Tag: J.R.R. Tolkien

Fantasy from A to Z: Q is for Quests

What is your quest in life? What is your driving goal, the thing that gets you up in the morning? What do you hope to accomplish before you go the way of all the Earth and depart this mortal coil?

Quests are huge in fantasy literature, because they resonate so much with our own lives. Most of us are not just merely existing, drifting aimlessly from one life event to another—or, if we are, there is something deep within us that yearns for greater meaning and purpose in our lives. Quest stories give us that sense of meaning and purpose.

I asked Grok to define “quest” in the context of fantasy literature, and this is what it told me:

In fantasy literature, a quest is a narrative framework where a protagonist or group embarks on a challenging journey to achieve a specific goal, often involving adventure, trials, and personal growth.

Grok then gave me a list of five things that all quest stories typically include:

  • a clear objective,
  • a journey,
  • challenges and trials,
  • some kind of character transformation, and
  • some kind of symbolic meaning.

One of the best-known examples of this is Frodo’s quest in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which is actually a subversion of the traditional quest story, because instead of seeking to acquire the object of the quest (in this case, the ring of power), Frodo is seeking to destroy it. 

The objective is to take the ring to Mount Doom and drop it into the lava, because that is the only place where it can be destroyed. 

The journey takes Frodo far from his home in the Shire, across nearly the whole length of Middle Earth to the desolate lands of Mordor, where the Dark Lord is gathering his forces. 

Frodo faces all sorts of challenges and trials, from the attack of the ringwraiths at Weathertop to the near-death experience with Shelob the spider. But perhaps the greatest challenge comes from the ring itself, which is constantly tempting him to submit to the Dark Lord’s will.

The story transforms Frodo so completely that by the end, he finds that he cannot return to his former life in the Shire. He leaves Middle Earth for the Grey Havens and sails with the last of the elves to the Undying Realms beyond the western sea.

As for symbolic meaning, the whole book is rife with it, from Gandalf as the Christ figure to the ring as a metaphor for the temptation of absolute power.

But what does an epic story like this have to do with us? How and why does a quest story like this one resonate so deeply with us? After all, very few of us have been attacked by giant spiders, or had a murderous experience with a ghost-like entity from beyond the veil. So why do we resonate with the idea of a quest? 

I can only speak to my own experience, but this is how my own life has resembled something of a quest:

My objective, ever since my college days, has been to make it as a professional fiction writer.

The journey has been more of an internal one than an external one, though I have traveled a bit for conventions and the like. I also spent a year teaching English overseas, not only to make ends meet, but to gain the sort of life experience that I thought would lead to better writing. In fact, I’ve taken a lot of odd jobs along the way, all of which have given me experiences that I’ve later drawn on.

As for challenges and trials, it’s been an extremely difficult road, because the vast majority of aspiring writers never manage to make a living at it. I’ve made just about every mistake that it’s possible to make (except writing porn—though some people would argue that not writing porn is the greater mistake). Overall, I can say that pursuing this writing career has been one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my life.

Has it transformed me? Yes, it has—and I know this because one of the major things that attracted me to my wife was my passion for writing, and the diligence with which I have pursued it. If I’d taken the path of least resistance instead of pursuing this difficult quest, I probably would have ended up as a morbidly overweight slob, addicted to porn and video games—in other words, the kind of person my wife would have never given a second glance.

As for symbolic meaning, I’ll say this: when my first child was born and I held her in my arms for the first time, I had the distinct impression that “this is her story now.” As a writer, I’ve pored over lots of writing advice, and one of the best pieces of advice I’ve received is to remember that every character is a hero in their own story. So when I had this powerful experience of holding my child for the first time, is it any surprise that one of the lessons I’d learned from my quest to become a professional writer helped me to understand the deeper meaning of that moment?

Those are some of the ways that quest stories resonate with me. I’m sure it will be different in your own life, but the main points are likely all there—which is why the quest story has become such a powerful archetype.

Of course, not all fantasy books involve a quest of some kind. In recent years, “cozy fantasy” has become something of a thing, where the story is less of a quest than a low stakes, slice-of-life sort of tale. Perhaps the most successful example of this is Travis Baldree’s Legend and Lattes.

Why do those stories resonate so much? Frankly, I think it’s because so many of my fellow Millennials feel like they have failed to launch. We came of age during the Great Recession and the Global Financial Collapse, saddled with way too much student loan debt. With all of the bankruptcies, mass layoffs, hiring freezes, and delayed retirements, many of us struggled to find meaningful work. As a consequence, many of us were forced to move back in with our parents and put off major life decisions like buying a home, getting married, and starting a family. Far too many of us have sadly put off those decisions indefinitely. And things haven’t gotten much better in the decades since. Indeed, our Boomer parents have the dubious distinction of being the only generation in American history to enjoy more prosperity than every generation before and since.

But I do think that is changing with the rising generation. There are a few key ways in which Zoomers are the diametric opposites of Millennials, and one of them has to do with this hunger for stories about quests. Just compare Epic: The Musical to Legends and Lattes. The contrast is stark. So as Zoomers come into their own, I think this subgenre of cozy fantasy is going to fade. It may stick around for a while, but I don’t think it’s going to be more than a tiny niche.

After all, what is your driving goal in life? What is your own personal quest?

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Fantasy from A to Z: P is for Prayer

What would fantasy be without religion? Probably much the same as us, when we don’t have religion: aimless, drifting, and lost.

Religion is more than just a useful aspect of worldbuilding. It’s something that lies at the very core of what makes us human—and thus, it’s something that any story needs to at least touch on if it is to be meaningful or important. Most likely, it won’t be meaningful at all unless the religious aspect is incorporated deeply within its bones.

But what is religion? For our purposes, religion is how we, as humans, relate to the powers that are higher than ourselves. It’s not about painting a cross on your cover, or a star of David, or a crescent, or an omh, or whatever else. It’s about how we act in regards to the cosmic and the transcendent. It’s about how we understand how to orient ourselves in this vast and terrifying universe, and find our own place within it.

I grew up in a time when religion was one of those taboo subjects that you never brought up in polite society. Politics, religion, and sex were all taboo like that. Granted, those taboos were already beginning to fray by the time I was old enough to hold an uninformed opinion on any of that, but even in the 90s, the post-war liberal consensus still held.

What was the post-war liberal consensus? It was the set of rules and norms that we all (or those of us in polite society, at least) agreed to live by, after the tumultuous catastrophe of the World Wars. From 1914 to 1945, more than a hundred Europeans died from political causes—and that was just in Europe. For thirty long years, the whole world was drowned in blood.

The wars ended with the invention of the world’s most devastating superweapon, which for the first time in the history of this planet gave us the power to literally annihilate our own species. So at the end of all that, our grandparents felt a very strong need to keep those weapons from ever being used again. Hence, they developed the post-war liberal consensus.

The greatest value of the post-war liberal consensus was tolerance—but they didn’t think of that as a value in itself. The idea was that instead of elevating the values of any one group over another, they would create a world where everyone tolerated each other. Everyone could keep their own culture and religion, along with their own unique (and often contradictory) cultural and religious values, so long as they didn’t try to impose those values on anyone else.

The trouble with that, of course, is that tolerance itself is a value. Which means that in order to maintain the post-war consensus, they had to be intolerant toward any culture or religion that threatened it. Which meant that they had to push their globalism and multiculturalism on everyone, superseding all of their own cultural and religious values. This gave rise to the global urban monoculture, which ultimately gave us the clown world we now live in. Which is currently falling apart.

Religion should not be off-limits, especially for good storytelling. At the same time, that doesn’t mean that stories should bash you over the head and try to convert you to whatever church the author happens to belong to. Indeed, some of the most religious stories aren’t about any particular church or creed at all. 

An example of this is Epic: The Musical. Beyond the old Greek mythology that runs through the story, the religious view is that the universe is utterly unpredictable, the gods (or higher powers) are arbitrary and capricious, and that the ends (getting home to Penelope) always justify the means. Indeed, any means that aren’t justified by the ends are immoral and wrong. Ruthlessness is mercy upon ourselves. How do we sleep? Next to our wives.

Those aren’t the religious views that I subscribe to, but those are deeply religious views. How? Because they show us how we stand in relation to powers that are higher than ourselves. In the 19th century, it became fashionable to throw out religion, and reverence man himself as the highest power in the universe. Where did that get us? It gave us the 31 years that killed 100 million Europeans and drowned the whole world in blood.

G.K. Chesterton said: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” Now, more than ever, the world needs religion. 

Of course, one of the nice things about writing fiction is that you can explore all sorts of religious ideas that may or may not have a direct counterpart in our world. Indeed, that’s part of what makes fantasy so rich. Tolkien created a whole race (the elves) that is bound by magic and immortality to this earth, contrasting with us humans, who are “strangers in a strange land.” In fact, Tolkien’s entire oeuvre is rich with religious elements, not just in the worldbuilding and the mythology, but in the Christian symbology—and he does it so subtly and so deeply that it draws you into his world, rather than kicking you out. It’s all in service to the story.

There’s a reason why the best stories in the world are in the Bible (and most of those are in the Book of Genesis). Which is one of the reasons why I’m drawing on the life of King David for the fantasy epic that I’m currently writing (The Soulbound King). But I’m also drawing on symbology and mythology as well, to make sure the religious elements aren’t just skin-deep. There is so much fascinating tree-related symbolism within the Jewish/Christian tradition. So much rich and wonderful stuff to draw on for creating a fantasy world.

Don’t be afraid to play with religion in your own fantasy stories. After all, on the deepest level, creativity itself is something of a religious act.

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Fantasy from A to Z: O is for Orcs

Is anyone in this world inherently and irredeemably evil?

That is the moral question at the heart of the fantasy race known most often as “orcs.” They are occasionally called by other names, of course: goblins, tuskers, blackbloods, etc. Sometimes, you will also find different but similar fantasy races filling the same niche: trolls, kobolds, trollocs, ogres, etc. But the thing that ties them all together is that they are both inherently and irredeemably evil.

…or are they? In some iterations, the orcs aren’t necessarily evil, just savage—kind of like Robert E. Howard’s Conan, or his many stories extolling the barbaric hero who stands against the corrupt forces of a decadent civilization. I played around with that myself in my novelette “A Hill On Which To Die.” More recently, such as in Amazon’s Rings of Power series, the orcs are played up as sympathetic creatures, whose only true fault is that they come from a different culture than our own.

Here’s the thing, though. While I enjoy a good redemption arc, or a heel-face turn when it’s done really well, I also believe that there are some people and some cultures in this world that are wholly and irredeemably evil. They may not have started out that way—indeed, my faith teaches me that we are all children of an eternal Heavenly Father who loves us—but my faith also teaches me that evil also exists, and that there are some in this world who cannot be saved, because they have become sons of perdition.

Traditional publishing (and the entertainment industry more broadly) is currently dominated by people who skew to the left in their politics and their cultural values. As such, they are heavily influenced by the philosophies of thinkers like Rousseau, who posited that all people are inherently good, and that evil originates from social structures and institutions. That’s why they are so obsessed with “systemic oppression,” or with stories that obsess over victimization and victimhood—as if being a victim (especially of “colonization”) makes one inherently virtuous.

I don’t think that’s true, though. I think that some cultures are more virtuous or morally good than others. For example, when Columbus discovered the truth about the Amerindians he’d first made contact with—that they were the remnants of a tribe that had been conquered by cannibals, who had slaughtered all their men, put their women on an island, and were now farming them out for meat, visiting them once a year to devour all their infant children, then raping and impregnating them again before leaving—I believe that Columbus was justified in concluding that the culture of this vile cannibal tribe was inherently and irredeemably evil. And I believe that the world was made a better place after this culture was exterminated.

The term “orc” has its origins in Old English, especially in the epic poem Beowulf, where the word “orcneas” refers to monstrous beings who make an appearance in the poem. Tolkien was a scholar of Old English, so when he needed a name for his race of inherently and irredeemably evil creatures, he came up with the name “orc.” Tolkien also saw action in the trenches of WWI as a British soldier, and that undoubtedly influenced him as well.

It is an unfortunate reality of war that in order to fight effectively, you need to dehumanize the enemy. This is true, whether or not the enemy deserves to be dehumanized. World War I was perhaps the most senseless war in history, where the cause that everyone was fighting for was ultimately a suicide pact made by the incompetent and incestuous European royal branches. I honestly don’t know that the Germans were the bad guys in that war (though WWII is a very different story). I honestly don’t know if there were any bad guys—or any good guys, for that matter. The whole war was just a senseless cluster of a catastrophe.

So even though I do believe that some cultures are inherently evil, I can also sympathize with those who take a principled anti-war stance and say that we should all take a step back and focus on the things we have in common before rushing off to war. In our own day and age, there are many corrupt and evil warmongers who are working very hard to dehumanize the various groups that they would have us go to war against, whether those are Jews, Arabs, Russians, Ukrainians, Christians, Muslims, immigrants, or Trump voters. In such a complex world, there is a very real temptation to listen to such voices, and embrace the view that the other side is inherently and irredeemably evil.

And yet, there is such a thing as pure evil. There are some people who cannot—or will not—be redeemed. For that reason alone, I think there is still a place in our fantasy literature for creatures like the orc, who are inherently and irredeemably evil.

Fantasy from A to Z: N is for Noblebright

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.

While the quote comes from Warhammer 40k, a science fiction franchise, it very soon became applied to the “darker and edgier” fantasy that started coming out in the 80s and 90s. Indeed, the quote itself spawned the term “grimdark” for a fantasy subgenre that became very popular in the 00s, with the rise of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire and subsequent Game of Thrones TV series.

Grimdark combines the scope and feel of epic fantasy with the savagery and moral greyness of sword & sorcery, ramping up the violence and savagery to levels that would have made even Robert E. Howard blush. It often features twists that subvert the old fantasy tropes, such as killing off the “chosen one” hero who would typically be the protagonist, or presenting a horrifying dystopia of a world that is the utter antithesis of an escapist fantasy.

In part, I think the grimdark phenomenon was a reaction to the Tolkien formula that dominated fantasy for so long. After J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings became wildly popular, his publishers tried to replicate that success by explicitly creating a formula that they wanted their writers to follow. This resulted in a bunch of Tolkien clones, such as Terry Brooks’s Shannara series and David Edding’s Belgariad series. For a couple of decades, these dominated the fantasy shelves, until writers began to revolt, and their books began to take off. After all, Game of Thrones was originally published in 1996.

But while there’s some truth to that theory, I don’t think it’s sufficient to explain the rise of grimdark. After all, Stephen R. Donaldson was rebelling against the Tolkien formula back in the 70s, and while his Thomas Covenant books were quite successful, they didn’t spawn a new subgenre (though arguably, they paved the way for later writers like Martin and Abercrombie). Instead, I think there’s something generational about the grimdark subgenre—that it’s the sort of thing that only could have arisen in the 90s and 00s, because of how the generational cycle works.

I wrote a lengthy blog post about this, which remains one of my more popular posts. My basic thesis is that the fantasy genre goes through generational cycles just like history goes through generational cycles. In its simplest form, the cycle looks something like this:

  • Hard times create strong men.
  • Strong men create good times.
  • Good times create weak men.
  • Weak men create hard times.

During the hard times, we tend to resonate more with stories that feature grim characters and dark fantasy worlds—hence, the rise of grimdark. But during the good times, we tend to resonate more with noble characters and bright fantasy worlds. 

(It’s a little more complicated than that, of course. The fantasy cycle is offset just a little, since we tend to resonate less with darker stories as we become exhausted from living in a darker world. Indeed, the yearning for the next phase of the cycle drives us to tell more hopeful stories, which in turn drive us to build a more hopeful world. But to read the full analysis, go check out my original post.)

So what is noblebright fantasy, then? It’s basically the antithesis of grimdark—a backlash against the backlash. And while it hasn’t yet manifested as a distinct subgenre, with a George R.R. Martin or a Joe Abercrombie to champion it, I think it’s only a matter of time before we see an author who rides this cultural wave to massive literary success. And as soon as that happens, I think we’ll have a much better idea of what “noblebright” actually is.

In other words, noblebright fantasy is currently in the process of being born—and after it has emerged fully formed into the world, it will probably take a different name. Indeed, “noblebright” as a term is itself merely a knee-jerk reaction to “grimdark.” To subvert the original Warhammer 40k quote: 

In the Noble Brightness of the far future, there is only HIGH ADVENTURE!” 

Currently, there are only a handful of writers who are explicitly labeling their books as “noblebright fantasy.” I am not one of them, though I suspect that my books (and my readers) have a lot of overlap. As it exists right now, noblebright is characterized by heroic quests and the triumph of good over evil, with an emphasis on hope, virtue, and making a positive difference in the world. It’s also very common for these authors to include Christian themes, though from what I can tell, the books aren’t explicitly religious.

While I haven’t yet joined the pioneers of this budding new subgenre, I expect that I will in the not-too-distant future. I’m currently working on an epic fantasy trilogy based loosely on the life of King David, which features many of these noblebright tropes and themes. But it’s going to be a while before I release the first book, since I want to publish the books of the first trilogy all within a month of each other. Since these books are going to fall in the 150k to 200k word range, a lot of things can change between now and then. Perhaps the term “noblebright” will have been abandoned, with people looking down on it as a passing fad of the early 20s.

But I don’t think the broader trend toward brighter, more hopeful fantasy is going to reverse course anytime soon. In fact, I think it’s generational. Whether or not it takes the name “noblebright,” I think that we’re going to see a new subgenre of fantasy emerge very soon. It’s starting right now as a backlash to grimdark, but as the wave crests and it begins to gain some staying power, I expect that it will stop defining itself by the thing it opposes and start to define itself in a more independent way.

I’m really hoping to catch this wave, and I think that my Soulbound King series has some real potential to do so. But whether or not I catch it, I know that this is the kind of stuff I like to write, and I hope to be able to write it for a long time to come.

Fantasy from A to Z: M is for Magic

Magic! What would fantasy be without it? About the same place as science fiction if you took out the science. Speculative fiction is all about the sense of wonder that it makes you feel, and the main way that fantasy does that is through magic.

In Brandon Sanderson’s writing class (which he has generously made available to the public, by videotaping and podcasting his lectures), Sanderson divides magic into two broad types: hard magic and soft magic. And while some fantasy readers take issue with the way that Sanderson leans more toward hard magic in his own books, the division he draws between hard and soft magic is still quite useful.

Soft magic is the kind of magic that isn’t fully explained, and is mostly left up to the reader’s imagination. Magical things happen, and we don’t know how or why, but it helps to instill a feeling that the world is vast and wondrous. As such, soft magic is primarily used as a way to enhance the setting.

In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, a good example of this is the elves. We know that they are immortal and that they are far more glorious than most other races, but we never really know the full extent of their capabilities. Gandalf is another example of this. Just what was he doing with the Balrog, and how did defeating that ancient beast in a marathon spelunking-hiking-wrestling match? Who knows!

And that’s the biggest criticism of soft magic: if you don’t know how the magic works, how do you know that the heroes won’t just pull a rabbit out of their hat to save them at the last possible moment? Or summon the eagles, which amounts to the same thing. For that matter, if the eagles are so awesome, why don’t the heroes just fly on their backs all the way to Mount Doom? I mean, can you believe what it would have been like if they had to walk the entire way? Somebody might have died!

Hard magic, on the other hand, is the kind of magic where everything is explained. It’s not just magic, but a whole magic system, which operates by rules in the same way that our physical universe works according to rules. In essence, it is the fantasy inverse of Clarke’s third law, where any sufficiently explained magic is indistinguishable from science. The reader might not know all of the rules, but the writer does, and he drops enough hints throughout to make the reader confident that there are rules.

In Lord of the Rings, a good example of hard magic is the ring of power itself. What does it do? It makes you invisible if you put it on (though it makes you shine like a beacon to Sauron and his ringwraiths), and it tempts you with false promises of power, with the goal of leading you back into the clutches of Sauron. If Sauron ever gets the ring, it’s game over, because he will regain all of his powers. Oh, and it also stretches out your lifespan, at the cost of your quality of life (and quite possibly your sanity).

Because we know the rules the govern the magic of the one ring, we aren’t upset when Tolkien uses that magic to advance the plot of the book. Indeed, that is the biggest strength of hard magic: that it can be used in all sorts of interesting and creative ways to advance the plot.

“But hold on!” the advocates of soft magic will say. “If you reduce your magic into a fancy plot device, it kills the sense of wonder that comes with the best magic systems.” After all, there’s a reason why Tom Bombadil is in the book. There are two big things that happen when the hobbits make their detour to his house: first, Tom Bombadil puts on the ring and shows that it has absolutely no effect on him; and second, when Frodo puts on the ring and goes invisible, Tom Bombadil demonstrates that he can still see Frodo. 

It’s subtle, but it’s there—and believe it or not, it’s there for a reason. By demonstrating that there are higher or more powerful forces that can supersede the laws of magic surrounding the one ring, Tolkien preserves that sense of vastness and wonder that more rules-based magic systems tend to lose.

There is a rejoinder to that point, however. When hard magic is done well, it creates its own sense of wonder, more akin to what we feel when we’re playing a good video game. It’s the wonder that comes from imagining what it would be like to exercise the kind of magical powers that we see the characters exercise. Brandon Sanderson is a master of this, and my favorite example is from his novella The Emperor’s Soul. By the end of that book, I couldn’t help but daydream what I would do if I had my own set of soulstamps. One of them would make me an awesome writer, the other an awesome marketer, and the third an awesome publisher. How cool would that be? (Okay, maybe you have to be an indie author yourself to fully get it… but still!)

As you can probably guess, though, the best fantasy novels feature a blend of hard and soft magic—and Sanderson says as much in his lectures. There’s a reason why he draws from Lord of the Rings for examples of each, much as I’ve done here. And ultimately, it’s less of a binary and more of a spectrum. The important thing is to know when to lean more toward the soft side, and when to lean more to the hard side. The best authors can play to the strengths of both to capture that magical sense of wonder that makes fantasy such a pleasure to read.

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Fantasy from A to Z: K is for Kings

Why are kings and kingdoms so common in fantasy?

Part of it has to do with the genre’s nostalgic yearning for a distant past. One way of understanding the modern era is to see it as an unending series of political revolutions that have spread like a slow-moving contagion from one part of the world to another. 

It started with the English Civil War, then died down for a while until it manifested in the American Revolutionary War, which resulted in the creation of the United States. After that, it spread to France, leading to the French Revolution and a very messy tug-of-war between the Republicans and the Monarchists, ultimately leading to the permanent end of the French monarchy. 

Then we had the aborted revolutions of 1848, which ultimately gave us Karl Marx and Socialism, the Bolivarian revolutions in Latin America, the American Civil War, which culturally was something of an echo of the old English Civil War (with the Cavaliers in the south and the Puritan Roundheads in the north), and ultimately the Bolshevik Revolution which gave us global communism, etc etc.

I won’t belabor the point (though if you want to hear a good podcast that covers all this stuff, check out Revolutions by Mike Duncan). The point is that the modern era has basically been one long series of very messy wars to depose the old medieval kings and emperors. Today, the only monarchies that survive are either constitutional monarchies that no longer exercise direct political power (for example, King Charles of the United Kingdom), or else they are strange aberrations that only exist because of unique regional history and economic circumstances (for example, Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, whose dynasty depends almost entirely on the country’s oil reserves).

Fantasy is all about hearkening back to a romantic view of the premodern past, even if that past never existed. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that most fantasy—especially classic fantasy—tends to feature kings and kingdoms. Never mind that historically, many medieval kings were almost totally beholden to their dukes, especially in the time before gunpowder, when the dukes could just hole up in their castles and openly defy their kings. That’s why Europe has so many medieval castles.

Of course, some fantasy like George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire does a really good job of capturing the complex dynamics of feudal politics. A lot of the old sword & sorcery also plays around with those kinds of medieval political tensions, balancing the nostalgic aspect of fantasy with the savagery of backstabbing courtiers and brutal hand-to-hand combat. Robert E. Howard’s classic Conan the Barbarian stories are a great example of this, with Conan ultimately rising to become King of Aquilonia.

Both grimdark and sword & sorcery embrace the medieval savagery—indeed, it’s a large part of the nostalgic yearning. Other subgenres play down the savagery, either by making the king a distant power, or by making the world out to be a lightly-populated wilderness. Lord of the Rings is a good example of both, though it still defaults to feudal monarchy as the majority political system.

Is there a subconscious yearning for old-fashioned monarchy that fantasy quietly fulfills? Perhaps, but I don’t think so. If kings and kingdoms are the default system of government in most fantasy novels, I think that’s because it was the default for much of the medieval era. In books like Game of Thrones where the political intrigue is a key aspect of the story, you get into the more complicated aspects of feudal politics, but that’s not necessarily a requirement.

Personally, I enjoy fantasy with a little bit of medieval-style political intrigue, though most grimdark tends to overdo it. I did really enjoy Larry Correia’s Saga of the Forgotten Warrior, though (no spoilers please—I haven’t yet read the last book!) Robert E. Howard hits the sweet spot, I think, with a world so wild and savage that no king has managed to subdue it, and even a barbarian can rise to become a king.

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Fantasy from A to Z: I is for Immortality

Immortality is one of those fantasy tropes that shows up everywhere once you start looking for it. Vampires, elves, gods, liches, ancient dragons hoarding gold through the centuries—we’re fascinated by the idea of beings that can’t die. Sometimes they’re terrifying, sometimes noble, sometimes weary and wise. But always, they strike a chord.

Why? Because they brush up against one of our deepest human anxieties: death.

Death is one of those universal aspects of the human experience. Everybody dies. And compared to the lifespan of things like mountains, or forests, or stars, the human lifespan is remarkably short and fleeting. Some of us live a long and a full life, and are ready to go when the time comes, but many of us are not. Tragedy can strike us at any time. No one knows when the reaper will come for them.

This is why, in fantasy fiction, immortality often comes wrapped in awe and mystery. It’s a mark of otherworldliness, a symbol of something beyond the ordinary cycles of birth and death. Sometimes it’s a gift. Sometimes it’s a curse. Often, it’s a little bit of both.

Personally, my favorite fantasy author who captured this complexity is J.R.R. Tolkien. His elves are perhaps the most iconic immortal race in all of fantasy. They don’t age or grow frail. They don’t die of disease. They are not eternal in the divine sense, but their lives are bound to the life of the world. When they are slain, their spirits travel to the Halls of Mandos, where they can eventually be re-embodied. But they are still bound to the world. They don’t pass beyond it. They don’t get to move on.

That’s the heart of their tragedy.

Elves in Tolkien’s legendarium aren’t happy fairytale creatures dancing in the moonlight. They are ancient beings with long memories, deep sorrows, and wounds that don’t always heal. They remember battles and betrayals that happened millennia ago. They carry the weight of history like a cloak that can never be removed. And for all their beauty and wisdom, they are fading. Slowly, subtly, inevitably. Their time is passing, and they know it.

In contrast, humans are mortal and thus are not subject to this curse. As Tolkien writes in The Silmarillion:

“And the Doom of Men, that they should depart, was at first a gift of Ilúvatar. It became a grief to them only because coming under the shadow of Morgoth it seemed to them that they were surrounded by a great darkness, of which they grew afraid.”

That’s a remarkable insight. Mortality, which we so often view as a curse, was originally a gift. The elves envy us not because we die, but because we get to leave. To move beyond the world. To have an end.

And yet, we don’t often treat it like a gift. In fact, we go to absurd lengths to avoid it.

You don’t have to look far to see that our obsession with immortality isn’t limited to fantasy stories. In Silicon Valley and other corners of the tech world, there’s a growing movement of wealthy futurists who are pouring money into the dream of defeating death. Some want to reverse aging at the cellular level. Some are working on brain-uploading technology, convinced they can digitize the human soul. Others are experimenting with biological “enhancements,” anti-aging therapies, or even transfusions from younger people in an effort to extend their lifespans.

This hunger for immortality is as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh, but today it wears a lab coat and calls itself “biohacking.” The names have changed, but the impulse remains the same. We want to stay. To cling to life. To hold onto what we have, no matter the cost.

But is that really such a noble goal?

Fantasy offers us a counterpoint. Again and again, stories show that immortality comes at a price. Vampires lose their humanity. Liches surrender their souls. Gods become detached from the world of mortals. Even the elves, for all their grace, are caught in a long decline.

Immortality often brings with it a kind of existential exhaustion. Without death, there is no closure. Without loss, there is no growth. Without time running out, nothing truly matters.

Mortality, by contrast, sharpens everything. Because we are mortal, our choices matter. Because time is a scarce resource—indeed, perhaps the only resource in our world that is truly scarce—our relationships carry weight. Because we will one day die, every act of love, courage, sacrifice, or faith becomes immeasurably precious.

And that’s something that fantasy, at its best, understands better than any philosophical treatise or TED Talk ever could. Again, Tolkien writes:

“But the sons of Men die indeed, and leave the world; wherefore they are called the Guests, or the Strangers. Death is their fate, the gift of Ilúvatar, which as Time wears even the Powers shall envy.”

The elves call us guests. Strangers. Not because we are lesser, but because we do not belong to the world in the same way they do. We are pilgrims passing through this world—strangers in a strange land. Our road leads elsewhere, and that elsewhere—whatever lies beyond the circles of the world—is part of the hope that makes us human.

In my own fantasy, I like to play with this idea. My characters all live in the Mortal Realm, but there is an Immortal Realm that lies beyond the bounds of their current existence, and the veil that separates the two can sometimes grow quite thin. In The Sword Keeper, there is a Void between the two realms that Tamuna must cross in order to confront the evil that afflicts her world, and to find the lost spirit of her father. In Bloodfire Legacy, when Lord Arion is assassinated in the first chapter, he temporarily gives up the indescribable glory of the Immortal Realm in order to linger as a ghost and help guide his orphaned daughter. 

All of these characters are bound, in time, to pass from this Mortal Realm, but that isn’t a curse—it’s a gift. There is far more to this life than the bounds of our material existence. There are more things in heaven and in earth than we can comprehend with our mortal understanding.

In the end, fantasy doesn’t just explore our fear of death. It teaches us how to find meaning in the brief time we’re given. So the next time you read about some deathless sorcerer or ageless elf queen, remember: you have something they never will. An ending, and a beginning. A home beyond this world. A story that can reach its conclusion.

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Fantasy from A to Z: E is for Epic

What is the ideal length of a fantasy novel? Of a fantasy series?

Fantasy, as a genre, is known for being big. Big stakes, big emotions, big battles—and big books. It isn’t unusual for a single fantasy novel to run well over 200,000 words. Authors like Brandon Sanderson regularly turn in doorstoppers, with Words of Radiance clocking in at over 400,000 words, longer than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy combined. And of course, there’s J.R.R. Tolkien himself, whose influence looms large over the genre. The Lord of the Rings helped establish the idea that a fantasy story needs room to breathe—and to expand.

Series length is no different. Some of the most beloved and influential fantasy series are also some of the longest. Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen spans ten main volumes and several more side novels. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time ran for fourteen massive books (fifteen, if you count the prequel). These stories require commitment, but for many readers, that’s part of the appeal. Once they find a world they love, they want to spend as much time there as possible.

But not all fantasy needs to be long.

Robert E. Howard, one of the foundational voices in the genre, wrote mostly short stories. His Conan tales, often published in pulp magazines like Weird Tales, rarely ran longer than a few thousand words. Yet they endure. David G. Hartwell, in “The Making of the American Fantasy Genre,” points out that Howard and Tolkien were arguably the two most successful fantasy authors of the twentieth century. Before The Lord of the Rings took off in the 1970s, most fantasy readers thought of the short story as the natural format for the genre. That pulp tradition carried strong into the mid-century, where fantasy shared shelf space with science fiction in magazines and anthologies.

That clearly isn’t the case anymore. In today’s market, a 90,000-word fantasy novel is often considered short. Readers are more than happy to put up with a bit of filler or extra padding if it means they get to linger in the world a little longer. And to be fair, there is something immersive about a book that takes its time. When done well, it can feel less like reading a story and more like living inside another world.

That said, I still believe in the value of economy of words. Economy of words doesn’t mean writing short—it means writing lean. It means using only as many words as the story needs. Louis L’Amour is a great example of this. His prose is tight, clear, and evocative. Most of his novels are quick reads, but they pack a punch. He could sketch a character in half a page and make you care about them. That’s not to say all of his books were short—The Walking Drum is a long and sprawling novel—but even there, his style is efficient. Every scene does something. Every word earns its place.

So why does epic fantasy run so long? Does it always have to be padded with extra filler? Not when it’s done well. One of the defining features of epic fantasy is that the world itself becomes a character. Tolkien mastered this. Middle-earth isn’t just a setting; it has a history, a culture, and an arc. The long travelogues, the deep lore, the songs and genealogies—they help build a sense of depth that makes the final conflict in The Return of the King resonate on a mythic level. You’re not just watching Frodo destroy a ring; you’re watching the curtain fall on an entire age.

And when the world has that kind of weight—when it grows, transforms, and carries the burden of history—it’s no surprise that a single book often isn’t enough. That’s one of the reasons epic fantasy so often stretches into multi-volume series. If the world is a character, it needs space for its own arc to unfold. A hero might only need three acts to complete their journey, but a world? That can take a bit longer.

Still, there’s more than one way to structure a series. Take Louis L’Amour again. He wrote mostly short standalone novels, but many of them followed the same families—like the Sacketts or the Chantrys—so that readers who wanted more could get it. You didn’t have to read them in order. You could pick up whichever one you found first and still get a complete story. That’s a far cry from most modern fantasy series, where the series itself is a single, complete work that must be read in order. After all, try starting The Wheel of Time at book five or A Song of Ice and Fire at book three, and you’ll be utterly lost.

My copy of The Lord of the Rings is a single-volume edition, the way Tolkien originally intended it. The main reason it was split into multiple books was to save on printing costs (Tolkien himself split the book into six parts, but the publisher turned it into a trilogy). Frankly, I think it works better that way. When a series beings to sprawl, the middle books often sag, and readers can definitely feel that. Just look at Crossroads of Twilight (Book 10 of The Wheel of Time) and how much the fans hate that book. I also remember when A Dance with Dragons first came out, with a 2.9-star average on Amazon that held for several years. (That rating has since improved, but I suspect that a large part of it is due to review farming by the publisher.)

Another risk inherent in writing a long, sprawling series is that the author will never finish it. George R.R. Martin is the most infamous example here—fans have been waiting for The Winds of Winter for over a decade, with no firm release date in sight. Patrick Rothfuss has faced similar criticism, with readers growing increasingly frustrated over the long delay between The Wise Man’s Fear and the long-promised third book in the Kingkiller Chronicle. And Orson Scott Card has yet to finish his Alvin Maker series. Seventh Son was published when I was just four years old, and though I enjoyed the first two books in that series, I refuse to read the rest of it until Card finishes the damned series.

I’m not alone. Many readers, burned one too many times, now refuse to even begin a new fantasy series until it’s complete. I can’t blame readers for feeling this way, but it does create a real challenge for new and midlist authors trying to break into the genre. Without the benefit of an established readership, it’s hard to convince readers to invest in book one of a planned trilogy or longer series. And if readers don’t start the first book, the rest may never see publication.

Right now, I’m writing an epic fantasy series based loosely on the life of King David. According to my outline, it’s a seven book series, but I’ve decided instead to split it into two trilogies (each with a complete arc) and a bridge novel (kind of like what Frank Herbert intended for the Dune books, though he died before he could finish the final book of the second trilogy). My plan is to wait until the first trilogy is totally written, publish the first three books within a month of each other, and promote that trilogy while I write the bridge novel and sequel trilogy.

In the meantime, I’ve been having a blast writing short fantasy novels in the Sea Mage Cycle, in-between drafts of my larger books. With The Sea Mage Cycle, I’m following a series structure that’s much closer to what Louis L’Amour did with his Chantry and Sackett books. Each book is a standalone, and the books can be read in any order, but they all tie together with recurring characters/families. As with all epic fantasy, the world itself is something of a character, but each book is more like a single thread in the tapestry of that wider story.

Not every epic needs to be long. Not every story benefits from being part of a massive, sprawling series. But when done well—when every word pulls its weight, when the world itself becomes a living character, when the structure supports the arc instead of smothering it—epic fantasy becomes something truly special.

It becomes epic, in every sense of the word.

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Fantasy from A to Z: D is for Dragons

If you were expecting a post about dragons, I hate to disappoint you. but that’s not what this is going to be. I think dragons are fine, and there are lots of fantasy books with dragons that I’ve enjoyed (Jane Yolen’s Dragon’s Blood comes to mind, as does The Hobbit, which is, after all, a classic for a reason), but I’ve never read a dragon book that made me go crazy for dragons. 

(And yes, I’ve read the Dragonriders of Pern books by Anne McAffrey, or at least the first two books. I can appreciate how other people like them, but frankly, the dragons are just way too OP for me. I mean, come on: not only can they teleport anywhere on the planet, but they can also travel through time? That’s just too much.)

Rather, I want to explore the idea of “here be dragons”—specifically, how it was that before the modern age, every civilization’s map of the world had a huge part of it that was dark and unexplored. Until that period ended, I don’t think it was possible for the modern fantasy genre to emerge. 

Some people think that fantasy is an old genre, with roots that go back at least as far as the Roman Empire (some lists include The Golden Ass by Apuleius as the first fantasy book) and possibly much longer. But I think that fantasy is a much more modern genre, and as such has much more in common with science fiction than it does with the ancient myths and legends from which the genre often draws inspiration.

It all comes back to this idea of “here be dragons.” Until the modern age, it wasn’t possible to write fantasy fiction because for all anyone knew, there might actually be dragons, or hobbits, or elves, or dwarves, or unicorns in some unexplored part of the world. Indeed, the medieval world was full of fanciful stories that many people actually believed, such as the mythical tales of Prester John that motivated so many crusaders, or the rumors that prima nocta had been forced upon the people just over the next mountain range (as far as we can tell, prima nocta was never actually practiced, but almost all European cultures thought that it had been enforced somewhere else).

If you went back in time and tried to write a fantasy novel for these people, they probably would have read it the way we read some of our more elaborate and creative conspiracy theories today. Part of the reason we enjoy fantasy is because we know that it’s fictional. The suspension of disbelief allows us to enjoy the story without constantly asking ourselves “wait—is this real?” or excitedly shouting “nuh-uh—no way!” Instead, we can just cozy up in our reading nook and let the story carry us away to another world, knowing that it only exists in our head.

The modern era began with the fall of the Roman Byzantine Empire and the Age of Exploration in the 14th century. It wasn’t until the late 19th century, though, that the Europeans had fully explored the world, filling in those parts of the world map that said (in one way or another) “here be dragons.” It’s not a coincidence that proto-fantasy writers like Lord Dunsaney and William Morris came onto the scene at this time. At first, people didn’t know what to make of these mythologies and adventure tales set in fictional worlds, but they paved the way for later writers like Howard and Tolkien to forge the fantasy genre as we know it today.

Science fiction and fantasy may seem like opposites, but they are really more like two sides of the same coin. Both are essentially modern genres, but where science fiction broadly looks to the future, fantasy looks to the past. Indeed, a large part of fantasy’s appeal is this sense of nostalgic longing that it gives us for a world that never actually was. Tolkien was a master of this. Howard was too, though he was a little more explicit about it in his worldbuilding: his Hyborian Age is supposed to be set in our own world, many thousands of years ago in the prehistoric era, as evidenced by the maps he drew up, and the way his Picts carry through all of his stories, including the Roman-era tales of Bran Mak Morn. 

All of this is to say that while we read fantasy for very different reasons than why we read science fiction, we read both genres as children of the modern age, and the genres would make very little sense to us otherwise. If you took Lord of the Rings back in a time machine to the middle ages, it wouldn’t give them that nostalgic sense of yearning for a simpler time. Frankly, it would probably leave most of them feeling confused (and wondering why there’s a distinct lack of religion—even though, to our modern sensibilities, Lord of the Rings has lots of subtle Christian symbolism). 

Every book is a product of the culture that created it, and as such, modern fantasy has far more in common with its brother genre science fiction than with its great-great grandfathers: pagan mythology, Christian allegory, epic poetry, etc. Fantasy certainly draws from all of these, but until the world was fully mapped—until “here be dragons” had been fully excised from our understanding of the world—the fantasy genre as we know and love it today was still gestating in the womb.

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