Jo Walton has an interesting piece on Neil Gaiman’s Stardust in which he argues that while the book is indeed fantastical, it isn’t fantasy – at least not in the modern sense of the term:
Of course Stardust uses some of the worldbuilding techniques of fantasy, and any book about a young man going on a quest for a fallen star and encountering witches and magic is inherently fantastical. But genre fantasy post-Tolkien has become connected to specific imaginary history and geography in a way that Stardust scorns. This is not only a book without a map but a book where the very idea of a map would be ridiculous. The geography makes sense in an intuitive magical way that works for the plot. The same goes for the history and the social systems. This isn’t a book that you can consider comfortably in the same genre as Daniel Abraham’s Long Price Quartet or Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles. It’s just not interested in doing the same kind of thing — it’s coming at the numinous from quite a different direction. It has different ancestors and works by different logic.
[…]
Stardust is very short and very beautiful and it reads just like a modern fairytale should.
If Stardust isn’t fantasy because it isn’t like Rothfuss or Martin or the other world-building fantasy epics, than none of Gaiman’s work is fantasy. Anansi Boys and American Gods certainly don’t qualify. Even Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia would not make the cut. Lev Grossman’s The Magicians might not either and Harry Potter is a close call at best.
And if fairytales aren’t fantasy, then we must also strike Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell from the canon, as well as Little, Big and any other modern fairytales we can root out.
Post-Tolkien fantasy is, of course, deeply infused with fairytales if only because Tolkien himself was fascinated with faerie and fairytales. Sure, the Dragon Lance books may be your typical party-of-heroes world-building narrative type fantasy, but it is no more the heir to the genre than Stardust or Jonathan Strange. These are all very different sorts of books, but I think they all belong on the fantasy shelves.
Fantasy is a big tent. We should make sure it stays that way.
Jo Walton has an interesting piece
I don’t think I’ve ever read anything of Jo’s that isn’t interesting, including Usenet posts.
I’m not sure I even track Walton’s point here. Is his concern that fantasy books aren’t homogenized enough?
Fantasy is the biggest tent out there. Long may it live!!!
“The geography makes sense in an intuitive magical way that works for the plot. The same goes for the history and the social systems.”
Frankly, I don’t think this is what differentiates Stardust from most Tolkien-flavoured fantasy, though I think I understand what she meant. A fairytale has a particular style and tone to it, a kind of saturated dreaminess that reduces the world to that story,
“Once upon a time, in the kingdom of X…” For all intents and purposes, existence has been distilled to that kingdom; there is no outside world, no history beyond that which is happening. Whereas in traditional worldbuilding fantasy, there is a whole world occurring – or supposed to be occurring – outside the written page.
But while many post-Tolkien authors became infatuated with world-building, it’s not as if they developed truly alien cultures, geographies, or histories. Early high fantasy fiction was often a layman’s version of European history with elves, dwarves, and orcs. There might be a different intent from someone who consciously sets out to write a fairytale (look at the differences between King’s Eyes of a Dragon and his Dark Tower saga) – but the ultimate result is still a geography etc. that exists to serve a particular plot, and reads as such.
I wonder what she would think of Mieville; he’s invented a rich history and geography for Bas-Lag, but one that makes absolutely no sense if it was actually depicted in visual form.
““Once upon a time, in the kingdom of X…” For all intents and purposes, existence has been distilled to that kingdom; there is no outside world, no history beyond that which is happening.”
The Science-Fiction version of this is “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”.
The point is to let the audience know that they are as caught up as they need to be and anything they need to know on top of this will be given them as they go along.
Star Wars is an interesting example. Some science fiction readers have never been comfortable describing Star Wars as science fiction – in part because of the fantastical setting implied by those opening words, but also because it doesn’t share the same speculative inquiries that mark mainstream science fiction.
But it’s also interesting because it has spawned a separate expanded universe that expressly goes against what its original creator intended. None of the movies have considerable depth to them, nor are they meant to. They were essentially fairytales in space.
Yet an entire industry has been built around catering to a fandom that has demanded more, leading to an ongoing universe that’s essentially subverted the ‘happily ever after’ intentions of the end of Return of the Jedi and replaced it with the bitter truth of slowly dismantling a galaxy-wide empire.
I remember reading a story about Ursula K Le Guin and Star Wars and her quote was “what the hell is nostalgia doing in a science fiction film?”