Last year, aided by an abundance of quotes from other fantasy writers, I attempted to make an argument for fantasy as a genre fundamentally rooted in history. The basic thrust of my argument was that intelligent fantasy riffs on history, takes its materials and combines it in new ways, albeit often whilst borrowing mythology's toys.
It turns out, though, that Adam Roberts has beaten me to it with a far, far more incisive, intelligent, and compelling argument: that
[C]ontemporary Fantasy is, amongst other things, a mode of historical fiction:—that genre Fantasy is one of the ways the historical novel has evolved as a form, out of the fiction of Walter Scott and his nineteenth-century imitators
It's nice to have one's errant notions confirmed by a greater intellect.
