At Dusk I Reign
Sage
Fantasy.
The word itself is evocative, or has become so over the last six decades. No sooner has it been uttered then the mind invokes images of dragons, castles, square-chinned heroes wielding magical swords, amusingly-dim peasants who are so busy spouting home-spun platitudes that they never stop to wonder why, exactly, they're toiling all the hours God sends just so some individual they've never met can attend tourneys and bed the nearest kitchen maid.
Those three syllables conjure a medieval world.
They also lie.
Fantasy, at its best, is a world without end. It's a playground, where fancies are born and wither in the same breath, where mages and machine guns can happily co-exist under one sun. There are no boundaries, no immutable laws which forbid one thing and allow another. It's free.
At least, it was. Then publishers got thinking. Too broad, they thought. Too unwieldy. We need definitions. And so parameters were set. This, of itself, is no big deal. Except there was a poisonous side-effect: the people who read fantasy (and thereby the people who eventually write it) became selectively blind. They accepted the enclosure around their imaginations, in some cases even helped to build it. For many, many years they collaborated in the construction of a prison, a place whose confines were so distant they could pretend they didn't exist at all.
But they do. However far away the barriers are located, they oppress. They feed the untruth. They make writers of the fantastic believe that 'fantasy' equals medieval. The walls, in effect, kill the imagination.
And that's the key word here: imagination. Writing fantasy isn't about conforming, towing the line, wallowing in the mundane. Just the opposite. It's about flying where your wings will take you, searching the soul, excavating the bones of the extraordinary.
What it should never be about, I contend, is mindlessly doing whatever's been done before. If the world you've created in your mind is medieval because you've thought long and hard about it and that's the best setting then good luck to you. If the world you've created is filled with stereotypes simply because all the books you've read have told you that's what sells, then be ashamed. You're better than that.
Kill the king. Slaughter his entourage. Set your novel in the early-modern period. Set it in prehistory. Set it in the future. Set it wherever and whenever you want. Just don't believe the lie. It's corrosive, and sooner or later it will destroy the one thing which sets you apart: your ability to dream things others shy from.
Writing fiction isn't a science. It can't be measured in vials and quantified. It's art, and art surely has no limits.
Or does it? Has the human imagination finally exhausted itself? Is the fantasy genre destined to forever more pick at the flesh of the dead, rehashing but never innovating?
The word itself is evocative, or has become so over the last six decades. No sooner has it been uttered then the mind invokes images of dragons, castles, square-chinned heroes wielding magical swords, amusingly-dim peasants who are so busy spouting home-spun platitudes that they never stop to wonder why, exactly, they're toiling all the hours God sends just so some individual they've never met can attend tourneys and bed the nearest kitchen maid.
Those three syllables conjure a medieval world.
They also lie.
Fantasy, at its best, is a world without end. It's a playground, where fancies are born and wither in the same breath, where mages and machine guns can happily co-exist under one sun. There are no boundaries, no immutable laws which forbid one thing and allow another. It's free.
At least, it was. Then publishers got thinking. Too broad, they thought. Too unwieldy. We need definitions. And so parameters were set. This, of itself, is no big deal. Except there was a poisonous side-effect: the people who read fantasy (and thereby the people who eventually write it) became selectively blind. They accepted the enclosure around their imaginations, in some cases even helped to build it. For many, many years they collaborated in the construction of a prison, a place whose confines were so distant they could pretend they didn't exist at all.
But they do. However far away the barriers are located, they oppress. They feed the untruth. They make writers of the fantastic believe that 'fantasy' equals medieval. The walls, in effect, kill the imagination.
And that's the key word here: imagination. Writing fantasy isn't about conforming, towing the line, wallowing in the mundane. Just the opposite. It's about flying where your wings will take you, searching the soul, excavating the bones of the extraordinary.
What it should never be about, I contend, is mindlessly doing whatever's been done before. If the world you've created in your mind is medieval because you've thought long and hard about it and that's the best setting then good luck to you. If the world you've created is filled with stereotypes simply because all the books you've read have told you that's what sells, then be ashamed. You're better than that.
Kill the king. Slaughter his entourage. Set your novel in the early-modern period. Set it in prehistory. Set it in the future. Set it wherever and whenever you want. Just don't believe the lie. It's corrosive, and sooner or later it will destroy the one thing which sets you apart: your ability to dream things others shy from.
Writing fiction isn't a science. It can't be measured in vials and quantified. It's art, and art surely has no limits.
Or does it? Has the human imagination finally exhausted itself? Is the fantasy genre destined to forever more pick at the flesh of the dead, rehashing but never innovating?