[Scott Bakker]

Aldarion, who has to be one of the best read and brightest people in the genre, has been digesting some weighty thoughts on the origin and significance of epic fantasy, so I thought I'd better prepare a porcelain bowl for him! :D

The idea here is to suspend our commitment to as many assumptions as possible, and to simply look at this strange and seemingly all-conquering genre in a manner that opens possibilities rather than closing them down.

How does epic fantasy fit into the Big Picture? What historical influences gave rise to it? What contemporary needs does it answer to? Why is it a 'degraded' literary category? Is there a Big Fat Fantasy gene, or are social conditions to blame? What is the psychology of epic fantasy? Or for that matter, it's economics, politics, ethics, sociology - or even physics? What would Freud say? Or how about Heidegger, Adorno, Popper, Foucault or Wittgenstein? What would alien anthropologists watching from orbit think?

What would your mother say?

[AuntiePam]

Does it have to be that complicated? :)

I don't like all fat fantasy, but when I find a series with a world (or worlds) that I like, with engaging characters, I get comfortable, and I want more of it.

Fantasy fans have Martin, Tolkien, et al., mystery fans have Stephanie Plum, James Lee Burke, John D. MacDonald, romance fans have the Outlander books, general fiction readers have The Forsyte Saga and Emile Zola's Les Rougon Macquart family, horror has King's Dark Tower books, with the tie-in novels, SF has Hyperion.

Same concept -- the books are like real life people and places that you return to because you've been treated well and had a good time while visiting there.

[Priestvyrce]

What would alien anthropologists watching from orbit think?



With our luck, we probably have grad students as alien obsevers and they're probably to busy having keggers.

[Scott Bakker]

With our luck, we probably have grad students as alien obsevers and they're probably to busy having keggers.

That would explain Roswell... :rolleyes:

[Rob B]

With our luck, we probably have grad students as alien obsevers and they're probably to busy having keggers.
I really miss kegs and doing keg-stands—aaah the days of having keggers and living within walking distance to 4 or 5 great bars….

Seriously though how does Epic Fantasy fit into the big picture?

I think it fits many sections of the big picture and has different meanings for different people. (that’s the no-duh answer)

I think Epic Fantasy fits into a lot of the same role as Comic Books (in terms of the Superhero genre) do – that is, a sense of society attempting to create myths for our own era, myths to give coherent meaning to the parts of the world we cannot otherwise understand. Writers mine various histories and myths to come up with their stories, the cultures they present and the characters they create. From the time early man took to painting on the walls of caves, there has been an inherent need, a form of the collective unconscious that seeks to understand the world around us through stories, and very often to explain why things occur they way they do. Why fire works, why the sky turns dark for part of the day, and ultimately why we are here on this world.

Once we start getting into why we are here, we try to understand who put us here. If we are the top of the food chain, should there be anything higher than us? Those stories involve creatures of a higher intelligence serving as the higher order of the world, in essence some form of god.

Many early societies have their own creation myths, just look at any of book on World Mythology and there are different interpretations of how man came to the world. Consequently, there are also many myths of how civilization ends. Life and death, good and bad, dark and light, these are conflicts, both externally and internally that have been going on since man could formulate thought, and Epic Fantasy, as a metaphor, often is an extrapolation of this conflict, on a grand scale, where the fate of the world (or some metaphor for the grand scheme of things) is in the balance. I know that is a simple summation, and doesn’t speak for EVERY Epic Fantasy out there, but to me, that’s a big part of it in a nutshell. Throw in the down-to-earth everyman character going through this journey, and you get your kitchen-boy turned savior. Again, that’s an oversimplification and only part of it.

I'm not an expert, by any means on sociological ideas and theories, philosophical ideas and how they relate to religion, but I think one reason Epic Fantasy is such a viable form of entertainment and reading is because there, at least in the US, is no single unified religion. Sure our country was based, in part, on Judeo-Christian principles, but I've gotta believe that a part of the appeal of the genre is a lack of faith by many people. I’m not saying there aren’t people who practice their religion religiously and read Epic Fantasy, but there is a correlation there—in both cases people trying to reconcile the world at large that they DO NOT understand through means which they can understand.

And all this while being entertained:)

I’ve got more to say on this, and I’ve probably garbled it a bit, but that’s my off-the cuff response to the first question.

[Luke_B]

I think we are socialised into reading epic fantasy. Most readers of fantasy seem to have followed the pattern of reading Tolkien when very young, then gotten into gaming, and ultimately conditioning themselves with the genre tropes (even though I know there will be a choir of posts protesting this). Therefore, as Fitz says, it's entertainment. You guys lost me on the appeal of epic fantasy thread. The views and heady level of discussion was amazing and I enjoyed it very much. But I can't see even half the erudition you guys spoke of in that thread in the fat fantasy being published these days. Even the best stuff, like Martin, seems to really only be writing out of sheer love for character and story.

EDIT: Sorry, I realise this post probably isn't in the spirit of No-Dog's thread.

[Larry]

Right now, I hate you all! Only because I've been awake over 18 hours and I'm needing to stay awake another hour or two so I can get back to a "normal" sleep pattern for the grueling 16 straight hours of work I have from 3PM-7AM CDT.

So I'll reply better in a day or two? ;) Right now, I can tell there's the potential for some very interesting discussions. Thanks, No-Dog, for starting this and I am almost blushing (except I rarely ever do that) from the compliments. Now I have to live up to those statements. Fun times ahead, huh? :p

[Larry]

With our luck, we probably have grad students as alien obsevers and they're probably to busy having keggers.

Not only that, you're stuck having grad students (or former grad students who've completed their studies) critiquing not just the beer funneling and keg standing techniques, but also their significance to the Decline of Western Civilization (a movie I've been meaning to see for about 10 years now and somehow haven't!) ;)

[Scott Bakker]

I think one reason Epic Fantasy is such a viable form of entertainment and reading is because there, at least in the US, is no single unified religion.

Let me try to recap, Fitz: myth is the cultural expression of humanity's need to understand their place in the social and cosmic orders through narrative, and epic fantasy is the modern expression of this self-same need, driven (in part) by the contemporary fragmentation of traditional institutions of myth-making. Would that be fair?

If so, it actually contrasts quite sharply with Monosyllabik's:

I think we are socialised into reading epic fantasy. Most readers of fantasy seem to have followed the pattern of reading Tolkien when very young, then gotten into gaming, and ultimately conditioning themselves with the genre tropes (even though I know there will be a choir of posts protesting this). Therefore, as Fitz says, it's entertainment.

which is also a BIG FAT THEORY (and no way counter to the 'spirit' in which I posed the original question!). The former suggestion is that epic fantasy expresses something innate, some hard-wired need that we humans have, the latter is that it expresses an arbitrary way certain youths are trained to like a certain genre.

So I guess the question here is one of whether epic fantasy is a contingent social artifact (Monosyllabik) or a necessary social artifact (Fitz). (The point about entertainment I take as a given, so long as entertainment isn't conceived in any naive sense of 'pure' entertainment.) This might be a good issue to sound off on, since it seems to describe two rather large approaches one might take to the question of epic fantasy.

For my own part, it seems obvious that it has to come down to some combination of the two. Myth, for instance, certainly isn't contingent - we humans are obviously hard-wired to understand things in narrative, anthropocentric terms. Insofar as epic fantasy maintains any relation to myth, it maintains some relation to those needs myth answers to.

Which leads me to think I'm misunderstanding you Monosyllabik. For instance, I'm not quite sure what you're referring to when you say

But I can't see even half the erudition you guys spoke of in that thread in the fat fantasy being published these days. Even the best stuff, like Martin, seems to really only be writing out of sheer love for character and story.

What erudition? You seem to be suggesting (especially with that 'really only') that authors must somehow be aware of the social and historical contexts that inform their writing - that whatever meaning we find in a work has to be a matter of authorial intention. But this has to be false for something like social critiques to even be possible, and they're quite possible.

Which makes me suspect there's more to your view than meets the eye.


Right now, I hate you all!

Hold onto that hate! You'll need it to survive the trial to come! :D

[Erfael]

Let me try to recap, Fitz: myth is the cultural expression of humanity's need to understand their place in the social and cosmic orders through narrative, and epic fantasy is the modern expression of this self-same need, driven (in part) by the contemporary fragmentation of traditional institutions of myth-making. Would that be fair?


This is definitely how I view the genre, at least as long as I have been thoughtful enough to put any time into what makes it up. And I think it's totally fair. For me, now, I read fantasy specifically for this reason, that it can border so well on the mythic.