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? “
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 10th
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:
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.
