do, at least in the case of Twilight) find their way into the fantasy section in a bookshop.
It might be tempting to say that fantasy is about worlds that are alternatives to our own, either in terms of being (like Harry Potter or The Chronicles of Narnia) worlds with a hidden magic element, or in terms of being secondary-world fantasies (like The Wheel of Time or A Song of Ice and Fire). But I've already discussed the absurdity that that leads to.
I hope that so far, I've shown that there's a problem here worth talking about. To put it bluntly, I feel like most of the people in charge of genre branding for books use the following decision process: 'Does it have magic in it? Okay, it's fantasy.' (and yes, magical realism blah blah blah, I'll come back to the topic of magical realism later). Okay, we now have various labels like 'YA fantasy' and 'Dark fantasy', which I suppose are steps in the right direction, but you still see a big lumping-together of stuff on the fantasy shelves.
One last example: Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson is a fantasy version of Ocean's Eleven - it's a heist caper (which, in cinema, is a surprisingly clear-cut and distinctive genre, albeit a quite rare one), with all the particular kinds of character interplay and authorial sleight of hand that implies. And yet it sits on the shelf right next to his The Way of Kings, which is unabashedly a straightforward epic. Okay, author branding makes it good to keep all his books in one place, and most bookshops don't have a section for capers (though they'd normally end up in 'crime' alongside a bunch of books better described as 'thrillers'), but the two books are very different in feel and style.
So there's a problem here. I'm going to split at this point (ooo, cliff-hanger ending), and next week, I'll pick up the theme and offer my definition of fantasy as a genre (and then I'll get back to that WEIRD stuff).
Monday, 23 January 2012
The Bones of Long-Dead Giants
This one's for fantasy writers and readers. If you're not into the genre (and specifically the high/epic fantasy subgenre which is my main interest), this post is probably not going to interest you at all.
For those of us in the know, though, I have a question. Think of your favourite fantasy story, preferably an epic. Is there, anywhere in it, a plot-significant vestige of an ancient, long-dead civilisation? I'm thinking everything from Raymond Feist's Valheru to the elderglass cities of Scott Lynch's books, to the pre-Breaking civilisation in the Wheel of Time.
Okay, now find me an epic series that doesn't have this. There must be one, somewhere. The closest I can think of is Steven Donaldson's 'Lord Foul's Bane', but I don't know the series (I've only read the first book), and I'm not sure the fact that it's technically paranormal fantasy, and thereby still involving the meeting of two cultures, one appreciably more 'ancient' in style than the other and with lessons to bestow on the traveller between the two.
Which brings me to my point, which is why does the genre carry this obsession? I do it too; my three current projects are: The Non-Agency, in which the lead character at one point travels to the great library at the heart of a long-since-fallen empire, The Second Realm, in which human technological civilisation was destroyed 70-odd years before the story, leaving a whole bunch of old, abandoned cities knocking around, and [as-yet-untitled semi-secret short story project] which involves [spoiler involving a long-dead civilisation].
But why? It's true that the ruins of Earth's dead civilisations (to whatever extent they are dead; it varies from case to case) make fascinating settings - Mayan and Egyptian pyramids, Greek and Roman temples etc. - and leave us legacies of fascinating mythology, but it's debatable whether we can look up to any of those civilisations. Certainly (ludicrous conspiracy theories aside) it's unlikely that relics from such cultures are going to have much power in the modern world.
Nor can I see a trope-based reason for the trend. With some tropes, the most obvious being the Luke Skywalker/Harry Potter farmboy-nobody hero, the power that makes them so close to ubiquitous is obvious, because it's a vicarious thing; how many kids now check the post eagerly on their 11th birthdays, desperately hoping for a letter from Hogwarts? (disclaimer: I turned 11 a few months before reading the first Harry Potter book, or this would totally have been me...).
But I can't see the same appeal in ancient civilisations. I can see some appeal in it, obviously - I love epic fantasy, and there are numerous ways in which the ancient civilisation thing can be made a brilliantly interesting, fascinating centrepiece of an epic (Brandon Sanderson's 'The Way of Kings' is my recent favourite example of this) - but I don't understand why it's in every fantasy book I can think of.
The best explanation I can think of would be some sort of displaced nostalgia; we do tend to romanticise the past, and maybe ancient civilisations that actually were greater than the present one satisfy that sentiment, but even that seems shaky. I am deeply suspicious of and uncomfortable with nostalgia, particularly for cultures and experiences one hasn't actually lived through (most steampunk seriously gets on my nerves for this reason), and I still enjoy a good wisdom-of-the-ancients plot.
I've been mulling this over for a few days now, and trying to work out what a fantasy story without an ancient culture to look back too would look like. When I figure it out, I'll write it and let you know...
So, any ideas? Does it fill an obvious psychological need I haven't thought of? Can you think of a modern epic fantasy I've forgotten/not heard of that doesn't do this?
For those of us in the know, though, I have a question. Think of your favourite fantasy story, preferably an epic. Is there, anywhere in it, a plot-significant vestige of an ancient, long-dead civilisation? I'm thinking everything from Raymond Feist's Valheru to the elderglass cities of Scott Lynch's books, to the pre-Breaking civilisation in the Wheel of Time.
Okay, now find me an epic series that doesn't have this. There must be one, somewhere. The closest I can think of is Steven Donaldson's 'Lord Foul's Bane', but I don't know the series (I've only read the first book), and I'm not sure the fact that it's technically paranormal fantasy, and thereby still involving the meeting of two cultures, one appreciably more 'ancient' in style than the other and with lessons to bestow on the traveller between the two.
Which brings me to my point, which is why does the genre carry this obsession? I do it too; my three current projects are: The Non-Agency, in which the lead character at one point travels to the great library at the heart of a long-since-fallen empire, The Second Realm, in which human technological civilisation was destroyed 70-odd years before the story, leaving a whole bunch of old, abandoned cities knocking around, and [as-yet-untitled semi-secret short story project] which involves [spoiler involving a long-dead civilisation].
But why? It's true that the ruins of Earth's dead civilisations (to whatever extent they are dead; it varies from case to case) make fascinating settings - Mayan and Egyptian pyramids, Greek and Roman temples etc. - and leave us legacies of fascinating mythology, but it's debatable whether we can look up to any of those civilisations. Certainly (ludicrous conspiracy theories aside) it's unlikely that relics from such cultures are going to have much power in the modern world.
Nor can I see a trope-based reason for the trend. With some tropes, the most obvious being the Luke Skywalker/Harry Potter farmboy-nobody hero, the power that makes them so close to ubiquitous is obvious, because it's a vicarious thing; how many kids now check the post eagerly on their 11th birthdays, desperately hoping for a letter from Hogwarts? (disclaimer: I turned 11 a few months before reading the first Harry Potter book, or this would totally have been me...).
But I can't see the same appeal in ancient civilisations. I can see some appeal in it, obviously - I love epic fantasy, and there are numerous ways in which the ancient civilisation thing can be made a brilliantly interesting, fascinating centrepiece of an epic (Brandon Sanderson's 'The Way of Kings' is my recent favourite example of this) - but I don't understand why it's in every fantasy book I can think of.
The best explanation I can think of would be some sort of displaced nostalgia; we do tend to romanticise the past, and maybe ancient civilisations that actually were greater than the present one satisfy that sentiment, but even that seems shaky. I am deeply suspicious of and uncomfortable with nostalgia, particularly for cultures and experiences one hasn't actually lived through (most steampunk seriously gets on my nerves for this reason), and I still enjoy a good wisdom-of-the-ancients plot.
I've been mulling this over for a few days now, and trying to work out what a fantasy story without an ancient culture to look back too would look like. When I figure it out, I'll write it and let you know...
So, any ideas? Does it fill an obvious psychological need I haven't thought of? Can you think of a modern epic fantasy I've forgotten/not heard of that doesn't do this?
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