The Changing Face(s) of Fantasy – Guest Blog by Adam Dalton

It’s obviously blasphemy to criticise Tolkien, even indirectly, but for me his work is more important in historico-cultural terms than modern literary terms. Before you send me a load of hate mail, yes, yes, I fully accept that current fantasy writers inherit greatly from him and couldn’t write what they did if it weren’t for him… but (brace yourself) fantasy’s come on as a genre quite a lot since he sat penning lines in the Inglenook pub in Oxford, and his work isn’t as immediately ‘relevant’ to today’s concerns as the work of those currently writing. Think about it, if his work was still more relevant than the work of current writers, we wouldn’t need those current writers, now would we?

Things move on. Things evolve. It’s healthy that the fantasy genre does so too – it keeps it fresh, vibrant, progressive and alive. It keeps is strongly ‘relevant’ to new readers. There are some genres that are far less progressive (in literary terms), and that are beginning to fail. A clear example is the genre of horror. Book sales have all but died off entirely (although in TV and film horror still does well). Many Waterstones stores have entirely done away with their horror sections (hiding them in their Scifi/Fantasy sections or relabeling them as Dark Fantasy sections). Unless you’re Stephen King or James Herbert (RIP), you simply aren’t going to sell many books if your book is labelled ‘horror’. Horror is literally dead. Ironically dead. Dead. Justin Cronin’s The Passage was first launched as a horror, and it hardly sold. It was relabelled scifi and relaunched. Again no sales. Then it was launched as a literary fiction and it became a best-seller.

Because scifi in terms of book sales is also in massive trouble. Brian Aldiss (the UK’s oldest and greatest living scifi author – ‘we’re not worthy’) puts is down to the fact that we now ‘live in a scifi world’ and that we therefore no longer need to read scifi so much. ‘Every week there’s some new device or invention that comes out and we don’t know how it works! Strange and confusing technology is all around us.’ Mr Aldiss has put his finger on it for me – current readers just don’t see scifi literature as being as ‘relevant’ to them as past readerships did.

Yet fantasy survives and thrives! Where it was the poor cousin to scifi in the 1970s, it now utterly dwarfs (interesting verb!) scifi. How does fantasy do it? What’s the secret? Well, it’s the magic of fantasy, isn’t it? Magic is at the heart of that genre. It tricks, distracts, bewitches and bespells, where other genres merely appal or confuse.  And it’s learnt to be relevant, to reflect the shifting dreams and fantasies of its readership, to reflect the current state of society. ‘The current state?’ you might frown. ‘But fantasy isn’t real. It’s precisely the opposite of that.’ Precisely. Look, you can’t get a job as a philosopher these days, so you have to become a reader or writer of fantasy. Fantasy is the fairground mirror to the real, the extension and twisted exploration of the real, the different way of seeing that enables real change.

An example of how fantasy reflects its time and evolves. In the heady, materialistic 1980s, the big fashion in fantasy was the ‘epic fantasy’ (e.g. Raymond E. Feist’s seminal Magician). It told the tale of a young boy in difficult circumstances who learnt to use magic and change his life (and the world) for the better. He was ‘the chosen one’, the ‘working class hero’, the character who told us that if you worked hard enough and had self-belief, then you could succeed against all the odds. It was the Thatcherite ethos, which endorsed a political meritocracy. All well and good, but that sort of tale just doesn’t cut it anymore. We’re in a credit crunch now. It doesn’t matter how hard you work and how much self-belief you have – there’s a good chance you’ll still fail. Look at George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones. Look at the rise of the subgenre known as Grimdark – there’s no happy ending, and it’s only the most mean or corrupt characters who get anywhere (usually at the expense of others). A good example is the success of Mark Lawrence’s Prince of Thorns (a good but challenging read, by the way).

Another example. In Bram Stoker’s day, the vampire was evil incarnate. Satan, without doubt. Horrific. A definite baddie. That was a more Christian time, of course. Today? We are spiritually more plural as a society… and the vampire is sparkly, simply misunderstood and a goodie! Dark Fantasy supplants horror.

So where to now for fantasy? What will post-credit-crunch-era fantasy look like? Hmm. It’ll be exciting and magical to find out! I can tell you this. I’ve been told to write ‘shorter’ books by my publisher (Gollancz). Apparently, the ‘big fat fantasy book on the shelf just doesn’t sell like it used to, unless you’re George RR Martin and have a tv show to promote your work’). Where Empire of the Saviours was 172K words (2012), and Gateway of the Saviours was 185K words (2013), Tithe of the Saviours was a mere 143K words (2014), and my latest book Lifer is a literary scifi of just 86K words (2015), which is almost a short story for me! People are time-poor and are conscious of baggage allowance when going on holiday. Shorter fantasy is the order of the day!

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