Fountain of Knowledge

Ooooh, fantasy!

Hm. Well, let's say that Tolkien (i before e, except after c...) made it modern, but certainly didn't originate it. Fantasy has been around as long as people have been telling stories, I think--like the old Irish stories about people talking to magic salmon and turning into pigs, or dragons showing up in ancient China.

Oh, go argue whether fantasy and mythology are the same thing. It's tricky to differentiate them in my opinion, unless you apply some abritrary age limit--things older than 1000 years are mythology, newer are fantasy, or something. They're at least branches off the same trunk. Otherwise you get stuck arguing over whether something like Spencer's "The Faierie Queen" or even "The Tempest" is fantasy or mythology.

(I love the LOTR books and I liked the movies a lot too. I don't know how anyone could do it better considering the length of the novels, and frankly I always thought that Frodo spending tons of time wandering around the Shire saying goodbye to every bush was odd behavior, though I know why Tolkien did it. So that's my plug for the movies and the books. That said, read the books first.)

As I see it, fantasy is a story where magic can really influence events. It doesn't much matter whether the setting is Detroit or the Underdark or Middle Earth, if you have magic happening, that's fantasy. In a way it's a very forgiving genre that way.

Tolkien still dominates the genre, of course, because he hit on so many of the basic things about magical stories: a quest, good vs. evil, and the triumph of the unlikely (hobbits are even more unlikely than younger sons, really) and he did it really, really well.

So, like all genres where there are acknowledged masters, there's a good deal of conscious and unconscious imitation of his work. I like Terry Brook's stuff, but you have to admit The Sword of Shannara was pretty much straight knock off (down to the point that the heroes are short). There's a lot of other stories that steal one aspect or another of Tolkien's work--say the idea that elves are always older, more graceful, and wiser than humans, or that wizards are elderly codgers with beards and staves, or that there are creatures called orcs that are like big goblins. The challenge as a fantasy writer is to watch your work for derivation and be sure that you want it to be there.

IMO it's difficult to write a fantasy story without a quest of some kind, even if it's just a quest for enough money to buy supper, but I think that interesting results can be obtained by assuming that people don't substantially differ in fantasy worlds, just their options for manipulating their environment. Therefore, presumably there are tall, fat, short, young, old, smart, and dumb wizards, just like there are tall, fat, short, young, old, smart, and dumb plumbers. In fact a story about a wizard plumber might be downright interesting.

So far as urban/suburban/rural fantasy goes, see what I said above about setting. I don't write urban fantasy because I don't know much about urban settings--the biggest town I ever lived in had all of 40,000 people--but I've written rural fantasy before, and I can certainly see a story about the stereotypical suburbs, say, becoming infected with a goblin plague that has to be cleared out by a housewife who discovers a magic necklace buried underneath her peach tree. Come to think of it, I'd say Laura's story "Ferry's Crossing" fits as suburban fantasy.

I like all fantasy, pretty much, and will be interested to see what others say about it all.
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