The Aesthetics of Fantasy - Part Two

This is the follow-up article to The Aesthetics of Fantasy - Part One.

In this article I look at how the fundamental literary and economic values of the fantasy genre translate into a series of balancing acts for any aspiring writer of fat fantasy.

Given the hostile response that the first part of this article received (most notably from the SF book club), I feel it is also necessary to clarify the spirit in which I have written this.  I am not a regular reader of fantasy and generally find myself part of the “philosopher” elitist crowd rather than the populist “philistines” (to borrow Hal Duncan’s terminology complete with the eye-rolling tone with which, I'm sure he intends it).  However, in a spirit of open-mindedness, I decided to try and understand the allure of a certain kind of high fantasy literature so as to not only better understand the nature of the fantasy genre but also the values that govern the tastes of fantasy fans.  In no way are any of these remarks intended to be derisory or condescending.  I truly approached the matter of gathering evidence from fantasy fans with an open mind, so any errors are due to either a sample bias in the fantasy fans I talked to or an honest failure on my part to connect the dots correctly.  I’m not looking to make generalisations... merely to understand so as to function better as a critic.  It was certainly not my intention to insult or defame anyone be they author or fan, if anything, this process has given me a good deal more respect not only for the fantasy genre but the writers who produce it.

It is also worth noting that I also refer, in this article to examples of genre such as Japanese computer RPGs or tabletop RPGs.  Though clearly not examples of “fat fantasy” I would argue that these mediums have close conceptual ties to the fat fantasy sub-genre and, as such, can sensibly be taken as examples to illustrate principles that apply as much to them as to the genre and medium that inspires them.

Let us now consider the dimensions that make up a fantasy novel.


PLOT - Much is made of high fantasy’s reliance upon what are uncharitably called “stock” plots and rather overly charitably called “archetypal” plots.  To the cynic, the frequent re-emergence of similar plots is evidence of, at best, laziness and hackish tendencies among fantasy writers and, at worse, an institutional culture of plagiarism and derivativeness.  However, to the fan, these plots are part of the deeply resonant cultural pattern referred to by Joseph Campbell as the Monomyth, the basic pattern underpinning all heroic folk tales.  The most famous example of this is, of course, Frodo’s quest to destroy the one ring in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, but we can also point to the binding/destruction of the Dark One in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time.

The reason for the close relationship between fantasy plotting and the pattern of similar narrative structures known as the Monomyth is that the Monomyth is instantly accessible simply because, as cultural anthropologists have it, it is a part of pretty much every story.  For the fantasy fan, the very universality of these narratives are what makes them particularly attractive (particularly as, for many fantasy readers, the plot is little more than a delivery system through which to get at the characters and the setting).  This has lead many fantasy apologists to elevate these patterns both by seeking out either claims of deep cultural resonance (as provided by Campbell and other cultural anthropologists)  or claims of representation of some inbuilt psychological or quasi-mystical basis (as offered by the works of Carl Jung, the author of the theory of the collective unconscious and the archetypes that populate it).  However, it is not sufficient for a fat fantasy plot to be anchored in Jungian psychology as, while fantasy fans are undeniably conservative, they are not immune to the boredom of repetition, nor do they suffer hackery gladly.  Indeed, the small number of monomyth plots and the large large amounts of fantasy consumed by fantasy fans introduces the need for the monomyth to be diluted or modified.

A particularly interesting way of diluting the Monomyth is to use it as a high-level plot arc that perhaps binds an entire series together, while the nuts and bolts of the narrative that keeps readers turning the pages of individual books may be lower order plot or character arcs.  The classic example of this type of structure would be a series of books about destroying some ancient evil, but in order to destroy said evil, the heroes must collect either a series of items or one item broken into several parts that need to be reassembled before the evil can be vanquished, though such dilution can also take the form of the heroes forging alliances, the heroes falling in love or any number of lower order plot lines and narratives.  An excellent example of this creative approach can be found in Japanese computer role-playing games such as the Suikoden and Final Fantasy series which invariably combine linearity, tight scripting and a close adherence to the rules of genre to produce stories that span dozens of hours of active game play but whose plots can generally be summarised in one sentence (or a song).  However, spreading the plot out across a series of smaller plots is not the only way in which fantasy authors can innovate.  Indeed, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series (arguably the most respected and popular fat fantasy series of the current day) attempts to reinvigorate the monomyth by modifying the tone of the plots.

One of the most notable characteristics of A Game of Thrones and the rest of Martin’s series is its willingness to inspire itself from the cut-throat politics and moral ambiguity of renaissance Italy and real history in general.  Martin not only has a number of characters who are clearly morally ambiguous such as deformed dwarf Tyrion Lannister, but he is not afraid to have his characters be motivated by money, lust or cowardice; motivations that are traditionally absent from the frequently Manichaean high fantasy genre.  In fact, such deviations from the traditional demands of the genre has prompted some to argue that Martin’s work is actually low rather than high fantasy.  However, as pointed out by Abigail Nussbaum, Martin only ever uses half measures.  Admittedly his characters might engage in incest or treat their daughters as chattel to be used to shore up political alliances, but ultimately the goodies are good and the baddies are bad.

Martin’s work is an excellent example of the fine line that fantasy authors must walk if they want to produce successful works as he includes a large dose of politics (high fantasy invariably deals in morality and never in the relativism of realpolitik) as well as moral ambiguity.  However, he only includes enough plotting to demarcate himself and “do fantasy right” as his relationship with gritty realism  is never close enough to sever him from the genre’s Tolkienian roots and his political scheming is never so complicated or devious that the audience need spend time and energy trying to work out what is going on.  Indeed, for all the talk of Martin’s politicians being devious, none of their plots would pass as credible in a political thriller as the political thriller is a genre far more concerned with being clever than with being accessible.  This is different to the fantasy genre where a successful author is able to balance his audience’s need for accessibility with their desire for originality.



CHARACTER - Much is made of the messianic character of many fantasy protagonists who are frequently called upon to be the last chance of humanity in the face of some great brooding evil.  The most famous example of this is Frodo in the Lord of the Rings who literally carries the evil of the world to its destruction but also the likes of Shea Ohmsford, the last wielder of the magical MacGuffin in Terry Brooks’ Shannara series.  In fact, this model of character has become so common in all forms of fantasy that it has prompted Terry Pratchett to parody it by having the exiled rightful king of Ankh-Morpork turn up but, instead of reclaiming his throne, he’s quite happy to live his life as a lowly guardsman.  This archetype was discussed as an integral part of the Monomyth by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which Campbell argued for the similarities between such religious figures as Osiris, Jesus and Buddha.  This link is even made explicit in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia as the death and re-birth of the lion Aslan is not only “a clumsy spiritual allegory involving lions” (to quote comedian Stewart Lee) for the resurrection of Christ but also a means for young children to be introduced to the concepts of Christianity before they even start attending Sunday school.

The prominence of such archetypal characters is, as with the use of archetypal plots, a question of accessibility.  Indeed, even Michael Moorcock (creator of Elric and Hawkmoon, famed for his critique of Tolkien) fell into a pattern of re-using characters and plot-lines during his most prolific years, using talk of an Eternal Champion to justify repetition by framing it as artificial myth.  It is also worth noting that if you are going to keep using the same plots over and over again then you will be forced into using the same characters as regardless of any cosmetic differences the characters might have, they all serve the same role in the story.

This has become a source of some animosity between critics and defenders of fantasy as the need for characters to be easily understood as well as empathised and identified with (as I suggested in Part One’s discussion of the value of Immersion), frequently results in a seemingly simplistic approach to characterisation.  Indeed, in works of literary SF such as Peter Watts’ Blindsight or Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s End of the World Blues, the characters frequently embody the ideas that the author is wanting to explore, meaning that character studies are frequently coded studies of interesting ideas about the human experience.  This symbollic approach to characterisation is, of course, taken from mainstream literature but, by virtue of the fact that it exists as an intellectual riddle for the reader to solve (in order to “get” the piece), it is a barrier to access and therefore not popular in high fantasy.

Instead, as with the dilution of the Monomyth in matters of plot, fantasy writers frequently dilute their characters’ plot arcs by making various detours allowing their protagonists to struggle to overcome some psychological flaw, have a love affair or indulge in any of the other elements of the Monomyth albeit at a lower order of abstraction (the messianic arc always taking precedent).  Authors also get around this problem by splitting their protagonist up into several different characters allowing him to explore different aspects of the Monomyth at the same time (this explains the popularity of heroic twins), or by outsourcing either lesser elements of the Monomyth or more interesting original character arcs to the character’s sidekicks, a good example of this might be the movement from dark to light experienced by George Lucas’ loveable rogue Han Solo whose initial selfishness allowed Luke Skywalker to remain morally pure until tempted by the Dark Side in Return of the Jedi (Star Wars is not only fat fantasy in drag, it was also written by someone with a keen awareness of the works of Campbell).  This is a tool used intelligently by George Martin who has his numerous protagonists, some textbook Monomyth followers and others clearly separate such as Stark’s daughters who, in radically different ways, learn the difference between their childhood conceptions of self and the reality of adopting such identities.  As with his treatment of plot, Martin excels at balancing the need to stick closely to universal themes and the need to give his readers something new, hence his willingness to flirt with moral ambiguity up to the point where the readers would be forced to start thinking about the morality of Martin’s world and how that compares to their personal ethics.  As ever, conceptual heavy lifting is bad for business and forcing your readers into moral introspection is undeniably asking them to put their backs into it.

Authors can also vary the details of the characters’ plot arcs in order to make them appear different.  Tad Williams’ Shadowmarch series, for example, sees one of the characters slump into self-pity and madness rather than death before realising his powers and returning to save the world.  As we shall see, in fantasy characters as in fantasy worlds, what is important are the cosmetic differences, not differences in the underlying structure of the world.  By being mindful of this, an author can balance the competing needs for a new and original hero with one who is easily understood, sympathetic and identifiable with.

The question of identification is invariably a sticky topic in fantasy circles.  To speak of is invariably to speak of escapism and to speak of escapism immediately conjures up images of a basement-dwelling inadequate who would rather escape from his problems than confront them.  I think that such thoughts are entirely unwarranted, not least because it is a gross misunderstanding of the idea.   Activities such as Cosplay and Fantasy Roleplaying (both activities with close ties to high fantasy literature) suggest that some fantasy readers do identify with the characters they read about, though this identification is not of the order of “I wish I was Frodo” but rather emotional engagement with the novel as simple as recognising in a character’s struggles similar tensions to those occurring in the life of the reader, or engaging with the stories of princesses and knights in an aspirational manner similar to the way in which people read gossip magazines.  Indeed, the BBC’s recent SF series Torchwood with its high adventure and sexy characters was seen as aspirational TV and if genre TV can be aspirational, it is not unthinkable that genre writing can be seen in a similar light.  Even in extreme cases of identification such as the Otherkin who believe themselves to be the spiritual doppelganger of characters from the fantasy corpus or members of well known fantasy races, to speak of these people as people actively denying reality would be grossly unfair, though they do illustrate the idea that, for some readers, identification with the characters of fantasy novels is a vital part of the reading experience.

SETTING - Perhaps the most important characteristic that defines the fat fantasy sub-genre as it constitutes the primary focus for the desire for immersion.  While critics such as Adam Roberts have sought to categorise the difference between fantasy and SF as one analogical to the difference between the Protestant and Catholic faiths (with Fantasy as the cavaliers and SF as the roundheads), I see the difference as being that fantasy worlds are worlds of things whereas SF worlds are worlds of laws.

SF’s fixation with laws stems partly for its characteristic desire for scientific verisimilitude, but also from its desire to be speculative.  It is is this context that the old platitude about SF takes on meaning; the best SF is not about the future but about about the present.  This is because speculative SF takes existing cultural and physical phenomena and assumes that the laws governing them will continue to stay the same, allowing authors to project that phenomenon into the future so as to show not only how a certain trend or technology will evolve but what the important trends and discoveries of the current day might be.  For example, consider the opening section of Charles Stross’ Accelerando.  Stross’ protagonist Manfred Macx sustains himself through a kind of high-level system of quid-pro-quo gift economics clearly inspired by existing Web 2.0 projects such as Wikipedia or YouTube.

Compare this approach with that common in the high fantasy genre where it is more common to find authors picking and choosing ideas from history and mythology in order to create worlds with a certain aesthetic feel.  This prompts many critics of fantasy to point to fantasy authors’ frequently scant regard for the economics or sociology of the societies they depict.  A good example of this are Tolkien’s horsey Rohirrim.  This race of men look like Viking raiders but live on the plains and are famous horsemen, much like the Mongols.  However, they also live in assorted palaces, castles and keeps similar to those popular in medieval Europe and seemingly perfect for receiving sieges, therefore casting aspersions on the logic of having a military entirely composed of cavalry.  In fact, the riders of Rohan don’t even seem to have any proper agriculture or industry making it unclear how they could support such a huge military caste, let alone produce enough food to weather sieges.

The reason for this difference in focus is the nature of the intellectual experience the writers are hoping to illicit from readers engaging with these different kinds of story.  A speculative, law-based fictional environment exists to draw the reader’s attention to the laws that govern our world and the world of the book.  In thinking about the rules that govern the world of the novel, we are forced to think about the rules that govern our world because they are frequently supposed to be the same as our own.  Fantasy novels differ from this approach by being focussed on aiding immersion into the world by drawing out attention not to the abstract laws that govern the world but the concrete particulars that fill it.  Fantasy worlds are full of named and described things from places to people, from food to religion, from songs to animals  and from gods to plant-life because when we passively and directly experience the world we do so through facts... not laws.  Indeed, from the time of David Hume up till the present time with Bas van Fraassen, certain philosophers have remained sceptical about the existence of laws of nature.  In fact, the much famed problem of induction can be seen as a result of our failure to perceive laws of nature and having to infer their existence from observable facts.  All we ever see is the Sun rising and setting, we do not directly experience the celestial dynamics that keep the planet orbiting the Sun, we instead infer their existence and use them to justify our belief that because the Sun came up this morning, chances are it’ll come up tomorrow.

By creating worlds so full of things that they require glossaries and maps in order for the player to make sense of them, fantasy writers encourage immersion in the subjective rather than abstraction to the objective as encouraged in more speculative genres.  The only notable exception from this rule would be writers who decide to spend some time discussing the mechanics of magic in their setting.  By and large I would class such lapses into speculation as trope-stretching on a par with Martin’s cut-throat renaissance politics (indeed, one of the things that differentiated China Mieville’s Bas-Lag novels from standard fantasy was the “scientistic” way in which magic was discussed as something involving study and experimentation and drawing to it a class of brainy types with questionable social skills reminiscent of our own nerds), but an interesting fact about magic is that it is very much based around objects and names rather than processes and laws.  Indeed, it is telling that fat fantasy will frequently have its protagonists quest for a magical sword or some long-lost power and rarely, but rarely hit the books and try to work out how to make an object or spell capable of defeating the great evil.  This is a pattern that is also present in fat fantasy’s treatment of morality, though I shall return to that issue later.

The character of fantasy worlds are not only structurally geared towards encouraging immersion, but concretely too as the trappings of fantasy worlds are predominantly European and frequently influenced by the genre’s big players thereby making making the worlds both generally accessible to any westerner with a basic grasp of what went on in the middle ages, and particularly accessible to those who have read fantasy before, because while fat fantasy does try to be as broadly inclusive as possible (indeed, John Clute once memorably accused Tad Williams’ Otherworld books of lapsing into phatic discourse), it is particularly skilled at being accessible to habitues of the fantasy genre, a useful skill given the economic conservatism of the audience.

As with other aspects of fat fantasy, the desire for a text to be accessible, immersive, and conservative is attenuated by the desire to be innovative so as not to bore readers or rob the writers of the chance to stretch their artistic wings.  This balancing act results in authors innovating in a number of ways.  For example, while Europeanised tropes are clearly the most accessible to a western fantasy audience, there are a number of series such as Garry Kilworth’s Navigator Kings trilogy (Polynesian culture) or Glen Cook’s later Black Company stories (Indian culture) that attempt to sever themselves from the genre’s Tolkienian European roots.  However, here the Otherness of the new cultures can prove to be barriers to accessibility and Immersion, prompting authors to rely upon the use of traditional genre tropes to allow the reader to get their bearings.  For example, if a hero is battling an evil god does is there really much difference between him wielding a magical sword whilst riding a white stallion and him carrying a shark-tooth dagger whilst riding in a canoe as in the Navigator King books?  However, relying upon traditional plots and characters to carry the reader along can be risky, indeed the Navigator King books are arguably on the experimental edge of the fat-fantasy sub-genre.  Many authors choose instead to work around the Otherness of their new cultures.

Since the days of Tolkien and Lewis, it has been common for fantasy to feature non-European cultures inspired by human cultures both contemporary and historical.  Unfortunately, these cultures have frequently been cast as evil with the unfamiliarity of their ways and the Otherness of their values being used to demonise them.  Even in cases where this does not occur, it is not uncommon for one or several western-inspired characters to serve as gatekeepers through which to explore the alien culture, thereby imposing on that culture a Euro-centric conceptual framework that facilitates the readers’ exploration and immersion into that culture.  In essence, this is a way of having the author do the conceptual heavy-lifting so that the audience does not have to.  This is a technique used by George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series and Glen Cook’s later Black Company novels where the European Croaker and Lady find themselves first in a setting similar to Africa and then one similar to pre-British India.

Authors can also use this bracketed approach to Otherness to explore non-Human cultures which, though fictitious, will frequently not be entirely alien thanks to their similarities to other fantasy non-human cultures (hence the popularity not only of Tolkienian Elves and Dwarves but of Tolkienian Elves and Dwarves with minor cosmetic differences such as the Fairies and Founderlings of Tad Williams’ Shadowmarch books) and their tendency to be rooted in human cultures and characteristics such as Tolkien coming from a nation with a huge class divide writing about clearly working-class industrialist Dwarves and effete intellectual old money upper-class Elves.

Another interesting aspect of fat fantasy settings is the way in which they deal with morality.  As with magic, it is quite common for fantasy to objectivise or personalise morality.  By this I mean that fantasy frequently includes a strong moral element, but that it rarely actually discusses the content of the morality in question.  Instead, people fight to destroy things such as the forces of evil or ancient dead gods or corrupting artefacts or they wage war on people such as demented wizards and witch queens.  In essence, morality in fantasy is not so much a question of commandments or rights, it is about wanting rid of a certain object or being on the same side as some particular person.  for example, we do not know in what way Sauron is evil, nor do we know what he is actually planning on doing to Middle Earth once he gets his hands on it.  We simply know that he lives in an ugly land and is opposed to everyone that is good.  There is no discussion of Sauron’s economic policies or his views on stem cell research.  We’re simply told that he is evil (and, in the case of the film, this is driven home by having him be represented by a flaming toothed vagina).  This is partly because of fantasy’s focus on concrete particulars rather than abstract laws, but also because the more explicit you make your morality, the more readers will compare it to their own therefore not only possibly losing people who disagree with you but also pushing them out of the immersive zone.  Indeed, the best example of this would be C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia where his old-fashioned views on race and the role of women have lead to the books being widely seen as bastions of reactionary religious preaching.  However, my favourite example of this is at the beginning of George Martin’s A Game of Thrones where Stark makes a point of executing prisoners himself using his own sword.  Clearly this was intended to demonstrate how Stark takes the death penalty and the running of his realm seriously, but to a liberal non-American reader this felt ghoulish and slightly sinister.  Would people have voted for George W. Bush if, as governor, he had personally decapitated all the people sentenced to death during his time in office?  perhaps Martin would have voted for him but I would take it as a sign that Bush was a dangerous and sadistic madman who would be better off in an insane asylum than running a country.  Even a politician who attends every execution would appear ghoulish and slightly odd.

Interestingly, the genre’s propensity to conservatism and its tendency to stick quite close to the ideals of the founding fathers of the genre has lead some to believe that fat fantasy is an inherently reactionary form of writing.  It is rare for fantasy stories to be about changing the world for the better, instead they tend to revolve around protecting the status quo against an evil threatening it (Lord of the Rings) or undertaking a quest that wrenches the protagonists away from an idyllic childhood (A Song of Fire and Ice).  It also explains  the popularity of setting fantasy novels in what are essentially post-apocalyptic dark-ages where some earlier age of enlightenment or advancement has passed leaving only ruins, relics and legends.  This results in stories that are about recapturing a by-gone age either figuratively by seeking a powerful object from that age or literally by changing the current world so that it resembles the old one more (both aspects feature in the Dragonlance novels where the protagonists not only want the old protective gods and good dragons to return to the world but also to find the dragonlances capable of killing evil dragons).  The tendency of fantasy novels to look backwards rather than forwards combines with unpleasantly racist and reactionary genre staples such as a confrontational attitude towards the Otherness of non-European cultures to give an impression of unpleasantly right-wing politics.  This is most unfortunate as this is not necessarily reflective of fantasy writers being particularly prone to reactionary views but rather a result of sticking too closely to tropes drawn up at a time when unthinking racism and hostility to Otherness was very much the norm.  Fantasy’s refusal to engage with real world politics and tendency to talk about evil in purely aesthetic terms serve to form a moral vacuum into which it is easy to project the unthinking attitudes of the genre’s early days.  While not as common as many critics of fantasy would have you believe (especially when you consider the astonishing levels of racism frequently on display in the original pulps, Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft would shame the national front), fantasy’s troubles in distancing itself from the political grammar (if not vocabulary) of the colonial age is indicative of the value placed by genre writers on being as accessible as possible and as conservative as artistically and economically practical.


These three aspects of a fantasy novel are obviously not exhaustive as I have not touched upon writing style or gone into the details of the various balancing acts in any great detail.  However, my aim was never to completely exhaust the genre or to provide a complete critical examination of the books that one can consider to be fat fantasy.  Instead, I intended this piece as an informal look at some of the values and rules that affect the fat fantasy sub genre in a hope of helping both myself and others to understand how fantasy works.  Seeing as this piece is now nearing the length of the average M.A. dissertation I think I will leave it at that.

Please keep a look out for my upcoming review of Tad Williams’ Shadowplay.

Comments

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi Scott --

Sorry, I've been a bit on edge over this. My GF tried to tell me very gently that she likes LotR and I bristled. Clearly I need to step away from the keyboard.

I agree that there's a lot of debate here and there's a lot of room to move forward into. But I also think that while a full understanding of the aesthetics of fantasy would allow for the stuff you've mentioned, it is a modular thing... some framework is better than none.

What I meant about "romanticised religion stuff" is that the ideas you were throwing at me a few posts back tap into a certain vision of religion. A version of religion that is compatible and probably stems from the same roots as romanticism as a movement. That phenomenological approach to the world as a manifestation of metaphysical ideals rather than mechanistic laws.

I think that this is something worth expanding upon actually. Do you think that I'm just flat out wrong that Fantasy is about things and not laws or do you think that the "laws" in question are qualitatively different to those mined by SF? I've talked about the laws being teleological rather than causal and just now I've suggested that the "laws" are merely metaphysical ideals and principles. Which of these (or either) would you say you were talking about?

Yeah... I often get this way around things that rub me the wrong way ideologically. Another example of the same principle was Bennett's The History Boys which had an idea about education that I really didn't like.

Speaking of ideologies and laws, I decided to purchase one of your books today. Partly because of the stuff you've been talking about and partly because some of the harrumphing about the Nebula Shortlist has taken the shape of "if the Thousandfold Thought isn't on it then it's worthless".

So if I don't find spectacle and relationships to myth and scripture I'll be pissed ;-)

[Scott Bakker]

Ditto on the apologies. I damn well knew that the defensiveness I was feeling when I first read the second part was likely more a function of my own personal history than anything. The pigeon-hole goes deep.

I'm glad to hear that people think I should be shortlisted, but I'm not holding my breath. I can't even get shortlisted for a Canadian award in a pool 1/15th the size. Sometimes it seems the generic fidelity of a work is inversely proportional to the chances of that work receiving awards (which is why so many of these awards strike me as exercises in self-loathing), and my whole MO is all about generic fidelity - exploring conventions in their execution, not their breach.

This is what I like telling myself, anyway. Maybe I'm just no damn good!

Regarding Romanticism: maybe I was confused by the ambiguity of the term 'romantic,' whose meaning is about as stable as 'post-modern,' which is to say, all over the damn place. I suppose a notion like the 'objective sublime,' given its relation to Kant and Kant's relation to early Romanticism, might be construed as romantic, but I'm too much of a skeptic and a naturalist to put much stock in the kinds of rational reconstructions philosophy offers by way of explanation. It's not that I don't find them interesting - quite the contrary - I just see no way of arbitrating between their many and often incompatible interpretations.

The question of epic fantasy's SPECIFIC appeal, it seems to me, is primarily a social, historical, and psychological one.

So getting back to your question regarding worlds and laws. Humans are hardwired to anthropomorphize. Among the many specialized inference systems possessed by our brains, we have 'intentionality detection' systems, which we use to track various kinds of agents as opposed to natural events, which have their own inference systems. Our brain literally has modules dedicated to understanding events according to the modalities of intent or according to the modalities of cause. The thing is, our intentional inference systems are (and this is an uncomfortable fact) hyperactive: they regularly impute intent to events which are in fact causal.

Now before the institutionalization of science in the Enlightenment, we really had no way of knowing this, so as a result, we universally understood the world at large in intentional terms. Only as science provided us with its astonishingly reliable and powerful picture of the ways that causal processes monopolize natural events (the so-called 'disenchantment of the world') were we able to recognize the kinds of wholescale anthropomorphizing underwriting our worldviews. In other words, the institutional dominance of science is what allowed us to see these kinds of worlds as FANTASTIC.

Thus the connection of fantasy worlds to the worlds of scripture (myth that is believed) and myth (scripture that is disbelieved). It's no accident that Middle-earth, Homeric Greece, Biblical Israel, and Vedic India all share such similar ontological structures. They all use the same inference systems to interpret the 'world' - the signature difference is that Middle-earth is a classic example of what psychologists call 'decoupled cognition,' which is just a fancy way of referring to the capacity to think 'as if' that underwrites all fiction. Middle-earth is, in a very real sense, 'scripture otherwise.'

The laws of these worlds are quite literally social and psychological as opposed to natural. This is one of the keys to their appeal, I think. Fantasy worlds are intrinsically meaningful worlds - this is what makes them fantastic. They are not worlds of things, but of AGENTS and ARTIFACTS. There's literally not a 'thing' - understood in the strict sense - to be found in fantasy or scriptural worlds.

Since this is our default way of understanding the world (the scientific worldview requires oodles of training), the primordial way, the 'escapism' of fantasy is not so much an escape as a return to worlds that make immediate sense. And this is part of what makes fantasy the antithesis of modernism, if you define the latter as narrative forms involving the struggle of a protagonist trying to find coherent meaning in an apparently meaningless world. (The Prince of Nothing, btw, tries to turn this toothless saw on its head.) The 'great clomping foot of nerdism,' as Harrison puts it (at once evincing and reinforcing the general bias against forms of decoupled cognition without obvious utility), is nothing more than the 'as if denial' of the scientific worldview, a return not to happier times, but to more comprehensible ones. In epic fantasies, we often like our illusions to run deep.

I can go on and on about this - there's many parallel stories to be told here.

In terms of content, the laws of fantasy worlds are CONCEPTUALLY different, which is just to say they engage different inference systems. In terms of composition, where hard SF uses what I call pseudo-cognitive transition rules to build speculative versions of the stochastically mechanistic world we've gained thanks to the Enlightenment, epic fantasy uses 'associative elimination rules' to build alternate versions of the intentional worlds we've lost thanks to the Enlightenment.

[Brian Malone]

Hate mail? LOL, seriously . . . the internet :-?

I have a question, an actual question, and not my usual sarcasm: (I'm going to cross post this at the Geekshow because I want Hal's opinion too): Why does fantasy, or even SF/F in general, need or require (whatever) an evaluative scheme any different from any other type of literature? Is what makes an SF/F book good (or bad, or indifferent) any different from what makes any other kind of book good? Why?

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Scott --

You say your MO is all about generic fidelity, do you think that could be one of the reasons why there's a bit of a two cultures thing going on between fantasy and litSF? They seem more interested in breaking and fusing genres than exploiting existing conventions.

I see exactly where you're coming from regarding intentionality detection. For proof all you need do is look at things like the Kennedy Assassination and the death of Princess Diana and you'll see people inferring intentionality where there, in fact, is none... just a random causal process.

The thing I'm not sure I'm getting though is why these laws you're talking about would be social and psychological? If you want to argue that Fantasy is about immersion in a world designed in accordance with pre-scientific common sense conceptions of how the universe works, then would it not follow that said world would operate in accordance with pre-scientific models of folk psychology? and folk psychology, unless informed by a knowledge of say psychoanalysis or social and cognitive psychologies, tends not to be rule based does it?

Put it this way... does the universe described by something like Christianity (an example of a pre-scientific mindset AND an example of people getting intentional false positives) obey social laws?

Or do you mean social laws qua deep grammatical structural stuff as described by the likes of Joseph Campbell?

Also, would you argue that fantasy's intentional construction of pre-scientific universes is a mirror of SF's extrapolation of existing understanding of our universe? But if that's the case then where does stuff like Hal Duncan's authenticity fit in? Is someone who reads LotR and complains about how unrealistic the Rohirrim seem failing in his immersion by drafting in modern scientific understandings of medieval economics and technology?

I ask as, intuitively, from where I'm coming from, moaning about the lack of depicted farm land in LotR strikes me as missing the point of the book to a certain extent.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Brian --

I'd argue that, critically speaking, there's a balancing act between judging a book entirely on its own terms and purely on the grounds of what you consider to be universal aesthetic principles.

If you go too far towards the latter then you get reviews that go "it's shit... it's stupid..." but fail to understand that something can be intentionally trashy and silly without being intentionally bad. Go too far to the other extreme and you get "But you can't review the works of RA Salvatore because you're not a 14 year old D&D fan".

You need a balance.

So you need some kind of lens through which you can both allow for universal stuff like people writing uninteresting characters or people going off on 30 page tangents in the middle of a climax but also the more limited stuff like the values of the genre.

Genre's quite useful in this regard as it's essentially a set of rules that people more or less intentionally follow. So you can objectively judge how well something fits into a genre and whether its excentricities are due to the genre or the individual writer.

HOWEVER, you're quite right, I don't think it's clear that we need one hard and fast critical lens through which to look at all genre. It's more a matter of having a box of conceptual tricks.

For example, if you look through my various reviews you'll see some of the same ideas popping up; similar failings and the use of similar yardsticks. That's why cinema critics talk about "pace" for example... there's a universal conception of what good pacing is and when you're writing a review you can dip into it.

I agree that 'where are the orc supply train' type criticisms entirely miss the point in Tolkien's work, simply because it's obvious that those details aren't part of the fabular contract he sets up with his readers. I think they might be more telling in the case of my stuff, though, but then only because I implicitly take a historical approach (as opposed to Tolkien's more mythic MO).

Otherwise, are you suggesting that folk-psychological intuitions don't involve lawlike generalizations? Of course they do - which is why they're so effective. They just haven't been systematized, is all.

Campbell has always stuck me as more literary critic than anthropologist. I do know that he isn't taken very seriously in many anthropological circles.

As for the culture clash, I think it's as plain as the nose on our faces. When the galleys of TDTCB first came out, Penguin made a mistake and sent me two boxes, so I decided to make a list of 'literary oriented' web reviewers and contact them, asking if they would be interested in taking a look at my philosophically informed epic fantasy. A good number of them replied saying, don't bother, don't expect to be read, or don't expect a favorable review. I was absolutely dumbfounded (I knew nothing about the genre community in those days).

Norm-breaking as an aesthetic maxim is well and fine. But as a global evaluative principle it has been a catastrophic failure. Pursue it far enough, and all you succeed in doing is generating hothouse normative contexts almost completely divorced from the mainstream, where the real work of rewriting the status quo needs to be done.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

So fantasy allows for different, non-compatible MO's then? or is it a question of having different MOs at different times? You've written quite a bit on here about the links between myth and fantasy and yet you think you take a more historical approach? can the two MOs be reconciled, or is it a trade-off?

To the extent that a law is a statement of the kind "All Xs are necessarily Ys", then I'm not sure that folk psychology is law-based. I think it's more a matter of people projecting their own feelings onto others. So it is law based in the sense that it's underpinned by "Everyone thinks the way I do" but is that really a law?

I agree that Campbell isn't much of an anthrpologist. But then Freud isn't much of a psychologist either. I rather suspect that both have been acquired by literary criticism because of the fact that they both have nice systemic theories about things.

I've noticed the culture clash here. I normally write about SF and I get certain kinds of links to here and certain kinds of people posting comments. The second I crossed over into fantasy, none of the people who usually link to me did so and a whole load of new people turned up and posted *shrug*.

Sorry to hear you got turned down... that's a bit brutal. Weirdly though, it only affects certain people and places. For example, the SF Site is essentially 70% fantasy now. If you look at their best of 2006 lists, hardly any of the SF novels have been reviewed. Meanwhile, at Strange Horizons, SF and Fantasy appear on the book offer emails in almost equal numbers. It is weird.

[Scott Bakker]

Well, as the acerbic Mr. Fodor might put, there damn well better be intentional law-like generalizations, otherwise there's no such thing as psychology or sociology!

Did you notice how little overlap there was between SFSite's Editor's Choice list and their Reader's Choice list? Definitely some rather large disconnect going on there. It's endemic to your trade: the specialist's sensibilities tend to drift away from those of regular readers. Add to that the social psychology of status and identity claims, and the particularity of tastes becomes a kind of flag. Iconoclastic chic, I like to call it. So in my case, publishing an epic fantasy at the highwater mark of its popularity (Jackson's second movie had just come out), I was pretty much doomed to get the responses I did. For many, I HAD to be writing dreck, simply because I was writing epic fantasy, which meant I was writing for the 'masses.' Like I say, we're hardwired to dupe ourselves with this shit. Not only do we universalize and objectify our own tastes, we use them as a yardstick to judge the tastes of others (I think I've yet to read a single amazon review that doesn't blame the book). Which is why you find it in all spheres of human conduct: we'll run down whatever it takes to feel special.