Kasper Hviid
Sage
I saw a few episodes of CARNIVAL ROW, a steampunk fantasy TV series with rather in-your-face political references to everyday issues like racism, war and migration.
While the series didn’t really speak to me, I was a bit surprised to find political stuff in a fantasy setting. Not that it hasn’t been done before, but it isn’t all that common. I did a search for reviews; people writing those always love showing off their cleverness. One I came upon had the really nice title How CARNIVAL ROW Balances Political Allegory with Romantic Escapism. I’m drawing attention to that particular review due to a single sentence which really got to me:
“Its timely social commentary felt more like sci-fi than fantasy.”
But it’s true, isn’t it? Fantasy has always had this safe air of escapism, recycling the same Tolkien tropes over and over again, whereas sci-fi is critical and challenging with works like 1984, BRAZIL and DARK MIRROR. Possibly, that’s why there are loads of sci-fi short stories, yet practically no fantasy ones, as the short story format works better for quickly pushing some entirely new idea at your face, a bit like a fictional TED talk. On the other hand, the 4rth entry in a fantasy series will pretty much stick to the same recipe as previous entries. Perhaps the protagonist finds a magical item that is different from the ones he found earlier, but we basically read the fourth book because staying in that universe feels comfy. We don’t read it to experience anything actually new.
The story of 1984 could easily have been told in a fantasy setting. It might have worked better in the long run. Today's surveillance society is closer to non-physical magical mechanics than it is to the dated technical solutions seen in the novel. But if fantasy can work for those kinds of stories, why is it that sci-fi seems to have this kind of monopoly?
While the series didn’t really speak to me, I was a bit surprised to find political stuff in a fantasy setting. Not that it hasn’t been done before, but it isn’t all that common. I did a search for reviews; people writing those always love showing off their cleverness. One I came upon had the really nice title How CARNIVAL ROW Balances Political Allegory with Romantic Escapism. I’m drawing attention to that particular review due to a single sentence which really got to me:
“Its timely social commentary felt more like sci-fi than fantasy.”
But it’s true, isn’t it? Fantasy has always had this safe air of escapism, recycling the same Tolkien tropes over and over again, whereas sci-fi is critical and challenging with works like 1984, BRAZIL and DARK MIRROR. Possibly, that’s why there are loads of sci-fi short stories, yet practically no fantasy ones, as the short story format works better for quickly pushing some entirely new idea at your face, a bit like a fictional TED talk. On the other hand, the 4rth entry in a fantasy series will pretty much stick to the same recipe as previous entries. Perhaps the protagonist finds a magical item that is different from the ones he found earlier, but we basically read the fourth book because staying in that universe feels comfy. We don’t read it to experience anything actually new.
The story of 1984 could easily have been told in a fantasy setting. It might have worked better in the long run. Today's surveillance society is closer to non-physical magical mechanics than it is to the dated technical solutions seen in the novel. But if fantasy can work for those kinds of stories, why is it that sci-fi seems to have this kind of monopoly?