The Traveling Round Table Fantasy Blog(s) – 1

Way back in 2012 six specfic writers, including me, decided to set up a monthly circulating blog series: one unifying topic, fantasy, and one post each per month, on each member’s site in turn. Eventually it was named, partly in jest, “The Great Traveling Round Table Fantasy Blog,” and it lasted for most of three rounds.
My own posts are the only ones I can now retrieve, but some of them still strike me as interesting, if somewhat out-of-date. I’m therefore aiming to re-post them here for those who may be interested. I’ve also included the image that became our leit motif: The Arthurian Round Table, from a picture in Winchester, UK.
And the first topic in the first round was a general approach, to paraphrase:

One Step Sideways: What’s Fantasy FOR?

I once had an academic at my local University tell me that  Sheri S.  Tepper’s Beauty couldn’t go on an English course, “because there’s fairies in it.” I was too gob-smacked to produce the obvious  retort: “There are fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Huccome that’s on an English course?”

However narrow-minded, this is a common view of what’s now called high fantasy. Meaning, fantasy set in a secondary pre-industrial world, and very possibly, “there’s fairies in it.” Ever since the novel made realism king in fiction, anything such has been scorned as light-weight, make-believe, fit for children, and, most damning of all, “escapist.”

It’s very tempting to retort, almost with Douglas Adams, “Reality is a crutch for those who can’t handle fantasy” (he actually said, science fiction.) An on-site observation from a librarian, passed along by my friend Lois Bujold, rather suggests that readers fall into two groups. Group A can’t handle anything outside “reality.”  Group B, on the other hand, according to the librarian, wants “total departure from the known world.”

Such departure would actually lead to unintelligibility – a frequent problem for SF and F writers trying to depict some form of The Alien. So SF and Fantasy – and horror – are in fact border-straddling genres. They deal with the unknown, the unreal, the unexperienced, but only up to a point where those things can be understood.

I tend to call all three genres non-realist fiction. They often present realist settings, but they also slot in so many non-real elements. FTL travel. A space diaspora of “humans.” Non-human races and beings, from Laurell Hamilton’s Bloody Bones to Tolkien’s Elvenkind. Ghosts. Monsters. Demons. Non-realist fiction, or the genres of Elsewhere, as I  like to say.

And if readers do include a group wanting Elsewhere, we have one answer to the question, What’s Fantasy (and SF etc) FOR? It’s for people who want something else in their heads than another bunch of people just like those next door. Who want events unlimited by the constraints of the nightly news and what’s called “consensual reality.” Who are hooked on that old SF cliché, the sensawunda. The moment when the reader’s eye looks from Here into Elsewhere. To a different, infinitely desirable world.

A lot of that draws a writer as well. World-building isn’t a common term in realist fiction, but it’s a prized ability in the Elsewhere genres. And for an Elsewhere writer, building a world is a definite pleasure, if of a more arduous kind than ordinary narrative can provide.

So Fantasy is FOR, at one level, that carefully avoided word in literary criticism, Pleasure. Pleasure that can begin with a lamp-post in the snow beyond the back of a wardrobe, and go all the way through a sensawunda experience to that rarest reaction of all. More than pleasure. More than desire. Sometimes, it can be awe.

That emotion is linked to the word “numinous.” Which here indicates a piece of writing, or an image, or an event, that gives the reader an almost spiritual reaction. You hardly ever get it in realism.  But in fantasy, like Frodo on the hill of Cerin  Amroth, sometimes the reader can walk with gods.

All this doesn’t cut much ice with people who want their literature/fiction to “matter.” To put over a serious message, or make a political statement, as well as to produce writing of force and power. And this is where such people err worst over fantasy (less than SF, which has always had aspirations to the “serious writing” label.”) Because fantasy can and does carry messages, can and does think about its own present world and its problems, but also can and does dislocate the ruts of consensual reality to bring the reader that one step sideways. To see, to imagine, a different, perhaps a made-new world.

Which is why “there’s fairies in it” stunned me as a rejection of Beauty, because if ever a novel grappled with the real world, right here in the present, dislocated that present and painted its future alternatives in the most ferocious colours, and shouted, “message!” and, “serious!” from its first genre change, it’s Beauty.

The same can’t be said, of course, of every novel shelved under the label “Fantasy.” But look more closely, and in some way, every one of those Elsewhere texts will be engaged with, thinking about, drawing on the world from which it springs.  In the deepest sense, Fantasy isn’t escapist. It’s right here with us, “under the sun” as Tolkien put it.  If it moves us away from this world, it’s only to bring us back to it with a different, a clearer understanding. To my mind, that dislocation and rediscovery, as much as the pleasure of difference, are what Fantasy’s FOR.

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Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia. She writes fantasy and SF set in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published twelve fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some short stories in Australian and US anthologies. Some of her works appear in the Bookview Cafe store under:

https://bookviewcafe.com/bvc_author/sylvia-kelso/