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.)
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Monday, 28 January 2013
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, 3 December 2012
There Are Only Two Genres
This is a discovery I've come to recently, which I think is interesting enough to merit sharing. All fiction, however it's marketed, falls into one of two genres; fantasy or sci-fi. I'm aware there's a cachet about not being 'fantasy' or 'SFF', and that a good many authors will protest at being lumped in with fantasy or sci-fi, but that's just tough for them. Here's my argument:
Let's start with a quick piece of philosophy. What is 'a world' (or universe)? In fantasy and sci-fi, of course, we talk quite a lot about worlds - 'The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time', or 'The World of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire', for example. But what is a world?
The simplest answer to this question - the one, I think, which would be most common in the academic philosophy discourse on worlds - is that a world is a set of states of affairs. A state of affairs could be an object's existing, or an event's happening, or any combination thereof. Technically, a world is a set of states of affairs which is maximal in some way - that is to say, it's a complete set, capturing a whole environment of some kind. Parts of our universe, for example, are not literally universes in themselves. We can pass over this point, though - it's philosophically interesting, but not presently significant.
So a world is a set of states of affairs. The actual world - the one we're living in right now - is (as it probably should be) the easiest one to identify: it's the set of all states of affairs which actually or really occur.
A fictional world, then, is a set of states of affairs some of whose members do not actually occur (otherwise it's not fiction, of course). To put it another way, no work of fiction can ever, by definition, be set in the real world. This is the key point, really, and one that bears far more investigation than we can give it today; I'll certainly be coming back to it over the coming weeks.
It's an entirely reasonable definition of the fantasy genre to say it is concerned with fiction that occurs in worlds which are not ours. Science fiction is primarily concerned with worlds which ours might become. Since all fiction is set in a world which isn't ours (in some cases, though, a world which ours might turn into), all fiction must fall into one or other category, with the vast bulk falling under 'fantasy'.
Obviously, there are degrees of honesty in this. 'Classic' fantasy, running the gamut from Tolkein to Brandon Sanderson, is obviously and openly fantasy. Space opera is (at least very often) fantasy masquerading as 'classic' sci-fi. Technothrillers, romance novels and so on - stories which are set in close replicas of the real world which are twisted for fundamentally wish-fulfilment purposes - are fantasy by the back door, attempts to escape the scorn so frequently appended to the 'fantasy' label. Some works that start out as sci-fi become fantasy when their predictions fail to come to pass - 1984 and 2001: A Space Oddysey come to mind.
It might be claimed that there's a third category, one occupied by 'serious' writers tackling 'serious' matters, which is set either in 'the present' or at some point in the past, and whose worlds are effectively indistinguishable from our own because we do not have enough evidence to be able to prove that the events in them did not occur.
So, for example, it might be argued that Wolf Hall fits neither the fantasy nor sci-fi labels as I've just defined them, because it's a well-researched account of how things may very well have happened. Or, since Wolf Hall is about a noted historical figure, we could envisage a novel set further from the centres of power, about people unremembered by history, and one could argue that this is a form of temporally-reversed sci-fi, a 'possible past', legitimised by the extent of the author's research into the lives of people at the selected time.
There's a case to be made there, though as far as I'm concerned you're still talking about fantasy, since the states of affairs described in the novel, whatever their resemblance to anything that might have happened, came from the head and imagination of a modern author, not from matters of actual fact.
What of works set in the present day, which are nevertheless very serious about their non-other-worldliness? If we allow the premise that some works of fiction are indistinguishable from biography or history due to us being unable to prove that the events portrayed did not actually occur, then this will depend on setting - in some parts of the world, it would now be very hard to imagine events that truly did fall through this kind of epistemological hole, so thoroughly digitised, closed-circuited and surveilled are our lives.
Should we allow this premise, though? Not if we want to count the works as fiction, and one of the few clear-cut distinctions I think has any value is that between fiction and non-fiction. Allowing people to publish semi-fictional accounts of events as anything other than wholly fictional is a dangerous business, full of openings for soft and subtle propaganda. For a work to be posted as fact, whether historical or sociological, a rather higher standard of proof must be demanded.
Aaaand that's probably far enough with the argument, since we're getting into rather more difficult philosophical territory, and I intend this post mainly as an act of satire. Genres are a marketing tool, and this analysis is obviously useless from a marketing perspective - I have no more desire to see Pride and Prejudice shelved in the same section as The Lord of the Rings than anyone else. All I want to do at this point is point out one way in which the rejection of fantasy by that wonderful bastion of hubris, 'the literary establishment', is ridiculous.
As I'll be arguing over the coming weeks, fantasy has all the best tools for literary craftspeople, and 'realism' generally blunts the purpose of fiction altogether. History, sociology and biography are far better tools for studying the actual world than fiction, and fiction is much better at studying human beings in a peculiar but vital kind of abstraction.
By the by, if you're offended by the way I've talked about 'mainstream' or 'literary' fiction at any point in this article, tough. Fantasy authors and readers get exactly this kind of condescending crap all the time, and we put up with it well enough.
Let's start with a quick piece of philosophy. What is 'a world' (or universe)? In fantasy and sci-fi, of course, we talk quite a lot about worlds - 'The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time', or 'The World of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire', for example. But what is a world?
The simplest answer to this question - the one, I think, which would be most common in the academic philosophy discourse on worlds - is that a world is a set of states of affairs. A state of affairs could be an object's existing, or an event's happening, or any combination thereof. Technically, a world is a set of states of affairs which is maximal in some way - that is to say, it's a complete set, capturing a whole environment of some kind. Parts of our universe, for example, are not literally universes in themselves. We can pass over this point, though - it's philosophically interesting, but not presently significant.
So a world is a set of states of affairs. The actual world - the one we're living in right now - is (as it probably should be) the easiest one to identify: it's the set of all states of affairs which actually or really occur.
A fictional world, then, is a set of states of affairs some of whose members do not actually occur (otherwise it's not fiction, of course). To put it another way, no work of fiction can ever, by definition, be set in the real world. This is the key point, really, and one that bears far more investigation than we can give it today; I'll certainly be coming back to it over the coming weeks.
It's an entirely reasonable definition of the fantasy genre to say it is concerned with fiction that occurs in worlds which are not ours. Science fiction is primarily concerned with worlds which ours might become. Since all fiction is set in a world which isn't ours (in some cases, though, a world which ours might turn into), all fiction must fall into one or other category, with the vast bulk falling under 'fantasy'.
Obviously, there are degrees of honesty in this. 'Classic' fantasy, running the gamut from Tolkein to Brandon Sanderson, is obviously and openly fantasy. Space opera is (at least very often) fantasy masquerading as 'classic' sci-fi. Technothrillers, romance novels and so on - stories which are set in close replicas of the real world which are twisted for fundamentally wish-fulfilment purposes - are fantasy by the back door, attempts to escape the scorn so frequently appended to the 'fantasy' label. Some works that start out as sci-fi become fantasy when their predictions fail to come to pass - 1984 and 2001: A Space Oddysey come to mind.
It might be claimed that there's a third category, one occupied by 'serious' writers tackling 'serious' matters, which is set either in 'the present' or at some point in the past, and whose worlds are effectively indistinguishable from our own because we do not have enough evidence to be able to prove that the events in them did not occur.
So, for example, it might be argued that Wolf Hall fits neither the fantasy nor sci-fi labels as I've just defined them, because it's a well-researched account of how things may very well have happened. Or, since Wolf Hall is about a noted historical figure, we could envisage a novel set further from the centres of power, about people unremembered by history, and one could argue that this is a form of temporally-reversed sci-fi, a 'possible past', legitimised by the extent of the author's research into the lives of people at the selected time.
There's a case to be made there, though as far as I'm concerned you're still talking about fantasy, since the states of affairs described in the novel, whatever their resemblance to anything that might have happened, came from the head and imagination of a modern author, not from matters of actual fact.
What of works set in the present day, which are nevertheless very serious about their non-other-worldliness? If we allow the premise that some works of fiction are indistinguishable from biography or history due to us being unable to prove that the events portrayed did not actually occur, then this will depend on setting - in some parts of the world, it would now be very hard to imagine events that truly did fall through this kind of epistemological hole, so thoroughly digitised, closed-circuited and surveilled are our lives.
Should we allow this premise, though? Not if we want to count the works as fiction, and one of the few clear-cut distinctions I think has any value is that between fiction and non-fiction. Allowing people to publish semi-fictional accounts of events as anything other than wholly fictional is a dangerous business, full of openings for soft and subtle propaganda. For a work to be posted as fact, whether historical or sociological, a rather higher standard of proof must be demanded.
Aaaand that's probably far enough with the argument, since we're getting into rather more difficult philosophical territory, and I intend this post mainly as an act of satire. Genres are a marketing tool, and this analysis is obviously useless from a marketing perspective - I have no more desire to see Pride and Prejudice shelved in the same section as The Lord of the Rings than anyone else. All I want to do at this point is point out one way in which the rejection of fantasy by that wonderful bastion of hubris, 'the literary establishment', is ridiculous.
As I'll be arguing over the coming weeks, fantasy has all the best tools for literary craftspeople, and 'realism' generally blunts the purpose of fiction altogether. History, sociology and biography are far better tools for studying the actual world than fiction, and fiction is much better at studying human beings in a peculiar but vital kind of abstraction.
By the by, if you're offended by the way I've talked about 'mainstream' or 'literary' fiction at any point in this article, tough. Fantasy authors and readers get exactly this kind of condescending crap all the time, and we put up with it well enough.
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