Discussion of fantasy/literature divide and levels of Brow-ness

[Eventine]

So what's the opposite of escapism then?
And if (Capital L) Literature can do those things, and they're things your'e looking for, then I assume that some Literature can fulfill your need for entertainment and escapism?

 

[3rdI]

So what's the opposite of escapism then?
And if (Capital L) Literature can do those things, and they're things your'e looking for, then I assume that some Literature can fulfill your need for entertainment and escapism?

I do not think there is any opposite. If escapism is simply a definition given to encapsulate the kinds of recreation people partake in then it is as I said just an expression. If escapism is a mechanism based upon avoidance then it becomes a psychological topic.

 

[molybdenum]

Owlcroft: Agreed. I was going to bring up the layers thing myself, but my post was getting a little longer than I intended. And I do understand where you are coming from with the pints and gallons thing, though interestingly enough it is probably two different skill sets to be able to find the idea present in a work and to be able to hold that idea fully in their minds.

3rdI: I think you and Owlcroft are agreeing more than you realize. (Which is still not much, but...). Owlcroft is not suggesting that reading should be done as an intellectual exercise, that each work should be some sort of social commentary, but that intellect is required to fully immerse yourself in the emotion and imagination and characters that the author presents. Which is often a form of escapism, but intellect is still required to achieve that escapism.

(Sorry to speak for you Owl, but I had a feeling 3rdI wouldn't listen if you said it. Feel free to correct anything I got wrong.)

 

[3rdI]

Would you consider watching a movie to be escapism?

 

[Eventine]

Would you consider watching a movie to be escapism?

It depends how heavily I invest myself in it. There's degrees as well. I might enjoy the distraction of Back to the Future, someone else may watch it and wish he were Marty McFly. You could say it was escapism for both of us, but it's a very different experience between the two consumers. I suppose it depends on the level of immersion, but having said that it doesn't ring true to my own ears - I've definitely been immersed in non-fiction.
Some food for my own thought here.

 

[3rdI]

It depends how heavily I invest myself in it. There's degrees as well. I might enjoy the distraction of Back to the Future, someone else may watch it and wish he were Marty McFly. You could say it was escapism for both of us, but it's a very different experience between the two consumers. I suppose it depends on the level of immersion, but having said that it doesn't ring true to my own ears - I've definitely been immersed in non-fiction.
Some food for my own thought here.

See we are still on definition though. Someone wishing they were someone else or pretending to doesn't seem like escapism. That strikes me more as a psychological disorder of some kind. Escapism might be one of the most difficult things to define.

I do not read fantasy to escape. I read fantasy for entertainment. I enjoy the world building and plot/character development. In the simplest terms it is fun. For me reading fantasy is not much different than watching Sports on TV.

 

[Eventine]

My apologies, your previous comment "I am looking for something outside of the day to day insanity that is life" led me to believe you were reading for escapism, to use the fantasy genre to "escape from routine or reality into fantasy".

 

[3rdI]

My apologies, your previous comment "I am looking for something outside of the day to day insanity that is life" led me to believe you were reading for escapism, to use the fantasy genre to "escape from routine or reality into fantasy".

I should have worded that differently I could see where it might create confusion. What I meant by that is that I am looking for something engaging to read for the purpose of entertainment/recreation.

Thanks for pointing that out btw I went back and re-read it myself and it changed it.

 

[owlcroft]

Nah.

Is escapism just one branch of the entertaining versus "meaningful" literature debate?

I would think that by now Professor Tolkien's extended and eloquent arguments about "escapism" and fantasy--and, indeed, about many things and fantasy--as set forth in his lecture "On Fairy-stories", to be well known. But if not, let me recite the salient points:

Though fairy-stories are of course by no means the only medium of Escape, they are today one of the most obvious and (to some) outrageous forms of 'escapist' literature; and it is thus reasonable to attach to a consideration of them some consideration of this term 'escape' in criticism generally.

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the mis-users are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailors and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter. Just so a Party-spokesman might have labelled departure from the misery of the Fuhrer's or any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery.

(The bare essay is to be found in several Tolkien collections, but a full expounding with commentary, notes, and alternative draft versions can be found in the book Tolkien On Fairy-stories, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson.)

Personally, I love that "not always by sincere error".

I suppose the crux is that conceiving a particular work or a specific sort of literature as "escapist" has really very little to do, either way, with its merits or demerits; it is the craftsmanship with which it is constructed that determines its excellence or lack of it.

 

[Eventine]

Ah, I do not hold that real life is a prison though, so therefore the metaphor falls flat for me - it is the Flight of the Deserter rather than the Escape of the Prisoner.

 

[owlcroft]

That is certainly an appropriate response.

I happen to disagree with it: I feel strongly that most societies, by the nature of what a society is, and in particular the contemporary one, do imprison our imaginations and our sensibilities if we let them. There are only so many people who feel that a 9-to-5 drudge job with a small house in Florida as the long-term payoff is A Wonderful Life.

I said "if we let them": one way we don't is to let our imaginations out by way of literature. A lucky few people can live a more or less literally fantastic life in the real world; but a fantastic life in the world of the mind is available to anyone who wants to open a well-crafted tale.

 

[Alchemist]

Lots of good stuff here. To respond to some points from the last few pages:

To be fair, though, I don't see many (if any) comments that seem to be sneering on spec-fic or even swords-and-fireballs fantasy in and of itself. I do see people commenting that they wish they'd get more out of that kind of work or that some of those works would use the tools available in the genre to move in a different direction than they feel it's moving.

I would call myself one of these people. I love the form of the secondary world fantasy, but feel that it hasn't come close to reaching its potential. This is a complex matter and has a lot to do with the Shadow of Tolkien, the dictates of the market, and I would say various influences that hinder imagination, but that is another topic!

But I do see some posts seem to be setting up an us vs. them between works firmly in the fantasy camp and works that are on the so-called borderlands (if we accept that there are borderlands. I don't buy into that...if it's fantasy, it's fantasy, swords or no swords, magic or no magic, rabbits or no rabbits). That feels like self-ghettoization to me. It seems like once a work of fantasy becomes accepted by the larger world of fiction genre fans can't distance themselves from it fast enough.

I see your point, but I don't think that it is inherently problematic to make differentiations between sub-genres within fantasy. There is a huge difference between Malazan Book of the Fallen and The Aegypt Quartet, not just because of the authors and their style of prose, but because of the tone, atmosphere, setting, and perhaps more to the point, the intention in terms of use of literary devices.

In my opinion, secondary world fantasy loses something when it tries to be too intellectual, too intentional in terms of allegory and meaning. Fantasy is the language of the subconscious, of myth and mystery - when you try to intellectualize that you end up limiting it, and you lose something in the process.

I am reminded of something Ursula Le Guin said in Language of the Night about the difference between symbolism and allegory or metaphor. A metaphor--and an allegorical work--is a simple equation of "A really means B", a kind of trick of cleverness where an author masks their true meaning in some kind of configuration of story. A symbol, however, is multi-faceted in its meaning--it could mean "all or nothing in particular"--and there is more room for personal interpretation and applicability. Tolkien also touched upon this when people asked him about the allegorical meaning of Lord of the Rings. He said, in paraphrase, "I was just trying to write a good story - you can take whatever meaning you want from it."

So the problem of "literary fantasy" (and I would say "high-brow literature" in general) is that it often becomes a kind of parlor game of cleverness; how clever can I be in my use of literary devices? How can I clothe my actual meaning in allegory? What ends up happening is that the meaning of the work is limited to what the author intended, the "A" of the metaphorical equation above. This is fine for certain kinds of literature but again, something is lost in fantasy when this becomes the focus. In a more symbolic, non-intentional approach, the meaning can run deeper - potentially beyond the conscious mind of the author.

I think in some respects there's at least some portion of the fandom that's afraid to lose their "outsider" label. "We're fantasy fans, so we're special. We're cool because we like all this stuff other people don't like. If this becomes accepted, we won't be counter-society any more. We'll be part of the masses."

Yes, I have perceived this phenomena - sometimes in myself! I suppose we could call this "geek chic" . But the same can be applied, you realize, if in a somewhat different manner to the Hallowed Halls of Academia and its literary departments.

Ah we finally get to the heart of things. The very crux of this discussion. You require fantasy say something. I do not. If I want social commentary I will look elsewhere. Alchemist said it best. Fantasy is the literature of imagination. I require only complexity in construction and subject matter. I am looking for an interesting story that is entertaining. I read fantasy because I enjoy it.

Thanks for the compliment here and before. I think we are in general agreement. If you haven't read Ursula Le Guin's Language of the Night, I highly recommend it. Here is a quote:

"The great fantasies, myths, and tales are indeed like dreams: they speak from the unconscious to the unconscious, in the language of the unconscious—symbol and archetype. Though they use words, they work the way music does: they short-circuit verbal reasoning, and go straight to the thoughts that lie too deep to utter."

In response to the question of "why fantasy," or what is its purpose, she wrote that the "truest answer" is "to give you pleasure and delight" which she says is downplayed and even castigated by the puritanism at the root of our (American) culture. The "next-to-truest answer" is "to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny."

So it is interesting to note that Le Guin calls the pleasure-and-delight purpose as "truer" than what we usually would consider - deepening our understanding of the world, etc.

I happen to disagree with it: I feel strongly that most societies, by the nature of what a society is, and in particular the contemporary one, do imprison our imaginations and our sensibilities if we let them. There are only so many people who feel that a 9-to-5 drudge job with a small house in Florida as the long-term payoff is A Wonderful Life.

I said "if we let them": one way we don't is to let our imaginations out by way of literature. A lucky few people can live a more or less literally fantastic life in the real world; but a fantastic life in the world of the mind is available to anyone who wants to open a well-crafted tale.

Well said. This perspective agrees with Le Guin, as well.

Now it seems that what is under discussion, or at least a key element, is what constitutes a "well-crafted tale" and whether or not fantasy should be judged by the same criteria as non-fantasy literature. I have been saying that it shouldn't be, and even more so, that excessive literary tricks and use of allegory can get in the way of what Le Guin refers to as the unconscious speaking to the unconscious.

In some sense I feel that, for secondary world fantasy at least, the writing shouldn't be too "low-brow" or too "high-brow," that both can be distracting. I have picked up and put down many a secondary world fantasy novel because the writing was poor; but I have also put some "literary fantasy" novels because I wasn't interested in the kind of intellectualized approach to fantasy that they were serving (e.g. Duncan's Vellum).

One of the reasons that I love secondary world fantasy (if mainly for its only occasionally actualized potential) is that we are more likely to encounter the sort of idea that Le Guin is talking about, that teases us with "the thoughts that lie too deep to utter." In a sense this is the stuff that just "comes to" the author, that they cannot or do no "make up." And it is also the stuff that doesn't have a clear explanation or meaning, that one is not always unable to unpack with the intellect.

So while I agree with you that the intellect is required to understand the story and to unpack what Le Guin calls the "next-to-truest" purpose of fantasy, it is not what is required to experience either her "truest" purpose, which is the experence of pleasure and delight, or the message from the unconscious to the unconscious, and what I spoke of in terms of the wonder and mystery. All of that is the domain of the imagination.

 

[Erfael]

Short on time, so only one thought:

I don't disagree at all with the Le Guin quotes or your basic ideas here. But when did Le Guin write that? What kind of fantasy was she referring to? I'm willing to bet good money it wasn't the "ultra-realistic", "gritty", everyone's grey, cynical fantasy that's so popular today.

I see those quotes as being totally true for things like Earthsea or Riddlemaster or Guy Kay's works or Peter S. Beagle or more recently Cat Valente, Kaitlin Keirnan, or Carol Berg or even more recently maybe even Pat Rothfuss. Not so much for Mazalan or even Game of Thrones or a number of others in the "in-crowd" today.

 

[Randy M.]

Short on time, so only one thought:

I don't disagree at all with the Le Guin quotes or your basic ideas here. But when did Le Guin write that? What kind of fantasy was she referring to? I'm willing to bet good money it wasn't the "ultra-realistic", "gritty", everyone's grey, cynical fantasy that's so popular today.

I see those quotes as being totally true for things like Earthsea or Riddlemaster or Guy Kay's works or Peter S. Beagle or more recently Cat Valente, Kaitlin Keirnan, or Carol Berg or even more recently maybe even Pat Rothfuss. Not so much for Mazalan or even Game of Thrones or a number of others in the "in-crowd" today.

The essays in Language of the Night were written before 1979. Le Guin would have been referring to some of the writers you mention, also Leiber and Zelazny (both of whom she took to task for reasons I can't say I agree with). Martin and others have, I presume, headed in directions other than that.

One observation: When we talk 'gritty realism,' fantasy authors achieve that largely through strong sensory detail, careful attention to setting and careful attention to characters so that their speech and behavior doesn't contradict themselves (except, naturally, when that's exactly what the writer wants to happen). In other words, through using the tools of mimetic fiction, so that this sort of fantasy may be rather close to historical fiction and often is structured like a 19th century novel. All of which, if my observation isn't totally erroneous, argues against chucking traditional critical tools.

[For fantasy with less of a grip on realism, you have to look to something like Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and The Man Who Was Thursday or the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges since to a larger degree they side-step the mimetic devices. (I'm sure there are more recent examples, but those are the ones that occur to me now.)]

I think saying you have to eschew the tools of criticism to read modern genre fantasy is a great incentive for lazy writing -- certainly it was for s.f. in its early years. I wonder if you could build a better, stronger argument around saying the critic/reader/whomever inclined to read critically may need to add more tools to his or her kit to adequately explicate the appeal and power of modern fantasy.


Anyway, I didn't see that this portion of the "Modern Classics" thread had become a thread of its own until this morning. I'm still working my way through, chewing on all the intriguing discussion. I'm glad to see that something that could have devolved to nasty sniping hasn't. This is a really good thread

Randy M.

 

[Psylent]

Some people keep acting like fantasy is the literature of the imagination which is somewhat true, but trying to apply that label to epic fantasy is laughable. The bulk of epic fantasy is retreading well used ground, imagination is not the point. Epic fantasy is about adventure fiction more than it is about imaginative fiction. The emphasis of the term lays on the epic and not on the fantasy. Epic fantasy readers are not searching for imagination, if they were they'd be reading more borderline fantasy novels or sci-fi. George R.R. Martin has one of the most popular series around and it is aggressively medieval with hardly a hint of the fantastic. The most prominently fantasy part of the story revolves around dragons...yes dragons, the most commonly used fantasy trope and the story treats them in a very typical manner with no unusual twists or turns.

Readers of epic fantasy are not foremost looking for imagine, in fact they seem to shun imagination. Please stop acting like that is the point of what they read.

 

[Sparrow]

Some people keep acting like fantasy is the literature of the imagination which is somewhat true, but trying to apply that label to epic fantasy is laughable. The bulk of epic fantasy is retreading well used ground, imagination is not the point. Epic fantasy is about adventure fiction more than it is about imaginative fiction. The emphasis of the term lays on the epic and not on the fantasy. Epic fantasy readers are not searching for imagination, if they were they'd be reading more borderline fantasy novels or sci-fi. George R.R. Martin has one of the most popular series around and it is aggressively medieval with hardly a hint of the fantastic. The most prominently fantasy part of the story revolves around dragons...yes dragons, the most commonly used fantasy trope and the story treats them in a very typical manner with no unusual twists or turns.

Readers of epic fantasy are not foremost looking for imagine, in fact they seem to shun imagination. Please stop acting like that is the point of what they read.

Exactly.

I compare Pullman's Dark Materials Books to Game of Thrones, or Wheel of Time, or any one of dozens of ho-hum epics, and there I find imagination. And in fact Pullman blends a good deal of science fiction with fantasy, as you'll find in The Diamond Age. Thank goodness for urban fantasy and steampunk... much needed fresh blood to the genre.


I mean really, sword fights and dragons?.. time to grow up and read books that stretch you a bit.

 

[owlcroft]

Some more odds-and-ends thoughts.

I don't think that it is inherently problematic to make differentiations between sub-genres within fantasy. But, as M. John Harrison neatly encapsulated the matter (in a discussion on the difference between sf and fantasy), "I would put it that there’s no difference between imaginary things; they share the over-riding quality of not being real." It is nearly impossible to make a meaningful, and in particular a purposeful, distinction even between sf and fantasy; whyever would one want to try carving it all up even thinner? (Readers here might also find this post by Harrison to be of interest.) To say "There is a huge difference between Malazan Book of the Fallen and The Aegypt Quartet, not just because of the authors and their style of prose, but because of the tone, atmosphere, setting, and perhaps more to the point, the intention in terms of use of literary devices," is, I think, to miss or sidestep the point. No two books are alike; even books of the same "sub-genre" differ in many ways. But that does not make them different animals: a parrot and a starling are both birds, both use the same means to fly.

As to the authors: as a thought experiment, imagine that, for a suitable commission, we convinced John Crowley to attempt a swords-and-fireballs novel, and Steven Erikson to attempt, well, whatever one might described Aegypt as (its very unclassifiability is suggestive)--do you suppose we'd get works much like the real (original) Aegypt or Malazan? I really, really, really think not. It is not the "sub-genre" that determines the quality of the work, it is the quality of the author.


Secondary world fantasy loses something when it tries to be too intellectual, too intentional in terms of allegory and meaning. You have, perhaps in haste, there mixed together two immiscible substances: allegory and intellect; they are related in much the same way as fish and bicycles. As you rightly go on to point out, there is a vast difference between symbolism and allegory. Any and every sort of work is gravely weakened by obvious allegory and intention: that is scarcely something restricted to fantastic fiction. And neither is it a defining characteristc of fantastic fiction, for lots and lots of mainstream fiction is grossly and overtly allegorical.


what constitutes a "well-crafted tale" and whether or not fantasy should be judged by the same criteria as non-fantasy literature. I have been saying that it shouldn't be, and even more so, that excessive literary tricks and use of allegory can get in the way of what Le Guin refers to as the unconscious speaking to the unconscious. Here I think we approach the nub of this whole thread. There is a completely, absolutely, utterly wrong belief floating in the air hereabouts that well-crafted "literary" writing consists in "literary tricks and use of allegory". Picture the Monty Python cartoon skit in which the questioner pounds rapidly and repeatedly with a huge hammer while saying "WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!" "Literary tricks" are almost the diametric opposite of good writing. For pity's sake, pick up, say, The Green Child by Herbert Read (I choose that author because he is well known for his non-fiction work English Prose Style); the prose could scarcely be simpler, smoother, clearer. And where are the "literary tricks" in, say, Tolkien? In Bramah? In Vance?

That is the core, I think: a mistaken confounding of complicated, artificial prose with literate prose. What is so impenetrable about, say, this?

It was just past midnight and the air was filled with wings. An army of ravens came out of the west like a cold black storm. Leaves rustled in the deepening chill, and over the grounds a wind rolled, a darkly visible tumbleweed of air.

But in the sky was a rumble such as a distant earthquake might have made. The moon was startled by the sound. The night had been peaceful, its curved sweep studded with stars. Above her, their sharp sparks bristled. She had followed this course forever, her bright edge unfolding until a pale medallion hung full in the sky. Balanced between the earth and the pincushion of stars above, she remained pleased with herself, the axis of night, the interlocutor. But now she was waning, past half, growing weaker with the loss of light. And this rumble behind her was frightening.

Over her shoulder the moon watched the ravens approach.

Any of the words too long? Any clauses too complicated to parse? Yet that is a poet writing, the book (Satyrday his one prose novel.


Epic fantasy is about adventure fiction more than it is about imaginative fiction. Well-put. A hundred years ago, most today reading "epic fantasy" would have been, probably with equal delight, reading "ripping yarns". And the levels of writing are reasonably comparable.

 

[Eventine]

So the problem of "literary fantasy" (and I would say "high-brow literature" in general) is that it often becomes a kind of parlor game of cleverness; how clever can I be in my use of literary devices? How can I clothe my actual meaning in allegory? What ends up happening is that the meaning of the work is limited to what the author intended, the "A" of the metaphorical equation above. This is fine for certain kinds of literature but again, something is lost in fantasy when this becomes the focus. In a more symbolic, non-intentional approach, the meaning can run deeper - potentially beyond the conscious mind of the author.

I'm not sure I hold with that paragraph on multiple levels - firstly I don't think it's valid to draw an allegory/symbolism divide between mimetic/genre fiction (if that's what you were actually doing) and secondly, to understand if a piece is truly an allegory you need to understand authorial intent. Tolkien is famous for refuting LotR as an allegory of WWII, and more recently Mieville has had to refute the use of allegory in Iron Council.
Isn't allegory in the mind of the beholder?

EDIT: Just covering the last few posts as well, surely a focus on prose (as opposed to themes, techniques, etc) is too simple for critiquing work? Isn't that where we're more likely to open ourselves up to Sturgeon's law?

 

[Werthead]

Epic fantasy is a genre that has often flirted with conservatism and staleness, but it's always found a way of evading that fate. In fact, the modern epic fantasy genre was born with two very specific books in 1977 that illustrate this point: one of them is so predictable, conservative and 'safe' as to be laughable (The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks) and the other one is revisionist, interrogative of the genre and very much 'unsafe' (Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen Donaldson). One is a furry comfort-blanket and one is basin of water upended over your head first thing in the morning (though rather moreso in 1977 than now, I feel).

Arguably today we'd still have the same thing if the 'fluffy' fantasy authors hadn't either died off or moved on. Probably the closest example today would be someone like Brooks (though even he's moved onto at least relatively new ground) or Feist. Maybe Salvatore or Lackey. There's definitely not as much of it around as there used to be. The subgenre today is dominated by authors much more interesting in challenging or interrogating the conventions of the subgenre (although in the process they risk falling prey to its trappings), including Erikson, Kay, Bakker, Martin, Rothfuss or even Sanderson, who mixes a fairly traditional approach with worldbuilding that tends towards the post-apocalyptic. Success is for the reader to judge, of course, but the notion that epic/secondary world/fat fantasy is still the cloying and unworthy field of mediocre predictability it was twenty years ago is dubious at best.

I compare Pullman's Dark Materials Books to Game of Thrones, or Wheel of Time, or any one of dozens of ho-hum epics, and there I find imagination.

I agree, Pullman wrote a truly marvellous and inventive fantasy novel with Northern Lights. He then added a sequel which was a bit weaker, but had some strong moments, and some amusingly bizarre concepts. And then I guess he went and re-read CS Lewis and got himself worked up so much that he wrote a final novel almost impossible to read between the frothing anti-religious polemic (I'm not sure I'd call a gyrocopter with missile launchers shooting down angels 'imagination').

So he took three novels to go from the sublime to ridiculous. Quite an achievement, even more impressive than his nemesis CS Lewis, who at least didn't completely go overboard until the seventh and final book of his series.

Thank goodness for urban fantasy and steampunk... much needed fresh blood to the genre.

Both subgenres have been around for decades and have their overused cliches as much as epic fantasy. The notion that they are inherently superior is flawed.

As to the authors: as a thought experiment, imagine that, for a suitable commission, we convinced John Crowley to attempt a swords-and-fireballs novel, and Steven Erikson to attempt, well, whatever one might described Aegypt as (its very unclassifiability is suggestive)--do you suppose we'd get works much like the real (original) Aegypt or Malazan? I really, really, really think not. It is not the "sub-genre" that determines the quality of the work, it is the quality of the author.

Whilst Erikson has his problems, he's actually genuinely one of the more interesting fantasy authors trying his hand at different things. He's also one of the few who has written a fair amount in other genres (SF and contemporary fiction) and is equally adept at novels and the short form. I actually think he'd relish your challenge and would produce something worthwhile, though as you say, absolutely nothing like Aegypt at all.

 

[Eventine]

Both subgenres have been around for decades and have their overused cliches as much as epic fantasy. The notion that they are inherently superior is flawed.

I don't think the point was that they were new or superior, but that their recent resurgence offered an alternative to epic fantasy.