Has The Fantasy Genre become Stuck in One Place ?

[KGeo777]

Robert E Howard was so good at creating those kinds of standalone heroes and stories and so was, Clark Ashton Smith , Fritz Leiber, Henry Kuttner, C L Moore, Edgar Rice Burroughs , Karl Edward Wagner , David Gemmel , Poul Anderson , jack Vance Den Wolfe , Tanith Lee.


I will always have a soft spot for those kinds of stories and characters.

I read The Shadow of the Vulture recently. Interesting REH experiment-in that case the hero was a drunken bum and the woman was the competent warrior (I wonder if it was inspired by Athena in the Odyssey). The only thing is, I expected the treacherous sister spoken of to show up at the end!
Too bad he didn't do a sequel.

 

[BAYLOR]

I read The Shadow of the Vulture recently. Interesting REH experiment-in that case the hero was a drunken bum and the woman was the competent warrior (I wonder if it was inspired by Athena in the Odyssey). The only thing is, I expected the treacherous sister spoken of to show up at the end!
Too bad he didn't do a sequel.

That one ive never read .

 

[Toby Frost]

p.s. The War for the Oaks is probably the seminal Urban Fantasy text.

Thanks - that's the one!

 

[Extollager]

Simple answer no, there is still a lot of books out there that are clearly influenced by Tolkien and dungeons and dragons but there are numerous fantasy with not a magical creature or other fantasy cliche in sight.
Look at the number of sub genres available, I know I'm not a fan of labelling books into sub genres but the vast range alone should tell you fantasy is not all Tolkien wannabes or stagnant.

Perhaps the question itself should be rephrased. There's no entity "Fantasy Genre" to "get stuck" or not. There are innumerable authors, most of whom even people who read nothing but fantasy will never have heard of, who are writing fantasy; it is not possible to generalize about all the authors writing fantasy. Moreover, I doubt that even the people here who read nothing but newly published works of fantasy are able to, or intend to, read all that's published in English -- which represents quite a narrowing down of things already.

So can the question be answered at all?

If the question is to be rephrased, it might come out like this:

"To me, from the new fantasy I have read and the reviews and advertisements I have seen, it seems that there's a lot of very similar stuff being published. Can anyone direct me to authors and books that seem fresh and interesting in the fantasy field?"

If nobody could, then, well, you might have an indication that (so far as anyone here can tell) the "fantasy genre" is "stuck" -- if you want to put it that way. But in fact we're seeing responses indicating that, yes, there are books and authors that seem fresh and interesting.

Question answered?

 

[.matthew.]

There are many sub-genres of fantasy these days so I wouldn't say it was stuck. I would say that it trends towards the tropes within each category though.
High Fantasy - Western / Medieval / White Male POV / Male Authors
Grimdark - Western / Medieval / White Male POV / Male Authors
Urban Fantasy - Western / Modern / White Male POV / Male Authors
YA Fantasy - Western / Modern / White Female POV / Female Authors
Historical Fantasy - Western / Victorian (give or take a hundred years) / White Female POV / Female Authors
Flintlock Fantasy - Western / Age of Muskets / White, Mix of genders POV / Male Authors

This is not to say there aren't outliers, but on average, that seems to be the pattern I've noticed. Men (in general) prefer the big epics and war-torn worlds, while the period fantasy and romance centred YA will attract more women. There are of course readers who don't fit into these boxes and I've read from all the genres myself - though I do still read a lot more of the male lead ones. It's then hardly surprising that authors choose to write what they enjoy reading.

There's also the clear lack of diversity in these books, however, that appears more to do with the fact that English speaking countries tend to be pretty heavily white. I rarely see translations from other languages that would mix this up and give us more to enjoy, perhaps because people like to place themselves into the characters and publishers aren't willing to take the risk?

The diversity issue also applies to the cultural bias, with western audiences (and authors) feeling more comfortable in western settings. This isn't helped by the 'appropriation police' who scream bloody murder when an author takes from their heritage without being a part of it. Most of this comes down to it being badly written, but badly written western fantasy full of cliches and stereotypes is everywhere as well. Still, all these reasons combined steer western authors away from exploring foreign worlds and sticking to the safe zone of medieval Europe.

 

[Extollager]

To elaborate a little...

The original posting could be rephrased, "Thesis: The publication of books marketed as fantasy in a free enterprise economy reflects reader preferences, available authors, and influence-makers in such a way that repetitive books are and will be common. Agreed?"

That's probably a true statement. Some of us are old enough to remember how sword-and-sorcery mass market paperbacks were abundant after Lancer's revival of the Gnome Press Conan books, etc. caught on. Authors imitated Howard, de Camp, Bjorn Nyberg, &c. as they found paperback publishers eager to print adventures of Kothar, Thongor, Brak, and so on. For a time, if all you wanted to read was sword-and-sorcery, enough product was appearing that, if you had the money, you could feed on those paperbacks almost exclusively. The books looked alike -- often using the same artists. The free market is responsive to consumer interest.

 

[Extollager]

So, you could have said around 1970 that the "fantasy genre" was stalled, with so much barbarian stuff (along with precursors or imitators of Tolkien). But is that what the stuff marketed as fantasy looks like now?

So publishers to some extent follow, to some extent shape reader/consumer interest.

There's also the factor of influence-makers, inside and outside publishers' offices and fan conventions. I would assume, without needing to look, that fantasy with a strong "woke" element has been published this year and that more will come. In some cases people buy and read these books because they feel that they ought to, I suppose, or they're curious. Some will be delighted and some will gradually or rapidly decide these things are not for them.

The more publishing comes to look like a department of state, the more stagnant it really will become. If you want to consider fiction that really was "stuck," check out "socialist realism"!

For myself -- I'm glad that, from time to time, new fiction in familiar forms is published, whether by the highly visible publishers or by small presses. I'm not interested in Tolkien imitations, but something new yet familiar, recalling M. R. James, for example, can be nice; I'm thinking of Jacqueline Simpson's Where Are the Bones?, which works with the M. R. James literary ghost story tradition with an injection of folklore -- the author was president of the Folklore Society, in fact, and has edited some outstanding collections of folktales. Happily the present economic system allows this.

We have to hope that publishing outfits will at least occasionally employ people of taste and discernment who will occasionally see something extraordinary and see it through to publication. Lin Carter used to like to talk about how The Lord of the Rings was not unprecedented -- why, there had been a number of high fantasy works published before. Yet the publishing firm of Allen and Unwin did take a chance on something new when they committed to LotR. Stanley Unwin thought: We'll lose money on this but let's go ahead; it's worth it.

I'm not all that optimistic about publishing, as it seems the big publishers focus on trendy social stuff and on acquiring books that will sell enormous quantities. Too, many of the people in the field will now be grads with college degrees closely related to the field (I think society is over-credentialed these days). There might be less of a "mid-list" niche now. But we can hope.

(1) The "Mid-List": "'Routine Books' of Yesteryear"--Piers Paul Read, Alec Waugh, and more | Science Fiction & Fantasy forums (sffchronicles.com)

(1) Was (Is?) There a Science Fiction "Mid-List"? | Science Fiction & Fantasy forums (sffchronicles.com)

 

[Toby Frost]

The question is, has fantasy become stuck in one place and mode? Or does it still have the possibility to continue evolving ?

I'm not sure about either heroic fantasy falling by the wayside (I'm not 100% sure how it's defined) or epic being the dominant form of fantasy (I think this would depend on how you defined "dominant"). However, I think that a person of random characteristics who wanted to read a fantasy novel would be more likely now to be able to find* a book they liked than they would, say, 40 years ago. So, say, a person who wanted to read a mock-Renaissance ensemble crime caper might read The Lies of Locke Lamora, etc.

If a wider range of stories is available, then surely fantasy hasn't become stuck in one place and mode, and it has the possibility to continue evolving.


*Assuming equal advertising, visibility, etc - which is quite a large "assuming".

 

[nixie]

I recently read Matt Haig's Midnight Library, completely outside my comfort zone, I do lean towards epic the darker the better.
This was a lady caught between live and death finding herself in a Midnight Library filled with books about her life and how things could have been if she made a different choice.
I nearly gave up, no magic, no war, no violence, no political plots or anything resembling my usual reads, pleased I never.

 

[The Big Peat]

There's also the clear lack of diversity in these books, however, that appears more to do with the fact that English speaking countries tend to be pretty heavily white. I rarely see translations from other languages that would mix this up and give us more to enjoy, perhaps because people like to place themselves into the characters and publishers aren't willing to take the risk?

The first big issue with translations is economic. The maths for paying an author + editor + everything else + translator rarely beats author + editor + everything else + no translator and there's no shortage of talented authors in the Anglosphere.

The second is a dearth of material. Talk to non-Anglosphere fantasy readers and they'll often tell you there's no great undiscovered treasure trove of fantasy waiting to be read; that a lot of non-English written fantasy (particularly in Europe) is very classic fantasy and not that good. And increasingly you'll see non-Anglosphere natives like Hannu Rajaniemi and Aliette de Bodard who just write in English, which decreases the amount of material available. And the biggest market where we're going to keep seeing quality non-English works published - the Chinese one - has to contend with the economic issue of there being a lot of free translations out there already.

It is only after that we get to how willing people are to walk in other cultures' shoes. The answer to which is fairly. If you look at Goodreads - not a completely accurate representation of the community but a decent showing of a popular vote - then two of their five most popular fantasy books in 2019 were Hafsah Faizal's We Hunt The Flame and Joan He's Descendant of the Crane. Roshani Chokshi's The Gilded Wolves isn't exactly Anglosphere-centric either.

Incidentally, Joan He's existence - and Rebecca Kuang's, and Zen Cho's, and so on - is another thing against translations. There is no need to pay for translations of Chinese originals to get works with Chinese flavours while there's an ever increasing number of Chinese ethnicity English first language authors working. Which in itself is a matter of stress in some quarters.

In any case, while translations aren't super common, there's a decent amount out there if people go looking for them. I reviewed works originally written in Croatian and Korean this year; I reviewed Jin Yong's Legends of the Condor Heroes (Chinese) the year before. We've all heard of The Witcher. Etc.etc. No, there won't be oodles of them on the big bookshop shelves, but if people want them, they're available.

I am meant to be being social so I can't really do talk about the diversity and what not, but translations are definitely an issue of economics and quality as much as anything else and, while rare in the genre, the genre is so big that there's still a decent amount. You could probably construct a year's worth of reading list of solely translated works without that much difficulty (particularly if doing SFF rather than Fantasy).

 

[Extollager]

You could probably construct a year's worth of reading list of solely translated works without that much difficulty (particularly if doing SFF rather than Fantasy).

I don't have the expertise to have an opinion worth anything, but -- my guess is that this is true. Amazing! I'm old enough to remember when the paperback publication of sf from countries like France into English was unusual.

 

[.matthew.]

It is only after that we get to how willing people are to walk in other cultures' shoes. The answer to which is fairly. If you look at Goodreads - not a completely accurate representation of the community but a decent showing of a popular vote - then two of their five most popular fantasy books in 2019 were Hafsah Faizal's We Hunt The Flame and Joan He's Descendant of the Crane. Roshani Chokshi's The Gilded Wolves isn't exactly Anglosphere-centric either.

That's an interesting point, but looking at the top five for 2020 shows none (in the Goodreads Choice I'm thinking you're using?) There looks to be one middle-eastern and three Asian stories in the whole top twenty this year, which is more than I thought there would be, though these generally fall into the 'novelty' category and those same readers will still consume far more western media.

Having done a little work with polls and the like, I can also say that people will often vote for things that they think will make them seem better. Want to appear well-read to others? Let them know you voted for an obscure off-culture book, even if it wasn't your favourite

We've all heard of The Witcher. Etc.etc.

The Witcher is a pretty rare example of it and only really became well known after the game franchise took off. Not only that, but it is still European in its themes and settings which would help with marketing to English speaking readers.

In any case, while translations aren't super common, there's a decent amount out there if people go looking for them. I reviewed works originally written in Croatian and Korean this year; I reviewed Jin Yong's Legends of the Condor Heroes (Chinese) the year before.

Could you give us a few examples of good ones we might be interested in reading? I'm sure a few people in this thread would like to start the year off with something a little different

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Urban Fantasy - Western / Modern / White Male POV / Male Authors

I read that with some surprise, since I know that tons of published Urban Fantasy is written by women. So much, in fact, that I was expecting you to categorize it as written from Female POV by Female Authors.

I wonder if you did not because so many of the UFs written by women feature main characters involved in romantic relationships*, so that you consider it to be Romance rather than Urban Fantasy?


______
*But these are ongoing relationships with ups and downs that continue from book to book, with no Happily Ever After (or HEA as they say in the Romance biz) at the end of each volume as would be essential for actual genre Romance.

 

[BAYLOR]

To elaborate a little...

The original posting could be rephrased, "Thesis: The publication of books marketed as fantasy in a free enterprise economy reflects reader preferences, available authors, and influence-makers in such a way that repetitive books are and will be common. Agreed?"

That's probably a true statement. Some of us are old enough to remember how sword-and-sorcery mass market paperbacks were abundant after Lancer's revival of the Gnome Press Conan books, etc. caught on. Authors imitated Howard, de Camp, Bjorn Nyberg, &c. as they found paperback publishers eager to print adventures of Kothar, Thongor, Brak, and so on. For a time, if all you wanted to read was sword-and-sorcery, enough product was appearing that, if you had the money, you could feed on those paperbacks almost exclusively. The books looked alike -- often using the same artists. The free market is responsive to consumer interest.

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I think ive read at least one Gardner Fox story and a couple of the Thonger stories.

 

[The Big Peat]

That's an interesting point, but looking at the top five for 2020 shows none (in the Goodreads Choice I'm thinking you're using?) There looks to be one middle-eastern and three Asian stories in the whole top twenty this year, which is more than I thought there would be, though these generally fall into the 'novelty' category and those same readers will still consume far more western media.

Having done a little work with polls and the like, I can also say that people will often vote for things that they think will make them seem better. Want to appear well-read to others? Let them know you voted for an obscure off-culture book, even if it wasn't your favourite

Best Fantasy 2019 (182 books) | Goodreads - I just typed Goodreads Fantasy 2019 into google and got this list. Choice and the Year Lists might be different.

I'd be hesitant of drawing too much conclusive evidence from that list, of the Choice, or any single source really - and it's a fair point that people don't always report their preferences accurately - but it does fit some of my anecdotal evidence and ultimately I wouldn't want to say all the readers are reading all the non-Anglosphere things all the time. That's not true. But there is a demand and a market, and I think most of the readers are reading some non-Anglosphere. Maybe not that much, but enough to make a substantial market.

The Witcher is a pretty rare example of it and only really became well known after the game franchise took off. Not only that, but it is still European in its themes and settings which would help with marketing to English speaking readers.

The Witcher is off the charts successful compared to most fantasy translations in the last X - I guess the last one as successful is The Never Ending Story? Or maybe Lukyanenko's Night Watch? - but a long burn before success is far from unusual. And anything as successful as The Witcher is pretty rare.

It *is* fairly classic fantasy which does help it. But just being European? Europe's a big place and honestly, I wouldn't say I know Slavic mythology/culture - particularly non-Russian - better than Indian or Middle Eastern, increasingly, Chinese and Japanese. It's not like feudal nobility is unknown in those regions either. You can take something like the Empire Trilogy - which is convincingly enough Eastern Asian that I know a fussy Japanese reader who accepts it happily - and it's really not at all alien feeling to me.

And certainly both The Witcher and The Empire are easier to process for me than Mythago Wood, which is very very British but does unusual and interesting things.

Could you give us a few examples of good ones we might be interested in reading? I'm sure a few people in this thread would like to start the year off with something a little different

Where The Distant Bells Toll was a nice fun anthology. Legends of the Condor Heroes is a definite rec for me. The Gray House is one I haven't read yet, but I've heard a lot of recs for it for being literary and heartwarming.

 

[.matthew.]

I read that with some surprise, since I know that tons of published Urban Fantasy is written by women. So much, in fact, that I was expecting you to categorize it as written from Female POV by Female Authors.

I wonder if you did not because so many of the UFs written by women feature main characters involved in romantic relationships*, so that you consider it to be Romance rather than Urban Fantasy?

Ahh, I was placing most of those into the YA Fantasy. I suppose that was my mistake with there being some crossover between the two. For example, I would place something like the Dresden Files into Urban Fantasy, and something like Rachel Aaron's Heartstriker series into YA. I enjoyed both series (Rachel Aaron's one more) but when I think Urban Fantasy I tend to think of the smart ass wizard ones that have lots of combat magic and a very fast pace.

I don't know the YA genre well enough to say one way or the other whether this is true but from what I have read or heard about it seems a lot of what I would classify as Young Adult seem to have a prominent romance plot in them which was why I placed it where I did.

But, think about what could be considered YA. Many books might be labelled as such but would fall better into other genres. Take your standard coming of age story and that sounds like it'd be perfect for young adult readers. Add in a heavy dose of darkness and cynicism and it suddenly becomes grimdark. I feel the only books that generally stay in the YA genre are the teen romance ones.

Then again I might be completely wrong, YA might encompass all of them and I neglected the YA romance sub-genre. Who knows? Maybe there's just too many sub-this and sub-that to really list them all

It *is* fairly classic fantasy which does help it. But just being European?

My error. I should have said classic fantasy. That explains my point far better than the term European and is one I'll use from now on.

 

[BAYLOR]

I'm not sure about either heroic fantasy falling by the wayside (I'm not 100% sure how it's defined) or epic being the dominant form of fantasy (I think this would depend on how you defined "dominant"). However, I think that a person of random characteristics who wanted to read a fantasy novel would be more likely now to be able to find* a book they liked than they would, say, 40 years ago. So, say, a person who wanted to read a mock-Renaissance ensemble crime caper might read The Lies of Locke Lamora, etc.

If a wider range of stories is available, then surely fantasy hasn't become stuck in one place and mode, and it has the possibility to continue evolving.


*Assuming equal advertising, visibility, etc - which is quite a large "assuming".

Im thinking that maybe my definition of what constitutes fantasy might be way too limited.

 

[Randy M.]

Jonathan Carroll, Caitlin R. Kiernan, John Crowley, Theodora Goss, Angela Slatter, ... At least the last two, though writing short work in fairy tale, stem more from Angela Carter than from Tolkein. Carroll writes urban fantasy before it was called urban fantasy (blending in mystery and horror to some degree). Kiernan writes mainly contemporary fantasy stories from a Machen-Blackwood-Lovecraft nexus. Crowley hasn't written anything Tolkeinesque that I'm aware of.

Then there are works by Victor LaValle, N.K. Jemison, Daniel Jose Older, Nalo Hopkinson ... if you want diverse subject matter in fantasy, if you look for it you will find it.

 

[BAYLOR]

Jonathan Carroll, Caitlin R. Kiernan, John Crowley, Theodora Goss, Angela Slatter, ... At least the last two, though writing short work in fairy tale, stem more from Angela Carter than from Tolkein. Carroll writes urban fantasy before it was called urban fantasy (blending in mystery and horror to some degree). Kiernan writes mainly contemporary fantasy stories from a Machen-Blackwood-Lovecraft nexus. Crowley hasn't written anything Tolkeinesque that I'm aware of.

Then there are works by Victor LaValle, N.K. Jemison, Daniel Jose Older, Nalo Hopkinson ... if you want diverse subject matter in fantasy, if you look for it you will find it.

Michael Shea's Nift the Lean stories.

 

[Vince W]

I remember thinking the Xanth series by Piers Anthony was a step away from the traditional fantasy mould. Also, The Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizabeth Moon was quite different in the 80s for fantasy.