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owlRecently there has been some kerfuffle of JKR's supposed slighting of the fantasy genre, and Terry Pratchett's comments. I saw both sides of the indignation, and tend to come down more on the Pterry side.
Rowling says that she didn't realise that the first Potter book was fantasy until after it was published. I'm not the world's greatest expert, but I would have thought that the wizards, witches, trolls, unicorns, hidden worlds, jumping chocolate frogs, owl mail, magic food, ghosts, broomsticks and spells would have given her a clue?'
It's funny, and it's authentic Pterry. I don't think it's insulting to JKR to point this out. There really isn't anything else to classify Harry Potter as, unless it's 'fairy tale', but I don't imagine JKR would like that much better.
Anyway, Pterry's real point was the sloppy reporting. Whoever wrote that article was evidently even less of a fan of fantasy than JKR. From the Beeb:
In a recent interview with Time magazine, Rowling said she was "not a huge fan of fantasy" and was trying to "subvert" the
genre.
The magazine also said Rowling reinvented fantasy fiction, which was previously stuck in "an idealised, romanticised, pseudo-feudal world, where knights and ladies morris-dance to Greensleeves".
Even in Lord of the Rings there isn't any Morris dancing. Every good author subverts their genre to some degree. Tolkien probably seemed madly subversive at one point—whoever heard of inventing a universe, and writing a doorstopper of a book like that, so that one's characters could say 'Hello' in Quenya?
What Pterry and JKR agree on, it would seem, is the definition of 'fantasy' as 'got unicorns'. I would humbly beg to differ from both of them. Fantasy does not equal unicorns; it is the creation of an internally consistent secondary world which is by intention distinct from the real one.
Lord of the Rings is, for me as well as many others, the fantasy, and there's not a unicorn in sight. It has become the default setting for fantasy worlds, and has bitten deep into the collective psyche. As such, it's hard to write about. but at least I can say that it lends respectability to conlangers, the fellow addicts of Tolkien's 'secret vice', everywhere. :-D
Can anyone seriously deny that it is fantasy? Thought not.
Discworld has unicorns, apparently:
"...then there's wear and tear on virgins..."
"What?"
"My speciality's unicorns."
"They must be very rare nowadays."
"Right. You don't get many unicorns, either."
(Guards! Guards, quoted from memory.)
The important thing there is not the unicorn or the idea of unicorns, but the joke. Not really fantasy.
Star Wars is fantasy, but there are no unicorns; the outer trappings are of the science-fiction sort, but who knows how a hyperdrive works? Who cares about the power source of a lightsaber? It's a magical sword made out of light. This is why the EU works badly (apart from large parts of it being mere bad writing); it's trying to bolt on Star Trek-type extras on to a fantasy world.
Star Wars isn't a story about what might happen to the human race in the future (incidentally, I think the term 'speculative fiction' is misapplied to fantasy); it's a story about how the brave young knight and his loyal companions rescued the princess from the black knight in the dark fortress—and, in the end, how he rescued the black knight as well, and how the black knight shut himself up in the dark fortress to begin with. It is a fairy-tale by intention.
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sue_parsons surprised me the other day by saying that what she liked about Star Wars were the characters. I may have misunderstood her, but in ANH, at least, they are very close to their archetypes: the noble young knight, the evil knight, the wise mentor, the brave princess, the lovable rogue. Of course over the films they all all grow more dimensions, become breathing flesh and blood, while remaining (mostly) the archetypes beneath.
But what drew me in the first instance was—not exactly the story, for the bones of it are the same as beneath all the other thousand faces—but that incarnation of the story with its particular flavour. No-one could mistake Hogsmeade or Mos Eisley for anywhere else, any more than Hobbiton or Minas Tirith.
One might be forgiven for playing spot-the-difference between Ankh-Morpork and London. At times, Pterry is closer to Jonathan Swift than he is to JKR or to Tolkien. Discworld is often not a fantasy but a satire. In the early books it is a satire of the post-Tolkien fantasy genre, which confuses matters somewhat. That is why Discworld is flat and rides on a turtle and is full of dragons and magic: because of its origins. Discworld is a mirror of Roundworld, existing initially for that. The Ankh-Morpork books in particular show this. The important thing about Vimes is not that he lives on a disc that sits on top of elelphants that stand on the back of a turtle, but that he is a cop. Despite the crossbow and the swamp dragons, he is quintessentially a cop. Strip him of his incidental equipment and you could put him on TV. Men at Arms, Feet of Clay and Jingo could all happen anywhere with minor tweaking.
As for the wizards, they don't behave the way they do because they're wizards, but because they're part of a university.Ponder, bless him, is transparently a nuclear physicist. In the same way, Small Gods is about organised religion in general, and Monstrous Regiment is about armies and wars. They take place on Discworld because—well, they might bite a bit close to home in a Roundworld setting, mightn't they?
I'm not saying that Pterry doesn't write fantasy at all, nor that the rest of what he does write is inferior to the pure form. The Witches sequence (Lords and Ladies, Witches Abroad) and the Tiffany Aching books, together with parts of the Death sequence (Mort, Reaper Man, Thief of Time), are in my opinion, the books that most consistently reach the fantasy level. The Watch sequence grows less fantastic as the focus moves from Carrot to Vimes. Guards! Guards! is a not-too-severe fun-poke at The Lord of the Rings and its imitators, but the summoning of the dragon and the idea of the returning king who remains incognito are fantasy in their own right, with a distinctive twist. That distinctiveness, in fact, is what makes them fantasy under my definition.
Rowling says that she didn't realise that the first Potter book was fantasy until after it was published. I'm not the world's greatest expert, but I would have thought that the wizards, witches, trolls, unicorns, hidden worlds, jumping chocolate frogs, owl mail, magic food, ghosts, broomsticks and spells would have given her a clue?'
It's funny, and it's authentic Pterry. I don't think it's insulting to JKR to point this out. There really isn't anything else to classify Harry Potter as, unless it's 'fairy tale', but I don't imagine JKR would like that much better.
Anyway, Pterry's real point was the sloppy reporting. Whoever wrote that article was evidently even less of a fan of fantasy than JKR. From the Beeb:
In a recent interview with Time magazine, Rowling said she was "not a huge fan of fantasy" and was trying to "subvert" the
genre.
The magazine also said Rowling reinvented fantasy fiction, which was previously stuck in "an idealised, romanticised, pseudo-feudal world, where knights and ladies morris-dance to Greensleeves".
Even in Lord of the Rings there isn't any Morris dancing. Every good author subverts their genre to some degree. Tolkien probably seemed madly subversive at one point—whoever heard of inventing a universe, and writing a doorstopper of a book like that, so that one's characters could say 'Hello' in Quenya?
What Pterry and JKR agree on, it would seem, is the definition of 'fantasy' as 'got unicorns'. I would humbly beg to differ from both of them. Fantasy does not equal unicorns; it is the creation of an internally consistent secondary world which is by intention distinct from the real one.
Lord of the Rings is, for me as well as many others, the fantasy, and there's not a unicorn in sight. It has become the default setting for fantasy worlds, and has bitten deep into the collective psyche. As such, it's hard to write about. but at least I can say that it lends respectability to conlangers, the fellow addicts of Tolkien's 'secret vice', everywhere. :-D
Can anyone seriously deny that it is fantasy? Thought not.
Discworld has unicorns, apparently:
"...then there's wear and tear on virgins..."
"What?"
"My speciality's unicorns."
"They must be very rare nowadays."
"Right. You don't get many unicorns, either."
(Guards! Guards, quoted from memory.)
The important thing there is not the unicorn or the idea of unicorns, but the joke. Not really fantasy.
Star Wars is fantasy, but there are no unicorns; the outer trappings are of the science-fiction sort, but who knows how a hyperdrive works? Who cares about the power source of a lightsaber? It's a magical sword made out of light. This is why the EU works badly (apart from large parts of it being mere bad writing); it's trying to bolt on Star Trek-type extras on to a fantasy world.
Star Wars isn't a story about what might happen to the human race in the future (incidentally, I think the term 'speculative fiction' is misapplied to fantasy); it's a story about how the brave young knight and his loyal companions rescued the princess from the black knight in the dark fortress—and, in the end, how he rescued the black knight as well, and how the black knight shut himself up in the dark fortress to begin with. It is a fairy-tale by intention.
sue_parsons surprised me the other day by saying that what she liked about Star Wars were the characters. I may have misunderstood her, but in ANH, at least, they are very close to their archetypes: the noble young knight, the evil knight, the wise mentor, the brave princess, the lovable rogue. Of course over the films they all all grow more dimensions, become breathing flesh and blood, while remaining (mostly) the archetypes beneath.But what drew me in the first instance was—not exactly the story, for the bones of it are the same as beneath all the other thousand faces—but that incarnation of the story with its particular flavour. No-one could mistake Hogsmeade or Mos Eisley for anywhere else, any more than Hobbiton or Minas Tirith.
One might be forgiven for playing spot-the-difference between Ankh-Morpork and London. At times, Pterry is closer to Jonathan Swift than he is to JKR or to Tolkien. Discworld is often not a fantasy but a satire. In the early books it is a satire of the post-Tolkien fantasy genre, which confuses matters somewhat. That is why Discworld is flat and rides on a turtle and is full of dragons and magic: because of its origins. Discworld is a mirror of Roundworld, existing initially for that. The Ankh-Morpork books in particular show this. The important thing about Vimes is not that he lives on a disc that sits on top of elelphants that stand on the back of a turtle, but that he is a cop. Despite the crossbow and the swamp dragons, he is quintessentially a cop. Strip him of his incidental equipment and you could put him on TV. Men at Arms, Feet of Clay and Jingo could all happen anywhere with minor tweaking.
As for the wizards, they don't behave the way they do because they're wizards, but because they're part of a university.Ponder, bless him, is transparently a nuclear physicist. In the same way, Small Gods is about organised religion in general, and Monstrous Regiment is about armies and wars. They take place on Discworld because—well, they might bite a bit close to home in a Roundworld setting, mightn't they?
I'm not saying that Pterry doesn't write fantasy at all, nor that the rest of what he does write is inferior to the pure form. The Witches sequence (Lords and Ladies, Witches Abroad) and the Tiffany Aching books, together with parts of the Death sequence (Mort, Reaper Man, Thief of Time), are in my opinion, the books that most consistently reach the fantasy level. The Watch sequence grows less fantastic as the focus moves from Carrot to Vimes. Guards! Guards! is a not-too-severe fun-poke at The Lord of the Rings and its imitators, but the summoning of the dragon and the idea of the returning king who remains incognito are fantasy in their own right, with a distinctive twist. That distinctiveness, in fact, is what makes them fantasy under my definition.
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no subject
Date: 2005-08-07 02:20 pm (UTC)Part of the confusion stems from how label-conscious people are, and how subjective those labels are. No matter what we see, we always have to call it something, even if we're calling it by the wrong name. I'm reminded of my other fandom love, Star Trek. My whole life I've seen the label "science fiction" on it, but those who've thought about it and even Roddenberry himself when he was alive knew that wasn't really true. If you took away the starships and the phasers, you still basically have a story because it's about people, not the science. The other stuff is just props and decoration to set the story against. Even TV Guide knew that "sci-fi" wasn't quite right and categorized it as "adventure" in the 60's. Roddenberry's own term for it was "space opera."
I think the "fantasy=unicorns" thing just comes from a mainstream population that doesn't have the exposure to something to know any better, so they just latch on to the most universally recognized symbol it seems to have in common. These are the same people who think artists like Avril Levigne and Green Day are "punk," and don't realize that the term "alternative music" is meaningless now because that style has become marketed and popularized so it's no longer an alternative to anything. But you know, labels are so important...
Now, I've established that I'm not into Harry Potter beyond having seen the movies, but as an "outsider," I'm just wondering why JKR got picked on for her comment about not knowing HP was fantasy until it got published? From the way I understand things, she started out as a mom who told cool stories and took a chance and took them to a publisher. Is there any reason why she should have been label-conscious before that point?
no subject
Date: 2005-08-08 06:46 am (UTC)It looks to me as though JKR was poking fun at herself for not realising what her own book was about (she seems to think it's obvious to the reader, which it is), and the interviewer ran with it in the cause of his/her anti-fantasy bias.
On SF: laser guns and spaceships do not necessarily the SF make :) Talk like Yoda I must not, as confusing it is.
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Date: 2005-08-08 11:10 pm (UTC)Especially if those things don't operate in a scientific manner.