The Aesthetics of Fantasy - Part One

In recent times a debate has been slowly making its way round the various fora and blogs that make up the SFF community.  It even washed up on this HERE site and is evidently still raging out there somewhere, fierce enough to warrant Hal Duncan (of Vellum fame) writing a huge piece trying to clarify terms and lay some conceptual groundwork.

Clearly, there's more that needs to be said on this topic.

I have never made any bones about my attitude to fantasy, particularly fantasy of the epic/high/vanilla/fat kind.  However, I also like to think that I am quite an open minded chap who, as far as culture goes, likes to spend time outside of his comfort zone.  So, when the good folk at Orbit books sent me an advance copy of Tad Williams’ Shadowplay, I thought I would take a run at it.  Unfortunately though, after a hundred or so pages I realised that I was vaguely discontent with the book because the writer was clearly not writing for someone with my tastes and values.  Now, while I, as a critic, do think that my tastes are broadly in line with the objective aesthetic principles that govern all artistic expression, I do also believe that the best reviews are those that temper those principles with a knowledge of what the writer was trying to achieve when he wrote the book.  This means that, in practice, I dislike apologetic reviews that explain all the flaws and mistakes as deliberate unimpeachably artistic decisions, but I also dislike reviews that completely fail to give a piece any credit at all.  That way lies the broadsheet newspaper approach to reviewing where smug arty types sneer and pour insults on some harmless popcorn action film.  So, in order to fairly review Shadowplay and give fat fantasy a proper chance I decided to go off and do some research and try and work out what it was that fantasy fans liked to see in their novels.  Based on a couple of threads I started on forums that are full of fantasy fans and some discussions I have had with people I know that like fantasy, I have formed a preliminary theory of the aesthetics of fat fantasy, in particular the three values that imbibe fantasy with quality in the eyes of the fans and how those values manifest themselves as a series of balancing acts relating to each component of the story.

I use the term “fat fantasy” because that is a term I think rather fitting given the genre’s tendency to produce long series full of long books.  In truth the term actually hides a constellation of fantasy sub-genres which, I think, do not particularly need discussing here.  It is simply a nicely vague term that encapsulates works of the kind produced by Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin and David Eddings but rules out the more pulpy novellas of Robert E. Howard or Fritz Leiber and the more experimental fantasy of China Mieville or Charles Stross.  I am not really intending this to be a universal rule so I’m quite happy to allow for books that might be fat fantasy but not fit these criteria as well as books that fit these criteria without being fat fantasy.  I’m not so much looking to produce an iron cast set of artistic principles, rather I’m looking to make a cursory observation.

There are, in essence, three distinct values that underpin the aesthetics of fantasy.  These are values that seem to underpin any successful fantasy series and they are a combination of the rules governing the fantasy genre and the economic realities of the fantasy marketplace.


ACCESSIBILITY - Perhaps the supreme value of fat fantasy as a genre is that it must be easy to pick up and read.  This explains the frequent use of tropes as well as the tendency for fantasy to use the same stock/archetypal character in the same stock/archetypal plots.  It also explains why fat fantasy never strays overly far from the roots laid down by Tolkien.  A setting too different or a book confronting too difficult or weird a set of ideas would require the readers to either draw heavily upon educations that they might not have or for them to do some intellectual heavy lifting to come to grips with what the author is talking about.  This differentiates fantasy from what is frequently called “literary SF” or “speculative fiction” as the aim of such fiction is often specifically to engage with weird and difficult ideas.  Herein lies the degree of antagonism between SF and Fantasy fans and the philistines Vs. philosophers dichotomy discussed by Hal Duncan.  It is also worth noting that while accessibility is an important genre value, it is also an economic one that goes some way to explaining the Fantasy’s long history of outselling SF.

IMMERSION - Good fat fantasy invariably seems to present the readers with a world that is real enough for them to lose themselves in, the immersion value is also the value that covers escapism, one of the most frequently cited reasons for people reading fantasy.  This value explains why much fantasy dwells on what people like Hal Duncan refer to as “window dressing” and what M. John Harrison sees as “the clomping foot of nerdism” and is frequently seen as being the motivator for fantasy world-building and what differentiates fat fantasy from the ideas-and-characters dominated pulp fantasy of Howard, Leiber and their modern heirs such as R.A. Salvatore, though it is worth noting that Salvatore is a special case as he sets his most successful novels in a world created for the Dungeons and Dragons RPG.  RPGs have a particularly close relationship with world-building with Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance novels being based upon a campaign world and a series of adventures carried out as part of a series of D&D sessions.  The value of immersion prompts writers not only to spend time coming up with endless lists of names for people and places (hence the maps at the front and glossary of names at the back common in fat fantasy) but also discussions of language, dress, smells, tastes, games, histories, mythologies, flora and fauna.  The aim is to fill the world with the kind of stuff you usually find in a world allowing the reader to imagine themselves there or picture the action clearly, the textbook example of this would be The Lord of The Rings where Tolkien’s desire to create a fictional but “real” world tapped into a common desire to immerse oneself in a fictional setting, resulting in an intellectual exercise by an Oxford academic becoming a cultural phenomenon. 

The other dimension of this value is the ease with which the characters need to be understood.  This is partly because certain types of plot require certain types of characters but also because many fantasy readers not only want to empathise with the characters they read about but even identify with the them for the purposes of imagining themselves as the heroes of the novel.  This might seem like a strange desire to have but it is worth remembering the young age at which people get into fantasy.  So while it might seem peculiar that a 35 year old man would want to picture himself as a 14 year old prince, it makes perfect sense to think of an introverted pre-teen girl wishing she was a heroic princess with special powers.  It also makes sense when you consider the size of the Roleplaying hobby as well as the number of Cosplayers who, despite being grown up, dress as their favourite characters at conventions.  Indeed, one might argue that Otherkin are motivated by a similar desire for immersion even if the world they are immersing themselves in is not necessarily recognised as fictitious.

CONSERVATISM - The last value is also the one most frequently overlooked during discussions of fantasy.  One of the things most commonly said about fantasy is its desire to be familiar, cosy and comfy (a fact even recognised by Tad Williams himself in a recent interview).  This is usually explained away as a result of the drive towards accessibility and immersion or escapism but, I would argue, it is also a result of the conservatism of the audience and a value in its own right.  This conservatism is reflected in the fact that the more critically acclaimed fantasy novels are rarely the most commercially successful as well as the strange fact that many experimental works of fantasy wind up more in the orbit of science fiction than of Fantasy.  China Mieville is an excellent example of this as are Charlie Stross’ Merchant Princes books.  The golden age of fantasy fandom is frequently said to be the early teens and, I would argue, many adult fantasy fans saw their tastes and reading habits fixed at this age. 

This is one of the reasons why books such as Harry Potter that explicitly target the tween and early-teen markets have been so phenomenally successful.  In fact, the “young adult” market segment has been one of the most notable successes of the publishing industry in recent years.  Intriguingly, this is also a pattern that has been picked up on by market research looking at the roleplaying game industry.  In a recent interview, Ryan Dancey (former person in charge of the Dungeons and Dragons line) spoke about how the average gamer is a lower-middle class suburbanite.

Interesting aspects of this demographic is that A) they will not have limited amounts of disposable income and B) they will not be hugely well informed about what kinds of books are out there, relying instead upon word of mouth recommendations.  If you factor in that the internet is a relatively recent invention and that online reviews of fantasy works need to be actively searched for and you have a recipe for fantasy fans acquiring the habit of walking into bookshops and and, not wanting to take a risk with their money, picking up the book that seems most likely to replicate the good experiences they had with the last fantasy novel they read.  This model is also supported by the fact that young people will frequently buy whatever music is on the radio (rather than whatever music attracts the most critical praise) and the fact that the Potter books quickly attracted feeding frenzies upon launch (not knowing what else is out there, the children are desperate for what everyone is talking about).  This behaviour is not limited to fantasy either as it goes some way to explain the continued popularity of film, game and TV series tie in novels in the SF marketplace.

It follows from these facts about the marketplace that producing a novel that looks as much like every other novel on the shelf is a vital skill for any aspiring fantasy writer.  These facts also explain why fantasy has developed a tendency towards longer books and longer series, because an intensely conservative and intensely brand loyal audience will inevitably prefer books and series that last longer as it minimises the risk involved in the next purchase as well as the frequency with which new purchases need to be made.


These three values result in high fantasy having incredibly precise success conditions as fantasy fans are no less emphatic in their demands for quality and innovation than any other type of fan.  Indeed, the gulf in sales between the lesser authors and the most commercially successful authors is testament to the fact that it is not enough for an author to merely follow the rules of the genre.  Instead, writing a fantasy novel can be seen as a series of precarious balancing acts with the most successful authors invariably knowing exactly how far they can tip the scales without the whole thing collapsing.

Seeing as this is getting quite long, I’ll break it up into two parts.  In part two, I will look at how these values manifest themselves at the level of the plot, the characters and the setting.

Comments

[Scott Bakker]

I'm just chasing links after having responded to Duncan's response to Harrison (isn't the web grand?).

Isn't there an obvious contradiction between your 'accessibility' value and your 'immersion' value? Pretty much every person I know who dislikes fantasy, comes back to how it's too much work learning the world and all the 'stupid names.'

If by 'accessibility' you simply mean 'accessible to those who find it accessible,' then you have a tautology. I think you're simply tagging on one the 'commodity virtues' (reliability, stylishness, utility, etc.) which tend to characterize all commercially dominant fiction onto fantasy, in which case, it really does nothing to define the genre contra other commercially successful genres.

As for the 'conservatism,' I'm also at a loss as to how this distinguishes fat fantasy as a commercial genre from any other commercial genre. Commitment to form is what DEFINES genre, and if this counts as 'conservative,' then all genre fiction is, by definition, conservative. And so, you really haven't done much more than say fat fantasy is a commercial genre...

What you call 'immersion,' and what Harrison crudely slams as 'world-building' is the only 'value' you pose that possesses any parsing power. The real question, then, becomes WHY immersion is so important. I have some hunches of my own, which you can check out at http://www.sffworld.com/authors/b/bakker_scott/articles/whyfantasyandwhynow.html

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi Scott, thanks for dropping by :-)

Firstly, I don't think that the values need to be in complete alignment with each other. As I'll touch on in the second part of this, I think that good fat fantasy isn't so much a question of necessary and sufficient conditions as "a pinch of this, a soupcon of that". So I think I'm happy with there being a tension, especially when the phenomenon you're talking about isn't so much a problem with access, it's a problem with the way that high fantasy describes the world (which I also touch on in part 2).

I don't think I'm defining accessibility tautologically (though I can see why that would follow from your first objection). I agree that it's not a value that differentiates commercial fantasy from commercial SF but I do think it's a value that is absent both from the more literary fantasy works and from literary Sf as a whole. The best SF is frequently staggeringly difficult to completely understand. Look to Clute's review of Blindsight for example... he characterises technobabble as a way to keep SF for the scientific cognoscenti only. I disagree with the assessment (largely because I don't think anyone is expected to understand technobabble, viz. Stross for example), but it's a view that is out there. So I'd argue that the desire to be accessible as a primary value of a genre, isn't present in all fiction (genre or otherwise) and as such I'd argue that as a distinguishing feature, it's informative.

I actually disagree with you that commitment to form satisfactorily defines genre. I think there's enough genre bending out there, not to mention stuff like the New Wave of SF (that pretty much set out to stretch the boundaries of genre as far as possible), to suggest that that's an outmoded way of looking at genre, in so far as "genre writing" is what "genre writers do" and if it isn't then you're kind of in more trouble than I am ;-) If this is more of an SF perspective on genre (which is possible, I'm mostly an Sf reader) then I'd say that it nicely reflects that fat fantasy has a different and more conservative relationship with the limits of genre than other genres, thereby making the value informative. Similarly, I'd be quite happy to say that fat fantasy is a more commercial subgenre than many others (though SF Tv tie-ins are also very commercial).

When I was writing, I actually found immersion to be the least satisfying of the values. I found it overly loose and I'm not sure escapism and identification completely fit inside it. They're all related but they're also quite different and have quite different motivations and mechanics.

Thanks for the response, you're right that this probably needs tightening up a bit but I do think that, to a certain extent, you're criticising the view from within an incompatible understanding of genre. As such, the problems aren't so much problems (though you're right there are problems) as manifestations of higher order differences of opinion and incommensurate critical paradigms/language games/whatever pomo terminology is flavour of the month.

[Fantasy Scribbler]

First off, I'd like to say that I think this is a remarkable analysis and that I agree on many counts. That said, the interrogation tends to stereotype a body of literature that, in my opinion, plays a critical role.

For one, I don't quite like the term 'fat fantasy' as I'm a lover of these kinds of books and the term, in my opinion, is somewhat derogatory. I don't find George R.R. Martin's characters, for example, to fall into a set of easily defined archetypes. In many ways, these break the archetypal molds in brilliant fashion. Furthermore, I don't feel the use of archetypes in fantasy is a bad thing at all. The reason a market exists for these kind of stories is they have resonance. Many people enjoy them, especially those who have not become jaded or cynical and are looking for visceral, meaningful experience and may not care a hoot for the academically correct.

You fail to mention Tolkien. I think this is also a bit of an oversight as Tolkien laid a good bit of the groundwork for the current interest in fantasy. One interesting thing about Tolkien was his rather liberal environmental views. Though certainly a Catholic, that particular world view did not stop him from introducing ancient mysticism from Icelandic and Germanic cultures in his stories.

My minor contribution to the genre certainly does not fall into the 'conservative' category -- at least at the social level. It's a female epic, for one, and challenges absolutist good vs evil world views. That said, I could add a long list of epic fantasy authors who are certainly not conservative. A few include Anne Bishop, Andre Norton, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Ursula K. LeGuin.

In my opinion, the genre is broad enough (though not fat enough) to include all sorts of viewpoints and cultural archetypes. The fact that a certain set appears to be popular now is more a reflection of current day culture than it is of marketing.

Of course, this is simply my opinion and I sincerely thank you for letting me post it here.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi Rob, thanks for dropping by :-)

Yes, I agree that the term "fat fantasy" is slightly derogative because it carries with it the connotations of bloat that are so often leveled at the genre. In truth, I use the term because I don't really want to get sucked in to debates about where high fantasy (a term I do occasionally swap with fat fantasy) ends and epic fantasy begins. As I said, I'm trying to feel my way towards some basis for evaluating a certain type of book. I'm not yet quite sure as to how wide a spectrum these ideas cover. So I've tried to use a term that is deliberately approximate "those fat fantasy novels".

I agree with you, archetypes aren't a bad thing at all. I talk a lot about archetypes in part two which I'll finish a bit later. One of the things that I'm trying to achieve with this is to sell the genre to myself in a sense and while I think that "archetypes" is just a high-falutin' word for concepts that are culturally familiar. I even use the word "resonance" :-)

I do, to be fair, mention Tolkien a bit and I mention him quite a bit more in the second part of this essay. Though I do have a slightly different take on him to the traditional one simply because I think he's almost accidentally a fat fantasy writer... he didn't set out to fit into a genre or a marketplace. So his relationship with the tenets of genre are going to be quite different.

I don't mean conservative as in "professing right wing views" I mean conservative in the non-political sense of wanting more of the same. Though I would argue that the tendency of the genre to invariably be pro-status quo and be about saving the world from a force for change rather than setting out to change the world because of the inequities in it is an important characteristic of the genre and one related as much to the genre's conservatism as to the issue of accessibility. After all, if you're setting out to change the world you're setting out to place a new moral order on it and this is likely to send readers into a bout of moral introspection.

I agree with you that fantasy, as a genre in general, can and does look at other cultures and completely different viewpoints. I mean China Mieville's Iron Council is essentially all about a debate internal to the radical left and high fantasy series set in non-european cultures are relatively common. I disagree with you though that the euro-centrism of fantasy is a reflection of modern day concerns... if anything it strikes me as a refusal to engage with the modern day. One of the things that surprised me in Tad Williams' book was the characterisation of arab men as either silk-tongued courtiers or evil brutal misogynists. Clearly this is harping back to the racism of both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. If fantasy tropes really were responding to our cultures then you'd find multiculturalism far more frequently than you do. In fact, one of the more sinister aspects of fantasy fandom is the process of wanting to immerse yourself in a world where all the old moral certainties still stand. While I'm not going to accuse a whole genre of being reactionary, I will say that the genre has a strange relationship with the evolving face of western politics.

Your opinion is more than welcome on this site and I hope that you'll check back in when I put up part two.

[A.R.Yngve]

Fantasy fans and writers have often claimed that "subtext" or "metaphor" do not belong in speculative literature -- what is on the page shouldn't be interpreted, but accepted "as is".

Which is the same as to say "Little Red Riding Hood" should be read only literally -- i.e. there is no message between the lines, only a bizarre story about a talking animal who stalks a girl and her grandmother. (Yeah, right.)

What is the subtext of modern Fat Fantasy? It has to be something that resonates with the readership -- their "demons" are not Tolkien's demons, if you get my meaning.

Hypothesis: Perhaps Fat Fantasy is a mythology about consumerism. Its magic swords, stones, rings etc. are status symbols writ large.

The magic wand is a metaphor for the cell phone (or, before the cell phone, the remote-control). Flying dragons and broomsticks are cars. Magic jewels are mythologized bling-bling.

In a consumerist mythology, it is only logical that the "quest" (i.e. shopping spree) never ends, because Keeping Up With The Joneses is an endless rat race.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

A.R. -

As I said to you by email, I agree with you about fantasy's clearly aspirational elements. I'm not sure if that's what all fantasy is "about", partly because I think that fantasy writers seem reluctant to engage with the subtextual level... hence the numerous negative readings of fantasy texts and the accusations of if not social conservatism then outright racism and misogyny.

An interesting tangent to the idea of fantasy being about bling is the fantasy RPG which most definitely IS a crypto-Objectivist bare-knuckle capitalist fantasy in which the peasants spend their lives with their feet in shit while the "elite" go around collecting huge mountains of gold, killing anyone that stands in their way and covering themselves in magical bling.

The comparisons between hip-hop/pimp my ride culture and the World of Warcraft videos are frequently quite striking.

[Scott Bakker]

Thanks for having me, Jonathan - and don't mind my bad manners!

You have to walk me through how it is you're not saying that fat fantasy is accessible to those who find it accessible. (To say that accessibility generally distinguishes literary and nonliterary doesn't carry much information.) It IS a difficult genre, in its own peculiar way. I think it's this peculiar inaccessibility that distinguishes fat fantasy more than anything. Fat fantasy readers, as commercial nonliterary readers, are pretty much unique when it comes to the amount of work they put into their reading.

With regards the conservatism: if the conventional conservatism at stake in fat fantasy is a DIFFERENT conservatism, then that difference is the value you need to concentrate on, not the conservatism - isn't it?

Otherwise, I would suggest the generic erosion you refer to is just as evident in fat fantasy as elsewhere. I realize your purpose is pragmatic. You're not so much trying to nail the 'essence' of fat fantasy as to find some useful tools of categorization - a way of looking at certain family resemblances. The threat here, though, is a kind of criterial circularity, where your yardsticks simply become the works themselves: where you say, 'the works that count as fat fantasy are the works that I call fat fantasy.' When this happens, you rig the game so that when anyone brings up potential counter-examples, you can just say, 'Yeah, well, I'm not talking about THAT book.'

You need something that can distinguish between borderline cases.

[A.R.Yngve]

I see a new genre coming, that melds hip-hop culture and Generic Fantasy:

GANGSTASY!

Coming soon from Bloat Publishing: the Gangstasy bestsellers
ORCS IN THE 'HOOD,
SMACK DAT ELF HO
and
LORD OF THE BLING.
;-P

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi again Scott, I don't mind the combativity at all, I wouldn't expect anything less from a fellow philosopher ;-)

On the first point, I DO think that the original complaint about silly names isn't really a problem of access but a distaste for immersion that trumps the genre's accessibility. However, you might well be correct that this shows that the concept of "accessibility" is not fine grained enough.

A full theory of accessibility would allow for the bracketting of accessibility to allow for people with such strong aversions to elements of fantasy that the characteristics that make the genre accessible for one set of people would instantly make it unpalatable for another group. However, I don't think that this means that accessibility is an entirely tautological value. It makes sense to say that the Dragonlance books are written more with the desire for accessibility than the work of Philip K. Dick. In the case of the first, once access is gained and the pretense of the work is swallowed, the work is essentially open to understanding without effort. The audience is not required to be familiar with any concepts beyond the a passing familiarity with cod medievalism and magic. Meanwhile, Dick requires you to not only swallow the concept of reading a book about the earth being taken over by intelligent slugs with psychic powers, he then asks you to play with concepts such as the relationship between perceived reality, madness and a slug-like version of Descartes' evil djinn. I think to strive explicitly for a book that requires not only no interpretation but no conceptual analysis, is a meaningful and informative value.

I don't think I need to refer to social conservatism at all. In fact, I don't really factor it at all into the nature of fantasy (indeed, while I do think a lot of fantasy is reactionary, I'm at a loss as to work out why people would more easily get their head round fighting to preserve an existing system than fighting to replace the reactionary monarchist governments of the setting with a more democratic system similar to those most fantasy fans live under). The value that I think affects fat fantasy is the conservatism that comes from being risk averse in general. I don't see why the default conception of "conservatism" should be political... I think you're getting hung up on words there. Or maybe I'm just not grasping your point.

I think that it's pointless to try and nail down definitions for literary genres. People have been trying to nail down SF for decades without getting anywhere and, frankly, in a world where people go out of their way to fuck with the limits of genre, a set of demarcation criteria is not only methodologically inadvisable, I'd even say that it was practically impossible.

While my aims with this are entirely pragmatic, they are also informed by the critical debacle surrounding attempts to define SF as well as the ongoing and equally pointless Popperian/Logical-Positivist attempt to give science a set of demarcation criteria. Yes it's useful if you want people to stop teaching creationism in schools but as a piece of conceptual analysis it was doomed from the off and that is without even thinking about the philosophical problem of vagueness that would inevitably apply to your borderline cases... if David Eddings is undeniably fat Fantasy and charlie Stross undeniably isn't... is there even an exact point where one tiny change can change something from non-fat fantasy into fat fantasy?

Instead I was always rather fond that science represents not a set methodology but rather a set of values that people sign up to both in order to enter a certain arena of discourse and pragmatically on the grounds that studying the world with those values tends to result in better results than other values.

As a result, a certain degree of circularity is unavoidable. As I said, genre writing is always going to be "what genre writers do" with the limits of genre constantly changing. So my thoughts is that if I can lay down a set of values that broadly inform the writing of a certain kind of novel then I'm in a better position to judge one of those novels on its own terms.

The ultimate test of any theory is whether it produces decent results and should this collection of observations result in a fairer review of Shadowplay than a review without them then clearly there's some truth to the original theory.

[Scott Bakker]

I still don't see... But that's often the case with me. My criticism was that two of your values, accessibility and conservatism (which I never took in the political sense), simply weren't doing any significant work - and that the former actually seemed to be working against you. Sure, both values distinguish commercial fiction from literary fiction as generally understood, but then this is pretty much a given. What you need are values that isolate 'fat fantasy' as a distinct form of writing, not simply from literary forms, but from other commercial forms as well.

It's as if you were trying to give someone a way to isolate delicious apples from all the others varieties at the supermarket, and you said, 'Well, they're red, they have bumps on the bottom, and they're sort of round.' Though the second property has some (ahem) bite, clearly the first and the third properties belong to way too many apples to be of much use. If you were to say, "Well, they're the deepest red, have bumps on the bottom, and are more heart shaped than other apples," your description would be much more effective. This is all I'm suggesting.

It's all about finding a practical, working definition of fat fantasy - categorization is an essential component of cognition (we literally use it every time we speak). We learn quite abit through exercises such as yours. The problems of ambiguity and interpretative underdetermination go without saying - as I said, I know this isn't about nailing down essences. I'm just saying that your working definition really isn't doing all that much work because accessibility and conservatism simply apply to way too many things that are plainly not fat fantasy. From your standpoint, since you already have all the delicious apples sorted out, it's easy to think that your values are doing all the work you need them to do. But for someone who hasn't already picked them out, or has a different set of categorizations, the only value you posit that does any significant work is 'immersion' (and even that, I think, needs to be tightened by considering the content of the worldbuilding involved).

The kinds of more specific family resemblances I have in mind would be things like: the use of alternate, anthropomorphic worlds, the use of innocence (via characterization) as a foil to some apocalytpic threat, the valorization of archaic social interrelationships, the espousal of some bivalent morality, the compositional influence to Tolkien, the use of serial formats - things that are more specific to epic fantasy, and which provide tools which can be used to describe what makes borderline cases borderline. The above list, for instance, could be used to plot the way in which Erikson's Malazan books differ, or how works like, say, Dune or Star Wars share many fat-fantastic features (and again, not in any absolute sense, but in a sense that nevertheless sheds light on the group of works under consideration).

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi Scott --

If I were looking to provide what you call a "working definition" of fat fantasy then you'd be absolutely right. Necessary and sufficient conditions all the way babe-ee. However, I'm not looking for a definition and I don't think I need one either.

What I'm looking to do is construct some kind of lens through which I can fairly judge fat fantasy novels. If I was writing about say southern-style weepy-toughguy literature then I'd be in pretty safe hands if I reached for the standard litcrit toolbox that they teach kids at college. I wouldn't need to have a working definition of weepy-toughguy fiction, just an inkling of what it is and a set of handy tools. Those could be the exact same tools that I'd use for looking at effete east coast comedies of manners, it wouldn't matter as long as the tools fit the job. So I don't think I need to be able to identify big red shiny apples, I just need to know how to tell whether a piece of fruit (apple or otherwise) is bad.

In part two I actually talk quite a bit about the characteristics of fat fantasy that you mention here, I even mention Star Wars.

Where I might have a problem are in cases of catastrophic genre misidentification. Like trying to interpret Hard SF using standard LitCrit tools. But I think that's a larger methodological question and one I don't feel entirely confident answering as I haven't formally studied literature since I was 16.

In cases such as that you'd need some kind of formalised system to tell you "no... that's GENRE" or "yeah but everyone in that literary tradition does that" but I'm not even sure you'd need hard and fast definitions then.

I still don't think its possible to give a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for what's in a literary genre.

[Scott Bakker]

"So I don't think I need to be able to identify big red shiny apples, I just need to know how to tell whether a piece of fruit (apple or otherwise) is bad."

Again I'm confused. Wasn't the whole point of your exercise to find standards (values) appropriate to a SPECIFIC kind of fruit (and fruit lover) - namely, fat fantasy? If so, then my argument isn't at cross purposes at all, but goes right to the nub. To have an aesthetics of delicious apples, surely you need to have standards specific to them?

"I still don't think its possible to give a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for what's in a literary genre."

Since we've already agreed that ambiguity only allows for pragmatic definition, this sounds like you're saying there's NO family resemblances in literary fiction, which strikes me as obviously wrong. Consider: emphasis on interiority, emphasis on particularity, diegetic and nondiegetic norm innovation and transformation, generalization, stylized prose, and so on...

Have you posted the second part anywhere?

But then, I imagine you're getting a little weary of the third degree!

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi Scott --

Yeah, the second part went up yesterday. You can find a link on the bottom of the original article or you can just look at sfdiplomat.net and it's the last entry.

I actually think that there's a real danger with the kind of approach to criticism that you're suggesting. I mean, how often do you hear people defend really bad films or books on the grounds that it "has a sense of humour about itself" or "it's JUST an a kid's movie"? If you have a specific set of criteria for judging what is not even a genre but a certain subset of the high-fantasy sub-genre then you're moving from criticism into outright apologia with cries of "but all fat fantasy novels have plot-holes! It's unfair to criticise this book for having them!".

As I said originally, there's a balance to be found between accepting something completely on its own terms and holding no external values over it whatsoever and just sitting there thinking "I don't like fantasy... this is REALLY shit" which was how I reacted to fantasy up until I started to write this article. The balancing act is about how specific you want your frame of reference to be. If you say to me that my frame of reference is too loose then maybe you're right, but I'd argue that an aesthetic of fat fantasy alone would not give you the critical distance you need to both judge a fat fantasy novel as a piece of fat fantasy and as a piece of fiction generally.

...and actually I'm quite enjoying the third degree :-)

[Scott Bakker]

I don't really disagree with any of this. The problem I've been harping is simply a conceptual one: 2 out of 3 of your categories are too broad to actually do the work you claim they are doing. So, it's either tighten the categories and/or loosen the claim - which I think you've partially done in the course of this and previous responses.

That said, I've yet to read the second part, where I'm assuming most of the pudding lies!

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I think I've mellowed but I don't think my claims were ever that strong to start with.

I don't think I'm making any particularly strong claims here beyond "this might be useful" if I was trying to come up with a proper theory of how fantasy fits together than yes... I'd need to screw down the definitions a bit more so as to maximise their explanatory power but I think this is a good first step.

[Fantasy Scribbler]

Well, thank you so much for giving such a kind and measured response to my thoughts! I look forward to your part II!