Tuesday 14 April 2020

New Noise

Bryan Wigmore (author of the Fire Stealers series) foolishly asked me to write a blog every day to keep him entertained. I will find a way to make him regret that somehow and it starts with lots of blogs.

And happily after yesterday's blog, there was a topic I wanted to talk about, that being the idea of what differentiates today's Fantasy from yesterday's. When I said that today's Fantasy has deliberately made itself more challenging, it was a thought that spawned while writing and that I didn't have much time to think about. So let us think.

First, let me define what I mean by yesterday's Fantasy and today's Fantasy. Yesterday's is Brooks, Eddings, Feist, Jordan; the titans of the first wave of Fantasy authors who proved back in the 80s that there was a mass market for Fantasy that borrowed from Tolkien. It doesn't include Jack Vance's Lyonesse or Sir Pterry's Discworld (both published 1983), or Wolfe's Book of the New Sun (published 1980) or a bunch of other similarly famous Fantasy works published around this time (War for the Oaks, Aegypt, Mythago Wood, the Black Company etc.etc.) because by and large, when other people talk about reacting to yesterday's Fantasy they seem to mean the collective sort of style of the former four and not everything put together. Maybe I'm wrong but that's the definition I'm using. And I feel it's an important definition to make as the difference between that type of Fantasy and all Fantasy written in or near the 80s is huge and oft-forgotten.

I didn't mention any women with a similar style such as Lackey, Weis or (kinda) Wurts, Pierce or Kerr, because none of them are remembered as titans of the style and that very fact is in itself one of the things people are reacting to. 

And today's Fantasy? I would identify a halfway bridging point typified by Martin, Hobb and Erikson; books that notably have a lot in common with BEFJ but also have some notable points of difference. I would identify also the growth of other sub-genres that have helped to create a perception of Fantasy being wider than Epic and the odd S&S (particularly Urban and Fairytale retellings); the push for a more diverse author-base and group of stories; a burgeoning YA market; and Grimdark, the push onwards from Martin/Hobb/Erikson led by Abercrombie and Lawrence.

Or in other words, it is a big sprawling beast that is very difficult to characterise. What does Erin Morgernstern have in common with Nicholas Eames, and what is their link to Aliette De Bodard, and is this point of commonality going to stick with Jim Butcher? Before even considering the presence of JK Rowling? I think I'd very much struggle to come up with one thing that I could then use to say "and that's different from BEFJ". The sheer diversity of the beast is a point of difference in itself, but then it would be when people focus on such a small part of the past. It's not quite such a difference when compared to the full gamut of what passed before, but that's not quite the comparison and even so, there is definitely a difference in terms of how much more ethnically diverse the genre has become. But that's all I've got for now.

So let us perhaps concentrate on the other end. What are the commonalities for that quartet? Certain borrowings from Tolkien, namely the emergence of unlikely heroes from rural backgrounds to fight a resurgent dark lord that seeks dominion over what is not theirs through a mix of quest and politics. Maybe a slight borrowing from Star Wars in the usage of the young hero of uncertain parentage and a big destiny (not so much Brooks). But to home in on the crucial point; we see the clash of good vs evil in huge, sprawling multi-PoV series. 

Good vs Evil. Literature seen as unchallenging. Is there a link? I've seen it made. In particular how easy it is to kill an irredeemable enemy as proven by countless dead Zemochs, Trollocs, Pantathians and Demons. To my mind this only concentrates on a part of the whole and ignores the possible complexities. Forging peace and friendship with an enemy once seen is difficult. Seeing them as human and being willing to trust them is difficult. Dealing with the paranoia of the enemy is difficult. And of course, dealing with the pain that war puts people through is difficult. Robert Jordan in particular gave a bravura performance on that one; there are still very fantasy protagonists who go through as hard a mill. 

Lets look at another angle to this; the complexity of decision making. When against a do-or-die enemy, the list of choices become greatly fewer both in terms of the morality and the strategy. This theory falls down a little for me when put against Robert Jordan and the difficulty faced by Rand & co in binding an army against the Dark One. It's not unlike the struggle faced by Jon Snow against the Night King, or Temoc against the forces of modernisation in Last First Snow.

Raising Last First Snow brings me to another angle. The battles of Good vs Evil contain many interesting metaphors and parallels but it doesn't feature straight up recreations of the pressing issues of today in the same way some modern works do, particularly in YA. It is far easier though to think of books that do not do this though.

In terms of content, I don't really see a huge difference between what was then and what was now. There are differences of course, and meaningful ones, but they are not so vast as to not prevent people taking these stories to similar destinations. Yet it would be blind ignorance not to note that stories are often going to different destinations.

So where does this sense of challenge come from? Before I'd go on, I'd like to go back to something else I noted - huge sprawling epics. Eddings' flagship story ran to 12 books with a world building book and that put at the most modest of the bunch by a fairly considerable distance. Who in modern Fantasy is stretching out like that? Sanderson, obviously. Butcher. Abercrombie will be up to nine in the world of the First Law come the end of his current trilogy. But these are exceptions and not the rule.

And authors have contracted their stories to meet this change. They don't go the length and breadth of the whole world. They don't meet every King and Queen. They don't go through problem after problem, which means they can stay focused on one single problem longer. Their stories are far more personal in scope, far closer to Swords & Sorcery or A Wizard of Earthsea. Their format lends themselves better to deeper character dives. It's not that you can't do it with huge Epic Fantasies. See Wheel of Time. It's just that getting readers to buy into it for 14 books is hard. See Wheel of Time.

And here is the big difference for me. Not that authors have intended to challenge readers more - although I do think this deliberate decision is part of it and that publishers are running with it - but that they are writing Fantasy with a far more personal focus. That is part choice and part swaying with the wind in which publishers are less excited about backing gigantic series. Among the many by-products, it has led to stories that focus a lot more on characters' pain and trauma. Of course, it is a choice to focus more on trauma than on trouble and joy (and maybe I am underselling this choice and where it comes from) but the intensely personal stories make it a possibility in a way that the big sprawling Epics didn't. To me, the authors' choices are the building, but slimmed down personally focused stories are the foundation that make it.

Part of me wonders where we go next. Do we see more authors get name recognition and decide to try doing the huge epic? Does it go out of fashion? Do we go even further down the slim-line route with novellas and short stories becoming more the norm? I doubt that, as I think there's still an appetite for huge stories and getting to stay with characters and storylines for a long time, but whether that can be sold as Fantasy books I don't know. Have I completely misread this and simply ignored a dearth of big name authors getting their break between 95 and 05, maybe squeezed out by a generation of big name authors that dominated the market? I haven't even thought of that. One day I should try drafting these articles rather than uncovering conclusions as I go.

But for today, my conclusion is that the biggest difference between now and what we think of as then is a generation of authors that decided to drill deep into characters' personalities. Not an interest in pain and darkness, or the spread of difference thinking thanks to voices from non-Caucasian backgrounds, or even simply the search for new pastures and a desire to challenge readers glutted on a stupefying feast of Epic, important as all of them are. Just a structural change in telling stories to the personal, saying in detail what once might have been implied, and making our heroes and villains as human as know how. And that's no bad thing.

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