For the last month, I’ve been doing a lot of research into the fantasy genre, rereading all of the original Conan the Barbarian stories by Robert E. Howard and a bunch of the other ones too, by authors like L. Sprague De Camp, Lin Carter, Bjorn Nyberg, Robert Jordan, etc. I’ve also been reading a lot of epic fantasy, like the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan and the Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson. And I’ve also read some essays on the genre, most notably “The Critics, the Monsters, and the Fantasists” by Ursula K. Le Guin, and “The Making of the American Fantasy Genre” by David Hartwell. Oh, and opening a bunch of chats with ChatGPT, though those are of limited usefulness (for some reason, ChatGPT hallucinates like crazy when you ask it to recommend any noblebright fantasy that isn’t more than two or three decades old).
From what I’ve gathered, there are basically two camps or schools within secondary-world fantasy: the heroic / sword & sorcery camp, based off of Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, and the epic fantasy camp, based off of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. According to David Hartwell, those are the only two franchises to achieve breakout success: everything else has either achieved only moderate commercial success in its time before petering out, or gained only a niche audience. Apart from Conan, the fantasy genre as a whole didn’t really take off until Terry Brooks immitated Tolkien with his Shannara series, thus launching a wave of Tolkienesque epic fantasy in the 70s and 80s that morphed into Grimdark in the 90s, 00s, and 10s.
So for a while, I was looking into all the various tropes and archetypes that make Conan and LOTR tick, and trying to use those to differentiate the two. But lately, I’ve been wondering if maybe I’ve been overthinking all of this, and the real difference between the two is that Tolkien mastered long-form fantasy, and Howard mastered short-form fantasy. In other words, what if the defining difference between the two camps doesn’t have to do with tropes so much as with the length of the actual story?
I suspect that short-form fantasy is poised to make a resurgence, especially with all of the challenges associated with writing and selling long-form fantasy in the 2020s. Larry Correia is right: Rothfuss and Martin have ruined the epic fantasy field for new authors by failing to finish their series in a reasonable timeframe. Unless you are independently wealthy or already have a large and loyal following of readers, it just doesn’t make commercial sense to write a lengthy series of +200k-word fantasy epics. Better to write shortier, punchier 40k-word novels instead, especially if you can churn them out every other month or so. That seems to be the model that works best for indies, at least in adjacent genres like urban fantasy and paranormal.
Anyway, that’s my current thinking on the subject. What’s your take on it?
I would say that Michael Anderle has mastered the short-form, slice of life, stories. No matter the genre. To say that LMPBN publishing is successful is a serious understatement. So yeah, that’s working out great for him and all the authors he’s brought under his umbrella. But for me, there’s nothing like a great long-form story by someone like Larry, even as I appreciate what Anderle’s done for indies. I also enjoy the long-form books by indie authors such as Travis Bagwell (Awaken Online), Tao Wong (System Apocalypse) and Chris Kennedy.
Ok, so what it comes down to is whether it’s short-form or long-form, a good story is a good story 🙂
Michael Anderle has definitely made a lot of waves in the indie publishing scene, and seems to be making more with how he’s embracing AI-assisted writing. Very interesting to watch what that guy (and his wife, who is a very sharp business woman) are doing at any given time.
What do you think comes of the Anderle push to get AI stories out there?
I think that the debate between AI-generated stories and purely human stories will eventually settle out in much the same way that the indie vs. tradpub debate settled out: that writers should take a hybrid approach, and that it’s best to approach generative AI as a useful tool in the creative process, not a panacea or a threat. But until someone publishes an AI-assisted novel that is both a commercial success and a critical success, the debate is going to rage. In fact, the biggest difference I see between the AI vs. human debate and the indie vs. tradpub debate is the level of outrage, which is off the charts, and I’m not sure if that’s just because of the times we currently live in, or because there’s something unique about generative AI that drives writers to madness.
Right now, we’re at the stage of the debate right before Amanda Hocking came out of nowhere and became one of the first self-published millionaires. Anderle is too well-known to be an Amanda Hocking success—he’s more like Dean Wesley Smith, or J.A. Konrath: a successful author under the old paradigm who embraces the new innovation and becomes an evangelist for it. I’m not sure what our Amanda Hocking figure will look like, but it will probably be an experienced writer using a secret pen name who puts out a novel a month and becomes a runaway phenomenon too big for the anti-AI writers to ignore.
I’ve seen some of the AI content and I don’t think that the tech is there yet. Maybe time will tell… but I like knowing another human wrote it. The real damage they will do, in my opinion, is escalating the publish or perish model that requires content every 28 days. Well, that IS the AI algorithms from Amazon. Therein lies the danger of AI in my rarely humble opinion.