Tag: hopes and dreams

Fantasy from A to Z: Y is for Yearning

What kind of fantasy books do you hope to see more of in the next few years? What direction do you hope the genre goes next?

Personally, I would like to see the genre return to its roots. But that probably isn’t a surprise, if you’ve read the other blog posts in this series. I’ve invoked Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkien in almost all of them. Those two men are the grandfathers of modern fantasy: Howard from the sword & sorcery side, and Tolkien from the epic fantasy side. Until just the last few years, most fantasy authors stood on the shoulders of those great authors.

I’m not opposed to rules-based magic on principle. I do think that it can be done quite well, such as with Brandon Sanderson’s earlier work. But I would like to see a revival of more traditional fantasy magic systems, which aren’t really “systems” at all, but mysterious forces of nature rooted in folklore and mythology. With its overemphasis on game-like dynamics and quirky rules-based magic systems, much of modern fantasy seems to have lost sight of the ancient archetypes that gave the works of Tolkien and Howard their staying power.

As the modern world drifts further from its roots, forgetting all the stories that were handed down to us from countless generations past, so too has our fantasy lost sight of its roots, thinning out to the point where it’s little more than an aesthetic—a bundle of tropes and caricatures that evoke a nostalgia not of our pre-modern past, but of other popular fantasy stories. Thus, with each new work in this vein, the genre is diluted just a little bit more, becoming a pale shadow of what it once was.

That is why I would like to see fantasy return to its roots. I would like to see more fantasy that draws deeply from the well of history and mythology, not just to create an aesthetic, but to embed those themes and archetypes deeply into the story itself. I don’t care whether that mythology is European or not (though as a pan-European mutt, that is the culture that resonates most with me), but I do want to read books that do more than file the serial numbers off of another culture and wear it like a skin suit. 

It’s not so much that I’m worried about “cultural appropriation”—hell, as the son of medieval vikings, cultural appropriation is my culture—but if that’s what you’re going to do, you should damn right do it well. There’s a reason why we all got sick and tired of all the Tolkien clones. If we’re going to take fantasy back to its roots, we’ve got to do more than copy all the greats who came before us. We’ve got to understand, in a deep and visceral way, just what exactly they were trying to build, and then build upon it with something new.

Fantasy and science fiction are all about evoking that sense of wonder. Science fiction evokes that wonder by looking to the future; fantasy evokes that wonder by looking to the past. Our modern world has forgotten far too much of its cultural heritage. I want to see more fantasy that brings it back.

Extra Sci-Fi S3E2: The Fellowship of the Ring

Another fascinating episode from Extra Credits, this one focusing on the themes of generational passing and the diminishing of ages that is present in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I have a lot of thoughts on this episode, but they all basically boil down to one thing:

Every generation reinvents the world.

It’s a theme that’s also present in my favorite novel of all time, The Neverending Story. The Childlike Empress of Fantastica is dying, and the only way to save her is for someone from the human realm to give her a new name. Fantastica, of course, is the realm of all fictional stories, and the Childlike Empress receives a new name when the next generation makes the old stories their own. There is nothing new under the sun.

This is also a theme present in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. I’m not a huge fan of the movie, but the best argument I’ve heard in favor of it basically boils down to this theme: that the old generation has to pass away in order for the new one to rise and take its place. I’m still not entirely convinced that The Last Jedi did this well, but I can see how someone who loved the movie would see it that way.

As a writer, this theme weighs especially on me because I feel that I’m personally living it with ever book that I write. All of the greats of the genre, like Tolkien, Herbert, Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Card, Le Guin—the list goes on and on—loom over me every day. With their passing, the world feels somehow diminished. They left us with a great gift—their books—and yet as time passes and the old world crumbles into dust, these gifts from the previous generation feel increasingly out of place. It is time for a new generation to rise and give the Childlike Empress a new name.

I want my books to be a part of that. I hope that one day, mine will be one of the voices that helps to reshape the world. I hope to one day leave behind a gift as great as the ones that we were given: stories and books that made us feel deeply and taught us meaning and love. Is there anything greater than this? Raising a family, perhaps, but that too is a form of generational passing.

I’m sure this theme of generational passing applies to a lot of fields too, not only in the arts, but in trades, and crafts, and sciences too. Indeed, it is a fundamental part of the human story, because of this singular truth: that every generation reinvents the world. There are curses as well as blessings that are passed down from generation to generation, but it is up to each of us to decide whether those curses and blessings stop with us, or whether we will continue to pass them down.

Lots of interesting stuff to ponder and think about. That’s part of what makes Tolkien so great. He spent an entire lifetime writing Lord of the Rings, and that time was not wasted.