A fast pass on fantasy, my two cents
that many will disagree with...
Fantasy for me is the use of a different world, different world views
and even worlds with different natural laws, different physiologies,
etc....
thereby to illuminate and question those of our waking
world. Some of those I find the most compelling raise and illuminate
matters such as:
- What is honor and honorable
action, what is virtue and virtuous action, what is the just...or
malign or evil...use of power, how means become ends.
- How do worlds with different pantheons and theololges change the way life lives and breathes
- The matter of magic: in order for magic to be more than just flashy hand-waving, it has to have a consistency, a sensibility, a primum mobile....and all of that has to hang together, make sense...and even, be
compelling. That is, magic has to 'seem right and, speak to a higher
meta-reality...and make you want to live in its world.
- Dylan had it that 'To live outside the law, you must be honest'; that is, you must find an internal law to
replace the law that you left behind. HOw do you live a just life to counter a world of injustice?
- The crux of fantasy
is there: to imagine life apart from the 'world we know' requires the
author to construct a life, culture, society, physics and life on a
different plane....and the reader to imagine life in that world.
So the reader becomes a participant in the invocation of fantasy
Fantasy tell 'war stories' of wars they never were but
might be...they are object lessons dressed up to enchant while they instruct, by being utterly compelling.
Like the Bible, really substantive fantasy is a mirror of insight,
wherein which one can see life, vice, virtue and vicissitudes more
clearly, wherein things and relationships barely understood or missed
stand out in clear relief.
The fantasy that, for me, doesn't make the grade:
Half-baked stuff...
Like a cracked dish that hasn't
yet broken, that when tapped on the counter, doesn't ring true..chewing
gum writing, writing that is a chain of '
and then' monemnts.
I'm 75, have been reading fantasy since
I was 12 or so. Now that fantasy has stormed into the limelight,
I am bemused that, with a backlist of so much fine, fine work long
neglected, what is standing in the limelight is light-weight stuff like:
- Harry Potter
(C-, neat gadget and spells, flashy hand-waving, but little character depth or mythic
structure... So it is that its movies are more compelling than the book because actors inhabit the
characters) and bring them to live
- The Lightning Thief (sigh).
- The work of Mercedes Lackey: (lots
of output, but lightweight...Tamora Pierce does that sort of work much
better)
- Tolkien, who doesn't wear well to me. He is, after all, an
Oxford don who like others there turned to writing to make sense of the
titanic struggle of the World Wars. While his
work is epic, the surface glitters and his alternate world and
language(s) are superbly researched and created, the characters and the
myths have neither depth nor development for me.
That sort of thing....
Dark,ugly,
bloody, Machiavellian fantasy like Game of Thrones
which includes:
- the work of Guy
Gabriel Keyes,
- Robin Hobbs (glorified assassins? Please!)
- Stephen
Donaldson (glorified epilepsy, double forsooth),
Fantasy where
goodness, honor and loyalty are drowned in blood, betrayal, soulless
seduction and back-stabbing. If I'm reading and investing my
imagination in an author's alternate universe, I want to be shown
Light, deliverance and redemption, how another world might exalt the
human spirit, not yet another ugly imagination of the dark side of
humanity.
As
if that was something special: just turn on the news or watch
politics. If you are what you eat, you must also be what you
read. I wish to be enlightened, not endarkened.