Major fantasists before Tolkien

[BAYLOR]

William Beckford Vathek
H Rider Haggard She
Kenneth Morris Book of The Three Dragons
C J CutCliff Hynd The Lost Contient

 

[Windshadow]

Johnathon Swift was a seminal author of the early genre but I expect you have overlooked him because he was a humorist and a parodist

 

[KatG]

For instance, in the former list I'd have to include Dune, while in the latter Frank Herbert wouldn't register.

Right. Dune is science fiction, but it did influence some fantasy writers, because sand worms! So did Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, so much that it is frequently presented as fantasy fiction, even though it is SF. And Robert Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle was fantasy that also influenced fantasy fiction, but has strong SF elements, so a lot of folk consider it SF. Ditto Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover, which is SF, but was often considered fantasy by folk and influenced fantasy writers. You get a few like those, especially as they sold a lot of stuff as SF that was fantasy, and because people claim pre-industrial elements are always fantasy -- they aren't -- and anything with machines is always SF -- but it's not and if you have fantasy elements, it's not science fiction.

In a way I want to compile a hybrid list that includes every seminal author that influenced the development of fantasy in some at least moderately significant way.

That's going to need to be a bigger list.

Maybe I should envision it more as akin of tree, and focus on "epic fantasy" as the tree that "sprouted" with Tolkien,

Well except it didn't sprout from Tolkien. It wasn't even called epic fantasy regularly until the 1980's. You have to remember, there were lots and lots of fanzines, magazines and paperbacks being put out by a variety of publishers all over the English language market. And then there were the comics which enormously influenced the magazine short fictions, paperbacks and book cover art and which there was a lot of cross publishing with. Secondary worlds, sometimes reached from Earth through a magical portal of some sort or full out multiverses, but other times just made up worlds, were going on in category SFF well before they decided to reprint LOTR in paperback in the U.S. And most of them were pre-industrial, based on fairy tales, bardic and cultural myths, with magical creatures, fairies/elves, barbarian warriors, dwarfs, dragons, etc. Some were more fairy tale, folklore and mythical based and others were more adventure and blood & guts.

The reason they wanted to reprint Tolkien in the 1960's, and Peake, T.H. White, etc., was because fantasy, including secondary world fantasy, was already so popular in the category market that they developed fantasy programs to put out more books and take advantage of it. And getting "classic" novels that were well known as paperback reprints was a way to get the booksellers interested in stocking the newer titles. Tolkien was very popular in Britain, where he had paperback editions, and that was spreading, so obviously it made sense to have a U.S. paperback edition and the category SFF publishers were the most interested. When Ace exploited the copyright law to do a paperback edition, that led to the hasty deal with Ballantine for an authorized version, but Ballantine wasn't building their program around just Tolkien. Betty Ballantine has talked about how they put the program together to capitalize on new fantasy writers they had. Lord of the Rings resonated in the U.S. widely because of the Vietnam War, so Frodo Lives! took on a connective symbolism, but while that certainly helped bring in readers to category fantasy, it wasn't really the big influence on 1960's fantasy that was being put out for that category market.

With the popularity and growth in fantasy fiction in the 1950's and 1960's, editors, writers, publishers, etc. started coming up with terms for different types of fantasy. Michael Moorcock coined the term sword & sorcery for high adventure, sword and guts fantasy fiction in 1961, several years before the major LOTR reprint. In 1971, they started using the term high fantasy for books that had a more formal, poetic style and dealt with epic storylines, kings, wars, etc. That term was often applied to Tolkien, though the book had been out for awhile. It was also applied a lot to the fantasy fiction that retold myths, fairy tales, and ballads like Tam Lin, Beowulf, and sometimes to stuff that used Robin Hood, King Arthur and other legends.

But it got rather awkward referring to different types of fantasy that had another world in it, and you had historical fantasy that was also doing ballads and technically was "high fantasy," which was confusing, so they started using epic fantasy to refer to those books that involved a second world, and by the 1980's, all secondary world fantasy stories, whether they were swashbuckling tales like Brooks' Shannara, or high fantasy fairy tale types like McKillip's Forgotten Beasts of Eld, or darker stuff like Donaldson's Thomas Covenant, were most often just called epic fantasy. It just meant secondary world, with portal and multiverse fantasy either being called epic fantasy or called portal or multiverse fantasy.

There's no question that Tolkien is a seminal influence. Most epic fantasy works past 1980 were eventually judged as to whether they were close to Tolkien or in a different vein from him. LOTR became a buzz word. But he wasn't ever really involved in the fantasy category market and he certainly wasn't the trunk of all of epic fantasy. You could make a lot of good arguments that Conan had way more impact, especially since he became a big comic book feature and Conan style fantasy was the big drive in the late 1970's, early 1980's. Michael Moorcock was not inspired by Tolkien and he had enormous impact on New Wave SF, multiverse fantasy and SF, and epic fantasy, as editor and author, possibly more impact on the last than Tolkien did in the end, and Leiber as well. Roger Zelazny was not inspired by Tolkien, and though his Amber books were multiverse, they had a tremendous impact on epic fantasy. He and Moorcock were part of the group that called themselves Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA) that started around 1963 and involved authors and editors like Lin Carter, Poul Anderson, Zelazny, Leiber, Jack Vance, L. Sprague de Camp, etc. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which started in the late 1940's also had a huge impact on epic fantasy through short fiction.

And Dungeons & Dragons, first the game craze and then the tie-in books that launched numerous big authors and fantasy titles in the 1970's and 1980's, probably in the end had the biggest overall influence. It's true that D&D borrowed liberally from Tolkien to set up their game, but it also borrowed from Moorcock, Leiber, the Christian Bible, comics, etc., and it was much more focused on sword & sorcery style stuff, and creating systems of magic. A lot of the writers who came into fantasy fiction in the 1970's and 1980's hadn't even read Lord of the Rings. So LOTR was a very important stream in one sub-category of the fantasy field, but it wasn't the trunk. (I'm not sure the tree metaphor would work really -- it is more messy than linear.)

Maybe one way to envision this is that what we now call "fantasy" took awhile to come into focus, and what Tolkien did--among other things--was formalize and centralize the genre around epic fantasy. Not unlike how Babe Ruth completely changed the way baseball was played, even though there was professional baseball for half a century before him. Tolkien : fantasy :: Babe Ruth : baseball.

Well first off, I think you'd get an argument from baseball fans that Ruth changed all baseball and nobody was more important than him. It sounds reductive. But again, as for Tolkien, he did no such thing. He had no interest or involvement in the American fantasy category market or what developed in the English language global market. A number of very important editors of magazines and books did and they were not dancing all around Tolkien or epic fantasy. The late 1960's to 1980's fantasy market grew so quickly because again it had already gotten a big impetus in popularity in the 1950's and because it involved a wide range of stuff, some of which developed with science fiction developments (remember a lot of authors wrote both) -- horror, dark fantasy, contemporary and urban fantasy, historical fantasy, fairy tale fantasy, portal, multiverse, futuristic and post-apocalypse fantasy, African influenced fantasy, feminist fantasy, alternate history fantasy, superhero fantasy with comics connections, etc. Fantasy fiction was not centralized around epic fantasy as a market or a field. The tie-in fantasy market was but that's because it was mostly games tie-in stuff and the games -- RPG followed fairly quickly by electronic games.

Now, in the 1990's, decades after Tolkien, in the U.S. we had a recession and that was followed by the collapsing shrinkage of the wholesale market for comics, newspapers, magazines and paperbacks, mainly in the U.S. but also spreading globally. They didn't even need the Internet to start killing things off -- it went then when there was a lot of streamlining by grocery and drugstore chains, newsstands, etc. And that hurt all the genre fiction -- the category markets -- very badly because they depended on mass market paperback. Midlist authors got dumped as publishers reduced their lists and specialty bookstores for genre fiction that depended on mid-list titles and already were being squeezed by the corporate book superstores started dying off. It took mystery fiction over a decade to recover, and science fiction even longer. Romance frantically sub-divided as they lost lines, which is why they went into fantasy and sf romance much bigger in the 1990's, as well as suspense and sent their big writers out into general fiction to write family sagas, whatever would bring in readers. And one bright spot in that convulsion was epic fantasy. Most of fantasy fiction also took a hit -- especially since SF they published with was hurting -- but there were enough big epic fantasy series to keep things going. So publishers did pour a lot of titles into epic fantasy and then that did make epic fantasy the largest sub-category and the lead boat in the category market. But it didn't have a lot to do with the Lord of the Rings. And in the early oughts, it changed back to a wider variety, with contemporary fantasy briefly being the big boat (and technically still may be.)

There are a lot of fans who are only epic fantasy fans -- that's what they love. And a lot of them tend to forget that the fantasy field is much wider and that authors crossed sub-categories all the time. They think their love is the center. But it's really not. And it also wasn't a sub-category that was filled with happy elf stories because of Tolkien and then got all dark and dirty because of George Martin either. Again, readers and authors aren't a school of minnows who go all in one direction and then all switch in another direction. So yeah, if you're trying to map it out, it's more several lines interwoven, than one root, one author from which things sprang. We've become less familiar with a lot of critical authors in the 1920's to 1950's period who had a lot of impact on 1950's-1980's fantasy because there were several decades more of fantasy fiction, we don't read everything and a lot of what they did was short fiction in magazines that don't exist anymore -- but which writers in the 1960's say knew and were influenced by. So that is the harder part of your list. 1960's on up is easy, although the 1960's ones and some of the 1970's and 80's ones have also faded.

As for your statement that "realism was a reaction to romanticism," I don't think this is completely true--especially if you look at Romanticism (capital R) as more than a literary trend, but as a cultural and artistic movement.

Well it was also a cultural and artistic movement -- Byron, Shelley, putting up follies on British estates, and so forth, but it was, according to the historians, from the 1700's to the mid-1800's, ending more or less as a movement after the Regency period and the Napoleonic wars. And they claim that realism was a reactionary movement to that earlier romanticism. American transcendentalism was also in the early 1800's concurrent with part of the romantic period and ended in the 1840's. I don't know a lot about the German idealists but they were later -- like I said, ideas of romanticism didn't disappear just because the historical movement ended. Fairy tales never go out of style. And of course you had sort of a Freud-Jung discussion going on there throughout much of the 20th century.

This is going far afield, but I see fantasy as the "literature of the right brain," whereas science fiction is of the "left brain." They can mix, but I think one way to rephrase what Jemisin was getting at is that you can't reduce the former to the latter. Or at least when you do, you in essence "kill" it. It would be like saying that Romanticism is just fluff that can be explained rationally, or reducing "love" to brain chemistry.

Well, Jemisin was more talking about there being two stylistic strands in fantasy that approach magical fantastical element use -- numenistic and more structured, and that because more structured was used in several popular series -- Malazan, Sanderson , etc. -- in the last decade, there was clamoring that all fantasy has to be written that way. Because again fans often act like it's minnows -- everybody has to go in the same direction, even though that's never been how it works. So they were bugging her about her work, which is much more in the tradition of McKillip, Le Guin, Butler, and on back. Fantasy authors who come from games interest tend to prefer more structured systems because that's what they are used to in the games. Fantasy authors who come to fantasy from the more mythology and folklore side of things, including cultural traditions from African countries, Latin America, etc., tend to be more numenistic. A lot of fantasy authors are simply in between. Glen Cook's Black Company stories for instance are essentially numenistic on the magic side -- things just are, wizards do spells but there's not a lot of explanation, etc., but a lot of people think it's more structured because it's a mercenary company that have military procedures they follow. There is also a belief that anything that is contemporary in nature in fantasy is structured, whereas in a lot of contemporary and historical fantasy, it is also numenistic. You can't get fantasy authors to all write the same -- they just don't, and publishers like to have the variety in the field to catch the maximum possible number of readers.

As for left brain and right brain, fiction writers use both. They have to because left brain is verbal and written language and right brain is imagery. Science fiction does like to promote itself as very sciency and logical, but the reality is most of it isn't. Space opera doesn't really hit as left brain fiction -- it's spectacle with a science gloss, most of it -- and space opera is one of the biggest sub-categories of science fiction. But certainly the engine of science fiction -- unreal things that have a proposed natural explanation/basis for existing -- is left brain in wanting that natural science explanation over an unnatural, supernatural one that is used for unreal elements in fantasy. The line between SF and fantasy is often simply one of justification. If my vampire is a magical being who freaks out at the sight of a cross, that's an unreal thing that has an unnatural explanation for existence -- it's fantasy. If my vampire is an alien who is parasitic and drinks blood from other creatures as food, like a vampire bat, that's an unreal thing that has a natural explanation for existence and so it's science fiction. If I've got a talking cat, I can switch from a witch's magical familiar (fantasy) and so can talk to an android cat or a cat with scientifically enhanced intelligence and altered vocal chords (science fiction.) Same talking cat -- I just changed the explanation for how it exists.

A lot of people don't like that idea, I've found. It's apparently not rigid enough. But it is how we divvy up the two unreal genres into science fiction and fantasy. So even if I have a system of magic that is very detailed and categorized, as long as I'm explaining that it exists because it's magic -- unnatural, beyond nature, then it's fantasy. So that's why authors can in fact switch back and forth between science fiction and fantasy quite easily. The more sciency they want a story to be -- the more concrete the natural explanation for the unreal elements' existence they want to have -- then they've got to do more research and may be more left brainy about it. Fantasy may involve cultural and other research, which is also left brain, but it's still going to be an unnatural explanation for what exists, even if there are some science fiction elements -- unreal things that are given a natural explanation, along with the unnatural ones (i.e. futuristic fantasy for instance.) Jemisin took some sort of NASA workshop that educates media people, including SFF writers, about accurate science stuff and that is apparently what gave her the base material for The Fifth Element. And the magic system in The Fifth Element for the orogenes is actually pretty structured. But she has the unnatural magic explanation for the key elements as a fantasy story.

 

[Matthew Hughes]

Well except it didn't sprout from Tolkien.

Maybe we should say, "budded," as living trees do when winter is through.

It's true that D&D borrowed liberally from Tolkien to set up their game,

And they lifted D&D's "rules" of magic from Jack Vance's Dying Earth cycle. Gygax said so.

Byron, Shelley, putting up follies on British estates,

Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1820) was a strong influence on faux-medievalism, one of the thick branches of epic fantasy. He also essentially invented the historical novel, which marches in parallel with much fantasy writing.

So maybe we need not so much a tree as a thicket.

Lovely word, "thicket." Very woody. Not tinny at all.

 

[Bren18]

These roots run deep. If you want a good grounding in pre-Tolkienish fantasy, collect the Ballantine classic series edited by Lin Carter from the late sixties and early seventies, before Terry Brooks et alia dumbed the genre down.

Can you go a bit more in depth about what you mean by dumbing down the genre? As someone who has not read anything pre-Tolkien, I'd be interested to hear.

 

[jason10mm]

I'm being picayune, but those guys may well have believed they were writing history.

To be fair though, Tolkien DELIBERATELY set out to write a "pre-history" of Europe. He even frames his books as if they were recovered documents. So to say that Tolkien counts as someone who invented an entire world but guys that use "real Earth" as a base don't is being petty. Tolkien clearly based and intended Middle-Earth to be some sort of pre-written history Europe.

I don't think Tolkien is as aped as folks think he is. There are a few concepts, primarily the characteristics of the elf-dwarf-orc species and the "stop the big bad" epic quest, but otherwise most things can be traced to several sources, not just LOTR. About the only guy that I can say is hands down ripping off Tolkien is Dennis McKiernan and to be fair to him he was intentionally writing a Mines of Moria sequel that he then tried to cloak as much as possible. That initial start really colored the rest of his stuff (though less and less as he went on).

And Nathaniel Hawthorne deserves to be on the list.

 

[Randy M.]

A lot here to absorb so I'll take the easiest route. I'm not sure all of these fit your criteria, but they are writers to consider:

E. T. A. Hoffman – in spite of coming before your propose date and the term "fantasy" not really being used at the time, his short work is largely fantasy and shaped much of what came after, including Poe. This opens a can of worms, though: If Hoffman, what about Goethe or Gogol or Gautier or bunches of writers whose last name does not begin with G? (But then Gothic begins with G and a lot of my list stems from Gothic fiction.)

Edgar Allan Poe – if you consider influence, you should add him; if you consider solely his work, he wasn't really a fantasist and it’s arguable that he only wrote one real ghost story (“Bernice”)

Nathaniel Hawthorne – more of a fantasist in the short form than Poe: "Young Goodman Brown," "Rappacini's Daughter" (some consider it proto-s.f.), "The Celestial Railroad", "Feathertop" ... (nice to see Jason also thinks Hawthorne should be considered)

Thorne Smith -- have yet to read him, but for quite some time he was the Christopher Moore of his day

F. Marion Crawford – nice catch, Matthew. A couple of novels and an influential collection of short stories, though those short stories lean closer to horror than to what fantasy has become

G. K. Chesterton – The Man Who Was Thursday has been extraordinarily influential

Fritz Leiber – besides the early Fahfrd and Gray Mouser stories, there were “Smoke Ghost”, “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes”, “The Hill and the Hole”, “Diary in the Snow”, Conjure Wife, etc., much of which could be considered dark fantasy. Again, as KatG points out, there were writers writing in multiple genres and I think his writing in s.f. and fantasy bleeds over into his writing of horror, and his writing in horror leads to Richard Matheson and Stephen King among others.

L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt – I have books by either and one or two by both, but the Harold Shea stories were hugely popular among readers of the time and again when reissued in the 1970s

John Collier – Besides His Monkey Wife he wrote stories that ping pong off fantasy, horror, crime/mystery. Fancies & Goodnights is still in print last I looked (NYRB Press). But if you include Collier, maybe you also need to consider Saki.

David Garnett – When E. M. Forster defended fantasy, he mentioned Garnett’s Lady Into Fox specifically. Not sure if that’s enough to add him to your list, but thought I’d mention it.

Lafcadio Hearn – not primarily a fantasist, I suppose, but Kwaidan was probably an extension of the Orientalism that influenced the Gothic; see also, Some Chinese Ghosts.

Ray Bradbury – The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The October Country and many, many short stories beyond those contained in …Chronicles and …October…; arguably, he wrote one s.f. novel while everything else not mainstream or crime/mystery was fantasy

Gerald Kersh – another tough one. Ellison cites him as a major influence and Valancourt has reissued some of his collections, but he was probably better known for crime/mystery


Mentioning Leiber (early Fahfrd & Gray Mouser), de Camp and Pratt brings up the larger issue of Unknown which was pretty much populated by John W. Campbell’s stable of s.f. writers: Sturgeon, Heinlein, Fred Brown, Anthony Boucher, Kuttner & Moore, and probably some others I’m not thinking of. These writers were writing, more or less, what we'd now call urban fantasy.

Then there were writers kind of on the fringe of this, like Manly Wade Wellman (Who Fears the Devil?), who were writing a sort of rural fantasy.


Good luck with your project Alchemist.

Randy M.
(edited to finish incomplete thoughts, right the wrongs of spelling, and generally tidy up)

 

[BAYLOR]

Ernest Bramah The Kai Lung books
Apollonius of Rhodes Jason and The Argonauts
Apuleius The Golden Ass
George Meredith The Shaving of Shagpat and Arabian Adventure
Edith Nesbit The Enchanted Castle
Francis Stevens The Nightmare and other Tales of Dark Fantasy
Frank Stockton The Lady or The Tiger and other stories
Lafcadio Hearn Kwaidan Japanese Ghost Stories
Padraic Colum The Children of Odin Nordic Gods and Heroes
The Yellow Sign and Other stories The Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers
Austin Tappan Wright Islandia
W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory A Treasury of Irish Myth ,Legend and Folklore

 

[KatG]

Oh shoot, how could I forget Sturgeon -- E Pluribus Unicorn. And it is rather difficult to ignore C.S. Lewis' Narnia as just children's, because it did have a lot of impact on the epic fantasy writers.

 

[Randy M.]

Oh shoot, how could I forget Sturgeon -- E Pluribus Unicorn. And it is rather difficult to ignore C.S. Lewis' Narnia as just children's, because it did have a lot of impact on the epic fantasy writers.

(Randy, shaking his head): How could you, Kat? How could you? Poor Sturgeon! Poor, poor Sturgeon!

It occurs to me maybe dialog isn't my strong suit.

But seriously ... E Pluribus Unicorn is a good choice. Then there's Zenna Henderson's The Anything Box and Fred Brown's Nightmares and Geezenstacks and ... probably one for Charles Beaumont, maybe Shock I for Richard Matheson, and Anthony Boucher's The Compleat Werewolf ...

And there have to be others. Just 'cause I can't think of them, doesn't mean they aren't out there.

Randy M.
(who probably should duck for cover now)

 

[Alchemist]

So much good stuff in this thread, will take awhile to digest. KatG, I'll reply to your long post a bit later when I have more time. For now, I couldn't resist this one...

And they lifted D&D's "rules" of magic from Jack Vance's Dying Earth cycle. Gygax said so.

Interesting thing about Tolkien's influence on Gygax and D&D. Gygax was rather dismissive of Tolkien, in such a blatant way that--like Michael Moorcock--it seemed an instant of "thou dost protest too much." But Gygax said that Vance, Leiber, Howard, and Moorcock were much bigger influences, which of course seems like an over-statement. Tolkien was clearly a huge influence on D&D, but maybe somewhere between what the reductionist stereotype is ("D&D is just like LotR") and the dismissive rebellion of Gygax.

More on this in my reply to Kat.

And yes, D&D's magic system is often called "Vancian magic." Fire and forget.

 

[Alchemist]

I'd also love to see folks--KatG, Randy, Matthew, and whomever wants to participate--put together their list of "100 Essential Fantasists" or "100 Essential Fantasy Novels"...or whatever the parameters are agreed to be. It would be a hard task, but very interesting if folks would actually participate.

 

[Matthew Hughes]

Thorne Smith

He was my favorite author when I was fifteen. Very funny.

I'd also love to see folks--KatG, Randy, Matthew, and whomever wants to participate

I'm only good for the oldies. I stopped reading fantasy in the 1980s, except for Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe. I've never read most of today's big names.

Can you go a bit more in depth about what you mean by dumbing down the genre?

You need a certain reading level ability to get full value out of Lord Dunsany or James Branch Cabell. You need less ability to get full value out of Terry Brooks or Karl Edward Wagner or Stephen Donaldson.

Try reading the first page of Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter and of Tad Williams's The Dragonbone Chair. The former's prose is lyrical, the latter's utilitarian.

A great deal of fantasy up to Tolkien's time was written in more elevated prose styles. After Brooks, more plain and sturdy styles were the norm. Publishers were widening the readership by making the prose more accessible. Big stories, easier reading.

This is not to say one is superior to the other. It's largely a matter of taste and reading ability. But the differences are obvious.

 

[Alchemist]

I wonder, Matthew, if a lot of this "dumbing down" of prose from "elevated/lyrical" to "utilitarian" is at all related to the ascent of film as the primary form of storytelling. Utilitarian prose is more descriptive, like the author is describing a scene. Lyrical prose is a bit more evocative and perhaps lends itself more to a kind of poetic imaginative experience rather than "inner movie making."

 

[Matthew Hughes]

I wonder, Matthew, if a lot of this "dumbing down" of prose from "elevated/lyrical" to "utilitarian" is at all related to the ascent of film as the primary form of storytelling.

Could well be. Certainly, in the twentieth century, far more people went to the movies than read books. It was the storytelling form of the demos.

Fantasy, I think, had long been the territory of the more literate. Tolkien drew more readers to it, who then began to look for more of the same, or at least similar. Publishers had done well producing science fiction, mystery, romance, westerns, and war stories with prose that was accessible to a middle-of-the-bell-curve readership. They applied the same quality standard to fantasy and it became a bigger-selling category than sf.

 

[KatG]

(Randy, shaking his head): How could you, Kat? How could you? Poor Sturgeon! Poor, poor Sturgeon!

One side impact Sturgeon had of course was Sturgeon's Law, which along with Clarke's dictum about science and magic, everybody completely misquotes with the wrong context. So we get to hear it constantly to support the idea of genre being poor fiction when in fact he was saying the opposite. Very annoying. But yeah, the tricky part is that there were a bunch of writers writing from the 1930's through to the 1960's who were very influential and overlap with the post WWII to 1970's folk, so it's easy to forget them when we're splitting things in late 1950's.

Interesting thing about Tolkien's influence on Gygax and D&D. Gygax was rather dismissive of Tolkien, in such a blatant way that--like Michael Moorcock--it seemed an instant of "thou dost protest too much." But Gygax said that Vance, Leiber, Howard, and Moorcock were much bigger influences, which of course seems like an over-statement.

Michael Moorcock honestly wasn't protesting too much -- he wasn't influenced by Tolkien. He did not like the British class system, part of the socialist and further crowd, he did not like literature being put out by gentry writers like Tolkien and the Inklings, etc. Half of Moorcock's situation involved SF -- he was a major figure in New Wave SF later on. He had a big impact on urban/contemporary fantasy and multiverse fiction that influenced Stephen King. And he was essentially the leader in the sword and sorcery movement, also called heroic fantasy which was a misnomer as it dealt with amoral barbarian warriors and rogues more than heroes, which went from post-WWII into the 1980's, and had a sort of revival with the grimdark movement in the oughts. And that tradition was drawing directly from Howard and Conan, from Lovecraft, A. Merritt, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, etc. -- the Weird Fiction movement writers. (They had some women even.) All scandalous fighters, crushed skulls, exotic kingdoms, monsters, Arabic and Celtic cultural material and adventure stories. So Leiber and Pratt, who were a bit earlier than the rest, Vance, Moorcock, de Camp, Carter, and then Norton, Cherryh, etc. were following those influences as well as older mythological classics. They did not grow up with Lord of the Rings. It wasn't their thing. And they had an immense impact on the 1950's to 1980's period, because they were writing the stuff then and inspired the ones who came slightly after them.

Moorcock resented that in the 1970's -- the peak Tolkien phenom period for the paperbacks -- that so many people were claiming anyone doing epic fantasy -- or portal or other things -- were copying Tolkien. It is a thing that people do, claim that new works that get some attention copy a very popular book, and that the popular author owns various common bits of folklore because their book was popular, and in the 1970's and into the 1980's it was a bit of a ritual in some areas of the fantasy field. Moorcock didn't feel that most of the fantasy writers were doing pastorals like Tolkien -- he thought they were doing more modern styles, tackling more modern issues, and more drawn to Howard and other writers, so he was heavily critical there for awhile. (He softened about it some later.) Tolkien didn't invent tall willowy pretty elves, nor popularize them for category fantasy -- they were High Seelie Court elves and had been used in category fantasy fiction for decades. He didn't invent his version of dwarves, or orcs, he borrowed heavily from Arthurian and Norse/Wagner Norse opera myths -- stuff that he was an expert academic in. And he didn't invent hobbits -- they were a more obscure folklore variant. But he did manage to trademark hobbits on that obscurity and legally keep other fantasy writers from using that bit of folklore. So he actually lessened his impact on fantasy writers by not letting them play with parts of folklore that he didn't actually own.

Gygax threw everything and the kitchen sink into D&D, especially as the game got popular. That included hobbits, for which he got his wrist slapped by Tolkien's folks. But Gygax was making a game in the early 1970's and he was drawing on what they were doing in the games then and that was much more centered on drawing on Howard and sword & sorcery. So he drew heavily on Howard, Lovecraft, Eddison and such, and he drew on Vance, Moorcock and the sword & sorcery crowd. He also borrowed from the Arabian Nights, Grimm's fairy tales, Disney movies, Biblical monsters, and so forth. When it got to the tie-in novels mostly in the 1980's which then affected the games in a circular loop, it's much more Conan tradition than Aragorn in most of them, though there's some Arthurian stuff here and there.

Tolkien is very, very important in category fantasy fiction, though he had no interest in the field at all. But he wasn't Moses and he wasn't American and a lot of the American writers didn't read him. He was a classicist whose prose many found awkward and overly formal. And to the many authors who were doing fantasy fiction in general fiction publishing, but who also some of them impacted category fantasy as well, he wasn't very important at all. Moorcock and his crew had their effect, descended from Howard and Lovecraft. The folklorists who were similar to Tolkien in lyricism but more modern, had their effect. The noir fantasy folks, which came from a combo of fantasy elements and the 1930's to 1950's suspense fiction, had a big impact on fantasy fiction and epic fantasy too. The dark fantasy writers crossed with the noir fantasy folk and they came from the Weird Fiction and Gothic fiction, and they also crossed with the horror writers, so King, Joyce and others had an impact there too. So I'm not sure I'd call it a thicket (though I agree that thicket is a lovely word,) but it is more of a network of connected nodes than a tree.

I'd also love to see folks--KatG, Randy, Matthew, and whomever wants to participate--put together their list of "100 Essential Fantasists" or "100 Essential Fantasy Novels"...or whatever the parameters are agreed to be. It would be a hard task, but very interesting if folks would actually participate.

I wouldn't call it an "essentials" list because that sounds like a you should read this list and that I think serves little purpose. All of the traditions, settings and styles of fantasy fiction are not going to work for all fans. Some are very picky. Case in point -- you don't want the children's/YA titles that were influential, you don't want to involve the horror people but they were influential, and you are more interested in epic fantasy than the other types. Would it make sense to put Charles de Lint on a list -- even though he has been extremely influential and has written some epic fantasy titles -- when mostly he's written stuff that wouldn't interest you? I can make a very large list of titles/authors who were major from about the 1960's on, though I might miss some of the 1960's stuff. The 1950's and 40's is harder, and on back. The classic titles are a small number because a lot of them have of course faded into more obscurity except for areas of academia, but we know that small number well because they are the titles we were made to read in school. But it would probably be more than 100 writers and they wouldn't all be mainly epic fantasy writers and again, epic fantasy writers tend to also write other types of fantasy and SF. C.J. Cherryh is best known for her SF, but she's also been a very influential fantasy writer, crossing between both the folklorist line and the s&s line.

If you want to try and look up posts in the forums by our old member Owlcraft, he used to give us reams and reams of books in lists, many of them older ones, so that might be helpful in your research. And Randy is quite knowledgeable about the Weird Fiction writers (and horror.)

There are not just two styles of fantasy fiction or epic fantasy. Tolkien was writing in the tradition of the early to mid 20th century and the 1800's before that -- he was going for a specifically bardic, poetic, formal, biblical style. But 20th century fantasy fiction, particularly the mushroom of American writers, was not doing that style -- they were doing modern, less poetic, sometimes stripped down styles and often mushing old worlds and the modern world together. And others were in the middle -- the folklorists were more poetic, but would mix it. Somebody doing something that they wanted to seem historical would have a more formal style. The comic fantasies used more the styles of the time periods they were in. Comic books and their art influenced written SFF styles. What was going on in music influenced fantasy writers, social change, stuff in science fiction and the development of technology, suspense fiction, SFF movies and t.v., and so forth.

 

[Alchemist]

Right. Dune is science fiction, but it did influence some fantasy writers, because sand worms! So did Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, so much that it is frequently presented as fantasy fiction, even though it is SF. And Robert Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle was fantasy that also influenced fantasy fiction, but has strong SF elements, so a lot of folk consider it SF. Ditto Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover, which is SF, but was often considered fantasy by folk and influenced fantasy writers. You get a few like those, especially as they sold a lot of stuff as SF that was fantasy, and because people claim pre-industrial elements are always fantasy -- they aren't -- and anything with machines is always SF -- but it's not and if you have fantasy elements, it's not science fiction.

You know, when I read this paragraph I got this image of two parallel but distinct universes that come together and mix every so often, in a cyclical fashion – both major and minor cycles. The 70s seem to have been a “major” cycle of this, when fantasy and sf bled together and mixed. One of my favorite series, CJ Cherryh's Morgaine Saga, is a good example – where the book reads like fantasy, is experienced as fantasy by the viewpoint character, who is from a fantasy world (so to speak), but there are science fictional underpinnings to the whole set-up (Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is similar, as are many of the Darkover books). That is an example of subtlety and craft, whereas the warrior with a laser gun in one hand and a sword in the other is more crass and obvious.

But yeah, I hear you. And the line is fuzzy, the definitions of genre a “fuzzy set” as Brian Attebery would say.

That's going to need to be a bigger list.

Yeah, I know. And if it gets too big then I might as well trust those who are more knowledge than I and use the list in the back of Mendlesohn and James' A Short History of Fantasy, which includes pretty much (almost) everything I would include and a lot more.

I think what I am looking for, though, is a more essential list, thus my suggestion up-thread. Of course “essential” varies. And I'm not a big fan of “greatest” lists because they're either so subjective or so orthodox. But I'm intrigued by the idea of singling out a hundred or so of the greatest writers and/or novels in the fantasy genre, who most define what it has been and is. To put it another way, if you were to think of 100 writers (or novels, or even just stories) that best define and essential the entire history of fantasy as a genre, which would they be? My guess is that there are about 50+ authors (or books) who we could all mostly agree upon, and then it would get rather challenging.

Well except it didn't sprout from Tolkien.

To be clear, I wrote sprouted with Tolkien not from, meaning that the various strands or roots that would become epic fantasy, came together and gave birth to (sprouted) Tolkien as the modern archetype of the quest fantasy. It is almost as if every post-Tolkien epic fantasy and/or secondary world fantasy is, in some way, in relation or even dialogue with Tolkien and Middle-earth, even if it is completely different. People will want to define how it is different, and how it is similar. I can't think of any work that has that sort of placement in the fantasy field, except for perhaps A Game of Thrones and Harry Potter, but the only for the last two decades. Even The Wheel of Time's prominence seems to have lessened somewhat.

I would also broadly agree with what you say in that it almost seems that Tolkien wasn't really copied until Terry Brooks, whose popularity basically told us that copying Tolkien can lead to massive commercial success. As far as I know, and I think as you said or implied, there weren't a ton of “Tolkien clones” from 1955-1976; in fact, it was one of the most creatively fruitful periods of fantasy fiction (imo), with many of the truly seminal works written.

There's no question that Tolkien is a seminal influence. Most epic fantasy works past 1980 were eventually judged as to whether they were close to Tolkien or in a different vein from him.

Yeah, this is what I said above—before I read this (for long posts, I like to read and reply at the same time, so forgive me if I repeat anything you say...it merely supports the idea that great minds think alike ).

LOTR became a buzz word. But he wasn't ever really involved in the fantasy category market and he certainly wasn't the trunk of all of epic fantasy. You could make a lot of good arguments that Conan had way more impact, especially since he became a big comic book feature and Conan style fantasy was the big drive in the late 1970's, early 1980's. Michael Moorcock was not inspired by Tolkien and he had enormous impact on New Wave SF, multiverse fantasy and SF, and epic fantasy, as editor and author, possibly more impact on the last than Tolkien did in the end, and Leiber as well. Roger Zelazny was not inspired by Tolkien, and though his Amber books were multiverse, they had a tremendous impact on epic fantasy. He and Moorcock were part of the group that called themselves Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA) that started around 1963 and involved authors and editors like Lin Carter, Poul Anderson, Zelazny, Leiber, Jack Vance, L. Sprague de Camp, etc. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which started in the late 1940's also had a huge impact on epic fantasy through short fiction.

A few things. I think you understate Tolkien's influence and in a way contradict yourself by saying that most epic fantasies after 1980 or so were judged in relation to Tolkien, but then minimize his influence.

I would also say that Moorcock “was not inspired by Tolkien” in a similar way that a rebellious son is not inspired by his father. As I said above in my response to Matthew, with Moorcock—as with Gary Gygax—there's an element of “thou dost protest too much.” His reaction to (or against) Tolkien—and deliberate subversion—is a form of influence.

And Dungeons & Dragons, first the game craze and then the tie-in books that launched numerous big authors and fantasy titles in the 1970's and 1980's, probably in the end had the biggest overall influence. It's true that D&D borrowed liberally from Tolkien to set up their game, but it also borrowed from Moorcock, Leiber, the Christian Bible, comics, etc., and it was much more focused on sword & sorcery style stuff, and creating systems of magic. A lot of the writers who came into fantasy fiction in the 1970's and 1980's hadn't even read Lord of the Rings. So LOTR was a very important stream in one sub-category of the fantasy field, but it wasn't the trunk. (I'm not sure the tree metaphor would work really -- it is more messy than linear.)

Yes, agreed. Not sure what the right metaphor is for Tolkien's influence and relationship to fantasy post-1955, but certainly we can say that his shadow looms large, and larger than anyone else's.

Well first off, I think you'd get an argument from baseball fans that Ruth changed all baseball and nobody was more important than him. It sounds reductive.

Well, as a baseball fan I don't argue with that comparison . Again, I'm not saying that there weren't other significant changes, but Ruth—more than any other single player—defined and influenced baseball. He is “the” baseball player, among many other greats.

But again, as for Tolkien, he did no such thing. He had no interest or involvement in the American fantasy category market or what developed in the English language global market. A number of very important editors of magazines and books did and they were not dancing all around Tolkien or epic fantasy. The late 1960's to 1980's fantasy market grew so quickly because again it had already gotten a big impetus in popularity in the 1950's and because it involved a wide range of stuff, some of which developed with science fiction developments (remember a lot of authors wrote both) -- horror, dark fantasy, contemporary and urban fantasy, historical fantasy, fairy tale fantasy, portal, multiverse, futuristic and post-apocalypse fantasy, African influenced fantasy, feminist fantasy, alternate history fantasy, superhero fantasy with comics connections, etc. Fantasy fiction was not centralized around epic fantasy as a market or a field. The tie-in fantasy market was but that's because it was mostly games tie-in stuff and the games -- RPG followed fairly quickly by electronic games.

Again, not sure if I agree with this general argument. I think you are, because of your deep knowledge of the field, seeing too many “trees” and missing the “forest.”

But rather than go around in circles on this, let me take a different angle and ask, which fantasy authors do you think had a comparable influence to Tolkien?

I'm also not sure what Tolkien's “interest” has to do with anything. His influence was unintentional, yes, but no less for it (maybe even more for it, as “intentional influencers” often fade and/or are perceived as contrived...like trying to write the Great American Novel or the Next Big Thing...that attempt always falls flat, at least as a primary motivator).

Now, in the 1990's, decades after Tolkien, in the U.S. we had a recession and that was followed by the collapsing shrinkage of the wholesale market for comics, newspapers, magazines and paperbacks, mainly in the U.S. but also spreading globally. They didn't even need the Internet to start killing things off -- it went then when there was a lot of streamlining by grocery and drugstore chains, newsstands, etc. And that hurt all the genre fiction -- the category markets -- very badly because they depended on mass market paperback. Midlist authors got dumped as publishers reduced their lists and specialty bookstores for genre fiction that depended on mid-list titles and already were being squeezed by the corporate book superstores started dying off. It took mystery fiction over a decade to recover, and science fiction even longer. Romance frantically sub-divided as they lost lines, which is why they went into fantasy and sf romance much bigger in the 1990's, as well as suspense and sent their big writers out into general fiction to write family sagas, whatever would bring in readers. And one bright spot in that convulsion was epic fantasy. Most of fantasy fiction also took a hit -- especially since SF they published with was hurting -- but there were enough big epic fantasy series to keep things going. So publishers did pour a lot of titles into epic fantasy and then that did make epic fantasy the largest sub-category and the lead boat in the category market. But it didn't have a lot to do with the Lord of the Rings. And in the early oughts, it changed back to a wider variety, with contemporary fantasy briefly being the big boat (and technically still may be.)

I think you are putting too many things in one basket and in a sense saying I'm saying things that I'm not. By saying that Tolkien has an influence on everything after him, I am not saying that the LotR drove epic fantasy sales in the 90s (although he influenced the authors of the 90s to varying degrees). But if we're talking about sales, one thing that sets The Hobbit and LotR apart from almost every other fantasy, is that it is a consistent big seller, not only year in and year out, but decade after decade. It is the classic in the field, with other classics that have strong perennial sales, but none quite on the level of those two books. And this was even before the films.

There are a lot of fans who are only epic fantasy fans -- that's what they love. And a lot of them tend to forget that the fantasy field is much wider and that authors crossed sub-categories all the time. They think their love is the center. But it's really not. And it also wasn't a sub-category that was filled with happy elf stories because of Tolkien and then got all dark and dirty because of George Martin either. Again, readers and authors aren't a school of minnows who go all in one direction and then all switch in another direction. So yeah, if you're trying to map it out, it's more several lines interwoven, than one root, one author from which things sprang. We've become less familiar with a lot of critical authors in the 1920's to 1950's period who had a lot of impact on 1950's-1980's fantasy because there were several decades more of fantasy fiction, we don't read everything and a lot of what they did was short fiction in magazines that don't exist anymore -- but which writers in the 1960's say knew and were influenced by. So that is the harder part of your list. 1960's on up is easy, although the 1960's ones and some of the 1970's and 80's ones have also faded.

Again, I think you are making a bit of a strawman out of what I'm saying, Kat. It isn't either/or: either the view that fantasy is this complex web with no clear major forces in it, or it is one monolithic tree issuing from Tolkien. It is somewhere in-between. I think you say that with “it's more several lines interwoven, than one root” – which I completely agree with. And I don't necessarily see all sub-genres of fantasy as being offshoots of epic, but I do think that epic fantasy as a central location because of its close relationship to quest fantasy.

Well it was also a cultural and artistic movement -- Byron, Shelley, putting up follies on British estates, and so forth, but it was, according to the historians, from the 1700's to the mid-1800's, ending more or less as a movement after the Regency period and the Napoleonic wars. And they claim that realism was a reactionary movement to that earlier romanticism. American transcendentalism was also in the early 1800's concurrent with part of the romantic period and ended in the 1840's. I don't know a lot about the German idealists but they were later -- like I said, ideas of romanticism didn't disappear just because the historical movement ended. Fairy tales never go out of style. And of course you had sort of a Freud-Jung discussion going on there throughout much of the 20th century.

Yes, agreed.

Well, Jemisin was more talking about there being two stylistic strands in fantasy that approach magical fantastical element use -- numenistic and more structured, and that because more structured was used in several popular series -- Malazan, Sanderson , etc. -- in the last decade, there was clamoring that all fantasy has to be written that way. Because again fans often act like it's minnows -- everybody has to go in the same direction, even though that's never been how it works. So they were bugging her about her work, which is much more in the tradition of McKillip, Le Guin, Butler, and on back. Fantasy authors who come from games interest tend to prefer more structured systems because that's what they are used to in the games. Fantasy authors who come to fantasy from the more mythology and folklore side of things, including cultural traditions from African countries, Latin America, etc., tend to be more numenistic. A lot of fantasy authors are simply in between. Glen Cook's Black Company stories for instance are essentially numenistic on the magic side -- things just are, wizards do spells but there's not a lot of explanation, etc., but a lot of people think it's more structured because it's a mercenary company that have military procedures they follow. There is also a belief that anything that is contemporary in nature in fantasy is structured, whereas in a lot of contemporary and historical fantasy, it is also numenistic. You can't get fantasy authors to all write the same -- they just don't, and publishers like to have the variety in the field to catch the maximum possible number of readers.

I haven't read Jemisin's earlier works, but I almost see The Fifth Season as more in the Sanderson/Erikson school of magic than the Le Guin approach. Maybe it was in response to “them bugging her”? (Whoever “they” are...the minnows?). But again, I see a correlation between what could be called “right-brain magic” (numenistic) and “left-brain magic” (systematic). The right-brain needs no structured explanation, whereas the left-brain requires it.

As for left brain and right brain, fiction writers use both. They have to because left brain is verbal and written language and right brain is imagery. Science fiction does like to promote itself as very sciency and logical, but the reality is most of it isn't. Space opera doesn't really hit as left brain fiction -- it's spectacle with a science gloss, most of it -- and space opera is one of the biggest sub-categories of science fiction. But certainly the engine of science fiction -- unreal things that have a proposed natural explanation/basis for existing -- is left brain in wanting that natural science explanation over an unnatural, supernatural one that is used for unreal elements in fantasy. The line between SF and fantasy is often simply one of justification. If my vampire is a magical being who freaks out at the sight of a cross, that's an unreal thing that has an unnatural explanation for existence -- it's fantasy. If my vampire is an alien who is parasitic and drinks blood from other creatures as food, like a vampire bat, that's an unreal thing that has a natural explanation for existence and so it's science fiction. If I've got a talking cat, I can switch from a witch's magical familiar (fantasy) and so can talk to an android cat or a cat with scientifically enhanced intelligence and altered vocal chords (science fiction.) Same talking cat -- I just changed the explanation for how it exists.

A lot of people don't like that idea, I've found. It's apparently not rigid enough. But it is how we divvy up the two unreal genres into science fiction and fantasy. So even if I have a system of magic that is very detailed and categorized, as long as I'm explaining that it exists because it's magic -- unnatural, beyond nature, then it's fantasy. So that's why authors can in fact switch back and forth between science fiction and fantasy quite easily. The more sciency they want a story to be -- the more concrete the natural explanation for the unreal elements' existence they want to have -- then they've got to do more research and may be more left brainy about it. Fantasy may involve cultural and other research, which is also left brain, but it's still going to be an unnatural explanation for what exists, even if there are some science fiction elements -- unreal things that are given a natural explanation, along with the unnatural ones (i.e. futuristic fantasy for instance.) Jemisin took some sort of NASA workshop that educates media people, including SFF writers, about accurate science stuff and that is apparently what gave her the base material for The Fifth Element. And the magic system in The Fifth Element for the orogenes is actually pretty structured. But she has the unnatural magic explanation for the key elements as a fantasy story.

But there is a distinctly different tonal quality in fantasy and science fiction, just as your vampires “feel” different depending upon how they are explained. Another example that stands out is whether the “gods” are alien beings with advanced technology, or actual supernatural entities that exist in a non-physical way. In a way the former is closer to modern realism, and more acceptable to someone who doesn't like to suspend disbelief or finds the fantastical, magical, and supernatural abhorrent in some way—whether for scientific or religious reasons.

The Fifth Season is an interesting case and reminds me of what John Clute said, that as we go deeper into the 21st century, the boundaries between fantasy and science fiction will further blur. In fact, I see this as a literary version (or symptom) of globalism which echoes similarly in other fields. Actually, it may be that when we look back at the history of fantastic literature, we will see the mid-90s as a major turning point—similar in importance to the publication of the LotR—not because of any specific author, but because of the internet and how it made the Information Age come alive. But maybe that's another conversation...

 

[Alchemist]

I just posted that last one before reading your reply to me above it, Kat. I'm really pooped and will have to get to it tomorrow. Enjoying the discussion!

 

[Randy M.]

[...]I wouldn't call it an "essentials" list because that sounds like a you should read this list and that I think serves little purpose. All of the traditions, settings and styles of fantasy fiction are not going to work for all fans. Some are very picky. Case in point -- you don't want the children's/YA titles that were influential, you don't want to involve the horror people but they were influential, and you are more interested in epic fantasy than the other types.

Yes and no. Such lists gain the stigma of required reading, when really they serve best as pointers in a direction. I'm not a really fast reader -- too many distractions, too little concentrated time in a day for reading -- so lists used to help, especially if its from someone whose taste I had reason to trust. Early on I found I didn't like all the books/stories in any one list, but it didn't stop me from checking out other lists. Two things happened: 1) The more lists I consulted, the broader my reading in the given genre became. I started reading fantasy about the time Lin Carter's Sign of the Unicorn series ended, but that served as a list of works to look for: I knew (assumed?) these were works Carter would vouch for and I learned that others in the field agreed with most of his choices. Perhaps for some more recent readers the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks would serve a similar purpose. 2) Next I began developing my own lists because there were some books that sang to me, and some that didn't. Alchemist asks for a list of 100 "Essentials" and I suspect my inclusion of The Land of Laughs and a number of story collections like Nightmares and Geezenstacks and Fancies and Goodnights that mix in non-fantasy stories would likely fall outside of his interests. But they might help someone else triangulate what they want to look into.

So, KatG, assume someone interested in fantasy can't read as much or as fast as you can but has had a good experience with some of the books you've mentioned in the past and would like as wide a grounding in as possible in the genre: What did you love enough to point that person to?

Randy M.

 

[KatG]

Oh, good, I'm glad you are enjoying the discussion.

You know, when I read this paragraph I got this image of two parallel but distinct universes that come together and mix every so often, in a cyclical fashion – both major and minor cycles. The 70s seem to have been a “major” cycle of this, when fantasy and sf bled together and mixed. One of my favorite series, CJ Cherryh's Morgaine Saga, is a good example – where the book reads like fantasy, is experienced as fantasy by the viewpoint character, who is from a fantasy world (so to speak), but there are science fictional underpinnings to the whole set-up (Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is similar, as are many of the Darkover books). That is an example of subtlety and craft, whereas the warrior with a laser gun in one hand and a sword in the other is more crass and obvious. But yeah, I hear you. And the line is fuzzy, the definitions of genre a “fuzzy set” as Brian Attebery would say.

They are less universes perhaps than parallel tracks and you can flip back and forth between them pretty easily. The line between them isn't that fuzzy -- authors make choices. They choose to use unreal material rather than just real material, which puts their stories in the speculative unreal areas. And then they choose the cause of all of the unreal material and that choice -- natural or unnatural -- makes it science fiction or fantasy. Science fiction doesn't have unnatural stuff in it. (Of course, t.v. shows like to sneak it into their sci-fi shows anyway.) Fantasy may have natural and unnatural stuff in it, as long as it has the unnatural stuff. But readers often like to bend that basic division because they like different descriptions of it.

Again, fantasy authors most of the time don't write just one style of fantasy all their lives, also a good chunk of them also write science fiction, and/or suspense fiction, maybe romance, or contemporary realism stories -- and all of these things affect each other. Writers don't write in a vacuum. If you're trying to nail down epic fantasy, it's a bit hard without also including contemporary, historical, etc., and certainly portal and multiverse fantasy, and a few science fiction ones as well. Anne McCaffrey's Pern books are science fiction and included a seminal YA trilogy, but they had a big impact on fantasy writing and inspired a lot of fantasy writers to play with dragons. So when we talk about works shaping or defining the history of epic fantasy fiction or fantasy fiction the whole field -- it's a lot of works.

You can make lists that are about interesting works that were popular, awarded, talked about by many and which many authors cite as influences. There's a difference between these are the masters of all lists and reading lists. I am inclined to the latter.

To put it another way, if you were to think of 100 writers (or novels, or even just stories) that best define and essential the entire history of fantasy as a genre, which would they be? My guess is that there are about 50+ authors (or books) who we could all mostly agree upon, and then it would get rather challenging.

Oh I don't think we'd even get to 50 before it got challenging.

To be clear, I wrote sprouted with Tolkien not from, meaning that the various strands or roots that would become epic fantasy, came together and gave birth to (sprouted) Tolkien as the modern archetype of the quest fantasy.

I have never read that Tolkien was greatly influenced by Howard and Conan the Barbarian. But Jason and the Golden Fleece? Yes. Tolkien wasn't writing modern -- he was writing old, deliberately, in style and using the material of the far past, particularly the medieval works as his archetypes -- Greek myth, Norse myth, Beowulf, Song of Roland, The Morte d'Arthur, Chaucer, British history, etc. He did have some of the World Wars material there, which did give it a modern reflection of old archetypes, but again, he was not inspired by American fantasy and comics. But American modern writers of epic fantasy? They very much were. They were also influenced by fairy tales, Disney movies, adventure stories and noir suspense fiction. He's a major influence. He's just not the trunk, as I was saying. It's not that linear.

It is almost as if every post-Tolkien epic fantasy and/or secondary world fantasy is, in some way, in relation or even dialogue with Tolkien and Middle-earth, even if it is completely different.

It used to be that way in some circles, not really as much anymore. It was a thing some fans liked to do in the 1970's and 1980's, mostly in the wake of LOTR turning into a phenom. But it was a perception thing, not a thing that the writers were doing and what was all going on in the market. Tolkien was the lit boy -- a linguist British Oxford don who wrote a massive fairy tale saga, had no connection with the magazine/category market (respectable outsider,) but had let an American category press do the paperbacks of his work to deal with a copyright infringement, and that had been a large success. So that was the respectability touchstone -- writing big fairy tales wasn't silly, so there! So if you wrote a book, thick or thin, that was pre-industrial and involved a group of characters getting together to deal with something, which most fiction does, certainly most suspense fiction which is what SFF mostly is, they would compare you with the not only popular but respectable Lord of the Rings as to whether you were just a trashy copy (establishment,) or an innovator (rebellion) moving away from Tolkien's supposedly not dark, heroic quest tale (which is actually a war tale, not a quest tale.) It didn't matter if it had anything to do with what authors were doing or not or whether they'd actually read LOTR or not -- it was a way to trash authors you didn't like or elevate authors you did. You could think of it as sort of a transitional marketing reaction as category fantasy grew as a market in tandem with SF. When they did the movies, the Tolkien comparisons started up again for a bit -- and that's why Game of Thrones and Harry Potter are used too, and Twilight to bash women writers -- they had hit films/t.v. made which make people more aware of those titles in addition to their popularity as books.

I would also broadly agree with what you say in that it almost seems that Tolkien wasn't really copied until Terry Brooks, whose popularity basically told us that copying Tolkien can lead to massive commercial success.

Except Brooks didn't copy Tolkien. He blended bits from Lord of the Rings and then a lot of other bits from other places, as writers do. Sword of Shannara isn't even an epic fantasy novel. It's a post-apocalyptic futuristic fantasy story set on Earth with mutated humans. Brooks was borrowing heavily from previous science fiction stories, particularly planetary romances (Burroughs' Jack Carter,) and post-apocalyptic fiction with nuclear mutations, and things like John Wyndham's novels. And also, once again, Jack Vance's Dying Earth, because that got used again and again. He also borrowed from Leiber, because many writing past 1969 or so did, and adventure legends like Robin Hood, and he also borrowed a little from D&D (and later provided material for them.) But the main ones he used were Dumas' The Three Musketeers and the story of King Arthur -- the sword in the stone. A good chunk of Shannara's plot is lifted from the Musketeer stories, more than Lord of the Rings, and the principle conceit is the story of Arthur, especially as interpreted popularly by T.H. White.

Now, everybody knows that Gandalf is Merlin. Tolkien took Merlin and borrowed him whole cloth. Which is fine. Brooks has a sorcerer who is younger, temperamental, impatient, guilt-wracked, ruthless and largely incompetent at his job. Other than being tall and a wizard, he's nothing like Gandalf or Merlin. But he is tall and a wizard and comes to get the chosen young Arthur in the story. Tolkien borrowed a good bit from King Arthur, but flipped it in that Frodo isn't the chosen one king but an ordinary person (minor gentry) who volunteers (he's more Galahad, who was an important figure for Tolkien.) Aragorn became sort of the King Arthur figure in Tolkien's story, whereas Brooks made the King Arthur story central and his protagonist. The books have very different themes, world building elements and quite a number of plot points, and obviously the writing styles are completely different, but they are in the same neighborhood -- as were many other fantasy works both before and after LOTR.

Brooks was published by the same folk who did the official paperbacks of Tolkien and they marketed the book as the next Tolkien, since LOTR was the big phenom of the time, which pissed a lot of people off. The book did enormously well -- just short of being a phenom -- which also pissed a lot of people off who didn't think Brooks' writing was good enough to be liked and resented that lots of people liked his book anyway. Did Brooks bring in a lot of new readers and open things up for publishers to fund more fantasy works? Yes. He also was an influence in secondary world fantasy, portal fantasy and post-apocalyptic futuristic fantasy. But the idea that it was a linear line of Tolkien to Brooks to everybody following Brooks and that changed everything is not what was actually happening in fantasy publishing. Brooks' work helped fund the on-going fantasy market, letting them continue to expand in the 1980's. Other major works published around and shortly after Brooks' first would also have influences and provide funding, because fiction is a symbiotic market. Brooks' story is really much more sword & sorcery in the end, with a touch of science fiction elements, but people again tended to put different types of fantasy land fantasy as the same, which is why epic fantasy became the wider term.

A few things. I think you understate Tolkien's influence and in a way contradict yourself by saying that most epic fantasies after 1980 or so were judged in relation to Tolkien, but then minimize his influence.

I don't minimize Tolkien's influence. He was a huge influence (except in writing style, he mainly was not.) What I am countering is the mythologizing that occurred as Tolkien as the wellspring shaper of all modern fantasy, meaning usually category fantasy titles. He really wasn't and when he's put in that position, you can't really talk about all the influences and what was out there because you're trying to squish everything into Tolkien. It's trying to make him the seismic event, and he wasn't. He was a big money event, mainly for Ballantine Books, and he was directly for some and indirectly for other writers an important influence.

But he tends to get credited for being the source of a lot of things he's not the source of. Again, Tolkien didn't invent Merlin, or talking trees, willowy elves, dwarfs and other small fairy races, orcs, giant spiders, magical inscribed rings, ghost armies, women dressing up as men to be soldiers, nomadic horse tribes, corrupted evil entities who can't be easily killed, etc. All of these things were common myth, folklore, past fantasy stories sorts of things. And writers using similar things didn't all go to LOTR and then borrow from there. But they got accused of it a lot for awhile there. Using folklore plots and adventure plots, you are going to have a lot of the same stuff in plot structure or elements. So accrediting it to one book just isn't a really analytical thing -- it's a desire to have a holy bible of fantasy writing. So that's something you run into with some fans.

My favorite example of this currently is still the uproar when The Vampire Diaries t.v. show came on the air and was denounced as a rip-off of Twilight when it was actually the adaptation of a book series that came out years before Twilight. Because you know they both had teenagers and vampires -- like hundreds of other fantasy novels in the past. People assume that when a book is very popular that everybody is simply copying it, rather than writing in the same neighborhood or sometimes sampling bits of it and blending them with other things. So the influence of big books goes from being an influence to being an origin event. And they really aren't. Those titles that you would put on your list post-Tolkien as major influences weren't all Tolkien's descendants or reactions to LOTR.

I would also say that Moorcock “was not inspired by Tolkien” in a similar way that a rebellious son is not inspired by his father. As I said above in my response to Matthew, with Moorcock—as with Gary Gygax—there's an element of “thou dost protest too much.” His reaction to (or against) Tolkien—and deliberate subversion—is a form of influence.

Again, Moorcock started being involved in the British SFF scene when he was not even out of his teens and before LOTR was on the scene. His big thing was constructing a multiverse which included Elric, contemporary fantasy and science fiction parts as well. On the fantasy side, he was much more influenced by Howard, Burroughs and Eddison. And that was the source of a lot of his criticism of Tolkien -- he and many other authors weren't doing what Tolkien had done and they resented the insistence that they were and that everything was being declared some offshoot of Tolkien by many fans. The other part of it was that Tolkien came from the Old World, Catholic, classical, upper social classes colonialism, etc. that Moorcock regarded as problematic and in need of change, as he's an anarchist. Tolkien's pastoralism was not where he thought literature and fantasy literature should be heading or believed it was heading. In particular, a lot of writers of fantasy in the mid-1950's to 1970's era were upset that Leiber was being over-looked as a main influence in favor of Tolkien in discussion, given that Leiber really had an impact, especially on epic fantasy. (And Zelazny as well.) So for awhile there, 1970's into maybe the early 1990's, there were a lot of theories of a binary of fantasy fiction, that Tolkien and Moorcock (and/or Leiber,) were the twin suns of fantasy -- the high and the low, the pastoral, classical and heroic versus the more contemporary, edgy, dark and horror tinged adventures -- any of this sounding familiar to the same sorts of binaries that people put up now? Moorcock and his magazines and Elric really weren't a well-spring either, just an influence and sometimes a sales platform for writers of various eras. But for some, they made a handy rebellion to Tolkien's supposed establishment.

Yes, agreed. Not sure what the right metaphor is for Tolkien's influence and relationship to fantasy post-1955, but certainly we can say that his shadow looms large, and larger than anyone else's.

There's a difference with Tolkien being a looming shadow over how fantasy publishing is done and Tolkien being a very familiar name that most people know but which thousands and thousands of fantasy fans have never read, although many do end up studying his work in school. Fantasy publishers are not, nor did they in the past, build everything around whether it was like LOTR or not like LOTR. Most writers didn't write their stories around that. So his shadow doesn't necessarily loom. He's just a well-known author. He did not change fantasy publishing; though he did help bring more readers into the category market.

Again, not sure if I agree with this general argument. I think you are, because of your deep knowledge of the field, seeing too many “trees” and missing the “forest.”

I think it's more that you're talking about writers and publishers in fantasy but what you really mean are fans and what fans are most familiar with. People again are very familiar with Tolkien's name and a lot read him for pleasure or study his work in school and/or saw the movies more recently. But LOTR doesn't run the fantasy fans either, and certainly not the market. He's part of the history of it. He didn't direct that history. He did not change fantasy fans' interaction with the category fantasy market, etc.

But rather than go around in circles on this, let me take a different angle and ask, which fantasy authors do you think had a comparable influence to Tolkien?

Greco-Roman myths and history
Norse and German myths
Celtic myths
Legend of King Arthur/Le Morte d'Arthur
Legend of Robin Hood/Ivanhoe by William Scott
Grimm's Fairy Tales
A Thousand and One Arabian Nights
Judea-Christian Bible
Beowulf
William Shakespeare
The Bronte Sisters
Alexandre Dumas
Jonathan Swift
Charles Dickens
Robert Louis Stevenson
Bram Stoker
Oscar Wilde
Mark Twain
Rudyard Kipling
Arthur Conan Doyle
H.P. Lovecraft
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Jules Verne
H.G. Wells
Lord Dunsany
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Dashiell Hammett
Robert E. Howard
Susan Cooper
Roald Dahl
T.H. White
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Ursula Le Guin
Ray Bradbury
Fritz Leiber
Andre Norton
Mary Stewart
Stephen King
Anne Rice
Terry Pratchett
J.K. Rowling
Robert Jordan
George R.R. Martin
Glen Cook
R.A. Salvatore
Pern books, Anne McCaffrey
Xanth series, Piers Anthony
Charles de Lint
Peter Beale
Dungeons & Dragons Role Playing Game

Etc. I'm probably forgetting several people, and then of course there are Asian myths, etc. Influence, especially when we are talking about fantasy writers putting out titles, is again, not a direct thing.

I'm also not sure what Tolkien's “interest” has to do with anything. His influence was unintentional, yes, but no less for it (maybe even more for it, as “intentional influencers” often fade and/or are perceived as contrived...like trying to write the Great American Novel or the Next Big Thing...that attempt always falls flat, at least as a primary motivator).

You keep saying that he shaped category fantasy publishing. I'm saying he was not involved in the development of category fantasy publishing.

But if we're talking about sales, one thing that sets The Hobbit and LotR apart from almost every other fantasy, is that it is a consistent big seller, not only year in and year out, but decade after decade. It is the classic in the field, with other classics that have strong perennial sales, but none quite on the level of those two books. And this was even before the films.

Well no, there are a number of fantasy novels and science fiction novels that sell year in and year out -- they're called classic literature and they sell that way because they are studied in schools and universities and so sell lots of copies every year. It's not the classic in the field. It's a classic in the field. Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy is a big seller decade after decade (and it's never even had a good movie/t.v. adaptation.) Dracula sells year in and year out, so forth. J.K. Rowling's fantasy novels sell year after year and she has outsold Tolkien. Stephen King's fantasy novels sell year in and year out. Dr. Seus does. Ray Bradbury, etc. The Chronicles of Narnia. The Hobbit is a staple of school curriculum in North America and Britain at this point. And Lord of the Rings has a firm place at universities. The Silmarillion is a harder nut to chew, though it was Tolkien's dearest project, but it also has a decent academic reputation.

And it should. But being an important book/author and selling well does not mean that Tolkien has had the most impact on all fantasy writers of the past several decades. If he's going to have a "shadow loom," it's on epic fantasy obviously, but even there, the fantasy writers aren't mainly building their works around Tolkien and tons of epic fantasy fans have not read Lord of the Rings. That will change as the books are part of academics and people are required to read them through generations, and many may have seen the movies, but it is the reality.

So for this list you need to consider whether you want it to be about the books that are most famous and selling -- and maybe influential to fans, or the ones that ranged from popular to famous and influenced writers (obviously some overlap.) Twilight was very influential/popular to fantasy fans and a phenom -- but not necessarily to a lot of fantasy writers, even in YA. And whether you want it to be all of fantasy or just epic fantasy. If it is the latter, you might want to just make the cut-off point 1950, because while there were obviously titles that influenced those doing epic fantasy, as we've been discussing, the category fantasy market -- of which then epic fantasy became an official sub-category,started revving up in the 1950's and was fully launched in the early 1960's, mainly in North America.

Again, I think you are making a bit of a strawman out of what I'm saying, Kat.

I'm not trying to make any strawman because I'm trying to help you with the list you want to make. But it is your wants in the list, so the parameters can be various different things as I said above. If you want a list of those most directly linked to Lord of the Rings, we can try to do that.

And I don't necessarily see all sub-genres of fantasy as being offshoots of epic, but I do think that epic fantasy as a central location because of its close relationship to quest fantasy.

I would change that to its close relationship to classic myths and fairy tales, not quests. And that doesn't really cover all of epic fantasy because epic fantasy involves post-industrial worlds and historical blends, plus portals and multiverses, uses war and suspense plots, etc.

I haven't read Jemisin's earlier works, but I almost see The Fifth Season as more in the Sanderson/Erikson school of magic than the Le Guin approach. Maybe it was in response to “them bugging her”? (Whoever “they” are...the minnows?).

Fans who complain in general and sometimes specifically about what they feel proper fantasy should include. And yes, she did change her approach slightly in the new series, but not because of that. It was the nature of the material she was using -- seismic energy, natural phenomena, past secrets of civilizations. This puts it more in the neighborhood with post-apocalypse and futuristic fantasy fiction, as well as post-apoc dystopian SF.

But there is a distinctly different tonal quality in fantasy and science fiction,

I think that's more wishful thinking than reality. There are many different tonal styles in fantasy and SF, including both in horror. Certainly there are people who prefer one explanation for the unreal elements more than the other, but I'm not sure the particular use of an explanation produces a distinct tone feeling for all of SF or all of fantasy. It's easier just to identify concrete general elements because that's how we group them into categories. But there are many stylistic similarities between some SF stories and fantasy stories.

Actually, it may be that when we look back at the history of fantastic literature, we will see the mid-90s as a major turning point—similar in importance to the publication of the LotR—not because of any specific author, but because of the internet and how it made the Information Age come alive. But maybe that's another conversation...

See, this is probably where we are doing some of the cross-talking. You keep talking about "turning points" -- seismic events that change everything, the minnows going one way and then they all "turn" the other. And that's not really what happens. Big books aren't like bombs that are dropped into the landscape and change all forever. Instead, it's just lots of different developments and cross-borrowing, and the big books bring in floods of readers who then browse. What is the "turn" that you think Tolkien caused fantasy publishing to make? And the Internet has had a big impact on bookselling -- as did the wholesale market collapse -- but I'm not sure how you think it's affected the writing of fantasy fiction. Do you mean the self-publishing?

Yes and no. Such lists gain the stigma of required reading, when really they serve best as pointers in a direction.

Yes, recommendation lists. But there's a difference between recommendation lists and "best" lists. You can do the recommends list as you know, without making it a best of list. Not that I object to people making their best of lists when they want to. I just don't make Best of lists. I like to talk about authors and works, not pit them against each other in an arena.

There are a lot of books I know about that I actually haven't read (and may not get to.) But I know them. And there are lots of authors I can talk about, but as I said, my knowledge of pre-1960 fantasy fiction not counting classic lit may not be very effective. I think we've got everybody I know of who was major in the time period for the thread, but I couldn't say for sure.

But I'm still nailing down parameters. For instance Tim Powers -- one of my favorite writers, a bestseller, studied along with James Blaylock and K.W. Jeter with Phillip K. Dick, helped invent the steampunk lit movement and urban fantasy designation in the 1980's with Jeter, best known for his time travel fantasy The Annubis Gates, had a big impact on writers doing historical and contemporary fantasy. On the list, not on the list? Not that big an influence possibly on writers when they did epic fantasy, although of course, his works The Stress of Her Regard, On Stranger Tides and The Drawing of the Dark may have influenced epic fantasy writing -- some writers have sited him as an influence and writers who like Glen Cook tend to like him too. But does Alchemist want names not maybe critical to pre-industrial epic fantasy?