Settings of Fantasy: Place

From my MLA 2012 Fantasy presentation

Place:

Skillful world building is vital in Fantasy.  When creating a strange, irrational world, it’s incredibly important to create internal logic and consistency. It’s also helpful to make it familiar to one degree or another to increase the reader’s sense of automatic connection and ease the transition to the strange.  Unless, of course, your goal is the creation of a world that’s confusing and completely illogical, which might be the case depending on the story you want to tell.

Often times the landscape plays a role in the story, and/or has a physical, moral, and/or magical connection to its inhabitants. It can act as another character. Sometimes it’s sentient.  In Christopher Stasheff’s Wizard in Rhyme series, the condition of the land and people is directly, magically related to the condition of the Monarch.  She is truly the steward of the kingdom.

Definitions of place:

·       Alternate Earth – An Earth we almost recognize but with irrational differences. Magic has always been a part of Earth.  A hole opened up and let the things from fantasy and nightmare through. (“Keeping it Real” by Justine Robson, Book 1 of Quantum Gravity series.  Quantum Bomb of 2015 rips a hole through the fabric of realities.)  Mother Earth is fed up and technology dies and unicorns appear. (“Ariel:  A Book of the Change” by Steven R. Boyett, Book 1 of the Change series)

·       Slipstream Earth – An extra layer to the Earth we know that only some are aware of.  Often the story consists of either someone becoming aware of that layer, or that layer threatening to become known to all. – Harry Potter, Wizarding and Muggle worlds.

·       Different Land – Someplace other.  Narnia, created by C.S. Lewis.  A land that couldn’t exist here.  Needs to be internally consistent - following the rules of good storytelling, but other than that there are no limits.

Relationships of place:

·       Immersive: story takes place entirely within a different land with no reference to Earth at all:  Lord of the Rings.  

·       Portal:  Someone from Earth transported – willingly or no – to a different land – “Wizard of Oz”, L. Frank Baum. 

·       Intrusion – Someone or something from a different land comes here.

·       Can also be some sort of bridge between worlds – traffic moving both ways. Vivian Vande Velde’s “Now you see it…” has characters moving from a fantasy world to Earth and back again to get their hands on a pair of glasses that filter magic instead of light. 

Fantasy: Magic

From my MLA 2012 Fantasy presentation

Magic

·       The Fantasy threshold.  If a book does not have magic, it’s not Fantasy Literature.

·       In its broadest sense, magic is a way of talking about non-rational happenings and beings.

·       Manifestations of magic:

o   Overt - Explicit, traditional – magick –wizards and sorcerers.

o   Inherent – Beings that don’t necessarily do magic but are magic. Vampires, fairies, gods.

o   Implied - fantasy that has a lot of non-rational happenings that aren’t talked about as magic at all.  In Jasper Fforde’s “The Eyre Affair” characters jump in and out of books all the time, and yet magic is never mentioned in that series. In fact the series is written as if it’s rational – very 20th century British. Yet it’s obviously full of something science can’t explain; it’s not rational. And therefore it’s fantasy, regardless of the tone.

·       One of Fantasy’s defining characteristics is that sense that you’re somewhere you’ll never be able to visit.    For fantasy worlds to be true, the impossible would have to be true - there would have to be Fairies in downtown Minneapolis, gods would be manifest, or you’d need to be able to travel in and out of books. 

·       Magic works differently in every world.  There are some accepted general “systems,” mainly, as far as I know, passed on by osmosis.  But it’s up to the author to come up with a system that works for them and for their story.  However, if the author intends the reader to take it seriously (and sometimes that’s not the intention at all) it must be well-thought out, internally consistent, and make sense within the confines of the world the author is building.  

About Fantasy

From my MLA 2012 Fantasy presentation: 

Why I like fantasy:

• The enchantment.
• The ability to go somewhere in my mind that I’ll never go in reality.
• The sense of internal journey that I find in so much of fantasy.
• Fantasy can persuade me to go places emotionally that I don’t generally go voluntarily.
• It tells really good stories
• It helps me engage with my reality in new and startling ways.”

Good fantasy tells really good, highly emotionally engaging stories, with direct language, compelling characters, and an emphasis on the conflict between chaos and order, good and evil, although it’s sometimes difficult to figure out which is which, and they are often masquerading as other things.  Fantasy is over-all an optimistic genre, believing that the good fight is worthwhile and the goals attainable with hard work, sacrifice, and the will to win. Victory is not cheap and it’s often hard to figure out what actions will lead there, but with the hard-won restoration of order comes joy and enrichment, and the human spirit shall overcome.  So often this is not true in the real world, or in the fiction that mimics the real world; it’s good to find a place where this attitude is not only not ridiculed, but embraced.

However, fantasy is not necessarily about escapism.  The stories I find most compelling are those that speak to me personally, that seem to be as much about my internal conflicts as the external. The internal Hero’s journey, for instance, which is a very compelling aspect of the human condition, and something we all go through periodically.

One of the functions of Fantasy is to externalize those internal journeys, and give us the opportunity to fight our internal demons externally, if at a remove. Fantasy characters are challenged all the time to face their fears, to give of themselves, to sacrifice, and the reader is challenged right along with the characters. 

Given the irrational nature of our internal worlds, realistic fiction can’t perform this function nearly as well as fantasy can, with its allowance for flights of fancy and rampant irrationality that actually makes sense.

Many of the characters in fantasy are on personal journeys of discovery, often unintentionally. Throughout their stories they discover all sorts of interesting things about themselves, often resulting in new powers and positions.  The coming of age theme is part of this, but as it happens to characters of all ages, it’s more about them coming into their own. This is a major theme in fantasy literature, and again feeds back into the externalizing the internal.  Aren’t we all on our own journeys of discovery all the time, whether we realize it or not?

One thing fantasy authors are adamant about is that fantasy is not allegory or metaphor. Not that things in fantasy literature don’t have other meanings than what’s written on the page, but that those meanings are determined by the reader, and are therefore many and varied, not assigned by the author.  There is no one right answer when talking about what a fantasy story means.  Under this stricture, magical realism is not strictly fantasy, because it’s written as metaphor, and the author gives clear instructions on what the fantastical elements represent. It would be more appropriate to say that it’s fiction with fantastical metaphorical elements.

Fantasy is moving back into the mainstream. It’s probably the oldest form of fiction. Gilgamesh, the oldest narrative we have, is what we’d consider fantasy – imaginative literature with irrational elements. However it wasn’t until the 17^th century that fantasy was first posited as a separate kind of literature, along with the recognition of realistic or mimetic fiction. Can’t recognize one without the other.  Before that it was all just narrative. The first Conan story was printed in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1932, and the first science fiction award (sf being a subset of the fantastical) was in 1955, and the first fantasy award was in 1972.  It’s fairly young, as far as being a genre goes, and it’s aggressively genrecreeping.  More and more realistic fiction is including fantastical elements, and if you look at the top rated movies and television shows, the trend is even more noticeable.

Fantasy has an incredibly wide age appeal.  People of all ages read fantasy intended for people of all ages. Did you know that there are versions of Harry Potter printed in England with adult-appropriate covers?  They’re all black and restrained, so adults can read children’s fantasy on the underground without embarrassment. People tend to be life-long fantasy readers as well, from a very young age.  There’s something about training your mind to stay open to the possibilities and wonder that keeps people coming back.

A lot of fantasy is made up of series.  Many of those are the same story told over 3 or more volumes.  Big stories take a lot of room to tell. 

Fantasy is literature. A lot of the basic RA questions are the same – especially those pertaining to emotion and style.

Mood – humor, drama, etc.
Length – long, short, series, short story
Storyline - Character-driven vs. plot-driven, complexity of the plot.

Pacing – fast-paced, steady, leisurely

Writing Style – minimalist, lush, extensive description, etc.

Characters – strong female, children, pets, etc.

However, some of the questions and many of the answers are unique to Fantasy:

Sword and Sorcery & Epic/High Fantasy

So I'm finishing up the Fantasy presentation for the Minnesota Library Association conference, and I've had a devil of a time figuring out how to define Sword and Sorcery (S&S) and Epic/High fantasy.  Where are the dividing lines?  Do I want to include tropes for Heroic and Quest? Is there enough meaningful difference? All these are important fantasy elements, but it's not easy figuring out how to talk about them coherently and meaningfully to folks who are not very well-acquainted with them.

With the help of the resources I've consulted, I've decided to treat S&S and Epic/High as tropes, and Heroic and Quest as elements that can appear in many different tropes.  That seems meaningful to me, and should make them fairly explainable.  This has been one of the hardest things about this entire presentation, frankly. 

Age of Fantasy

In the chapter on awards, A Reader's Guide to Fantasy, published in 1982, makes the point that fantasy, "as a viable genre," is still pretty young.  The earliest award they have listed is the August Derleth Fantasy Award (in 1976 renamed the British Fantasy Awards) which began in 1972. The Gandalf Award, a "Grand Master" award awarded in conjunction with the Hugo, goes back to 1974.  The first World Fantasy Award was given at the first World Fantasy Convention in 1975.

The oldest SF award is the Hugo from 1955. WorldCon, aka the World Science Fiction Convention, awarder of the Hugo, was first thrown by the World Science Fiction Society in 1939. 

Of course fantasy's actually been around as long as there's been literature.   I wonder if it's this dichotomy that makes it so hard for a lot of people to understand?

How to describe the appeal of Fantasy

I'm looking for a word to describe the appeal of Fantasy.  I want to try to avoid any words that directly correlate to magic, as there are definitely fantasies that don't use magic, but it's difficult.  The non-literally-magical meanings of enchantment work very well, but again, there's a fairly strong correlation to magic.

I found this in "The Outlandish Companion" by Diana Gabaldon, which is a companion volume to her Outlander series.

"The processes of the body are both intensely personal and highly cryptic, which gives us the sense of significance and mystery that we call "magic."  This same mixture of significance and mystery underlies religious feeling and is it no coincidence that most healers in primitive societies are also priests. Religion and science lie at opposite ends of the spectrum of rationality, with medicine balanced somewhere in the middle. The important thing to note is that it is a spectrum; ergo, the elements of it are all connected, even though the extremities may seem so different as to bear no relation to each other."

Claire, one of the main characters in the "Outlander" series, is a healer.  She's a surgeon in the 20th century, and something a bit less sophisticated in the 18th.  So how magic is viewed is very important to the series.  (Gabaldon is serious about her research and her accuracy.  I highly recommend her books.)

It seems to me that the bit about significance and mystery might be very helpful in my search for a way to talk about Fantasy.  Also perhaps important when discussing SF & Fantasy.

"The Man on the Ceiling" by Steve and Melanie Tem

Just started "The Man on the Ceiling" by Steve and Melanie Tem and so far I want to donate to every children's charity I've ever run across.  "Sometimes I wonder if we will be judged on how we've cared for all our unwanted children and it makes me shudder." (P.14)  Indeed. 

Very interesting ideas about imagination and reality, and I can already tell the storytelling is going to be amazing.  I'm also liking what they have to say about created families being created out of faith and imagination, not blood.  I'm from a blended family, and that is so true. 

Adding Sarah Monette (the last author to leave me actively angry I had to put my book down and go back to work after lunch) and P.C. Hodgell (for whom I waited through a 20 year(?) hiatus for the rest of the story) to my list of books for my talk.  Ooh! Ooh! And Lois McMaster Bujold!