# Fantasy



## Allanon (Sep 22, 2010)

What is it about Fantasy or Sci-Fi thats makes you as an individual love the genre, is it trough your parents love for it, a friend? yours alone or something else? what makes you come back to it time and again. I would ask that if you leave your thoughts here take the time when doing so to really show how much it means to you. it does to me.

I've read since a very early age and I always liked the genre of Fantasy the best. I've dabbled with SF but it doesn't captivate me. I think though that I wasn't completely drawn into the genre totally until i was about 21 years old, not to say that I wasn't reading SFF until then as from my last thread you know I was, when I was given 2 books to read by my Dad. He's another avid reader, he gave me Gemmell's "Legend" and Feist's "Magician", I was hooked! For me it doesn't matter what people say about any author, they are the best i've read and will always hold special place in my heart. Obviously i'm biased and I do love other works but I could read their's every day and never get bored.

What gets me about Fantasy, the thing I love the most is escapism. I get into a book and people have to physically shake me before I realise they are there. I become a character along the journey. Now this may sound strange to those who get into the characters and imagine themselves as one also, but I don't take on the role of a lead man, I become a background player, not even named, just observing and helping as I can. The characters are another thing I love, heroes, they don't always get it right first time but the struggles and trials and the humanity is what sets me alight. People can relate to these things, and if you can picture the situation happening to you, obviously not being attacked by a hoard of goblins but the feeling and emotions, then the men and women in these books come to life.

The only other major part that I can think of is the "what if" factor. All these books that have alternate realities, alter egos, shadows and such. I sometimes think, where do these ideas come from? Is it really there? has it happened to this author? I do get drawn in and think this could happen, it may have happened or it could be happening right now! And i watch and wait for it, I love it!

By the way, my name is Stephen my wife is Gabrielle, she wouldn't let me call my son Roland! And another one, my wedding ring is white gold! _I KNOW!!!_


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## J-WO (Sep 22, 2010)

When one thinks about it, the vast majority of stories told throughout the ages have been fantasy. Realism has only really took off in the last couple of centuries. Looking at it that way, fantasy is actually the norm!


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## The Judge (Sep 22, 2010)

But I don't think people in previous ages would have thought of themselves as composing "fantasy" in the sense that we think of it today.  After all, the concept of history being a matter of true facts was a fairly alien one -- myth, legend, history all blurred into one.

Anyway, a good question Allanon -- but I think it's one which will find more response in SFF Lounge, so I'll move it over there for you.


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## Perpetual Man (Sep 22, 2010)

It is a good question and one that is not so easy to answer. 

Why do I love Fantasy and SF? Neither of my parents were great readers (both do a little better now) but none of it was ever 'imaginative' fiction.

I have very vague memories of sitting on the settee with my dad on a Saturday night and watching Doctor Who - and I must have been quite young, so in some ways I'm sure that influenced me.

As far as reading goes, I had a few problems to start with, but it was a series of beautifully illustrated pirate adventures, filled with dragons and griffins and other fantastical creatures that managed to get me going.

From there I started tried combining the two and tried the Doctor who novelizations and after making a new friend at the age of nine who was into the same things I slowly started spreading out...

But why do I actually like it?

Perhaps it is the sense of wonder that comes with the best of it; the fact that it is not about the real world around us, giving us an escape from the mundane and into something different and magical, while SF allows us to look at our world and see technology make the future real. In some cases just wanting to reach touch it! Wondering why the hell we are not on the moon and Mars yet!!

It is the feeling of reading dreams of wonder and excellence, a total freedom and escape from the real world, a magi in it's own right.


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## HareBrain (Sep 22, 2010)

With a good fantasy story, not only can you not predict what will happen, you can't even know in advance the range of possibilities of what will happen.

Also, fantasy quite often throws up interesting ideas about the Origins of Things, which I personally like.


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## Boneman (Sep 22, 2010)

Fantasy is what you make it; reality is what it is. And I do think I like fantasy because (partly) England was a very grey and dull place when I was a lad, and the element of escapism leant excitement and wonder to it. Partly why I have had  a lifelong love affair with the cinema, for the same reason. It does fire the imagination...


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## nixie (Sep 23, 2010)

My mum has always read, romance and crime are her thing. Around the age of 10-11 I picked up my older brother's reading habits, Dennis Wheatley, horror that sort of thing. I'd read the Narina books and other children' fantasy books and was a big fan of 2000AD and read some of the Gor books as a teen until mum banned them but never really got into adult fantasy. Then in my early twenties I picked up Feist's Magician and was drawn in hook line and sinker.The funny thing was my brother joined the army when I was 14, was stationed in Germany and Ireland for the next 14 years. We never really discussed books when he came home so we didn't realise until I went to visit him the first time he was stationed in Winchester our reading habits had followed the same path. Although he also reads sci-fi and has a library that makes me drool. When my sister in law makes noises about him reducing his collection he lets me take some home but always takes them back when he comes to visit.


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## Karn Maeshalanadae (Sep 23, 2010)

Well, actually, my first real experience with reading fantasy was with The Ruby Knight by David Eddings back when I was ten or eleven, and I branched out from there. I went over to Piers Anthony's Xanth novels and Terry Brooks, and have since branched out even further to more sophisticated works.


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## Deathpool (Dec 8, 2010)

I like Fantasy because it gives me a chance to imagine a different world.


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## Sargeant_Fox (Jan 24, 2011)

J-WO said:


> When one thinks about it, the vast majority of stories told throughout the ages have been fantasy. Realism has only really took off in the last couple of centuries. Looking at it that way, fantasy is actually the norm!



Jorge Luis Borges once said the same in a radio interview. He said that literature began with the fantastic tales of Gods, that realism was just a recent detour and that eventually literature would return to the fantastic.

When one considers that many of the mainstream literary writers haven't resisted the allure of fantasy, science fiction, the supernatural of horror - Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, José Saramago, J.G. Ballard, etc. - one begins to realise that's true.


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## Pyan (Jan 24, 2011)

In a word - _*escapism.*_

Whether I'm sitting in with Kimball Kinnison and his epic fight against Boskone, Druss trying to hold Dros Delnoch, or Pyanfar struggling to save her species through the politics of the Compact, I'm _there_: not in a small house in a small city in a small country, wondering if the rain will stop soon or if the car'll get through its MOT without too much work. I've a Lens, or a great axe or a hyperspace freighter, and that's much more enjoyable...


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## J-WO (Jan 24, 2011)

At least 45% of literary fiction is about some lecturer having a mid-life crisis and falling into bed with one of their students. I swear.

Give me squids in space any day of the week.


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## Menion (Jan 24, 2011)

I remember having The Hobbit read to me when I was... er maybe 6 years old, but the first real books I read by myself was Harry Potter when I was 8, then my Dad gave me Terry Brooks - Shannara, Lord of the Rings, David Eddings, Discworld and now 10 years later and a few hundred books later, I don't think there is anything better then diving into the imagination of authors.


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## Lucky_Lola (Mar 3, 2011)

There was really no option but for me to become a lover of speculative fiction.

My Dad read to me at bedtime until I was about 8 (I think), mostly adventure stories... my late uncle had an almost complete set of the _Biggles _books - strange thing to read to a young girl, no? I loved it, I often say that the root of my love for words came from those days, stopping Dad every few sentences to ask what such-and-such meant.

My Grandmother owned a bookstore. Little independent shop in a little town, and we always had books in the house. She loved Bryce Courtney, I think my Mum still has all of the hardbacks. I grew up learning that books were precious, magical things worthy of reverence and respect.

Then the moment that steered me irrevocably toward fantasy. At age 7 my school teacher (a British ex-pat who spoke the Queen's English with all the gravitas of a BBC announcer) read _The Hobbit_ to my class. Then began the landslide. Maurice Gee's _The Halfmen of O_, Sherryl Jordan's _Winter of Fire_, and Tamora Pierce's _Wild Magic_ prepared me for the eventual shift toward adult fantasy, namely Eddings' _Elenium_. To this day, even after several re-readings, the end of Hobb's _Farseer Trilogy_ makes me cry 

In an echo of previous posters, the largest attraction for me is the escapism. The empirical world was never enough for me, I was always imagining what lay beneath the things we could see and feel and hear... I have always been fascinated with the unexplained and the unexplainable, the illogical and the mystical. Fantasy fed that obsession.

Reality is hard, cruel and boring. I'll take my leisure with a warhorse and a spellbook, thanks


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## Yog-Sothoth (Mar 3, 2011)

Yep, pure escapism, as a 5 year old kid, I used to be into the world of Dinosaurs because it really fascinated me, it was so different from ours. Then one day at the same age, I found myself wandering through a fantasy section in the library and discovered the ElfQuest comics, and was sold forever. The fact that our class had an awesome teacher that let us watch a Fantasy movie every last friday of the month, helped a great deal too, films like the Big Friendly Giant, the Labyrinth and the Never Ending Story left a positive mark on me.


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## soulsinging (Mar 24, 2011)

pyan said:


> In a word - _*escapism.*_
> 
> Whether I'm sitting in with Kimball Kinnison and his epic fight against Boskone, Druss trying to hold Dros Delnoch, or Pyanfar struggling to save her species through the politics of the Compact, I'm _there_: not in a small house in a small city in a small country, wondering if the rain will stop soon or if the car'll get through its MOT without too much work. I've a Lens, or a great axe or a hyperspace freighter, and that's much more enjoyable...



Pretty much the same for me. I majored in lit and while I do still love some of the classics (Hemingway, and Catch-22 is still my fav novel), I'm over "serious" lit to a large extent. Think DeLillo, Franzen, etc... the people that write dreary books about dreary things happening to angst-ridden characters. My life is boring and feels monotonous, I don't want to come home and read about equally boring things happening to equally bored people. I have my own life for that. I read to imagine what it might be like to have a life a bit more interesting and exciting than mine... one where worrying about bills or how unsatisfying my job is is unnecessary, not a plot point.


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