Problems with fantasy fiction

You have accurately described why I haven't read beyond A Feast for Crows and don't plan to read any more of A Song of Fire and Ice and have never seen the TV series.

Sure it's "realistic" (or at least "gritty") to have a lot of violent and cruel people doing horrible things to other violent and cruel people, but I'm trying to read and watch things I'm going to enjoy.

Aside from the idea that yes, the legends were written at various times by various authors, and so aren't consistent, I would also say that people don't like stories with perfect heroes, so it makes sense to give them a few flaws. Any tragedy, of course, will also have a hero featuring a fatal flaw that eventually brings them down. That would be why the flawed versions of the hero remain in the legend - in a tragedy it's kind of the point.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” -Philip K. Dick

Yeah, that dichotomy is difficult for me. I have a story that features a slave society, but go out of my way to show some people are against slavery, because otherwise the fact might alienate readers.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.-Philip K. Dick

Any line between historical realism and modern values is a line drawn by the creator in a fantasy story. A fantasy story, especially one set in a made up world, doesn't correspond to our own once you introduce magic or gods or anything supernatural.

ASOIAF doesn't have all those dark or Value Dissonance elements because of Martin's devotion to realism, it has them because they are part of the story he wanted to tell.

Being inspired by a past age of time doesn't make a story teller bound to it. A medievalesque fantasy story with women warriors, ancient spells, and immortal elves isn't going to be made better by writing in the plague, religious persecution, and arguments over how many cows a girl's family should include in her dowry.

"What a century this week has been." - Seung Min Kim

Well the fantasy elements alter it, yes. The question would be how much. A lot of times authors seem like they want things both ways: Medieval, though not too much. Sometimes the problem seems to be that the Medieval aspect is put aside. Other times, the fantasy elements have no impact. In either case the suspension of disbelief gets strained. Any story reflects the author's choice, obviously. How logical would that be is the question?

edited 28th Apr '17 6:09:02 AM by Fireblood

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.-Philip K. Dick

Thank you, I've never had someone put their finger on it quite as succinctly.

I'm not declining to read a story further because I "don't like realism", it just turns out that while I can admire the man's craftsmanship and did enjoy some elements, I ultimately find the story he's telling to be too dark for me to say "this is where I want to spend my precious recreational reading time."

It's kind of the opposite side of the coin from Robert Jordan. I enjoyed the Wheel of Time and made it all the way to the start of book 10 when I finally said "there are another 650 pages of this? I don't think I can do it." It was his craftsmanship that grated me the wrong way and finally made me say "enough for now." I want to see what Brandon Sanderson did to complete the story, but I know I have two more books of Jordan's meanderings to slog through before I could enjoy it, so I keep putting it off. Jordan's craftsmanship gets in the way of the story for me (edit: I'm not saying it's necessarily bad craftsmanship, I'm just saying it doesn't work for me).

Where is the perfect balance between story and craftsmanship in a fantasy novel? Why, The Lord of the Rings, of course. For me, anyway.

edited 28th Apr '17 7:42:48 AM by Bense

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” -Philip K. Dick

I disagree, there is a reason martin never put high magic in the hand of everyone, to introduce a magical element dosent everything is artificial, is the kinda of thinking that let to much laziness.

in fact why no do the oposite, why not just make a modern world with swords and that it? it would be the same as fantasy world and get rid of the most pointless stuff.

"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"

Ugh. No. Tolkien has a separate but related problem to Jordan. Jordan's prose was fine but he had way too much narrative filler making the entire series take way, way longer than needed. Tolkien's narrative was more succinct but his prose was tedious and bloated and made reading the damn books feel longer than it should have.

To each their own, I suppose.

It was going so well until it exploded.

I find Terry Pratchett is one of those who managed to achieve that perfect balance. His prose is just brilliant, even his expositions are very enjoyable to read, and his character- and world-building are highly engaging. Not to mention, Pratchett's Discworld is a fantasy setting that actually evolves over time.

Bite my shiny metal ass.

Generally, I prefer fantasy dark and brutal because that's the way I like it. Mark Lawrence, Joe Abercrombie, Tim Marquitz, Rob Hayes, and so on.

Other people prefer Michael J. Sullivan.

Some people like both.

Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.

@Unknowing: I'm not sure I agree that having a ton of magic in your setting is necessarily going to lead to laziness or lack of tension, if that's what you're getting at. You just have to have definite rules for the magic and come up with problems and conflicts that can't be magicked away.

I think there's a difference when you're considering prose, in whether your goal is for the prose to be beautiful in its own right, or for the prose to be the most effective and least distracting way of getting your story across. If what you really want is to devour the story so fast you scarcely even register what words are being used, beautifully crafted prose isn't going to help with that.

edited 29th Apr '17 4:24:06 AM by LoniJay

Be not afraid...

I've had a similar sort of issue with The Kingkiller Chronicle. It's got wonderful prose, the kind that can keep me reading and enjoying the book even if nothing particularly interesting is happening. However, unless the third volume makes me rethink what the series was going for, the prose style seems like absolutely the wrong fit for the story.

For one thing, it's supposed to be a story that one character is telling orally to another character in the Framing Device, but doesn't sound remotely like a piece of oral storytelling (and we see the same character narrating the story tell stories-within-the-story that don't use this prose style).

For another, it seems like it's meant to be a Picaresque story, where the hero is involved in many different adventures and anecdotes, most of which aren't terribly important to the overall narrative except as a source of character development. But the prose is so detailed (even if it's beautifully detailed) that even one of the minor sidequests that Kvothe goes on can take 100 - 200 pages to tell, long enough that when most of characters and circumstances in that adventure either disappear from the narrative or prove to be of little importance later on, it feels like an incredible waste.

And then there's the Fridge Logic of it all. The aforementioned Framing Device is that Kvothe is telling his life story to a Chronicler over the course of three days, with each novel covering one of the three days Kvothe spends telling the story. But, again, the prose style makes the story take a very long time to tell, so long that Kvothe reciting one of the Doorstopper novels in a single day is just not possible.

"It takes an idiot to do cool things, that's why it's cool" - Haruhara Haruko

Eh, maybe it's a Translation Convention and their language is just better at describing things.

Of course, the irony is that Kvothe is trying to tell a story about how he wasn't awesome at everything and the entire book is one long monument to his ego and sexual prowess. Also, he routinely makes absolutes like "Rue don't steal" then talks about himself stealing.

I like those elements.

I just hate his central romance.

Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.

Pretty much any framing device requires some suspension of disbelief. Of course, any media requires some suspension of disbelief - a framing device is just another layer.

Interesting, isn't it, how two of the foundational pieces of Gothic horror - Frankenstein and Dracula - both feature framing devices? Frankenstein is a letter from an arctic explorer to his sister featuring a long story told the explorer by Dr. Frankenstein, including long bits where a character in the story, like the creature, is telling Frankenstein a story. Dracula is an epistolary novel, with every page supposedly being extracts from letters or diaries, or transcriptions of phonograph records. I suppose they were attempts at making them seem more "real".

Tolkien includes the literary agent idea in his work as well, though it is less overt.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” -Philip K. Dick

If you go back enough, almost every novel that contains even a hint of the fantastic has elements of the Literary Agent Hypothesis. The Wizard of Oz does it (to a silly extreme, where Baum had to explain that he talked to Dorothy by radio when she moved to Oz permanently) pretty much all of Edgar Rice Burroughs' books do it, Phantom of the Opera did it.

I think, for most of them, the idea was that people couldn't be expected to just buy into the fantastic elements, there had to be a separation between the author and the story. I think it's also how factual accounts were told, so fiction decided to follow suit to create a sense of authenticity.

Not Three Laws compliant.

With King Arthur, as with a lot of ancient myths, it depends on which version you're looking at. Lots of writers since antiquity have written about him, and they're not all consistent in their portrayal; medieval English romances, for instance, usually used Arthur and his court as an example of what not to do, or how not to behave, the better for whichever knight they elected to write about to come in and show everyone how it's done (that's where Lancelot came from, after all). Then of course you've got the earlier Celtic Arthur, as he appears in The Mabinogeon, and the later Arthur from La Morte d'Arthur, both of whom are much different characters. Not every Arthur did everything we attribute to him (I don't think it was until Mallory that Arthur fathered Mordred — he had another son, too, who's only ever mentioned once as a "valiant knight" and then never again — and did the baby killing bit; that particular incident then only shows up in works inspired by Mallory).

Merlin is himself a composite figure, and in his first appearance in literature as the Merlin we know wasn't what we'd really call a wizard, but more of a sage and prophet (and not entirely human—he was the son of an incubus and a mortal woman). He didn't so much use magic as he was privy to secret knowledge. It's hard to be exact about this, as there are other figures we can point to in earlier literature who do Merlin-y things, but he wasn't "Merlin, King Arthur's Counsellor" until Geoffrey of Monmouth, and there he was a wise man rather than a full fledged magician/wizard. That came later. And even then you can see the blurring of terminology, as simply being a wise man, whether or not one could cast spells and whatnot, counted towards being a wizard (literally, "one with wits," that is to say "intelligence" or "knowledge") at the time that stuff was written

edited 2nd May '17 9:04:19 AM by Robbery

With Baum, as well, he and everyone who officially succeeded him was dubbed the Royal Historian of Oz, and all of his books are canonically in the Oz archives.

"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."

[quote]something I have notice in fantasy is that when it come to values dissoance, the protagonist are the one who have the LESS amount to it. [/quote]

It is commonly assumed that, as time goes on, people become better and their views become more enlightened.

Your heroes are logically going to be the people who are somewhat more heroic than everyone around them, so less values dissonance.

The only times where this does not work is when the enlightened view you gave your protagonists is actually not perceived as so morally superior by the reader. Then the reader will wonder why the heroes randomly hold this opinion, even though it is very untypical for the time.

Your heroes being against slavery is a safe bet, there's no arguing in favour of slavery from an ethical point of view, so even if abolition would make the economy collapse, the heroes would still be morally right.

On the other hand, your heroic doctor never washing his hands because he is enlightened enough to know that the disease-transmitting invisible spirits that can be warded off with soap and garlic juice don't exist ... going to make readers of later eras wonder why you made your hero stupider than his contemporaries.

I note that the conversation seems to be mostly about epic fantasy. What more modern sub-genres like Urban Fantasy, Steampunk and Magic Realism?

Fireblood, you originally wondered about magic transforming societies. There's a trope that covers that called Magitek

Trump delenda est

To most people epic fantasy is fantasy, and anything different may as well not exist.

(I don't count steampunk as fantasy, myself, but there are fantasies that have steampunk elements.)

"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."

tricksterson: I know. My point was it often seems creators didn't deal with the actual implications of the magic in their settings, like Magitek. So it can be a problem of that trope (and others) not appearing.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.-Philip K. Dick

Even magitek dosent change to much or it dos depending of how much tought it put, having magictech on is own dosent change anything.

"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"

I disagree. Imagine if, in the future, self-driving cars become both feasible and incredibly widespread. Everybody who owns a normal car now would own a self-driving one instead. Small change, right? No, not really. Think of everything that would be different, impractical, or outright gone with self-driving cars. Would you need stoplights? How would car design change now that people don't have to pay attention to the road? Are there still traffic accidents? Are trains and airplanes still in use? What happens to the thousands of people who work as taxi or truck drivers? Can people hack the cars? What if you can't afford a self-driving car - are human-driven ones even still allowed?

Magitek is similar. Imagine you have a Standard Fantasy Setting with the standard Five Races. What happens if the dwarf and wizard need to work together to create a magical robot arm? Do the races become more cohesive in order to mutually benefit from creating high-demand product? Or do they refuse to work together and, as a result, create a world where Magitek is special and fought-over? Can the Magitek save or extend lives? Can it create technology similar to things we have today? What would happen if the Elves got their hands on a Magitek helicopter?

If you want to make a living, breathing world that a reader can look at and think, "Yeah, I can imagine myself living there!" then you have to answer at least some of those questions. Otherwise, you can expect a Fridge Logic list longer than your story is.

edited 8th Jun '17 10:11:30 AM by Incognitoburrito

It was going so well until it exploded.

Isn´t that what unknowing said? Magitek on it´s own doesn´t change anything what makes it interesting is, as you said, how its excistence changes the rest of the setting.

I think they're trying to say it doesn't even count as Magitek without the extra thought into how it'd be used and how it would change the world. Judging from the trope page that's not how it works, but that's definitely the feeling I was getting from their posts.