On the Future of Fantasy --- in 2005

This is going to be a little long: my apologies.

Recently I’ve been thinking of this interview with Matthew Woodring Stover, an author whose books I thought were pretty good at the time when I read this interview. I finally took the time to track it down to see if I remembered the passages correctly.  The takeaway that I brought out, when I read this years ago, was that J.K. Rowling was growing a whole new legion of fantasy fans and, when they grew up, their tastes would grow up, too. What kind of fantasy would these newly matured Harry Potter fans want when they were looking for something to read?

In rereading the interview, I was surprised to see that it’s from April of 2001, five or six months before 9-11, so his interview’s predictions are now easily looked at in hindsight to see if they were true. In the interview, Stover comes off as sort of an arrogant and narcissistic jerk, however, his points remain fairly interesting. Here’s the first, the one I took away from the article and that has stayed with me:

“There is a HUGE tidal swell of audience -- the kids who have grown up on bubblegum fantasy are starting to look around for something more challenging, and more rewarding. Hell, all those Harry Potter fans aren't going to be satisfied with the crap crowding the bookstore shelves. If they don't find something at least that intelligent, we lose the best of them forever. They become the gray zombies who drift once in a while through the stacks in a bookstore, in bleakly melancholy reminiscence of how much they used to like this stuff...”

First, I think it’s awesome that Stover predicted that all the Harry Potter fans would turn in to zombies. Which explains the popularity of the undead in modern literature. J

Here’s a second prophecy / quote: remember---2001 

 Q: “You also once told me that you thought George R.R. Martin was the only writer now who may save the epic fantasy series. Can you tell me a bit more? What do you see in Martin's work that you don't see in... oh, David Eddings? “ 

A: “First of all, Martin is a brilliant technician; there is not a single scene in Game of Thrones that is slow or superfluous. He is also willing to highlight a lot of the brutality and twisted sexuality that most fantasies leave buried. I admire the way he manipulates the conventions of traditional epic fantasy -- he knows his audience has been reading this stuff for years, so we have certain expectations. He sets up traditional situations, then pays them off in extremely un-traditional ways. He's writing for grown-ups, and setting a high standard -- those books sell a TON, and when they're all gone, his fans are gonna start looking for something that can move them the same way. That's what I mean about saving epic fantasy: teaching the fans to insist on better books”

So, since 2001, did those Harry Potter fans grow up and demand better, higher quality books? I kind of wonder. George Martin and Patrick Rothfuss seem outliers still. The abundance of “Young Adult Fantasy Fiction” indicates to me that maybe a lot of those Potter fans never moved past reading at the 10^th grade level. There was that huge wave of “Reality Meets the Magical” fiction: witches, vampires, sorcerers, zombies appearing in modern day life as heroes, which is basically “Harry Potter, but grown up”. Currently, there’s the wave of Steampunk fiction, which kind of masquerades as intellectual though the writing isn’t all that challenging.  It’s a direction away from Potter, anyway.

Here’s the link:

http://www.sfsite.com/04a/mws101.htm

It’s worth mentioning, if you read the interview, that Stover has written a bunch of Star Wars novels since then, as well as one Magic: The Gathering Novel. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Stover