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Fantasy: is it innovative enough and should it be?
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Lizzy



Joined: 02 May 2005
Posts: 674
Location: the wilds of the West

PostPosted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 7:33 pm    Post subject: Fantasy: is it innovative enough and should it be? Reply with quote

There has been an interesting discussion going on in a few blogs about this subject. It was kicked off by Mark Chadbourn here,
continued by Ariel here, and added to by Joe Abercrombie here.

What do you guys reckon? From my point of view I like my fantasy to be varied and pushing the boundaries. The Ascendants did imo, on many levels particularly the magic system and the world it was set in.

The Raven is perhaps more old school, but is kept fresh by the pace of the writing and the sheer drama of it. Plus it doesn't have cliched happy endings.

Same old same old doesn't do it for me, but from what I am reading the mass market want that, so how do we persuade the major booksellers to give better exposure to more varied fantasy and help open minded readers stumble across it?

Or am I the exception and is it all hunky dory?
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Grace



Joined: 28 May 2006
Posts: 302
Location: Bristol

PostPosted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 8:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Good thread.
No, all is not exactly hunky dory, but nor is it in its entirety doom and gloom. There will always be a common base of "cliches" to fantasy (because that's what makes a genre) but the best authors are the ones who can work within this framework and then turn some aspect of it on its head, without breaking that overall familiarity. The Ascendants did this with the emerging magic system and eugenics, while A Game of Thrones et al, at the time they were written, did this with real-world grittiness and highly personal character perspective.

The cliches are constantly evolving, for example with how normal detailed violence or sexual deviancy are in fantasy these days. Tolkien's generation would have been shocked.
RPGs and games will never kill books. Some people enjoy both, others get into reading via games or visa versa, and others, frankly, just can't read books. One feeds off the other, but this is arguably a symbiotic relationship, not a parasitic one.

Authors do need to be careful not to be complacant, but I would have thought the idea of writing exactly what others have already written would be anathema to any author worth their salt anyway. Authors have a passion for their worlds, else they wouldn't bother writing. So long as this remains I don't believe we need to fear an electronic coup d'etat.
Fantasy lives.

(My two penny worth...)
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Selik



Joined: 20 Jan 2005
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 9:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Grace wrote:
Authors do need to be careful not to be complacant, but I would have thought the idea of writing exactly what others have already written would be anathema to any author worth their salt anyway. Authors have a passion for their worlds, else they wouldn't bother writing. So long as this remains I don't believe we need to fear an electronic coup d'etat.
Fantasy lives.

(My two penny worth...)


And a very good two penny worth it is too Very Happy

I think genres will evolve with time because people change and society changes. As Grace says, people in Tolkien's day would have been shocked to read some of the sexual detail and the degree of violence within more modern novels, but we accept it. People have become more open and more desensitised. I think judging from this then it's fairly safe to say that any genre, including Fantasy will evolve along with society and how people individually see the world and its workings.

I personally don't like to read one book and then basically read the same thing by a different author, just in another world with different characters. It gets boring and in the end you don't want to read it. People would eventually all get bored and no longer bother with the genre so to prevent that from happening, things do need to change, even if they're only very subtle, they do need to change.
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Drizzt



Joined: 07 Mar 2005
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 10:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ooh, sexy thread!! Very Happy Complicated questions!

Should fantasy be innovative? Hell yes. Is the genre innovative? Hell yes. I'll now play the politician and ask a third: is innovation becoming more difficult?

Every writer wanting to be successful will know the value of new ideas, new takes on old ideas, and strive to produce them. Evolution is inevitable and unavoidable, it's a lovely little cirlce: the genre evolves through the readers with the readers doing the same through the genre. As the genre evolves the reader has their expectations raised and altered, and so they come to expect newly evolved ideas, thus forcing the genre to continue to evolve. So what of the writers?

This little partnership between reader and genre is wonderfully self-serving and self-fulfilling, but it's the poor writers who are the engine of the whole mechanism. Most start out as a reader, growing to love the genre through reading the best and worst of what is written at the time and what has come before. Armed with this knowledge, the writer is charged by the genre's constant need for evolution with the wonderful task of continuing this cycle by daring to innovate. And they do, and always have done.Without this innovation, the genre would stagnate, grow tepid and slowly die... surely?

But, as the genre evolves and the readers along with it, is it becoming more and more difficult for writers to come up with something new? I'm no expect but I'm sure some chap is credited with writing that there is only a set amount story arcs which can be told, from beginning to end, by a writer's work. So if there's is only a finite amount of actual stories which can be told, there must also be a finite amount of ways to tell these stories, a limit to just how many ways a writer can combine the various devices and tools available to create a story in a new way. As the genre moves on, these are exhausted... so how many are left and how difficult is it becoming to think up these new ones?

And, just to be a contradicting git... assuming it does, if everything I've said here makes sense... why is it then that the old warhorses like 'Lord of the Rings' continue to be so popular in an ever-evolving genre?
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Alia



Joined: 17 Sep 2007
Posts: 246

PostPosted: Tue Oct 09, 2007 7:14 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Last month I had a chance to listen to Tad Williams and he said one important thing about the current market for fantasy and literature in general - readers, and above all, publishers, expect their authors to be constant. So if author X started to write detective stories set in Middle Ages with the main character being a lesbian left-handed nun (that was his example), the publisher and the readers expect him/her to write in this little genre for ever. And if the author writes something completely different, the publisher may not want to publish it. Williams gave Stephen Donaldson as an example - forced to write the second Thomas Covenant trilogy.
And although Williams talked about American market, I can also see it in my country. We have a popular writer who started her career with a fantasy set in quasi-mediaeval world with a complicated religious system, with rather unpleasant characters and lots of cruelty. And then she went on to write a book of stories set in a more Renaissance-like world, reminiscent of Italy. And many readers started screaming - "Get back to your first world, we love it!".
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Max Power



Joined: 06 Dec 2004
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Location: United Kingdom

PostPosted: Tue Oct 09, 2007 7:57 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Good thread - links nicely to the discussion at FanCon about 2are tropes dead?" in which Terry Brooks, Juliet McKenna and Chaz Brenchley debated this. They agreed that tropes weren't dead, but it was the quality of the author, and the new 'spin' they put on a classic trope that kept it fresh and interesting.

I think that, with everything, as the market grows, things become more mainstream/central to appeal to more and more people (name me more than five differences between Labour and the Tories!!!).

I agree with Lizzy that same old same old isn't what I want (Drizzt hasn't mentioned David Eddings yet in this post, so I thought I would!!! I was a massive fan as a kid, but he hasn't moved on in my eyes and seems out of touch with what I think of modern fantasy).

You could liken this conversation to music - there are only so many musical chords possible, and whilst you have Westlife, BoyZone (earlier) Take That etc trotting out poppy pop music, you have innovators who push the boundaries. As long as it's done for the right reason (to move things on in a genre, not just to have more violence and sex in a novel to beat the other guy) and 'quality' fantasy writers are still writing, then RPGs, PC games Warhammer etc won't kill the genre. I think it's a promising sign if there are established authors talking about it - those who have spotted a worrying trend and are in the position to do something about it.
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Alia



Joined: 17 Sep 2007
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 09, 2007 8:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Drizzt wrote:
I'm no expect but I'm sure some chap is credited with writing that there is only a set amount story arcs which can be told, from beginning to end, by a writer's work.


Some people claim that all stories that can be written have appeared in the Bible. Other, more forward thinking, claim it was Shakespeare who wrote everything.
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Drizzt



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PostPosted: Tue Oct 09, 2007 9:10 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm sure there's some bloke who is taught as an example in some writing classes... if my memory's right, which it isn't always, he said something like there's only seven actual stories that can be written, they just get written in different ways... I think... Confused
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Deornoth



Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 09, 2007 12:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Wow... That's a big question!

Is fantasy innovative? Yeah, definitely! Very Happy Like others have said, I think the problem is that what we see on the shelves is a result what the reading public want to see.
Everyone says that they want to see different things in Fantasy but the shelves tell a different story... Some of this may be down to the prevalence of ongoing 'epic' series that fans want to collect. Maybe the question that we need to ask though is, "are fantasy readers innovative?"
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Alia



Joined: 17 Sep 2007
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 09, 2007 2:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Deornoth wrote:
Maybe the question that we need to ask though is, "are fantasy readers innovative?"


Well, according to Tad Williams, the majority isn't. They have their tiny little compartments, into which they put the writers and expect them to stay there. And they have their points of view on how a "proper fantasy novel" shoud look like - and if something deviates from that model, it can't be good.
I think he's right. I know a lot of (mostly young) fantasy readers, who grow up on their daily portion of Forgotten Realms and Warcraft novels, and who think it is the only way fantasy can be written. And if something is different, perhaps more difficult to understand, it's "stupid".
But then, apart from that majority, there are also readers who appreciate novelty and originality.
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Grace



Joined: 28 May 2006
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 09, 2007 5:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Drizzt wrote:
Ooh, sexy thread!! Very Happy Complicated questions!

Should fantasy be innovative? Hell yes. Is the genre innovative? Hell yes. I'll now play the politician and ask a third: is innovation becoming more difficult?


And, just to be a contradicting git... assuming it does, if everything I've said here makes sense... why is it then that the old warhorses like 'Lord of the Rings' continue to be so popular in an ever-evolving genre?


Firstly: To echo your speech genre Laughing ; Hell yes. Innovation will become more difficult as more stories within a limited genre are written. Writers will just have to evolve better brains, won't they. (Imagine! A master-race of Authors!)

Secondly: Lord of the Rings is still popular because it is the "original fantasy". People love it because it takes them back to less cynical days and because it is a story which appeals to deep emotions within all of humanity; love, loss, good and evil. It's not just a hack and slash fantasy.
Some things are too universally applicable to go out of fashion. Smile
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Drizzt



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PostPosted: Tue Oct 09, 2007 9:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well said. However, if Lord of the Rings is so universally applicable, why is it many modern day publishers wouldn't publish it? Razz

Or, with the market moving faster and faster and becoming more and more unforgiving, is there still room in the industry for some nostalgia? Is the nostalgia as important innovation?
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Alia



Joined: 17 Sep 2007
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 10, 2007 5:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

If by nostalgia you mean publishing the classics over and over again, I think it is important. Over here, we've just had sixth edition of "Dune" (it's not exactly a fantasy, but a classic for sure), in yet another translation, hardcover, and with art (cover and inside) by a well known artist.
But if you mean new novels in classic style, I'm not sure. "Old-fashioned" in book reviews is not exactly a compliment, isn't it?
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Grace



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PostPosted: Wed Oct 10, 2007 3:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Drizzt wrote:
Well said. However, if Lord of the Rings is so universally applicable, why is it many modern day publishers wouldn't publish it? Razz

Or, with the market moving faster and faster and becoming more and more unforgiving, is there still room in the industry for some nostalgia?


1. Because they wouldn't be sure it would sell, and publishing these days is all about money. Plus, competition for authors looking to be published is that much stiffer now.

2. Yes; for the same reason that you can get Elvis and Louis Armstrong on iTunes. People like to take the past with them into the future. Nostalgia gives us a nice fuzzy warm glow Smile .
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NicciM



Joined: 09 Oct 2007
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 10, 2007 8:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'd like to have my classics and eat my envelope pushers too thank you very much.

I don't see why you have to trade one for the other personally. Take something like Donaldson's Covenant series. It started in 1977 and managed to be classic and innovative all at the same time.

So long as there are writers to write, people to buy and booksellers to push there is no limit to what can be accepted by a mass audience. Tell people about the innovative books you read. Lend them copies, buy them as gifts. If you encourage the sales of the books you think are not getting the credit they need because they are not "classic" enough, book stores and publishers will take notice.
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