In which we take a look at the eternal hole of fantasy, and how to stop digging.



Today, I happened on a tweet which noted the difficulty for American writers to avoid using new-world foods in their fictional settings. I was immediately struck by this, as I see no reason for new-world foods to be somehow intrinsically bad in fantasy settings. I inquired as to the setting of the story concerned and was told it was a fictional analogue to the Turkey-Armenia area.

Now I dare not make assumptions about fiction I have not read, but the way in which the initial tweet was phrased struck me as, if not symptomatic, nonetheless very illustrating of a certain mindset that Fantasy finds itself in. If, when you go out of your way to not set your story in an alternate Western Europe, and you end up in an analogue to a place that is very much in the same cultural sphere, I think there is something wrong with this.

Now at this point a lot of people will very likely object that just because something is Fantasy does not mean it is, or should be required to be, setting fiction, but allow me to continue. Most fantastic stories written up to very recently were set, explicitly or implicitly, in the real world. This starts from myths over ancient epics to the rather recent phenomenon of Dark Fantasy or Gothic Horror: the story is set in what is nominally the real world, but makes use of the unknown to provide a space for the imagination. In modern times this has largely been relegated to children's stories (which is, fundamentally, what e.g. Harry Potter is) or disappeared into the realm of science fiction. Now there are still some works that do meet this definition, but they tend to fall in the Thriller genre (for instance, for all its science-fiction trappings I argue that Frank Schätzing's Der Schwarm is exactly this; equally a lot of Dan Brown's work is pretty solidly in this category). The label of Fantasy has become associated with something else entirely, which I uninventively blame on Tolkien — if anybody more knowledgeable about literature wants to point me to alternative views, please do.

Tolkien's work was deeply characterized by the fact that he was a philologist. Historical Fiction is remote from our world, Fantastic Fiction (and I use this in the sense I described above) is remote from our world, but both only by one degree of separation. Tolkien, on the other hand, was used to studying works that were fantastically remote from a world that was itself temporally remote from his, and he set himself the creative agenda of emulating this. In doing so, he added a third degree of separation. The story he had written now had no tangible real-world connections left. It was necessary to define its surroundings, at least a little bit, in order for the plot to make any sense.

Tolkien, of course, would go on to take this to great heights, but I argue that you do not need to write a Quenta Silmarillion to have a work of Setting Fiction. The Hobbit already is one: to understand even the very basics of the plot, you must know what a Hobbit is, and indeed the very first passage in the book is the explanation of precisely this fact. This is the key difference from other works of fiction, where the need for explicit explanation is significantly less to non-existent, and where it does happen, it usually happens as part of the plot. In Lovecraft,  the existence of fantastic phenomena is the plot. In an analogous work of Fantasy (with a big F) it is an assumption that frames the plot. It is almost like gravity, it is a fundamental fact.

The same applies to any kind of Fantasy. Even if you do not have magic, or monsters or indeed anything that could not happen in the real world, you must nonetheless describe the dynamics of your setting, as the reader can make no assumptions about how it functions. Sure, it is generally the case that fantasy physics tend to be much like real physics, but that is a genre trope rather than any sort of requirement. You could write a mediaevalesque warstory on a planet that has tiny gravity and is populated principally by creatures with exoskeleta and twenty legs. You wouldn't call it fantasy, but it would, in principle, be equivalent to it.

Now, there is a whole other point here about genre confusion that I will not make here and that requires another article together. For our purposes it suffices to recognize that big-F-Fantasy is in almost all conceivable cases Setting Fiction.

This brings us to the central point: the vast majority of Fantasy sucks as Setting Fiction. And this, I think, is partly because people don't realize they're writing Setting Fiction, and partly because perniciously this also causes two sets of Fantasy genre tropes to exist. Generally tropes happen because writers wish to explore a certain idea, and everything else can be more or less adapted from a common manual of style. This is good for both the audience and the writer: common elements make the reader feel more at home and reduce the amount of extra work the writer has to do, ideally allowing him to focus on the core ideas he wishes to explore.

If Fantasy is essentially Setting Fiction, therefore, the things that are not the Setting are of secondary importance. And indeed we find several tried-and-true storylines that allow for putting as much setting exploration as possible in the work. And yet there are also setting tropes. By our theory, of course, this makes little sense — if it is the primary element, why are there such easy-to-reuse parts? And more importantly, why is it that everyone seems to be using them?

I said before that I wouldn't bring genre confusion into this, but there is one aspect of it we will have to touch upon regardless. For there is Fantasy that is not Setting Fiction.

This largely falls into two kinds: works where the setting is less relevant, and stories in established settings. The former is classically exemplified by games set in a vague fantasy environ; if the game is mostly about the challenge, whether you fight knights or orcs or spider robots or solve wood puzzles is largely tapestry. The latter replicates non-big-F-Fantasy by having a setting to draw on, and thus being able to focus more on other things. Interestingly, though, this category too tends to include mostly games or be related to them.

In essence, what happens is that a certain stock of pioneer fantasy created tropes for works in which setting exploration was less important, which then cross-contaminated works whose authors failed to recognize that one set of tropes was really from another genre that just happened to share the name.

The result, in any case, is that both sets of tropes have a firm hold on the construct that is Fantasy, and as a result you really tend to get... a lot of exactly the same. I propose a two-pronged solution: firstly, as part of the eternal Confucian struggle against terminological confusion, genre names must be rectified. My ideas for this I will very likely outline in a future article. Secondly, and more importantly, people should write Fantasy that is good and conscious Setting Fiction.

This is a conworlder community, and here we may have high standards as to what a setting requires to be good. But I feel that just a bit of change in the right direction is needed to vastly improve the situation. Get creative with your cultures. Get creative with your biology. Have your conpeople eat potatoes. Have them live somewhere where potatoes grow, not fake that-part-of-Eurasia-where-there-are-no-tones. Heck, invent your own food crop. Give your conpeople some interesting traits. Even if they're bog-standard humans, you can make totally new things just by mixing and matching from what already exists. Dark-Skinned pointy-nosed blond Vietnamese who speak a language that sounds more like Finnish — there's no reason other than chance why that doesn't exist!

Once Setting Fiction establishes itself as a thing, perhaps the names will even rectify themselves.