On Fantasy

Most fiction is about a battle between Good and Evil. The Evil may be a sadistic schoolteacher or Adolf Hitler, but this is still Evil, and it is balanced by a protagonist who presumably seeks to overcome it. Fantasy is richer and deeper than reality, its blacks more black and its whites more brilliantly white than any black-and-white we know in our world. Here, Good is often faced by the likes of Smaug the Dragon, Sauron the Lord of the Rings and his phantom army of Ringwraiths, or Darth Vader and his Evil Emperor. In fantasy, Evil stands ready to shatter the world, or even the galaxy; and the forces of Good are always ready to stand and defend it. It’s a larger-than-life battlefield, where Good and Evil turn into avatars and battle it out for the right to rule the world or destroy it.

Fantasy is not new.

Lord Dunsany and Spenser were writing what would today be called fantasy back in the days when Gloriana still sat on the throne of England, and even Shakespeare was known to invoke Titania and Oberon when he required a light touch of the fantastic. But it was the distant rumbling of "The Hobbit" (published in 1937), followed by the thunder that was "Lord of the Rings" in the early 1950s, that heralded the real beginning of fantasy as a modern literary genre. J.R.R.Tolkien who established the dominance of the trilogy as the pre-eminent form by which fantasy would define itself, and "Lord of the Rings" was a seminal work grand in scope and imagination. Many an up-and-coming young writer’s publishers sought to launch a career by providing a blurb along the lines of "The Heir to Tolkien!!!" - alas, rarely deserved.

Tolkien clones - both the good and the bad - quickly flooded the market. For some reason fantasy was perceived as easier to write than mainstream fiction. One of the justifications proffered for this misguided opinion was simply that the story in mainstream fiction was rooted in the familiar everyday world and had to be plausible in the context of that world. Should one say something stupid or ill-informed in the course of such a work, there would always be at least ONE knowledgeable reader ready to expose the writer as a fraud and pick the whole thing apart. On the other hand, there appears to be a prevalent belief that writing a fantasy somehow requries less effort, as though, once you've broken the rules of the real world, it really doesn't matter what you do next.

In truth, fantasy is harder to write than the average mainstream novel. It is easy enough for an author to remain consistent when dealing with the real world that surrounds us. In fantasy, however, the rules of the created world are different and the author has to constantly remember exactly which rules are different and how. A character may be killed by telepathic command, for example, but only if such an act has been previously established as possible in the world in which such a killing takes place. Fantasy protagonists simply must exist, body and soul, in their own world, and their problems must be solved through their own efforts and not some deus ex machina author intervention when they had been painted into a corner by the storyline. Special powers can’t be invented at the point of the story where they are required. If they are not set up at the outset, then they do not exist, however much they might be needed in some future crisis.

They may not be OUR rules, but fantasy worlds do have rules, quite specific and often very rigid ones, and what transpires in that world must be consistent with those rules. When looked at it from this point of view, things suddenly appear very different - the writer no longer has the comfort of relying on the real-world set of laws and conventions which other people have set up. No, the writer is wholly and completely responsible for the world being created, for the people who inhabit it, and for the readers invited to step inside.