Over the past year or so I have
been struggling with writing fantasy literature and because fantasy is such a misunderstood form of literary art. Fantasy is often contrasted with science fiction,
with the latter genre considered superior to that latter. I disagree both with the conceptualization of
the genres as absolute opposites as well as positioning one superior to the
other as I have argued elsewhere. I find
some criticism of the genre warranted, insofar as fantasy is morally
irresponsible and culturally insensitive as I have argued in previous essays on
the subject. But I do not accept the
criticism that fantasy is literature only fit for children, while science
fiction is, at least potentially, acceptable for adults. I assume that fantasy is criticized as
childish because of its playfulness with reality and its fascination with magic,
judged as an immature and irrational mode of perceiving the world.
All fictional literature is fantastical in a banal sense. Literary fictions invent people, places and events as part of the narrative experience and even the most historical forms of literature must be original with their thematic structure and character dialogue. Fantasy is a genre of fictional literature but unlike historical fictions which attempt to reflect our real world or science fiction which attempts to imagine some alternative to our world (usually but not necessarily set in the future), fantasy fiction imagines some unique world all its own. Even when a fantasy story is situated in some point parallel to our world history, it necessarily cannot be our world since by its nature fantasy involves an impossible deviation from our world history; a World War II story involving a cabal of Nazi necromancers in a secret war with a circle of British druids is fantasy, despite its historical setting, because of its inclusion of magic which is not historical, at least according to our current understanding of the world. So while all fiction is creative with reality by imagining ways that the world was, is or could be, and is therefore fantastical to an extent, it is only the fantasy genre itself which consciously avoids consideration of this world in all its historic possibility and instead invites us to imagine the history of an entirely unique alternative world.
Fantasy is a still developing, and of all genres it has the most potential for development since it is not constrained by a concern for historical realism. Much of fantasy has been, and continues to be, fantastical versions of feudal Europe replete with all the cultural and moral problems endemic to romanticizing that society. Fantasy writers are just beginning to explore the edge of the genre and push its boundaries further by writing in sub-genres such as steam-punk, science-fantasy, new weird or urban fantasy. As I have argued in detail in other essays, fantasy is not, and should not be, limited to the tropes of knights, dragons, dwarves and elves but includes anything that deviating from historical continuity with our world view. Fantasy is incredibly flexible in its imaginative potential; it encompasses underwater empires of sentient insects to spaceships powered by the souls of dead gods to time-travelling demons of a trans-dimensional hive-mind. But nothing is more magical in a fantasy narrative than a system of magic; magic is not merely a part of a fantasy world but is a fantastical way of acting in, if not creating, that world itself.
Although an authentic fantasy story can be written without magic, I think its inclusion in the narrative provides a unique opportunity for understanding the genre. Magic systems can aid in explaining the appeal of the fantasy genre as a whole but can also exonerate it from judgment as irrational immaturity. Rather than being the very thing that condemns fantasy to criticism, magic can liberate the literature from it. But first, what is magic? Magic, broadly defined, is the causal manipulation of the world through ritual symbols, gestures or words. Systems of fantasy magic are fundamentally systems of language. But instead of merely describing the world, they command, alter or create the world itself. When a mage’s gesture or incantation conjures a familiar or creates a flame, that act of magic is an act of communication in some sense between the mage and the world. It is a communication that compels the world to conform to our desires, to understand us. If the belief in magic is intelligible it is as the belief that language, if not literature particularly, can change the world.
I came to this epiphany as I began to write fantasy stories; as I was writing about magic I became aware that I was practicing magic itself, albeit in a modern and mundane form. I commit myself to my ritual of finding a quiet coffee-shop, open my laptop and type out worlds that come to form original worlds in themselves. Writing is most true when it emerges from the intimacy of personal experience and I believe that fantasy, despite its defiance to historicity, is no different. But the personal experiences that inform the magic of the fantasy genre is the wonder of writing itself, of creating worlds unto themselves through mere words. I imagine that the authentic fantasy writer or reader is uniquely able to live within their fictional world insofar as the art of writing and reading about it provides the very alchemy to transform it from mere fantasy to reality. For readers or writers of other of other genres, the continuity between the narrative and our own history takes primacy and provides the element of realism, doing much of the work for the reader themselves. But for the fantasy genre, reality is ironically supplied by the imagination itself since the more magical the world is, the more it mirrors the art of literary language. Just as the mage must master words of magic power to shape the world to his desires, so too does must the writer and reader of fantasy wield the precise words so she may articulate her imaginings.
Just as fantasy is concerned with its own imagined worlds and not our own world extrinsic to it, so too is the very power of that very imagination intrinsic to the text itself. It arises spontaneously from the parallels between the capacity of the writer or reader to create the world through words and the world within the text itself to be responsive to the communicative power of magic. Fantasy neither depends upon our world to be understood nor to be imagined, but is perfectly capable of being self-contained. In this way is the genre inherently interesting simply for its singular creativity of world-building. Fantasy literature appeals to the creatively inclined soul and many of those who critique it for its immaturity I suspect are simply immature in their own capacity for imagination. For those possessed of such a capacity though, the appeal of fantasy is apparent insofar as one appreciates the creativity of writing in general, of which fantasy is paragon and an elaborate system of magic is its pinnacle. And to any critic who alleges that it is easy to write fantasy precisely because it is unregulated by historic reality, I find this claim simply incredulous. Great fantasies require not only immense imagination but also a delicate attention to words so that one can articulate that imagination. One must be especially creative and careful when crafting out an elaborate system of magic for the world one is writing since magic is not merely a description of that world but is the language of the world itself.
Magic as a language by which the fantasy world comprehends and obeys commands is both a creative achievement of the fantasy writer as well as a limit upon the potential creativity of the reader. Systematic magic is simultaneously an example of superior world-building by envisioning a fantastic ways in which the world can be changed while the rules of that system help constrain the flight of fancies that are inspired in the reader. The challenge of building a magic system, and fantastic world-building in general, is to create something original and interesting enough that it inspires the reader to invoke their own imagination while also being systematically detailed enough to avoid arbitrary creativity. World-building must avoid being so vague that the narrative lacks coherence and comprehensibility. But it must also ensure that it is not reduced to a restrictive totality of exhaustive explanations and info-dumps that deplete the imagination and interest of the reader. Our own world defies exhaustive description and it is equally foolish to attempt the same with a fantasy. World-building should not become so self-indulgent that it stagnates the creativity of the reader to imagine the world for them self. World-building that constrains the reader with exhaustive explanations and narrow possibilities is like the shadow of some dark god that eclipses all hope of freedom. To create such a world is to practice not merely bad literature but it is to invoke black magic and dominate, rather than liberate, the spirit of others. Fantasy worlds are read as much as they are written into existence and for the magic of literature to operate the reader must be able to speak the language of the writer, they must be made an initiate of the imagination.
The magical writings within fantasy literature serve as a mirror to the mystification and enthusiasm of the fantasy text itself. This mirror image may even come to be crystallized within meta-fantastic literature: fantasy stories about fantasy stories themselves. For example, a fantasy story may feature a magic system where mages can summon mythical creatures from the texts of fables or fantasy creatures are disappearing in the world because the books about them are being burned by religious fundamentalists. Other examples could include an evil god controlling people by editing the book of their lives stolen from the library of the gods or there could be a fantasy story where wizards can hop between worlds by literally escaping into texts about those worlds themselves. In each example, there is the primary fantasy narrative, but within the story is a secondary level of fantasy literature tied in with the magic system of the primary text. Such self-reference may not only be entertaining commentary but enlightening criticism of the fantasy genre as well. One may use it to speculate on the structure of imagination, the importance of literature to society or the responsibility of writers to the lives of their fictional creations. It may also allow the author to situate their work within the history of fantasy genre so that they can juxtapose the world of their writing to that of another writer within the former.
Meta-fantasy also allows the text to break the fourth wall, so to speak, by reminding the reader that the world of the story is not a complete reality unto itself meant to be indulged in solely for its own sake but is a construct integrated with a narrative and ideology whose significance transcends the confines of the text. Fantasy enthusiasts are often criticized for being compulsively obsessed with the nature of the fictional world they have escaped into but are inept, ignorant or indifferent to the real world around them. Caricature though this may be, I do think it to be a legitimate concern of the genre. It should be recognized that all fiction, and not just fantasy, is vulnerable to this sort of indulgence; fantasy simply receives more criticism because it doesn’t purport to be historical in content. The magic of meta-fantasy can be employed to ameliorate some of the anxiety over fictional over-indulgence in creative ways not available to other genres of literature. By referencing the fantasy text as a text, criticizing obsessive escapism or clarifying the nature of fantasy and imagination through meta-fantastical magic, the author provides explicit disavowal towards irresponsible escapism that an attentive reader would recognize and internalize.
Fantasy is criticized as escapist, as seeking solace from the injustices of the world in the illusions of literature. If anything, fantasy is the least capable of providing this form of escapism since it is preoccupied with an inherently impossible world. It is other genres of literature, with all their pretension to represent reality, that provide illusory comfort. One enters into a fantasy, not to live within it, but to look back upon our world from its vantage point, so that we may change this world. The magic fantasy provides is not a retreat from this world but an intrusion into this world. Fantasy literature is not merely a product of the written imagination but reading it is an instruction in exercising one’s imagination. One learns how to weave words together to create alternative worlds just as a sorcerer learns the spells necessary to exercise his will upon the world. The refusal to learn from one’s fantasies is a betrayal of the genre. Fantasy enthusiasts who find nothing in it but the indulgence of an illusion are akin to men suffering under the spells of a sorcerer, ignorant of their curse. By putting our dreams of liberation into words we give them the opportunity to live in the mind of others and thereby change their world and our own. Despite being words for another world, impossible for us, the ideals we struggle for are not impossible but are rather necessary across worlds. That is the magic of moral vision: it is not constrained by the world, but commands how the world is to be shaped.
Simply because fantasy is disconnected to the history of our world does not mean that it cannot change our history. The immense and progressively normalized popularity of the genre is a testament to its potential to inspire change through mass movement. It may be that the genre’s very playfulness with the narratives of our histories provides what is needed to change our history rather than merely escape from it. Fantastic stories allow us to occupy perspectives radically different than our own disregard the burden of history that encumbers our capacity to empathize with others. And by being estranged from identifying with our own narratives we may come to see that they are themselves arbitrary fantasies, forced upon us by the violence of history. The magical aspect of fantasy reveals the inherently ideological nature of reality; just as the mage’s words of power shape the world, so too does the power of the ideologue’s words shape our world. Fantasy gives shape to the monstrous ideologies that threaten our lives by literalizing them into the grotesqueries forms that they are. We are awoken from the spell of our false consciousness and dispel the illusory ideologies that control us through the rationalizations of history and science. Fantasy, through its free-flow of creativity collapses our conditioned patterns and prejudices of thought. It does not provide the answers, but it may provide a portal to glimpse them through.
It is with unfortunate irony that the fantasy genre has been accused of sub-literary quality. Unfortunate because there is a great wealth of aesthetic creativity and moral imagination that occupies much of the writing and ironic because fantasy, of all genres, takes literature the most seriously and invest it with the most subversive potential. Other genres of fictional literature write about our world as a given; the very credulity of science fiction depends upon the pseudo-inevitability of its projected future. The effect of this is to relegate literature to the role of reproducing our world and confining our imagination to it. Even science fiction, much lauded for its progressive optimism, proceeds to imagine the future as a projection from our current perspective and thereby constructions the future from within those constrains of privilege and power. No wonder then that so much of the imagined futures of science fiction are preoccupied with the colonialism and militarism of white saviors battling against some alien other we have projected those very same sins upon. Fantasy, for all its flagrant infidelity to reality, may be the best suited to bestow upon us the wisdom that we do indeed live in a magical world. One only need find the right words to summon its secret power.
All fictional literature is fantastical in a banal sense. Literary fictions invent people, places and events as part of the narrative experience and even the most historical forms of literature must be original with their thematic structure and character dialogue. Fantasy is a genre of fictional literature but unlike historical fictions which attempt to reflect our real world or science fiction which attempts to imagine some alternative to our world (usually but not necessarily set in the future), fantasy fiction imagines some unique world all its own. Even when a fantasy story is situated in some point parallel to our world history, it necessarily cannot be our world since by its nature fantasy involves an impossible deviation from our world history; a World War II story involving a cabal of Nazi necromancers in a secret war with a circle of British druids is fantasy, despite its historical setting, because of its inclusion of magic which is not historical, at least according to our current understanding of the world. So while all fiction is creative with reality by imagining ways that the world was, is or could be, and is therefore fantastical to an extent, it is only the fantasy genre itself which consciously avoids consideration of this world in all its historic possibility and instead invites us to imagine the history of an entirely unique alternative world.
Fantasy is a still developing, and of all genres it has the most potential for development since it is not constrained by a concern for historical realism. Much of fantasy has been, and continues to be, fantastical versions of feudal Europe replete with all the cultural and moral problems endemic to romanticizing that society. Fantasy writers are just beginning to explore the edge of the genre and push its boundaries further by writing in sub-genres such as steam-punk, science-fantasy, new weird or urban fantasy. As I have argued in detail in other essays, fantasy is not, and should not be, limited to the tropes of knights, dragons, dwarves and elves but includes anything that deviating from historical continuity with our world view. Fantasy is incredibly flexible in its imaginative potential; it encompasses underwater empires of sentient insects to spaceships powered by the souls of dead gods to time-travelling demons of a trans-dimensional hive-mind. But nothing is more magical in a fantasy narrative than a system of magic; magic is not merely a part of a fantasy world but is a fantastical way of acting in, if not creating, that world itself.
Although an authentic fantasy story can be written without magic, I think its inclusion in the narrative provides a unique opportunity for understanding the genre. Magic systems can aid in explaining the appeal of the fantasy genre as a whole but can also exonerate it from judgment as irrational immaturity. Rather than being the very thing that condemns fantasy to criticism, magic can liberate the literature from it. But first, what is magic? Magic, broadly defined, is the causal manipulation of the world through ritual symbols, gestures or words. Systems of fantasy magic are fundamentally systems of language. But instead of merely describing the world, they command, alter or create the world itself. When a mage’s gesture or incantation conjures a familiar or creates a flame, that act of magic is an act of communication in some sense between the mage and the world. It is a communication that compels the world to conform to our desires, to understand us. If the belief in magic is intelligible it is as the belief that language, if not literature particularly, can change the world.
I came to this epiphany as I began to write fantasy stories; as I was writing about magic I became aware that I was practicing magic itself, albeit in a modern and mundane form. I commit myself to my ritual of finding a quiet coffee-shop, open my laptop and type out worlds that come to form original worlds in themselves. Writing is most true when it emerges from the intimacy of personal experience and I believe that fantasy, despite its defiance to historicity, is no different. But the personal experiences that inform the magic of the fantasy genre is the wonder of writing itself, of creating worlds unto themselves through mere words. I imagine that the authentic fantasy writer or reader is uniquely able to live within their fictional world insofar as the art of writing and reading about it provides the very alchemy to transform it from mere fantasy to reality. For readers or writers of other of other genres, the continuity between the narrative and our own history takes primacy and provides the element of realism, doing much of the work for the reader themselves. But for the fantasy genre, reality is ironically supplied by the imagination itself since the more magical the world is, the more it mirrors the art of literary language. Just as the mage must master words of magic power to shape the world to his desires, so too does must the writer and reader of fantasy wield the precise words so she may articulate her imaginings.
Just as fantasy is concerned with its own imagined worlds and not our own world extrinsic to it, so too is the very power of that very imagination intrinsic to the text itself. It arises spontaneously from the parallels between the capacity of the writer or reader to create the world through words and the world within the text itself to be responsive to the communicative power of magic. Fantasy neither depends upon our world to be understood nor to be imagined, but is perfectly capable of being self-contained. In this way is the genre inherently interesting simply for its singular creativity of world-building. Fantasy literature appeals to the creatively inclined soul and many of those who critique it for its immaturity I suspect are simply immature in their own capacity for imagination. For those possessed of such a capacity though, the appeal of fantasy is apparent insofar as one appreciates the creativity of writing in general, of which fantasy is paragon and an elaborate system of magic is its pinnacle. And to any critic who alleges that it is easy to write fantasy precisely because it is unregulated by historic reality, I find this claim simply incredulous. Great fantasies require not only immense imagination but also a delicate attention to words so that one can articulate that imagination. One must be especially creative and careful when crafting out an elaborate system of magic for the world one is writing since magic is not merely a description of that world but is the language of the world itself.
Magic as a language by which the fantasy world comprehends and obeys commands is both a creative achievement of the fantasy writer as well as a limit upon the potential creativity of the reader. Systematic magic is simultaneously an example of superior world-building by envisioning a fantastic ways in which the world can be changed while the rules of that system help constrain the flight of fancies that are inspired in the reader. The challenge of building a magic system, and fantastic world-building in general, is to create something original and interesting enough that it inspires the reader to invoke their own imagination while also being systematically detailed enough to avoid arbitrary creativity. World-building must avoid being so vague that the narrative lacks coherence and comprehensibility. But it must also ensure that it is not reduced to a restrictive totality of exhaustive explanations and info-dumps that deplete the imagination and interest of the reader. Our own world defies exhaustive description and it is equally foolish to attempt the same with a fantasy. World-building should not become so self-indulgent that it stagnates the creativity of the reader to imagine the world for them self. World-building that constrains the reader with exhaustive explanations and narrow possibilities is like the shadow of some dark god that eclipses all hope of freedom. To create such a world is to practice not merely bad literature but it is to invoke black magic and dominate, rather than liberate, the spirit of others. Fantasy worlds are read as much as they are written into existence and for the magic of literature to operate the reader must be able to speak the language of the writer, they must be made an initiate of the imagination.
The magical writings within fantasy literature serve as a mirror to the mystification and enthusiasm of the fantasy text itself. This mirror image may even come to be crystallized within meta-fantastic literature: fantasy stories about fantasy stories themselves. For example, a fantasy story may feature a magic system where mages can summon mythical creatures from the texts of fables or fantasy creatures are disappearing in the world because the books about them are being burned by religious fundamentalists. Other examples could include an evil god controlling people by editing the book of their lives stolen from the library of the gods or there could be a fantasy story where wizards can hop between worlds by literally escaping into texts about those worlds themselves. In each example, there is the primary fantasy narrative, but within the story is a secondary level of fantasy literature tied in with the magic system of the primary text. Such self-reference may not only be entertaining commentary but enlightening criticism of the fantasy genre as well. One may use it to speculate on the structure of imagination, the importance of literature to society or the responsibility of writers to the lives of their fictional creations. It may also allow the author to situate their work within the history of fantasy genre so that they can juxtapose the world of their writing to that of another writer within the former.
Meta-fantasy also allows the text to break the fourth wall, so to speak, by reminding the reader that the world of the story is not a complete reality unto itself meant to be indulged in solely for its own sake but is a construct integrated with a narrative and ideology whose significance transcends the confines of the text. Fantasy enthusiasts are often criticized for being compulsively obsessed with the nature of the fictional world they have escaped into but are inept, ignorant or indifferent to the real world around them. Caricature though this may be, I do think it to be a legitimate concern of the genre. It should be recognized that all fiction, and not just fantasy, is vulnerable to this sort of indulgence; fantasy simply receives more criticism because it doesn’t purport to be historical in content. The magic of meta-fantasy can be employed to ameliorate some of the anxiety over fictional over-indulgence in creative ways not available to other genres of literature. By referencing the fantasy text as a text, criticizing obsessive escapism or clarifying the nature of fantasy and imagination through meta-fantastical magic, the author provides explicit disavowal towards irresponsible escapism that an attentive reader would recognize and internalize.
Fantasy is criticized as escapist, as seeking solace from the injustices of the world in the illusions of literature. If anything, fantasy is the least capable of providing this form of escapism since it is preoccupied with an inherently impossible world. It is other genres of literature, with all their pretension to represent reality, that provide illusory comfort. One enters into a fantasy, not to live within it, but to look back upon our world from its vantage point, so that we may change this world. The magic fantasy provides is not a retreat from this world but an intrusion into this world. Fantasy literature is not merely a product of the written imagination but reading it is an instruction in exercising one’s imagination. One learns how to weave words together to create alternative worlds just as a sorcerer learns the spells necessary to exercise his will upon the world. The refusal to learn from one’s fantasies is a betrayal of the genre. Fantasy enthusiasts who find nothing in it but the indulgence of an illusion are akin to men suffering under the spells of a sorcerer, ignorant of their curse. By putting our dreams of liberation into words we give them the opportunity to live in the mind of others and thereby change their world and our own. Despite being words for another world, impossible for us, the ideals we struggle for are not impossible but are rather necessary across worlds. That is the magic of moral vision: it is not constrained by the world, but commands how the world is to be shaped.
Simply because fantasy is disconnected to the history of our world does not mean that it cannot change our history. The immense and progressively normalized popularity of the genre is a testament to its potential to inspire change through mass movement. It may be that the genre’s very playfulness with the narratives of our histories provides what is needed to change our history rather than merely escape from it. Fantastic stories allow us to occupy perspectives radically different than our own disregard the burden of history that encumbers our capacity to empathize with others. And by being estranged from identifying with our own narratives we may come to see that they are themselves arbitrary fantasies, forced upon us by the violence of history. The magical aspect of fantasy reveals the inherently ideological nature of reality; just as the mage’s words of power shape the world, so too does the power of the ideologue’s words shape our world. Fantasy gives shape to the monstrous ideologies that threaten our lives by literalizing them into the grotesqueries forms that they are. We are awoken from the spell of our false consciousness and dispel the illusory ideologies that control us through the rationalizations of history and science. Fantasy, through its free-flow of creativity collapses our conditioned patterns and prejudices of thought. It does not provide the answers, but it may provide a portal to glimpse them through.
It is with unfortunate irony that the fantasy genre has been accused of sub-literary quality. Unfortunate because there is a great wealth of aesthetic creativity and moral imagination that occupies much of the writing and ironic because fantasy, of all genres, takes literature the most seriously and invest it with the most subversive potential. Other genres of fictional literature write about our world as a given; the very credulity of science fiction depends upon the pseudo-inevitability of its projected future. The effect of this is to relegate literature to the role of reproducing our world and confining our imagination to it. Even science fiction, much lauded for its progressive optimism, proceeds to imagine the future as a projection from our current perspective and thereby constructions the future from within those constrains of privilege and power. No wonder then that so much of the imagined futures of science fiction are preoccupied with the colonialism and militarism of white saviors battling against some alien other we have projected those very same sins upon. Fantasy, for all its flagrant infidelity to reality, may be the best suited to bestow upon us the wisdom that we do indeed live in a magical world. One only need find the right words to summon its secret power.
