I don't *get* the appeal of fantasy

With the exception of maybe some Urban Fantasy like The Maxx, I never liked Fantasy. High or Low. I never understood its appeal. I prefer science fiction because it looks forward and the ideas in SF are more plausible and relevant, I feel, than Fantasy. Why would I want to read about a world I know doesn't and never existed, like Middle Earth, when I could read about "the undiscovered country, the future?" The Maxx is mostly a psychological mystery, and other than the character Mr. Gone contains very little mysticism; it's alternate dimensions are the subconscious. I can buy fantasy stuff if it's inside someone's head, but to build a world on magic? I just don't get the appeal.

I understand international relations translate pretty well into Fantasy but Babylon Five and a hundred other Science Fiction works do the same. The Pern series by Anne Mc Cafferey at least attempts to explain, scientifically, the genetic engineering of the dragons, the construction of habitats and computer systems by the original settlers, etc, setting it clearly in the Science Fiction genre.

I can take "The Force" in Star Wars because I've been watching Star Wars forever, but perhaps because of my scientific and skeptical bent, I'm just not one for mysticism in literature. It seems as irrelevant and meaningless to me there as it does in Real Life.

This thread is not meant to disparage a genre; I am curious to know what attracts people to Swords and Sorcerers-style Fantasy.

edited 4th Sep '13 5:02:11 AM by fulltimeD

The answer is easy, really - just add "power" to the term "fantasy" and you get what 90% of the genre is all about. Far more often than not, the protagonist is either The Chosen One, or secretly royalty, or born with The Gift, or posesses any other sort of inherent speshulness and importance without much effort. In minor cases, they'd only be a powerful warrior of legendary might, ultimately crowned king by their own hand.

Basically, fantasy offers a sense of self-importance, with things like "magic" or "destiny" often used to do away with pesky details like social constraints, laws, checks and balances, court politics and responsibilities etc. It's about giving you a swashbuckling fireball-throwing power trip, without the respective consequences and repercussions of such anti-social behavior. Of course, exceptions exist... but few and far between.

To contrast, science fiction is very much about what you do rather than who you are. A lazy caretaker, a dead man's hologram, a humanoid cat, and a box-headed robot can have just as much of an adventure swirling around the Negative Space Wedgie as any scientific genius or psychic alien among The Captain's crew - because the story is not about them. You don't have to be speshul in order to explore strange new worlds, find new life and new civilizations, and get seven different types of space herpes while you're at it. You just have to be there.

edited 4th Sep '13 6:29:16 AM by indiana404

And, then you get A Song Of Ice And Fire and other Low Fantasy works... (or lowishly Dark). <_< Grit comes as standard, mate... and, good luck with the easy power-trip. The magic, more often than not, makes things worse. And, the prophecy would have been better burned before read.

Fantasy comes in flavours, much like everything else. <shrugs> You can find one to suit if you look.

edited 4th Sep '13 7:08:08 AM by Euodiachloris

Science fiction is more guilty of mysticism than fantasy ever has been. It tries to present all kinds of pseudo-religious bull as "realistic". Fantasy has never pretended to be reality, while that's the entire point of science fiction. Science fiction authors in general have always believed in all kinds of pseudoscience, and that's no less true today.

edited 4th Sep '13 6:56:09 AM by CassidyTheDevil

Another appeal of fantasy is escapism. Where science fiction is more "what if?" fantasy tends more towards "wouldn't it be neat if?" Mind, many of the people writing in the fields do both, so you get SF that's all about the sense of wonder, and fantasy that carefully follows the logical consequences of magic.

For most readers, who have ordinary baseline powers of suspending disbelief, a fictional world need only be internally consistent and coherent. It doesn't have to be theoretically achievable ... or even possible in any real-world era.

And if we're talking about realism, many sci-fi futures constructed out of plausible technological advances "get there" by hand-waving away stubborn, abiding truths about human nature. To take just one example: in its refusal to be starry-eyed about human motivations and ineradicable human vulnerability to one's inner demons, the Game of Thrones universe is infinitely more "plausible and relevant" than that of TNG, for all the former's magic & dragons, and for all the latter's transporters & starships.

You certainly don't need the fantasy part to have a story be a "power fantasy". A lot of action films prove exactly that. Hell, you can even make a decent argument that House M.D is a power fantasy for the cynical and socially averse (or not even just them).

As for enjoying fantasy, I've found that I'm actually more readily able to "believe" worlds that are removed from our own as opposed to when stories take place in our world, especially the closer they get to modern times. With fantasy or science fiction, I know it's not our world so I know that things are not necessarily going to work the same (though there still needs to be some logic), where as something that is specifically supposed to take place in our world (and especially our time) I'm more likely to call out things that are even just implausible. Think of it as a sort of Uncanny Valley for Suspension of Disbelief.

edited 4th Sep '13 7:16:17 AM by Mio

I was thinking more around the lines of Discworld, really. That, and what Pterry said in the preface to The Carpet People:

"I wrote that in the days when I thought fantasy was all battles and kings. Now I'm inclined to think that the real concerns of fantasy ought to be about not having battles, and doing without kings."

In a way, the Discworld books tend to be far closer to science fiction than quite a few Space Opera settings out there.

edited 4th Sep '13 7:23:25 AM by indiana404

I'd agree with that — up to a point. Quite a bit of both Fantasy and Science Fiction sometimes forget that plot is about people. You can say many things about Pterry, but you can't say that. ^_^

edited 4th Sep '13 7:24:22 AM by Euodiachloris

I really like both science fiction and fantasy, though it depends on how it's done. The genre is just the vehicle, it's the way the writer writes his prose and the overall storyline that makes me want to read it.

GRRM writes really well and so I enjoy ASOIAF. But Sandy Mitchell is a really great writer who makes great characters, which is why I really like his W H40k books. There are several authors out there that I pretty much eat up whatever they write because of how they write though, even if some settings can be cooler than others.

Only non-fiction book that's ever felt like that was Stryker. He managed to write non-fiction in a first person story format that didn't have the clinical and sterile feel of nonfiction.

We're in the same camp: "will read anything engaging if it stands still long enough".

edited 4th Sep '13 7:29:58 AM by Euodiachloris

Indeed, the most vital part of any story is its characters, not its setting — that's just the environment the writer places them in. It's the plot, the characterisation, that make a story good, not its setting.

Indeed, the setting might be insane, but if the characters are good enough then...well it might not be a great work, but it might be entertaining one to read/watch^note  Anybody guess which recent show in particular I've got in mind here? Answers on a postcard...

edited 4th Sep '13 7:37:59 AM by Greenmantle

Keep Rolling On

As in, his plots are or aren't about people? I'm pretty sure they are, myself.

Science fiction, however, can take another bent - it can be about the science. A lot of Isaac Asimov's stories are about taking a fictional scientific principle, like psycho-history or the laws of robotics, and bringing it to its logical conclusion. Another of my favorite books - "Moon Rainbow" by Sergey Pavlov - had a superficially cliched Fantastic Four premise, with people gaining superpowers from space phenomena, but instead of opting for tired old Fantastic Racism plots as some sort of social allegory, it played it for what it was - a brand new scientific issue, with focus on how it affected people.

This is not something fantasy can do; not easily anyway - should the story be about people analyzing magic, it will simply cease to be magic in the first place, making it a science fiction story with dragons and fireballs.

edited 4th Sep '13 7:42:39 AM by indiana404

Not that stories with Sufficiently Analyzed Magic, MagiTek, or Post-Modern Magik can't make interesting stories, regardless of that.

Keep Rolling On

Fantasy is a genre, not a cliché guideline. You have your LOT Rs and Narnias where the past is venerated almost religiously, and you have your Harry Potters and His Dark Materials that offer a glimmer of hope for the future.

It's like spirituality, really. Some preffer to go through rigid, inflexible dogma, while others seek enlightment and empowerment.

No one can explain it to you, you either get it or you dont, at an intuitive level. I don't get vampire romance, no conceivable explanation would change my mind. You yourself seem unable to relate to the setting of fantasy, while sci-fi and journeys through the sub-conscious appeal to you. Which is perfectly fair- none of us get to choose these things. Just try to bear in mind that the real point of any story, including sci-fi, fantasy or even vampire romances, is not the setting, but the interaction between the characters. I find that as long as there is at least one character I can identify with, I can adapt my mind to any setting.

Of course the lowest common denominator to any genre will be escapist entertainment. Power trips are the most common form of escapism for young men in our culture, and it's even more common in comic books and video games than in fantasy, high or low. The best works in any genre will transcend that: The Lord of the Rings was no power fantasy, the entire point of that story being the self-destructive nature of power-trips (which only worked because the setting was magical). Realistic settings are realistic because bad people usually get away with their power-trips.

I suspect that what turns you off to fantasy might not be the physical setting at all, but the idea that there is some sort of mystical force in the universe that imposes a kind of karma on everyone. If you don't believe that applies to RL, you most likely wont like it in fiction either.

Exactly. But again, just try and measure the percentage of fantasy tales that don't involve bloodline royalty and/or magical beings trying to kill each other. Having fantasy without battles or kings - now that would make it a full-fledged genre, like "adventure", or "crime", or "drama" rather than a set of cliches, like "vampire romance".

edited 4th Sep '13 7:58:46 AM by indiana404

After reading these various responses, I think I do understand. Thank you, all of you, although I would dispute the claim that Science Fiction promotes mysticism, that's not an argument I feel like having today.

I think I understand now why Fantasy doesn't attract me: I can accept science fiction tropes more easily than I can accept fantasy tropes (by which I mean the ones that aren't identical). Maybe it's because I adhere to a naturalistic and decidedly non-mystical, non-spiritual view of the universe and I'm more interested to know "What If?" than "Wouldn't it be neat if?" because I feel the question is more relevant to me.

One good example of how I look at it is priorities. One of my favorite fantasy series to read is the Vlad Taltos books by Steven Brust. In terms of the actual setting itself, it's got more or less fairly stock magic, nothing too fancy or impressive(although it does explain where it all came from in some detail)

The thing for that book that gets me is that he makes really good characters with a lot of personality who are easy to bond with. The social structure of society in his world is also very interesting. For me though, I'm not focused in on the magic or why it exists, that isn't important compared to what is actually going on.

a note-

I don't think the appeal one genre versus the other is explained by religious vs. secular viewpoints; that was not my attention in my previous post. I was speaking about me, specifically, and my worldview.

edited 4th Sep '13 9:43:14 AM by fulltimeD

It's simple: fantasy lets you do things in a story that you could otherwise not do. If you want a cool action scene where someone hurls a car through the air, it'd never fly in a realistic setting, but can easily be explained in a fantasy setting. Or if you want force a character to kill the person they love in order to save the world, while not impossible to do in a realistic setting, is much easier to do if you introduce portals to hell or mystical artifacts of doom or whatnot.

P.S.

Try Fantastic Comedy or Magical Realism.

edited 4th Sep '13 11:05:18 AM by RavenWilder

Dragons. That is all.

I think a common mistake when approaching Fantasy is to take "mystical" and "mythos" as actual things, rather than what they are. Simple plot devices. You don't have to believe in God (or gods or whatever) to accept that in the world you're reading about, they do exist or the people in that world at least believe they do (they could be wrong in a lot of cases).

It's like "positronic brains" or a superintelligent AI you can fit into something the size of a mobile phone. You don't have to accept they can get that complex, just accept that in the setting you're reading about, they have. None are more realistic than the other, when you think about it.

They're all just plot devices.

edited 4th Sep '13 11:17:16 AM by Euodiachloris

@OP: Sometimes I like to read something that has a complete and utter disconnect with the world we live in. It's not all about escapism (although that is certainly a component), it's about the narrative freedom that a completely imagined universe offers.

Having said that, I make a point of avoiding pseudo-medieval fantasy - with a couple of exceptions - as, if the genre is intended to set the imagination completely free, yet another cookie-cutter feudal setting that flees from the possibilities offered by science and magic coexisting seems rather contrary to the point. I want more fantasy in the vein of China Mieville: post-industrial revolution "scientific fantasy" rather than medieval-style stuff. As much as I love A Song Of Ice And Fire, I suspect I would like it more if it had a technological and cultural level of the turn of the 18th or 19th century. Myself, I hope to one day write a fantasy novel (yeah, I know, me and everyone else on this forum) with a mid-20th century level of societal and technological development.

With cannon shot and gun blast smash the alien. With laser beam and searing plasma scatter the alien to the stars.

If our imaginations can do as much as we let it, why should we be constrained by reality?