[Bond]

Maybe it's because I'm merely a fantasy enthusiast and not a fantasy fanatic, but going over the fantasy works I'm most familiar with there seems to be a relatively significant period of time where fantasy in the 20th century seems pretty undefined from which not many fantasy works are commonly remembered. The period I refer to is that which follows Tolkien and up to about Terry Brooks. What fantasy was produced during this era? Why is this fantasy period largely forgotten and ignored? The works that most easily come to mind for me are predominantly the children's oriented ones like The Chronicles of Narnia, The Once and Future King, The Chronicles of Prydain, A Wrinkle in Time although something like Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser (personally haven't read it yet) was made at this time and The Chronicles of Amber slips into the later end of the period as well.

I notice it coincides with a period for which sci-fi is largely remembered for today. Did the ascendence of one genre mean a dark period for the other? Or was it something else? Was fantasy still in its youth? Was the generation of writers that was reared on Tolkien, Lewis, Howard and White still young? Was the standard of fantasy writing simply low or unengaging for the majority? Personally from the little I've read from the time I have to say I don't find the style of the period particularly attractive. I'd like to know what other people think though.

It strikes me as strange that fantasy from this relatively long period survives as little more than a memory for only a few even though it is not that long ago. More people seem to be recalling Dunsany and Howard on these boards than Fritz Lieber and Zelazny who seems to be more well known for his sci-fi anyway.

An analysis of the fantasy in this period I think would be interesting to understand what exactly has made it (in)significant. Were fantasy authors too concerned with being literary in their own view that they marginalized themselves? Why did stuff like Shannara spark interest in fantasy while the stuff produced beforehand largely didn't? I think the popular fantasy of today and recent past is far richer than some people give it credit for.

[ChrisW]

Were fantasy authors too concerned with being literary in their own view that they marginalized themselves? From the little i've read from that period I'd have to say yes to that. Though i'm sure it's more complex than that.

[DrBloodmoney1]

I've often wondered this too. I think that a lot of the pulp S&S movement was happening with conan-type heroes. Plus Lin Carter revived a lot of classic works in the Ballantine Series. One author who wrote fantasy and horror was Manly Wade Wellman.

DrB

[KatG]

Well, we've gone over this in other threads, but I'll run it through again if you like.

Fantasy as a genre didn't exist until the late sixties. Fantasy as literature did of course exist, has existed since the beginning of written history and probably before that (the cave paintings are perhaps the first fantasy stories.) Once the novel was "invented," relatively late in the game, a fair amount of the fiction published was fantasy fiction. Many classics of literature are fantasy works, of course, and some of them like Alice In Wonderland and Gulliver's Travels, were also satirical and political.

So fantasy was published, but there weren't any fantasy publishers. There was no organized publishing of fantasy works. The closest one came were the sf pulp magazines and early comic books, which were a niche market catering largely to young boys. Children's publishing took awhile to exist as a separate field. When it did, fantasy was a common choice, but was not particularly organized into any official sub-genre of children's fiction. Many of the works we consider classic fantastic children's literature were originally intended for an adult audience. Fantasy was often published in the adult field; it simply wasn't labelled "fantasy."

Enter Robert Heinlein, whose science fiction work such as Stranger in a Strange Land, caught on with the hippie counterculture and the mass of baby boomers. Searching for more good stuff, they latched on to Tolkein, who had been building a cult audience over the decades. Sensing a good thing that would appeal to their core audience -- young males -- the science fiction publishers put out Tolkein, breaking up his work into three easier to handle paperbacks. This was a huge success both in Europe and the U.S., and science fiction publishers plunged into publishing fantasy with both hands. They had a number of sf writers who were already doing fantasy works under the umbrella of sf, plus the neighboring horror writers, so it was relatively easy to get started, and there were plenty of new folk who wanted to follow in Tolkein's footsteps. Hence Brooks, who was the first big post-Tolkein success, and many others, morphing all the sf imprints into sf/fantasy imprints. Fantasy continues to be published outside the genre as contemporary, suspense, historical or romantic fiction, but those works are not considered "genre" fantasy.

So modern fantasy as a genre was born in the late sixties with reprints of Tolkein and new writers like Brooks. That's its whole history, and that's mostly what fans of genre fantasy are thus aware and have knowledge of. It wasn't a case of science fiction supplanting fantasy during the thirties to sixties -- it was a case of fantasy simply not existing as a genre, whereas science fiction developed as a genre in the pulp magazines and then moved on to books, starting in the thirties, published by publishers and imprints that were specifically dedicated to science fiction.

If you look at classic literature in the 20th century, or for that matter, non-classic literature, you'll find lots of fantasy stories -- Watership Down, Wind in the Willows, etc. They simply weren't published in an organized manner by specialized publishers and marketed specifically as fantasy works to a core genre fan audience, because the core genre fan audience hadn't yet or was just starting to coalesce. Modern fantasy is an infant by publishing standards, still chugging along towards adulthood. In fact, you could say that it's just now entering its Golden Age, although I'm sure there would be much argument on that point.

And by the by, "The Once and Future King" was never marketed as a kids book (though I imagine it may well be in the kids section as well as the adult sections these days,) and "A Wrinkle in Time" is considered a science fiction work, not fantasy.

[Bond]

Thanks for your thoughts :)

KatG, something I would like to ask though is what is your perception of the adventure genre, if you can call it that, in the 20th century. When I think about it, it is the adventure aspect that I find most appealing in mainstream fantasy, the fantasy elements in this day of knowledge substituting for the ignorance of foreign lands people had in the previous century. To put it simply, from what I can tell, mainstream fantasy has supplanted the adventure genre in the 20th century. Would you agree? How would you characterize the development of the adventure genre in the 20th century? There seem to be a few people who seem to me to be overlooking this perspective when they argue about what direction fantasy should or will take.

When people appear dumbfounded at the success of a Goodkind for example despite his rather questionable writing skills, I think they are blinding themselves to what the larger audience seeks and that some "better" writers simply aren't providing.

It is anathema I know to an artist to suggest that a writer tailor their writing to the wants of the audience but if an artist does not connect to an audience, no matter how eloquent the prose, how can that artist seriously be considered as more artistic than the one whose ideas, no matter how inelegantly stated, at least are taken in by the audience?

But I digress. I guess I simply have trouble buying "the fantasy was young" argument although its impact on getting books published probably would be great. As a successor to the adventure genre, which for me personally from what little I have read, reached its apex in the 19th century I feel sword and sorcery fantasy had a whole lot to draw from and is not as new as it is commonly thought.

[golinub]

Since the Lord of the Rings wave that the 3 movies brought to the world this last 2 years, I saw a few TV biographies on Tolkien. In one, I remember a litterary critic mentioning that in the first half of the 20th century, there was a great effort made in the litterary world to bring a new "modernist" to litterature both in the content and in the form. This critic mentioned that the publication of TLotR was not well received at all not because it was judge for it's litterary quality but because it brought old paterns of myths and heroism in a medieval setup witch is exactly what the modernist wave wanted to get rid of.

An other factor that didn't help fantasy in the sixties was the conquest of the moon. I remember clearly my father waking me up at 5 AM when I was 5 years old to watch on TV the Appolo missions lauches. I, for instance, was strongly marked by those events and became a SF addict real young. I remember reeding TLotR while I was a teenager and taught it was OK and got back to my Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein books with no other toughts for Tolkien.

So I think that overall the fact that fantasy dwelt with medieval and caveman setup in a time where modernist was the thing and teenagers dreamed of rocketships, robots and aliens didn't help fantasy to come about. For me it's just a matter of a bad timing with the trends of that time.

But since then, I think that lots of events brought the actual social treads closer to fantasy themes. Our perception of the space program was hurt badly with the explosion of the first space shuttle and this last catactrophe with Colombia will keep that feeling alive for a least an other 10 years. Since 911, the front lines are closer to our homes. We are more preocupied by war and security. We give more importance to those people that sacrifice themselves for our protection.

Thus no wonder fantasy is so popular now.

[Ouroboros]

Originally posted by Stormgard
But since then, I think that lots of events brought the actual social treads closer to fantasy themes. Our perception of the space program was hurt badly with the explosion of the first space shuttle and this last catactrophe with Colombia will keep that feeling alive for a least an other 10 years. Since 911, the front lines are closer to our homes. We are more preocupied by war and security. We give more importance to those people that sacrifice themselves for our protection.

Thus no wonder fantasy is so popular now.

That might hold water for the reading habits of north america, but it's important to remember that the fantasy genre and its readership is truly international. I think each nation would probably hypothetise differently about what have the been the most significant events in recent years, the examples you cite (9/11, the space programme etc.) are very americancentric (if thats a word).

To americans the major occurence of recent decades might well be 9/11, but a german might think of the fall of the berlin wall, a russian of the sundering of the USSR, an irish person of the signing of the good friday agreement and so on.

[KatG]

Originally posted by Bond
Thanks for your thoughts :)

KatG, something I would like to ask though is what is your perception of the adventure genre, if you can call it that, in the 20th century. When I think about it, it is the adventure aspect that I find most appealing in mainstream fantasy, the fantasy elements in this day of knowledge substituting for the ignorance of foreign lands people had in the previous century. To put it simply, from what I can tell, mainstream fantasy has supplanted the adventure genre in the 20th century. Would you agree? How would you characterize the development of the adventure genre in the 20th century? There seem to be a few people who seem to me to be overlooking this perspective when they argue about what direction fantasy should or will take.
No, I don't think that I would say that fantasy has supplanted the adventure novel, if I'm understanding your definition of adventure fiction correctly. Adventure is considered part of the suspense genre. Adventure fiction is still very much around, though there have been changes throughout suspense over the years. War novels (which could be seen as adventure or war thrillers,) declined a little because spy thrillers perhaps became more popular. Then spy novels declined in sales because of the end of the Cold War, but technothrillers, the new name given to war novels, emerged as a big deal, and spy thrillers have bounced back. Adventure stories into foreign lands tend to be military adventure these days -- commandos and Navy Seals and such -- and the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq may create more market for those books. Thriller writers like Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen are in a sense writing adventure stories about crime. Adventure stories about feats of darring do are perhaps less common, but around. And the science thriller -- science fiction marketed not as genre work but as futuristic thrillers, such as "Jurassic Park" -- certainly has provided its fair share of adventure stories.

Outside of suspense, contemporary fiction has offered adventure stories and has in the past few decades been going through a movement of "ethnic" writing -- stories in non-Euro/American cultures such as India, China and the African continent, and frequently with a lot of adventure in them. "The Life of Pi" which won the Booker Prize and other awards, for instance, is about a young boy shipwrecked on a raft with a tiger. I think you'd have to call that an adventure story, if a meditative one. And there is a great deal of historical fiction -- westerns, Victorian age adventures, etc. -- that offer adventure stories too. And last, but not least, science fiction has been doing more than its fair share of adventure tales. What you could say, I suppose, is that fantasy provides another kind of canvas for adventure, one that some book readers enjoy. Certainly, adventure is usually a big element in most fantasy stories. But people are not yet flocking to fantasy. Flocking to the Harry Potter books, maybe, but not to fantasy. Suspense, where you more typically find "adventure," is still a much bigger genre than fantasy.

When people appear dumbfounded at the success of a Goodkind for example despite his rather questionable writing skills, I think they are blinding themselves to what the larger audience seeks and that some "better" writers simply aren't providing.
I've only read the first one of Goodkind's books, but I didn't feel that his writing skill was questionable. I just happened to find his characters boring. But I think for many people, the emotional angst of those characters is appealing. Also, Goodkind received a very large advance for his debut novel -- a recordbreaker for sf/f -- and so the publisher printed great numbers of the work and shoved them down the booksellers' throats. Consequently, more people became aware of Goodkind than they might of other authors' work. But the publisher did all that, paid the money, because they thought he was worth it and it seems to have paid off for them, because people do buy him and like him.

It is anathema I know to an artist to suggest that a writer tailor their writing to the wants of the audience but if an artist does not connect to an audience, no matter how eloquent the prose, how can that artist seriously be considered as more artistic than the one whose ideas, no matter how inelegantly stated, at least are taken in by the audience?
I don't think it's an anathema to say it, as many writers do just that. Other writers don't do it because they simply can't, even if they wanted to do so. But the thing is, eloquent prose writers have always done quite well. Back when publishing was a cottage industry and only a small portion of the educated upper classes bought most fiction, the eloquent prose writers -- the contemporary literary writers -- were the bestsellers. And they've continued to be bestsellers all along. If you look at the major lists, many of these writers are selling far better than fantasy writers, I can tell you that. Fantasy and sf writers, in the scale of things, get paid very little for their work comparitively. Eloquent, artistic writing and well-expressed ideas are not mutually exclusive, and writers lauded for their success with plots, say, often get lauded for their eloquent or socially relevant writing styles later on in their careers. Stephen King, for instance, is considered a literary writer in most quarters these days. It's seldom the case of either/or, I think.

But I digress. I guess I simply have trouble buying "the fantasy was young" argument although its impact on getting books published probably would be great. As a successor to the adventure genre, which for me personally from what little I have read, reached its apex in the 19th century I feel sword and sorcery fantasy had a whole lot to draw from and is not as new as it is commonly thought.
Sword and sorcery fantasy isn't new at all. Try the Iliad and the Odyssey, for starters. And sword and sorcery stories have been told throughout the centuries, including of course the 19th century.

There just wasn't a fantasy GENRE. Or to be more linguistically correct -- CATEGORY. "Genre" as we use the term today, is an artificial construct created by publishers for marketing purposes, not by readers. And there were no publishers or publishing imprints dedicated to publishing fantasy fiction until the late 1960's. If these publishers decided tomorrow to dissolve their fantasy lines, there would still be plenty of fantasy fiction around; there just wouldn't be a fantasy GENRE. This is what happened with westerns in the nineties. The sales for genre westerns got so low, the core fan audience going elsewhere, that publishers dissolved their western publishing imprints. There's still plenty of western fiction, only now it's called western historical fiction and is published as general fiction. There's just no western GENRE anymore.

So all these terms we like to throw around -- sword & sorcery, epic fantasy, urban fantasy, dark fantasy, etc. -- they don't come from us. They come from editors, publicity and sales, and booksellers. Because the baby boomers embraced science fiction and fantasy stories, pulp magazines, comic books and other things their parents thought were trash, publishers organized publishing lines to cater to these fan audiences and came up with category terms to identify titles so that fans of those particular types of stories could find them easily. Essentially, by creating the fantasy genre, Del Rey, Ace, DAW, and the rest, made it easy for fans to find titles they liked in the bookstores, building that core fan audience that supports genres, and trying to make it grow. So fantasy fiction is old, but the fantasy genre is young. The science fiction genre is about 150 years old. The suspense genre is many hundreds of years old. The romance genre started in the 1700's, which is not to say that romances weren't written before that, but just that they were recognized as a genre with a particular market and their own corner of the bookstore.

So yes, the first part of the 20th century, and the centuries that preceded it, are an undefined era for fantasy because publishers never felt the need to define it into a genre until they determined that there was a core fan market for it. I think probably your best bet is to hit the anthologies. The magazine editors have also made of themselves historical archivists and I believe there're a fair number of historical fantasy anthologies out there that have preserved the tales that were floating around before fantasy got its own berth on publishers' lists. And of course, there are many classic fantasy tales. You just won't find them in the fantasy section of the bookstore, usually, because they predate the genre classification and besides, there's only so much shelf room.

And I apologize for being so long-winded, but you did digress. :)

[KatG]

Well I know that Tolkein's massive work wasn't that big a hit when it came out. The Hobbit had been, but he wrote that for a children's audience. But it was in the sixties that LOTR became a massive cult phenomena, and that was also the peak of the space program. So I don't know that there's a link. A lot of sf writers had been doing fantasy-like stories in the magazines, such as the Gray Mouser and Conan, with the occasional book, and stories with fantasy elements existed in contemporary, historical, suspense and romance. But publishers didn't identify a core fan market they wanted to go after until the popularity of Tolkein attracted them and the broken up LOTR paperbacks then sold so well. Tolkein wasn't the sole reason the fantasy genre was created, but the success of LOTR did pave the way for more sf publishers to jump on board with larger numbers of titles.

[Dawnstorm]

It's certainly true that genres are created by the publishing industry; but the existence of a genre seems to lead to expectations that writers, consciously or unconsciously, pay attention to.

I find it interesting that I tend to prefer fantasy published by "literary" authors to fantasy published in genre line-ups. (For example, I never got further with Lord of the Rings or Brooks' novels than excerpts in book shops. On the other hand, I just loved the story collection The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye by A.S. Byatt) The reverse is true for science fiction. (I'm a big fan of SF-magazines; the genre is at its best in short stories. However, I read Doris Lessings attempt at SF and was bored... I enjoy reading Doris Lessing and I enjoy SF, but they don't mix. I've not yet been brave enough to attempt Margret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. I've heard conflicting accounts...) In consequence, I can say I'm a science fictrion reader without blushing, but I have problems saying I'm a fantasy reader, although I do read fantasy if a book catches my interest.