Fantasy’s Four Eras

One of my goals with all of my historical reading these past few years has been to understand the origins and evolutions of the speculative fiction genre, both its fantasy and science fiction sides.  The science fiction dimension is relatively straightforward and already well documented as it evolved from gothic horror through seminal pieces like Frankenstein and HG Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, but the fantasy facet has been less explored, perhaps in part because the people who tend to explore such matters still are inclined to turn their noses up at fantasy as being not “real literature.”  After exploring stories from ancient Sumer to the present, I assert that the modern fantasy genre arose from the mythic storytelling tradition.

Modern fantasy can be divided into four eras, but there first came a zeroth era which I call the pre-fantasy era.  Fantasy didn’t exist in the pre-fantasy era, but we can see the outlines of what would become the genre in ancient mythologies, oral storytelling traditions, legends, religious storytelling, fables, and fairy tales.  We can identify elements that have been integrated into the fantasy genre in Norse mythology’s Volsunga Saga, in the Navajo’s Dine Bahane, in Greek epics, and in Christian epic poetry like Dante’s Divine Comedy or Milton’ Paradise Lost.  These stories provide the sense of wonder, the initiative and adventure, the larger-than-life stakes and scope that characterize fantasy as a genre, for all they were treated more seriously in a religious guise than today’s fantasy genre.

Storytelling itself began to evolve significantly in the late Middle Ages as books became more commonplace and literacy more prevalent (albeit very gradually).  The Early Fantasy Era began in the eighteenth century and, like science fiction, drew heavy early inspiration from gothic horror, as seen in The Castle of Otrantro.  Later pieces, like The King of Elfland’s Daughter or Phantastes, will feel more familiar to readers of modern fantasy, and began drawing more inspiration from fairy tales and less from darker paths, although dark fantasy remains a prominent subgenre today.  As the genre matured and speciated, it began to draw more consciously from religion and myth, which The Worm Ouroboros attempts to make good upon, but which does not reach its apex until Tolkien’s seminal The Lord of the Rings.

It would be difficult to overstate the significant of The Lord of the Rings in fantasy’s history and evolution.  It marks the apex of the Early Fantasy Era, the culmination of its trends, and it set the standard for all fantasy that came afterwards.  In fact, it marked the end of fantasy’s first era and the beginning of its second, the Post-Tolkien Slump.  So masterful was and is The Lord of the Rings, which Tolkien wrote and workshopped over decades and intended as a new mythos for the Western world, that its shadow stretched across the fantasy landscape for additional decades, during which the vast majority of fantasy was derivative from Middle Earth, full of immortal elves, delving dwarves, and flatly evil orcs.  This may have been exacerbated by coinciding with a golden age of science fiction, which understandably drew the attention of would-be speculative fiction writers.

Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time marked the end of the Post-Tolkien Slump and the beginning of fantasy’s third era.  Wheel of Time redefined the meaning of fantasy’s “epic scope,” gave us far more compelling, complex, and nuanced characters, and brought magic to the forefront (long before the series was actually finished).  It takes a step away from the genre’s mythic origins, and closer to other narrative genres.  The era it initiated was an era of experimentation and maturation, in which authors explored new and different ways that this concept of “fantasy” could be explored and scratched.  Some of these experiments were more successful than others, but they culminated in the Sanderson Era.

Elantris, Sanderson’s first novel, was not necessarily the first, or the best, of what this new era offers, but it is the most famous, and Sanderson’s unique storytelling style and outsized presence in the field gives him pride of place for the era to which I’ve taken the liberty of assigning his name, the fourth and current era of the fantasy genre.  This new era builds on the foundation of Jordan’s Wheel of Time, which seems appropriate given Sanderson’s role in finishing that series, but it is further characterized by three significant traits which now permeate a significant majority of the fantasy being published today: transparent prose, hard magic systems, and tight third-person limited viewpoints (or first person).

Transparent prose and tight viewpoints go hand-in-hand and are almost inescapable if reading modern genre fiction.  Transparent prose is the concept that the writing, the medium through which a story is told, should be invisible to the reader, an unnoticed windowpane through which to view a story and its events.  It combines with a tight viewpoint to give a sense of immediacy to the action and an immediate insight and relation to the character.  That means that characters will tend to be anachronistic, so that they are more relatable to readers and have distinctive, recognizable voices.

Most significant, though, are the “hard” magic systems.  In Tolkien and similar authors, magic exists in the story as a soft element, something that is poorly defined and is present primarily to provide a sense of wonder and awe to the story.  Jordan began to change that, bringing magic to the forefront, where it must have more rules and definitions in order to function effectively, but it was still, well, magic.  Sanderson pushed the genre into a realm of hard magic, in which magic is more like incompletely explained science or shortcuts to physical manipulation.  Perhaps in no series is this more obvious than Mistborn, but Sanderson is far from the only author who’s adopted hard magic.  Brent Weeks’ Lightbringer has a wonderful “hard” magic system, and even Will Wight’s Cradle magic is arguably “hard,” albeit on a very different scale and with its own set of rules to accompany it.

These hard magic systems are uniquely appealing to a modern audience accustomed to internet search engines that can provide the answer to most any question with a few queries and clicks.  We live in a world where, whether because it’s true or out of hubris, we think that we have the answers or the tools to find the answers to every mystery, and where sense of wonder is more about scale than it is about something that mundane humanity cannot accomplish without some inexplicable intervention.  A hard magic system, for all it is magic, fits nicely with this understanding, while soft magic systems smack of something bordering on the divine, something we don’t have to explore and with which we are no longer comfortable.  They are something we cannot define, in a time when we have definitions for everything (even if those definitions may not be correct).

No wonder, then, that the Sanderson Era has swept fantasy up in a whirlwind.  Already I notice a dearth of truly innovative fantasy on the shelves, with a great deal falling in some way into Sanderson’s shadow.  Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy Sanderson’s work; it is deeper than most give him credit for, and he’s a superb author who is innovative – but there are coming to be too many Sanderson imitators, whether they are doing it intentionally or not.  More and more, I am hoping to find something new, and wondering where fantasy will go next.  From Gilgamesh to Tress, this genre we call fantasy has come a long way, and I’m confident it has further to go, new concepts and ideas to explore.  In fifteen years, I want to be writing about the fifth era of fantasy, and I hope you’ll be reading it along with me.