Third Wave Fantasy

My review of Swords & Dark Magic, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders, is up now at SF Site:

So Swords & Dark Magic is an excellent showcase for both its contributors and the subgenre itself. If epic fantasy is generally considered to be most comfortable with a word count measured in the millions, sword and sorcery proves to be the perfect genre for the short story. Like their protagonists, the authors follow the adventurers’ code: get in and get out. The result is an anthology with a remarkably high hit rate. In fact, this is probably the single best original fantasy anthology I’ve read. More please.

It turned out to be a cracker but I initially requested a copy of Swords & Dark Magic because of an increasing interest in commercial fantasy, its substance and its taxonomy. This was also the subject of two earlier posts:

• Extruded Fantasy Product
• Epic Fantasy Vs Sword And Sorcery

Edit: I gave Gene Wolfe’s contribution, ‘Bloodsport’, short shrift in my review since I don’t think it really fits with the anthology. However, I did discuss it in detail here.

Epic Fantasy Vs Sword And Sorcery

I thought it might be helpful to pick a few thoughts about epic fantasy and sword and sorcery out of that other post. Here are some of the characteristics that were thought might distinguish them:

Epic Fantasy:

• The plot is central to the world’s history or even cosmology.
• The story come to an end, usually with some sort of healing of the land, and either a restoration or dissolution of magic
• The story is published as single narrative arc (for example, a trilogy).
• Characters tend to the heroic.
• Setting likely to be pastoral and expansive.

Sword and Sorcery:

• The plot is what adventurous people tend to do within a particular world.
• There is always room for another adventure.
• The stories are published as a series of interlocking narratives (for example, individual novels)
• Characters tend to the anti-heroic.
• Setting can be urban and intimate.

Obviously these are not hard and fast rules and should be taken in the spirit of thinking aloud in public. The fact that these distinctions break down, particularly, in modern commercial fantasy, returns me to thinking about the history of the subgenres. For epic fantasy, this is relatively straightforward and seems to come in clear waves; for sword and sorcery, things are murkier and the waves are overlapping. Again, these are notes towards a theory so treat them with the scepticism they deserve and feel free to shoot me down in the comments.

Epic Fantasy:

• Progenitor text: Tolkien – Lord Of The Rings (1954-55)
• First wave – emergence as a commercial subgenre: Brooks – Shanara (1977-85), Eddings – Belgariad (1982-84) and Weis and Hickman –Dragonlance Chronicles (1984-85)
• Second wave – bestsellers within a mature subgenre: Jordan (1990-), Goodkind (1994-) and Martin (1996-)

Sword And Sorcery:

• Progenitor text: Howard – Conan (1933-35)
• First wave – emergence as not quite a subgenre: Leiber – ‘Fafhrd And Gray Mouser’ (1939-) and Anderson – Broken Sword (1954)
• Second wave – deconstruction and subversion: Moorcock – Elric (1965-75) and Wagner – Kane (1970-78)

The third wave of commercial fantasy then seems to be a merging of these two traditions. So, for example, Richard Morgan’s The Steel Remains (2008) explicitly ties itself to the sword and sorcery tradition in opposition to Tolkien tradition but is not especially different to contemporary epic fantasy. Equally, Scott Lynch’s The Gentlemen Bastards (2006-) follows in the footsteps of Leiber but is highly popular and influential within epic fantasy circles. This isn’t entirely new, as previously mentioned Glen Cook’s The Chronicles Of The Black Company (1984-85) is an early example of this, but it does seem to be increasing and it may well explain the reason people have increasingly felt the need to resort to the adjective “gritty”.

Right, I have to go to a charity fundraiser now so I don’t have time to fully integrate two other important influences: Dungeons & Dragons (1974) and Perdido Street Station (2000). And yes, I know I need to read Wizardry And Wild Romance. (I also realise women are under-represented in this crude history.)

Extruded Fantasy Product

Mark Newton has been thinking about “gritty” fantasy. As you would expect from a shorthand that has grown organically from the grassroots, no one is that clear on what it actually means or which works it could be applied to. I’m not particularly interested in pinning down gritty – I’ve made my comments in that thread – but it did get me thinking about epic fantasy more broadly and I quickly ran into another taxonomical issue.

A half-baked theory had floated into my mind that grittiness was a symptom of epic fantasy entering its third wave. Trying to expand this I soon ran into the problem that I didn’t know that much about the history of the subgenre. So I turned to A Short History Of Fantasy by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Now, you may remember that this books classifies Joe Abercrombie as a New Weird writer so there were always going to be issues but I was still surprised at just how unhelpful it was for my purposes.

To start with, they don’t actually use the term epic fantasy. It doesn’t appear in the glossary and if you turn to the index you will only find an entry for “epic”. In contrast to this, the glossary contains entries for – amongst many others – heroic fantasy, high fantasy, immersive fantasy and medievalist fantasy as well as sword and sorcery. (On the other hand, the glossary also fails to include edifice fantasy and full fantasy, two Clutisms which appear in the index.) It seems a conspicuous absence so to check I wasn’t mistaken about the popularity of the term “epic fantasy” I did a quick straw poll. The results are an overwhelming consensus for epic fantasy. Not very scientific but a bit of research nonetheless. Perhaps James and Mendlesohn had a good reason for excluding the term though, epic fantasy is, after all, fairly loosely defined and A Shorter History is a critical text; perhaps they needed more precision. Unfortunately, if you look at their other definitions, this doesn’t appear to be the case:

Heroic fantasy: fantasy set in a world which often resembles the ancient or medieval past, drawing on their epic traditions of heroes; barely distinguishable from high fantasy or sword-and-sorcery.

High fantasy: fantasy that deals with the activities of heroes, drawing on the literary tradition of epic; immersive fantasy, and not set in our world (as low fantasy is).

Immersive fantasy: a story set entirely within an imagined world, without any overt reference to the the world of the reader. [This term is imported from Mendlesohn’s Rhetorics Of Fantasy.]

Medieval fantasy: a story set in a world based in some loose way on the world of the European Middle Ages, often drawing its inspiration from medieval romance and the Matter of Britain, and frequently in the form of a quest fantasy.

Quest fantasy: a story (frequently in multiple volumes) involving one or more people travelling through a landscape, learning about the world, and fulfilling some quest or destiny.

Sword-and-sorcery: fantasy set in a pre-industrial world, involving warriors in conflict with magical or supernatural forces; largely indistinguishable from heroic fantasy or high fantasy, although perhaps better seen as a subset of them.

Not very helpful. It is even less helpful that, despite the minimal and ill-defined differences given above, almost all these different types of fantasy each have their own entry in the index. Therefore to follow the history of what most people would see as a single subgenre you have to constantly cross reference multiple terms, although it does allow the reader to guess the authors’ preferred terms by counting the number of references:

• Quest fantasy: 30
• Medievalism: 25
• Sword-and-sorcery: 16
• Epic: 10
• Heroic fantasy: 5
• Immersive fantasy: 2
• High fantasy: 0

This preference means that we read, for example, that “the three major medievalist writers of the 1990s are Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind and George R.R. Martin.” This is perhaps understandable given the backgrounds of James and Mendlesohn but it is still pretty perverse given its lack of popular currency (particularly since elsewhere Mendlesohn has said that epic fantasy is, in fact, her preferred term). You might argue that an academic work should use technical language rather than casual, fannish language, however, as we’ve seen above, the language isn’t really technical enough. The other obvious rebuttal is that the book should be read forwards, rather than backwards; true enough and I am yet to read the whole of A Short History but a reference work is infinitely more useful if it can be dipped into in this way. There is greater explication within the text though. For example, they begin the chapter on the Eighties by saying:

If we are contend that quest fantasies became the dominant tradition in the 1980s, we need to explain the difference between quest fantasies and the older sword-and-sorcery… Quest fantasies come to an end, usually with some sort of healing of the land, and either a restoration or dissolution of magic, whereas sword-and-sorcery fantasies always have room for another adventure. (p. 119)

I am not especially persuaded by this but, even so, it would have been nice if this distinction had been picked up in the glossary. This seems to be indifference born out of contempt as James and Mendlesohn give the strong impression they don’t really care for epic fantasy. That is fair enough as a matter of personal preference but it becomes a bit of an impediment when you a writing a history of the genre of which it has been the most commercially successful and visible subgenre for at least two decades. Take, for example, the case of Steven Erickson, one of the most acclaimed epic fantasy writers of the last two decades. There are two references to him in A Short History which read in their entirety:

George R.R. Martin’s more realistic and hardcore mode has influenced a number of new writers including the Canadians Steven Erikson and Scott Bakker. (p. 146)

We have already mentioned a number of Canadian writers whose careers began in the 1990s or earlier, such as Steven Erikson… We do not intend to discuss them in detail here. (p. 199)

That is it. The caveat “short” in the title is well taken but perhaps a better word would have been “partial”.

By the way, if you are still pondering what dark fantasy might be, they have a definition of that too: “A fantasy story which borrows elements from horror, and which typically does not end in eucatastrophe.” So that’s that cleared up.