[I have been convinced in the comments that second-world fantasy is a better term for what I’m talking about.  The “epic” aspect will be addressed in a later report.]

Even as I sit down to write this, a very small Nick Mamatas homonculus in the back of my head is flipping me off, calling me stupid and storming away in a huff. He’s got a point.

Definitions are tricky by nature, and offering one up gives the impression of having solved a puzzle. What is Epic Fantasy? Well, this is, and anything that doesn’t fit the definition isn’t. That kind of proscriptive rigor is doomed, but being doomed doesn’t take away from the essential dignity of the effort. I’ll just take a moment to point out that what I’m saying here isn’t intended to tell the reader what they should think but rather to clarify what I do. When I say Epic Fantasy, I mean this. If you mean something else, please do make that explicit. Thanks.

Epic fantasy is (1)fiction in (2)an ahistorical setting with (3)magic, and usually but not exclusively with (4)preindustrial technology. I should say that I don’t draw a distinction between Epic and Heroic. If you do, you’ll want to make that explicit. (The homonculus waves its arms in rage at my refusal to stand and fight. Hard life, bein’ a homonculus.)

So let’s start in.

1) Fiction

The least controversial point in this formulation is that epic fantasy is a subset of fiction. These are invented stories about invented people taking part in actions that (at least on the small scale) didn’t happen. They don’t even have the dubious claim to reality of history or religious texts. More importantly, they don’t assert themselves to be real in a way that is intended to convince the reader. Even if the narrator of the story says that the recounted events really happened, this is recognized as part of the fiction.

It’s ain’t real. Cool?

2) an ahistorical setting

Here, things start getting tricky.

Looking at a few of examples of epic fantasy may help here. Tolkien’s Middle Earth is alleged to be in a sort of human history, but not ours as we know it. As we look at our historical timeline from prehistory to the present, there is no place where Middle Earth would fit. Donaldson’s Land in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant is explicitly a different world existing outside our history (though Covenant himself is placed within our world as a man living in the late 20th century). George’s Westros is clearly not intended to be read as connected to our own world. And so on.

There are also a lot of fantasies that do occur within history. Crowley’s Little, Big; Most of Charles de Lint’s work, any of the hundred thousand urban fantasies in which elves and vampires inhabit modern Chicago or similar settings. I don’t intend to dismiss those, except in the sense that they aren’t what I’m talking about here.

Another term that gets used here often is “second world” and I suppose that’s just fine. Explicitly, epic fantasy (as I use the term) involves the existence of a second world either in relation to ours (a la Donaldson) or as an entirely separate reality (Martin). The important thing is that the story happens outside our history.

What about Naomi Novik? Not epic fantasy? Nope, not for the purposes of this discussion. Maybe alternate history would be a better fit.

China Mieville, on the other hand, could be. It would be impossible, for instance, to relate the founding of New Crobuzon to (for instance) the Truman presidency. The two exist in separate worlds, and that separation is central to the reader’s experience of the story. I’ll go into this again in the report on setting as character. (As an aside, I agree with Jeff VanderMeer’s assertion that Mieville specifically and the New Weird in general makes the most sense when considered as a marriage of epic fantasy and visceral horror as championed by Kathe Koja and Clive Barker.)

3) Magic

This is the second least controversial point about fantasy (be it epic, urban or any other flavor); It’s got magic. It is possible, I believe, to write an epic fantasy in which nothing particularly magical happens (Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint is an excellent example), but those are few, far between, and not typical of the genre. Fantasy without magic is like a bird without flight — it happens sometimes, but not so often as to spoil the point.

As another aside, we broke magic down into three rough categories:

A) Magic as alternate physics: magic is a set of universal rules accessed by anyone with sufficient technical knowledge. If you wave the wand the right way and say the right words, the effect occurs reliably and for anyone.

B) Magic as negotiation with a sentient universe: magic is a suspension of physical laws mediated by some entity that exists outside those laws and is not subject to them. The mage is in the position or prayer, supplication, binding, etc., and the magic requires more than technical knowledge. It’s only available to special people who the universe as a whole or the magical entities in specific can recognize as special.

C) Magic as an extension of the body: magic is the direct exercise of will over matter. Most of us are able to move our bodies simply through an act of will — I decide to move my hand, my hand moves. There is no intercessor. Magic can also be an extension of that past the limits of the body. The mage focuses on the candle, and the flame appears and so on.

So why magic? Descriptively speaking, because when I get together a bunch of fantasy books, they’ve pretty much all got magic in ‘em. When I get a book with just a little magic, it’s called the “fantastic element” (Niccolo’s divining in Dororthy Dunnet’s House of Niccolo series — which is otherwise strict historical novels). In practice, the existence of magic marks something as a fantasy.

Proscriptively, I can speculate, but there are a lot of folks out there who’ve done a much better, deeper, and more footnoted version than I can muster.

4) Preindustrial technology

A large part of the conversation revolved around Tolkien. Love him or hate him, his work is the touchstone of modern fantasy, and pretty much everything since is either an homage or a critique. There’s actually some variation of tech level even within Lord of the Rings, but the vast majority of fantasy involves an explicitly preindustrial technological bent.

And, what the hell, let’s put too fine a point on it. Most fantasy is a vision of Europe sometime after 500 and before 1450. Merely preindustrial isn’t enough. Very little fantasy is set in an explicitly Sumerian milieu. Likewise the Indus Valley. Likewise Han China or sub-Saharan Africa. There are a lot of civilizations and epochs that could be borrowed from the way that Tolkien borrowed English culture. And while they are used occasionally, and some gain notice, the standard setting remains the European dark ages.

One theory put forward to explain it runs like this: Tolkien tapped into a literature of childhood for many of his readers. People picking up Lord of the Rings when it first was published had grown up on Robin Hood and King Arthur and other source material from which Tolkien drew. There was a resonance with the reader’s childhood that gave the books a power which other settings would not have.

In the generations since then, Tolkien himself became that literature of childhood. Terry Brooks and Stephen Donaldson got something like the same resonances because they were reacting to Tolkien (as have we all, one way or another and whether we like it or not).

It’s a pretty theory, and I want to be convinced by it. So far, I’m not totally sold. I do agree, however, that there is something nostalgic about epic fantasy’s harking back to times that we imagine to be simpler than our own. Like political conservatism (but not identical with it), epic fantasy seems to indulge the longing to return to a better age. That in this case the age is explicitly mythical forgives a lot in my book.

I’m not sure what this implies for those of us who are writing fantasy now. Certainly there are a wealth of writers who are chafing under the expectation of kings, knights, and barons. I’m one of them. Reader’s expectations, however, may still be such that these excursions into other places and times are done at the author’s risk.

So, as groundwork: Epic fantasy is fiction in an ahistorical setting with magic, and usually but not exclusively with preindustrial technology.

Next up: The Role of Setting

The symposium went off as planned. I have about four and a half hours of recorded conversation that I’ve been reviewing and thinking about and trying to put into some order in my head. I’m not going to make the recordings public. In order to get folks to talk about what I wanted to know, we had to talk about some of our colleagues - -both their strengths and their weaknesses. Broadcasting that kind of thing is unprofessional and counter-productive.

The participants were George RR Martin, S.M. Stirling, Melinda Snodgrass, Walter Jon Williams, Ian Tregillis, Ty Franck and myself. I expect the report on the symposium to take a while to get out completely. The topics we chewed over tend not to have particularly well-defined boundaries, and putting them into a taxonomy here is trickier than I expected it to be.

I’m beginning with this outline both to give an overview of what topics we discussed and provide myself with a sort of working plan for how I talk about it in public.

TOPICS:

1) Definition of Epic Fantasy:

This is in part an exercise in setting boundaries. What exactly is epic fantasy for the purpose of this particular conversation, and what isn’t. (I didn’t want the group to have to take on the burden of outlining all the differences between Laurel K. Hamilton and Jim Butcher in order to define urban fantasy, for example, when that wasn’t the subgenre I was interested in.)

I’ll summarize the definition we came up with here and then spend a full post on it later. Epic fantasy is fiction with an ahistorical setting and magic. That sounds really simple. We took a long time getting there, and we still don’t all agree.

2) The Role of Setting

One theme that arose in the conversation that I think deserves more attention (ie a separate blog post) is the role of the landscape as a character. Epic fantasy seems to have a great deal to do with place (not something I’d considered much when I first went into this). Tolkein’s Middle Earth, for instance, is filled with memorable places — Rivendell, the Mines of Moria, Mirkwood, etc. — that invite the reader’s imagination as much or more than the characters or plot.

One consequence of this that I at least hadn’t noticed was a massive tendency for readers to defect when the world itself is changed, but to stay on when the new book/trilogy/series is set within the same world.

3) The Hero’s Journey/Clute’s “Greening”/the plot

There are several ideas about the necessary and/or appropriate plot structure for a fantasy novel. I am comfortable with none of them, but when I write that post, I will do my best to outline them (as I understand them) and give an idea of their strengths and weaknesses.

The moral structure of the epic is closely related to this, since the plot is an explication and example of a moral system. Yeah, I hadn’t noticed that either, but it does help explain with The Lord of the Rings became a classic and The Worm Ourboros didn’t.

4) Fan Service

Oh, this one’s an interesting problem. We borrowed the term from anime where it’s used (I’m told) to refer to the scenes that may or not make sense, but that have to be there to meet the expectations and appetites of the fans. This issue is, I think, the rabbit hole that leads to a very strange and I suspect illuminating analysis of what genre writers (and probably all writers) do. The single term stretches from whether it’s okay to treat the readers with contempt to the tension between accessibility and sophistication to what exactly it means to “sell out”.

5) The Large Canvas: A Metaphor for Something

Throughout the conversation, certain phrases kept popping up: broad scope, painting on a large canvas, big stories. I’m not sure we managed to say explicitly what this was all a metaphor for (we don’t actually have canvases, and the big in stories isn’t actually word count, no matter what it seems). I’ll try to give an idea of what a “large canvas” actually means and what techniques we thought of that might serve it.

6) A Plan of Attack

Of course all of this was ultimately self-serving. I’ve just turned in the last of my Long Price Quartet books, and I’m looking down the barrel of planning the next project. The underlying agenda of this symposium was to help guide me in that. That, the final post on the subject, will outline what I think I need to do and how I intend to go about it. (This has a certain Babe Ruth hubris about it, I know, but I’ll do what I can.)

Next up: The Definition of Epic Fantasy

I slightly under a week, I’ll be driving to Santa Fe for what I’ve been calling The Symposium. A few of us in the local writing scene (the whole local writing scene is *way* too big to fit into a house, much less have a decent single conversation) are going to get together to talk about what the strengths and weaknesses of epic fantasy are, what reader expectations are in picking up an epic fantasy book (or series), and how meet, exceed, or defeat those expectations.

The guest list right now includes George RR Martin, S. M. Stirling, Walter Jon Williams, Melinda Snodgrass and a couple other folks who I’m not sure want their names publicized so I’m not going to mention them just yet.

The thing is, I’ve just finished my big fantasy project. The Long Price Quartet, though only half in print at this point, is done for me apart from the corrections and editing. I’ve learned a lot from writing them — mostly I have a better idea how you write a novel. But now that it’s time to try pitching Tor a new project, I find myself wondering how to better structure something that complies witth he structures and expectations of epic fantasy, satisfies the reader, and still does something fresh and new and fun for me as a writer.

As it happens, I’m in the middle of a bunch of the best minds in the field, so I thought I should ask.

Next Friday, I’ll find out.

If any of y’all have questions that you think it would be useful to chew over in that company, I take suggestions.