What is the fantasy genre doing wrong?

It’s hard to say that, because so many fantasy authors put so much work into their worlds. Thousands of hours are spent writing lore, cross-referencing to make sure the history remains consistent, drawing up genealogies, sketching maps, conceiving of creatures, possibly even writing bestiaries. I don’t want to belittle all that work. But take the perspective of the reader: here you are, standing in a figurative library full of fantasy books. There are dozens of different fully-fledged worlds, each one crafted with painstaking care and attention to detail. What is there to recommend one world over another?

That’s the killer. For all the work that goes into them, most of these worlds boil down to Tolkien fanfiction, and the only thing that differentiates them is gimmickry. So choosing which one you want to read is as heavy a decision as choosing a flavor of ice cream cone; it’s the same thing (ice and sugar), but colored differently. If you read A Song Of Ice And Fire, it’s Tolkien fanfiction with a grimdark gimmick, which I am not fond of. If you read Dragonlance, it’s Tolkien fanfiction with a gimmick where it began as a Dungeons and Dragons campaign that somebody wrote up as a novel. The most common gimmick is the “my fantasy world is for grownups” schtick. The second most common one is the “my fantasy world involves vaguely sci-fi elements” schtick. There are a few others. None of them are terribly compelling after you’ve seen them once.

(Writing all that, I feel like a jerk. It pains me to dismiss so many people’s hard work. But most fantasy worlds have no essential difference from one another. It’s the same thing with a different gimmick, like different episodes of a repetitive Saturday morning cartoon.)

The easy thing to do would be to leave it here and let the fantasy readers pile into the comments and yell at me. Instead, I want to do two things: mollify the fantasy fans, and explain how I think the genre could be improved. And by “improved”, I mean taken to the level of literary writing.

On the first point, I note that there’s nothing wrong with reading fantasy, even if it is a gimmicky genre. Me? I watch cartoons on the internet and listen to dorky metal music. Trust me, your taste isn’t any worse than mine. And it’s not as if fantasy is the literary equivalent of McDonalds. Maybe Olive Garden, if it’s done well.

On the second point, I think the best idea would be worldbuilding with a purpose. In the first line I called out “aimless” worldbuilding as the big problem with fantasy, and I do think that most fantasy worldbuilding is aimless. It seems to begin from asking oneself this question: “I have the time and inclination to build a fantasy world. How do I make it not-Tolkien?” Instead of asking yourself that (and then trying to pretend that you began some other way), why not begin like this: “I have the time and inclination to build a fictional world. What am I trying to do with it?”

There are a few critical differences here. First, “fictional” is used instead of “fantasy” because “fantasy” seems to chain the whole thing to Middle-Earth in a counterproductive way. I’m not saying that the fantasy genre must cease to be fantasy in order to be any good, just to avoid sliding into the fantasy trope-space too early in the creative process.

The second difference, and by far the more important one, is the question, “What am I trying to do with my world?” I’m not insisting that every piece of fiction be didactic or make some social or political point. Believe me, the last thing I want is to replace all fiction with insipid propaganda for some trendy social cause. No, I’m saying that you should have a goal for your world. When you build your world, the very first concern is what you accomplish by building it. Tolkien, for example, knew that there was a compelling Norse mythos, but nothing to answer it in English literature. He didn’t feel that the Arthurian mythology served the same function. His goal was to create something that would fill the same place in the English mythic psyche as the Norse mythology filled in continental Germanic culture.

Another example is HP Lovecraft’s mythos. What was Lovecraft trying to achieve? He was trying to paint a picture of a universe where human morality, human culture, was completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, and where the most powerful entities were completely indifferent to human concerns. I have explained my thoughts on cosmic horror in depth already, so I won’t repeat all that here. In brief, Lovecraft wants to take the idea of a completely uncaring, indifferent universe — an idea that deeply horrified him — and drive it straight through the reader’s skull. That is what motivates all of his worldbuilding.

A third example: Frank Herbert, the author of Dune. Herbert’s worldbuilding, in my purely speculative opinion, is there to showcase the limits of human potential. Herbert asks himself, “If I take millions of humans distributed across the known universe and set them at each other’s throats, how strong will they get? Whose values will prevail?” Granted, Herbert wrote sci-fi rather than fantasy, but I have written at length on the complementarity of those genres.

So, there you have it. Fantasy’s big problem is its aimless worldbuilding, and fantasy authors can get around this and improve by asking themselves what their worldbuilding is meant to really accomplish.