In case you missed part one of this series you can find it here.
And if you missed part two of this series you can find it here.
In his study of epic fantasy, Wizardry and Wild Romance, Michael Moorcock suggests that one of the powers of the genre is to transport us somewhere new, and, as writers, to make the psychological landscape of the mind into a metaphorical landscape of the text. In this conception, fantasy doesn’t just speak to us through its characters and their stories, but also by way of the lands in which those stories take place, which vibrate to the tune of our primordial hopes and dreams.
Without a doubt, fantasy has taken us to many places. From the pastures of the Shire, Emond’s field, and Faldor’s farm, to Cirith Ungol, Shayol Gul, and Torak’s tomb, the classic vale-of-innocence-to-heart-of-darkness passage has been made many times. Contemporary fantasy stretches our sense of landscape even further, from the mushroom-city of Cinsorium to the ice-bound archipelagos of the Jamur Empire, from the nameless horrors of the Cacotopic Stain to the misted realms of the Holds and Warrens.
There are also many fantasies that take place in the real world, and transport us to places that are “other” merely by volition of the creatures and concepts hiding behind the veil of the real. Paranormal romance, stories of urban wizard cabals, gods intervening in the lives of humble mortals, and even supernatural horror stories: these all take us to new landscapes by shifting the world around us to make of it a fantastic realm.
However, whether the readers of either the “epic” or “urban” type of fantasy would consider the latter a “true” fantasy is debatable. I believe this is because urban fantasy lacks the complete reformation of the world that makes epic, heroic, and weird fantasy so poignant. There is not so much a psychological landscape as a psychological yearning, a latent wish rather than a potent dream. Nonetheless, both kinds of fantasy still affect a transformation within the mind of the reader, forcing a breakdown of the real and creating a landscape that allows not just anything to happen, but things to happen in some way that are deeply meaningful – in many cases more meaningful than they would be in a “real” context. Landscape and sense of place is what allows fantasy to be more than just the fantastic, and takes it to realms that are almost (or, in some cases, quite literally) sexual in their wish-fulfilling capacity.
Whatever world a fantasy takes you to, one of the enduring aspects of fantasy, to which any reader should be able to agree, is that it takes you somewhere unreal. Again, this stands in opposition to science fiction insofar as fantasy fights logic and empiricism in the name of romanticism and emotion. Although science fiction may have romance, engage in deep philosophical battles, and show us important things about human nature – all things that fantasy does well, also – its inevitably “realistical” landscapes keep readers from engaging the world as an emotional construct (it’s just quirks and quarks, right?). The sunset is beautiful and meaningful on Earth just as it would be on Mars; but the sun that is dying, the sun that never sets and the sun that sets eternally have poetic significance. One of the cardinal virtues of fantasy, then, is its ability to put us inside a world within our own minds.
This does not change the fact that there are a limited number of possible and meaningful landscapes in which to place characters; the superfluity of “field-to-fortress” stories among the classics of the genre, and the expanding amount of dead or decaying worlds in contemporary fantasy, demonstrates just to what an extent fantasy relies on communal unconscious metaphors. The truly interesting question, then, is whether fantasy is a confirmation or a denial of the real world. Are the exotic landscapes of fantasy an escape, or a release valve?
