As I slowly, haltingly attempt to write out my own epic fantasy, I've been thinking about the nature of the genre. This isn't a formal essay as such so much as an attempt to gather together some inchoate thoughts about it.
Everything that follows - excepting the quotes - is caveated with this: it's all subjective opinion, and any statement carries an implied "I think."
To the degree [modern fantasy] reflects our own world back to us, changed to let us see ideas freed from the particulars of history, and in my lifetime, that is most often concerned with the loss of innocence and the futility of war. [...]
By stepping outside the flow of history, fantasy gives us the toolbox to tell stories that are about deeper concerns, and often ones that we don't have other places to talk about. Because all fantasies, whether they say it or not, begin with "Once upon a time, but not now and not here" and those of us who love them, love that. And we love it because it isn't true.
Daniel Abraham, "Stories Outside History."
This quote captures the essential nature of fantasy. Its roots are not mythology, though it borrows much, dons its clothing, plays with its toys, but history. Mythology and the pre-modern understanding of magic is distinct from the scientific impulse to categorize and systematize, because its aims were not to order the contents of the box but figure out the best angle to view the contents from, or perhaps to figure out where the edges of the box were.
If you lived in nearly any society in human history, magic or divine power was a real and accepted part of your life. You wouldn't be a skeptic; you would probably not even recognize a divide between natural and supernatural. And magic would have real power in your life; it would have the power to alter the behavior of others, whether for good or ill, simply because of their belief in the power of ritual.
I want the reader of Baru novels to be in the same place. I want them to experience the possibility of magic or the divine or the supernatural exactly like anyone else in history would. In that sense I would say Monster is far more grounded than Traitor; it's closer to the psychological reality of living in premodern times.
Seth Dickinson. Reddit AMA, 2020-08-21.
Fantasy still deals in this. It does so by engaging with history. So Daniel Abraham, in The Dagger and the Coin, combines a medieval Europe analog with the development of fractional reserve banking, with a story inspired by twentieth and twenty-first century history; so Seth Dickinson, with The Masquerade, combines the South Sea Bubble, the ugly history of eugenics, and capitalism's relentless drive to eat the world; to name two examples that draw sharply from across history's range.
I'm drawn to the themes of politics and power. As a dedicated reader of history I am intrigued by the interplay of forces that shape societies and cultures. While at first history (real or fictional) can seem a faceless, all-encompassing process, it is far more often dictated by the actions of a powerful or dedicated few. While very few of my characters are 'heroic' in the traditional sense, they are all remarkable individuals, possessed of strength and purpose enough to have a profound effect on the worlds they live in, whether driven by ambition, vengeance, or expectation. Epic Fantasy allows one to paint a world with a broad brush, encompassing different and often conflicting ideologies and cultures. It is the interplay of these different powers, and the realpolitik that results from that interplay, that shape worlds and drive the narrative.
Gav Thorpe. "Something Greater: An Epic Fantasy Roundtable, Part 1."
This is also true of A Song of Ice and Fire, which - even incomplete - stands alongside Lord of the Rings as one of things that defines what fantasy is. Certainly, there is fantasy that stands outside of either - Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell takes place during the Napoleonic Wars and Gormenghast takes place in a self-contained bubble world seemingly devoid of relationship with anything other than itself (note the presence of history in both) - but when one thinks fantasy, either JRRT or GRRM comes to mind.
For my money, works that can be considered Epic Fantasy are those that attempt to go beyond merely telling the story of the messy fall of one particular king, or the journeys of this or that hero or heroine, to try to tackle larger questions.
Ian C. Esslemont. "Something Greater: An Epic Fantasy Roundtable, Part 1."
The writer can pick and choose aspects of history to work with, combine them in ways that didn't happen in reality to think about things that did. But fiction is such that it necessarily narrows. Mahler said that a good symphony contains the world; a good novel doesn't contain the world, but creates the convincing illusion that it does.
Contemporary fiction needs only to occur - it doesn't need, really, to create a sense of a society. Its sense of society is implied. It simply is. Its nature does that by itself. Historical fiction finds a society and culture that once existed, but no longer does, or which has evolved. Fantasy mixes and matches freely between history and imagination. It must create a sense of society as convincing as a real one, without actually being real.
People exist in a cultural context. Characters live within their landscape both in the ecological and the societal sense. The society/societies the characters come from will inform how they see the world, approach the conflicts they struggle with, and interact with others.
Kate Elliott. "Something Greater: An Epic Fantasy Roundtable, Part 1."
And the thing with engaging with history and society actively, which liberal borrowing, mixture, and invention require by necessity, is that fantasy often works on a large scale.
[On the first component necessary for a fantasy to be epic, scale.] Needs to cover The Fate Of A Nation at minimum. (Better if it’s The Fate Of All Existence.) I’m not even sure a single nation is enough; I’d much prefer to see it be the fate of at least a couple of nations, if not an economic bloc. I also think this should include several groups of people banding together, note — not necessarily multiple races, though that does illustrate the scale nicely; it can just be city folks and country folks of the same nation, though, or the closely-related-peoples of neighboring nations.
[On the fourth component necessary for a fantasy to be epic, span.] In addition to a vast physical scale, I think the story, or the story’s roots, need to cover a long span of time. The old epics had this because they were usually part of an ongoing narrative about the gods, the creation of the world, etc. While the immediate tale might not cover that long of a time — Lord of the Rings was what, a few months altogether? — the story’s origins should derive from waybackwhen. The One Ring didn’t just become a problem when Gandalf threw it into the fire; it was a problem from the time Sauron forged it thousands of years before.
N.K. Jemisin. "What is Epic Fantasy?"
As mentioned, however, the novel can not actually contain the whole world. It can only create the illusion. But the whole world is a complicated thing, and illusions are just that - illusions. Each of us has a different conception of the world, of how it works and how we understand it, and the same is true of history. Belief and prior knowledge filters everything. One virtue, then, of creating a whole world, is creating a world that is very different from our own, and letting us see into it, and expand our conception of the world.
[The Traitor Baru Cormorant, published in 2015] is basically an attack on this argument, popular at the time, that it's possible to be 'too oppressed to be interesting'; that you can't write about certain types of characters because they're not allowed to make any choices, they can't access power, and only powerful characters making choices are interesting. This argument was generally based, I think, on a false idea of history, where the history of humanity was all this big muddy sea of slavery and rape and atrocities, where men in leather and armor ran around sacking cities and starting religions while everybody else got smallpox or had babies or farmed dirt. Even the parts of history which did involve mass slaughter and the sacking of cities weren't that simple.
Seth Dickinson. Reddit AMA, 2020-08-21.
In their engagement with the scope of history and society (a friend of mine comes at things from a sociological perspective, I come at things from a historical one, but the result is that I'm becoming a little more conscious of that approach), the author picks what to include. But the process of inclusion necessary results in exclusion.
I and other writers have talked about the difficulty of creating a “Strong Female Protagonist ™” — but this is the wrong focus, on the wrong problem. The core of the problem isn’t actually that women are harder to write. The problem is that readers have been trained to like women less. Writers have to work against a weight of deeply-embedded societal bigotry which literally, actually causes readers to have trouble empathizing with anyone who’s not a straight cis white guy. We see this empathy failure everywhere and not just in fiction; for example, people actually have a harder time perceiving women’s pain versus that of men. And everything gets worse as you add intersections: race if the character isn’t white, gender identity if the woman isn’t cis, age if the woman isn’t young, and so on.
N.K. Jemisin. "Tricking Readers into Acceptance."
The author, if they are an intelligent author, must also decide what to exclude. And herein lies fantasy's great weakness. Just as in fiction, precisely that thing which is its greatest attribute is also the source of its weakness: an author whose conception of the world means that they fail to think about what they are excluding results in works that buttress moral depravity. (I want to note here that depiction and endorsement are different things and should not be confused for each other.)
If you read up on Thomas Cromwell, or Admiral Keumalahayati, or the problem of landlords in pre-colonial India, or the Joseon Wars, or Chinese history, or the epic of Sundiata Keita — man, history is so crazy, so full of absolutely unbelievable events and people. Even inside the constraints of ‘feudal system’ there’s so much happening. Your problem quickly becomes not ‘I need some inspiration’ but ‘oh my god, how will I ever write anything as crazy as real life?’
That’s why Aurdwynn has this lively collision of multiple cultures, with different family structures and beliefs coexisting in one country. The whole nation’s a scar or a monument (depending who you ask) to the historical forces that shaped it. And I try to bring that same complexity and heterodoxy to all the other cultures around the Ashen Sea.
If you break away from the telephone game of writing stories based on stories, you’ll find yourself staggered by how narrow our view of the past can be.
Seth Dickinson. Reddit AMA, 2015-09-10.
The fantasy writer plays with history by stepping outside it, then turning back and rifling through the bag to find the bits they like the most or the bits that fascinate them. They pick and choose what ideas to engage with. They can't, though, escape from society.
What is satisfying about building fantasy out of nuanced thought on the material experience of oppression is that it provides new ground for exploration – ground more fertile than the overplanted fields of noblesse oblige.
Elizabeth Sandifer. "Fantasy Worldbreaking."
So what's a good fantasy look like? Well, it might be one which engages with history carefully, intelligently, and empathetically, with a grasp of the chaos and uncertainty that the passage of time creates, a knowledge of the ways human nature is unchangeable (and if there's one thing we know, it's that human nature is deeply changeable), and an awareness that there is more to human life than the writer's own psychology, beliefs, and knowledge.
And that is, still, not a complete view of fantasy at all. But enough for today, I think.
One final comment, though. There is one great cardinal sin that fantasy - really, writing in general - can commit, which is to take as its great theme the power of stories. This is the dullest, tritest, most banal theme imaginable. The power of stories doesn't derive from being story-shaped, it derives from aboutness. "What's the story about?" and not "what's the story?" It's a subtle distinction, I grant, but I must press the point: fiction whose central concern is the power of being shaped like itself is not about anything at all.
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