The trouble with fantasy...

[IronParrot]

... is that it's so hard to pick out anything truly original nowadays.

It seems to me that the fascination with the Middle Ages has been bled utterly to death. Most of the fantasy on shelves today may have a few original ideas scattered here and there, I grant, but they are generally a rehash of the same thing. They can all be traced back to a number of key influences, and it wouldn't be such a big problem if these weren't the same key influences over and over and over.

Arthurian legend is a biggie. Kings, mystical swords, platemail, Merlin-esque wizardry, castles, a very English monarchy, quests for holy grails and the like - it's been done. Again. And again. There are also influences like Beowulf, the Greek and Norse mythologies, even the Brothers Grimm... my point is, it's one thing to allude to similarities, but rehashing it all is completely different.

I also blame Tolkien, in a way. See, Tolkien did it right: he took those ancient mythical influences and created an entire world, and upon it he built a unified story. His world was a mix-and-match of old England and really old England, and brought mythical concepts of Elves, Dwarves and the like back into the limelight.

But now you have all these writers who try to create their own worlds, and hardly add anything significant to them. Even more dangerous is when they get sucked into exploring every facet of that world, and aim for vastness at the expense of story and focus. Episodic series fiction proliferates in overwhelming abundance. They create silly names that make no sense due to their lack of a systematic linguistic framework or understanding, something that Tolkien had but few others possess.

So much fantasy literature today is just a theme and variations on swords and sorcery. Doesn't "fantasy" imply "originality"? In terms of being original, "world creation" does not go far enough.

I don't consider myself a fantasy fan by any standard. I don't like the genre. However, most of my favourite books belong to it. Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are prime examples of creativity in escapism. Baum's Oz books painted on a traditional background of kingdoms and magic, but he used a diverse palette of characters and settings that went far beyond the trappings of the fantasy genre's roots. The Princess Bride took the traditional archetypes and made fun of them ruthlessly and charmingly, which is perhaps why I enjoyed it so much. My favourite contemporary fantasy world in literature is by far that of Harry Potter, with its ministerial bureaucracies and modern re-imagining of old magical ideas.

Outside of literature, Star Wars is a perfect example of what I'm talking about here, in terms of originality in fantasy. It takes the traditional themes and ideas of everything from Tolkien to Japanese samurai legends, and places them in a completely different setting that had never been explored before in the context of these themes. It basically took settings and elements from the interplanetary worlds of Buck Rogers and Star Trek and the like, typically reserved for science fiction, and replaced sci-fi with mythical fantasy. It's no wonder it was such a success - and, like Tolkien, spawned so many lame clones (the Star Wars "literature" being the prime example, ironically).

There are other works that, while not among my favourite novels, are at least indicators of where fantasy should ideally be headed. C.S. Lewis' Narnia is a decent example, and it's perhaps no coincidence that the stronger books of the series (Wardrobe, Caspian and Dawn Treader, in my opinion) don't fall too far into the trappings I mentioned earlier, while The Horse and His Boy does. Cooper's The Dark is Rising turns Arthurian legend on its head, and is admirable for that.

Redwall is a good example as well, though in terms of animal personification, I vastly prefer Horwood's Duncton Chronicles, a mole's-eye-view of England that was a universe of its own, full of creative takes on religion and politics in its own right.

All of these works I've mentioned have a number of key things in common - namely, they're not Tolkien/Arthur/Grimm/Beowulf ripoffs, nor do they rely too heavily on outlandish names, nor do they put a lot of emphasis on world creation while forgetting to make that world original and interesting. Literature should not be a game of Dungeons & Dragons.