Yatterings

Where is fantasy going with market expectations of constant pace and action?

Direct to the bad place, if we don’t fight back. Getting there via ever-decreasing circles. Continuing to pass Go en route, for a while, and so collecting dosh, but getting dizzier and dizzier, and…

Enough bad boardgame metaphor! But seriously, it’s just another example of copier fade: endless replications of the same biff-boff will result in flavourless pap that eventually nobody will want to consume, however numb their palate has become. It’s happened to genre fiction before - to historical fiction, eg, in the ’80s, and to horror in the ’90s - and it will happen to fantasy also, if publishers follow their established route (giving the bookshops what they keep asking for, yet more iterations of last year’s hit). Without imagination and originality, nothing survives; and there are only so many ways you can go biff-boff.

Is this fuelled by the growth of genre films and gaming?

Not knowing, can’t say. It seems likely: born of abbreviated attention-spans and instant entertainment, 24-hour cartoon channels, yadda yadda. It’s easy for me to moralise, I didn’t see a television till I was ten; just spent my childhood buried in books. I think it was probably better - but then I would, wouldn’t I?

How easy is it to either revive things like the matter of Britain? Is there such a thing as British or European fantasy? If so, what might define it?

Nothing worthwhile is easy (but d’you think it might be possible to discuss the matter of Britain without mentioning Arthur? If so, I’d be an advocate…). There seems to me to be a British mood in fantasy, which can be contrasted with an American mood, and both with a European mood; but those are all such generalised conditions - an agglomeration, rather than an essence - that I’m not sure it’s a useful distinction. And then there are the Canadians, the Australians… You’d have to set European fantasy aside as being a different case, being translated fiction, where t’others are all writing in their localised versions of English; I think language has a bearing, just as culture does, the angle from which you see the others. Etc. It’s a topic for a discussion paper: way too complex for here, now.

Can Western fantasy ever truly deal with the non-occident?

Well, I hope so, because if not I’m wasting my time. This seems to me to be the same question as ‘can a male writer ever truly enter a female mind?’ or vice versa, or black/white in either combination, or whatever. It’s our job to study, to extrapolate and to imagine; nothing is privileged, nothing gets an exemption. If you back form this question to its logical origin and assume a negative, then I could write nothing but mimetic novels about gay middle-class white male writers. Which is not acceptable to me. I’m a fiction writer; I make stuff up. I take my readers with me, or I don’t. The rest is silence, and I leave the critics to fight over that.