Of course, as you consume more works, it becomes harder to find novelty, so I don’t read nearly as much fantasy these days as I used to.
I’m probably more familiar with contemporary fantasy than any other genre, but recently I’ve largely stopped reading it in favor of historical genre works and Earthfic. I don’t think a lack of novelty is why I’ve been slowing down, though.
Rather, fantasy—along with several related subgenres not usually categorized as such—is tied to its internal ethics in a way that most other fiction is not, and the more I learn and think about the way those ethics are built up, the less comfortable I am with them. It’s not so bad while I’m actually reading—it’s easy to submerge yourself in the consequential universe of a work, unless you’re actively trying not to. But once I’ve come up from that and started working out the implications, there’s usually some quite unpleasant cognitive dissonance for me to deal with, unless the author’s good enough to have worked some of this out in the text (rare) or is deliberately subverting genre expectations (common, but lazier).
I think this is a serious obstacle to writing rational fantasy that’s recognizable as such. MoR seems to a large extent to have been written around the problem, which is one of the reasons it works, but I wouldn’t be interested in retreading that ground exactly.
I’m not sure I’d agree with this as a generalization. Tolkienesque fantasy is a pretty large subgenre, but outside of it I don’t think fantasy is all that ethically unified.
Even within the set of stories that invoke The Chosen One as a device, the implications can vary quite a lot. Where on the one hand you have stories like the series set in the Tortall universe, which feature classic Chosen By The Gods characters who’re destined for greatness, you can also get works like the Keys to the Kingdom series, which features a Chosen One who is very explicitly chosen simply because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The central moral conflict isn’t the righteous elect versus the depraved reprobates, but adaptiveness and consideration versus a mechanical and inconsiderate bureaucracy (embodied in a population of beings of astronomical age which are nigh incapable of adapting their intellects to tasks beyond the narrow scope for which they were created.)
Oh, the direct implications do vary quite a bit. But modern fantasy is so dominated by a particular cluster of conventions—Tolkein’s too narrow, but you wouldn’t be too far wrong if you called it the set of plots encompassed by Tolkein, Lewis, Perrault, and the Arthurian folktales—that even when it doesn’t crib from their ethics, it’s still about their ethics.
Recently, for example, I read Glen Cook’s Black Company books, one of the first settings to use people from the “evil” side of a Tolkeinesque grand conflict as viewpoint characters. The ethics explicitly endorsed by their characters are utterly pragmatic; those suggested by the plot are a bit more idealistic, but still well short of Tolkein’s. Yet without Tolkein’s ethics in the background, that part of the story wouldn’t work; they’re simply being used as the negative space in the illustration rather than the positive. That limits things considerably.
Rather, fantasy—along with several related subgenres not usually categorized as such—is tied to its internal ethics in a way that most other fiction is not, and the more I learn and think about the way those ethics are built up, the less comfortable I am with them. It’s not so bad while I’m actually reading—it’s easy to submerge yourself in the consequential universe of a work, unless you’re actively trying not to. But once I’ve come up from that and started working out the implications, there’s usually some quite unpleasant cognitive dissonance for me to deal with, unless the author’s good enough to have worked some of this out in the text (rare) or is deliberately subverting genre expectations (common, but lazier).
Well, working this out properly would probably take a top-level post.
To oversimplify, though, most of the common fantasy plot devices are, or at some point were, intended to be understood not only as entertainment but as statements about ethics: you can’t make your protagonist a Chosen One, for example, without implying that there’s someone or something doing the choosing, and that this is in some sense how things are supposed to work. Because of the history of the genre or plot needs or romantic attitudes toward fantasy settings, these implications can end up being rather odd.
This isn’t a new complaint, of course; every time you hear someone complaining about how (for example) orcs in Lord of the Rings can plausibly be read as stand-ins for Zulu hordes out of the British colonial zeitgeist, you’re hearing a variation on it. But readings like that are really the least of my worries. I’m more concerned with what fantasy says about agency: what interests you can ethically pursue, and how and under what circumstances you can ethically pursue them. Suffice it to say that your options within your average fantasy universe are very limited.
It’s hard to get away from this problem within the conventions of modern fantasy, although some modern writers have started playing with it in various ways. Older fantasy doesn’t always work the same way, though; Fritz Leiber’s books, for example, seem to inherit more from picaresque than fairytale conventions.
I’m probably more familiar with contemporary fantasy than any other genre, but recently I’ve largely stopped reading it in favor of historical genre works and Earthfic. I don’t think a lack of novelty is why I’ve been slowing down, though.
Rather, fantasy—along with several related subgenres not usually categorized as such—is tied to its internal ethics in a way that most other fiction is not, and the more I learn and think about the way those ethics are built up, the less comfortable I am with them. It’s not so bad while I’m actually reading—it’s easy to submerge yourself in the consequential universe of a work, unless you’re actively trying not to. But once I’ve come up from that and started working out the implications, there’s usually some quite unpleasant cognitive dissonance for me to deal with, unless the author’s good enough to have worked some of this out in the text (rare) or is deliberately subverting genre expectations (common, but lazier).
I think this is a serious obstacle to writing rational fantasy that’s recognizable as such. MoR seems to a large extent to have been written around the problem, which is one of the reasons it works, but I wouldn’t be interested in retreading that ground exactly.
I’m not sure I’d agree with this as a generalization. Tolkienesque fantasy is a pretty large subgenre, but outside of it I don’t think fantasy is all that ethically unified.
Even within the set of stories that invoke The Chosen One as a device, the implications can vary quite a lot. Where on the one hand you have stories like the series set in the Tortall universe, which feature classic Chosen By The Gods characters who’re destined for greatness, you can also get works like the Keys to the Kingdom series, which features a Chosen One who is very explicitly chosen simply because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The central moral conflict isn’t the righteous elect versus the depraved reprobates, but adaptiveness and consideration versus a mechanical and inconsiderate bureaucracy (embodied in a population of beings of astronomical age which are nigh incapable of adapting their intellects to tasks beyond the narrow scope for which they were created.)
Oh, the direct implications do vary quite a bit. But modern fantasy is so dominated by a particular cluster of conventions—Tolkein’s too narrow, but you wouldn’t be too far wrong if you called it the set of plots encompassed by Tolkein, Lewis, Perrault, and the Arthurian folktales—that even when it doesn’t crib from their ethics, it’s still about their ethics.
Recently, for example, I read Glen Cook’s Black Company books, one of the first settings to use people from the “evil” side of a Tolkeinesque grand conflict as viewpoint characters. The ethics explicitly endorsed by their characters are utterly pragmatic; those suggested by the plot are a bit more idealistic, but still well short of Tolkein’s. Yet without Tolkein’s ethics in the background, that part of the story wouldn’t work; they’re simply being used as the negative space in the illustration rather than the positive. That limits things considerably.
Care to elaborate on that?
Well, working this out properly would probably take a top-level post.
To oversimplify, though, most of the common fantasy plot devices are, or at some point were, intended to be understood not only as entertainment but as statements about ethics: you can’t make your protagonist a Chosen One, for example, without implying that there’s someone or something doing the choosing, and that this is in some sense how things are supposed to work. Because of the history of the genre or plot needs or romantic attitudes toward fantasy settings, these implications can end up being rather odd.
This isn’t a new complaint, of course; every time you hear someone complaining about how (for example) orcs in Lord of the Rings can plausibly be read as stand-ins for Zulu hordes out of the British colonial zeitgeist, you’re hearing a variation on it. But readings like that are really the least of my worries. I’m more concerned with what fantasy says about agency: what interests you can ethically pursue, and how and under what circumstances you can ethically pursue them. Suffice it to say that your options within your average fantasy universe are very limited.
It’s hard to get away from this problem within the conventions of modern fantasy, although some modern writers have started playing with it in various ways. Older fantasy doesn’t always work the same way, though; Fritz Leiber’s books, for example, seem to inherit more from picaresque than fairytale conventions.
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That’s compressed aggressively enough that I’m not sure I’m parsing it right. Would you mind rephrasing in more than 144 characters?
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