That will of course backfire if you're one of the 14 vocal Malazan apologists currently alive. Yeah, I mean an argument can be made that Tolkien shone when he wrote mythology rather than fantasy. His fantasy is famously (literally) black and white, but his mythology is much more complicated. The Silmarillion has tragic heroes, characters with shades of grey to them, moral issues. Lord of the Rings has the best telling of the hero's journey archetype ever written, but the bad guys are the bad guys. Tolkien knew all this and didn't mind too much. -- Haven't read Earthsea, oddly, but that's an accurate portrayal of Game of Thrones. I enjoy it for that reason, although it's a grind and I don't exactly consider it fantasy. Fantasy is often about escapism and frankly, fuck escaping into A Song of Ice and Fire. I'll take real life. We may have found something upon which you agree with Eliezer Yudkowsky.That said, I would say that fantasy is graded more easily than sci fi, and sci fi gets softballed.
Boy oh boy do I agree with this. Got 400 interchangeable characters with names that hold no meaningful linguistic pattern? Words for the sake of words? No plot exposition until book three because True Fans of the genre will have stuck around that long and no one else matters? Must be a shining example of the fantasy genre. Malazan, looking at you.My problem with The Hobbit is it was a lot of singing and dancing and funny languages and twee little things that had nothing to do with plot or characterization. That's my beef with Tolkien - he was all about "here are things that are cool with the scarcest of plots to tie them together." Dragon Slayer had more plot than the Hobbit and it was like 75 minutes long.
When you've got all of magic to work with, you'd think you'd be able to come up with something compelling.
Best description I've heard for Game of Thrones is it's The Sopranos set in Middle Earth. I think it's disingenuous to argue GoT isn't fantasy - it's got dragons, foxfire, spellcasters and wights. The fact that Dragons = WMD, foxfire = chemical weapons, spellcasters = radical Islam and wights = global warming doesn't change the fact that you've got direct plot elements revolving around things that don't exist. Read Earthsea. They're kids books. You'll crank through them in a coffee break. Ursula LeGuin essentially wrote all of Harry Potter in 56,000 words in 1968. And she wrote it about Pacific Islanders.
Agreed. A friend of mine I won't name has been working on a novel that became a story arc that became a series of novels that became a universe, none of which have been released. Creating an imaginary world is certainly a good idea, but 99% of the time it does bugger all for the quality of the novel - usually making it worse, as the story is continually disrupted to retell backstory upon backstory. Unfortunately, I think that this has created a stereotypical idea of fantasy novels, which means the good stories don't get the attention they deserve (unless they are made into hit TV shows). I like the mythology angle that you presented. Series like Discworld take another good approach - very complex mythical world, but it feels like it grew organically as the series progressed, it doesn't feel like it was all planned top-down when the series started. Places that were just referred to in one-line jokes were later fleshed out as Pratchett pleased.