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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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Date: 2005-08-14 02:58 pm (UTC)Well, Tolkien was a purist who thought even Lewis was too frivolous with his use of fantasy, so I don't see him as the definite authority. Especially since I think the high fantasy inspired by his work is the least interesting of the fantasy sub-genres. (It's not his fault, of course, but I do think fantasy could have benefited from not having Middle-Earth as the huge fucking role model.)
I don't count Mum Allen's face or Ally McBeal's dancing babies and so on as fantasy in the genre sense
I don't count them as such either; rather, they're step four: magical realism. I used Allen as an example because it shows that New York remains New York regardless of what happens in it.
But a story like, say, Eight Days of Luke, that has paranormal events happening all over the place but still tied in with the mundane, that I would count as fantasy. Admittedly, it's not subcreation of worlds, but it's not magical realism either, and since fantasy is originally based largely on this type of stories, I think it makes sense to count them in. Before Tolkien, most stories of a fantastical nature were not set in another world.
I think one reason it's hard to peg down #3 is because it's largely ignored in modern adult literature - someone like Neil Gaiman might slip through the cracks, but largely the publishers are scared to death of things that can't be definitely pegged down as fantasy or mainstream. In children's literature, however, it's among the most common forms of storytelling.
I tend to see it as a POV thing. #2 type of fantasy has the ordinary person as an aberration in a fantasy world. #3 type of fantasy has the fantasy people as aberrations in the ordinary world. It often blends with the horror story - American Gods has horror elements and Buffy the Vampire Slayer has fantasy elements - but it doesn't have to.