this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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One of the most surprising things to me about the Conan novels was realizing exactly how many modern fantasy tropes are directly descended from them.
I'm fairly convinced that all contemporary fantasy is an incestuous mix of inbred descendants of LotR and Conan.
Sometimes some fresh blood will enter the mix, but those genes are strong.
Yes, it's hard to do anything new in fantasy without departing the genre norms and being reclassified as magical realism, sci fi, speculative fiction, weird lit, etc. But really it's just fantasy without the trappings of the genre.
Some examples:
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell -- a absolute banger of a fantasy novel -- gets classified as alternate history. Wut?
A Thousand Years of Solitude -- wins a nobel prize in literature -- oh, that's definitely not fantasy, right? Except it is...
Book of the New Sun -- it's got all the trappings of an epic fantasy travelog, even the emo main character. Medieval society, magical artifacts, weird and wonderful creatures (the ones that steal memories are so creepy!)... but no elves, and the setting is post-technology, so it's sci fi. (If you haven't read it, and enjoy a challenge, this is a serious recommendation.)
The Fifth Season -- it and its sequels win three Hugo awards for sci fi (they aren't that good in my opinion, but I digress) -- but the main character is an earthquake wizard, and the whole thing is basically a magic system. No dwarves though...
So if you're an author and you're trying to sell a fantasy scenario that just a little off course, you don't want to stray too far or you end up on another shelf in the bookstore. So we get Shannara and Wheel of Time and Mistborn and Elric of Melniboné and more and more. Some of it is quite good, but all of it is basically fan-fiction for LotR and Conan. Or Dungeons and Dragons, which is itself LotR/Conan inspired.
Counterpoint: Earthsea, Discworld, American Gods, Stardust
You're not wrong about Stardust, as that one was explicitly an homage to pre-tolkein fantasy.
American Gods is surrealism or magical realism. I wonder what shelf it's on in my local bookstore. It belongs on the shelf wherever Marquez, Borges, and Murakami are, in my opinion. Ironically, Tolkein could be a "new" god inside this book, one that is created out of modern nostalgia for the old gods.
One of the ways I ask myself: "is this fantasy that follows the trappings of Tolkein or Conan?" is to rephrase the question as "if you set a D&D campaign in this universe, aside from the local lore, would you have to change much?"
Earthsea very nearly fits. High magic, but not medieval. The tropes were not as established in 1964 when Earthsea was conceived, and Le Guin pushed back against them somewhat. It'd make an excellent D&D setting. I should really reread it. I recently got a nice illustated single volume copy, but haven't cracked it except to look at the illustrations haha.
Discworld is so much a parody of the tropes, but still contains the tropes. It's still medieval fantasy with high magic. It would make a great D&D setting if you were looking for a comedy oriented campaign. Hell, it'd be super fun to DM this campaign. Just imagine Death as an NPC haha.
The first time i saw North by Northwest, it was a little jarring realizing Hitchcock basically invented the modern action/suspense/thriller genre with that wonderful movie. So many references suddenly made sense.