The Five Factors of Fantasy

I usually hunt the shelves of fantasy aisles on my lunch hour.  And I spend a lot of time looking things over before I buy.  I do judge a book by its cover, I'm afraid.  And though this has lead to some disappointments, overall, it seems to work well.  Thank God that I chose to disregard this in the case of the Eye of the World, painted by Darrell K. Sweet, or I would have missed the fantasy experience of a lifetime.  One of the reasons I dodged the bullet on that one is that another natural factor in fantasy selection is:  numerosity.  Quite simply, if a novelist manages to generate four or five novels in a series, there must be some pretty serious demand for his work.

Many people stop reading a book after the first chapter.  I like to give the author the benefit of the doubt and will always finish the first book.

So I will take this opportunity to develop, The Five Factors of Fantasy. 

1)  Character
2)  Cliche
3)  Scope
4)  Magic
5)  Theme

Character:
The characters of a fantasy novel really have to appeal.  They don't have to appeal on the first page, necessarily, the first page is about action, scene set up, and drama.  But they do have to set up interesting characters such that the reader is curious enough to continue reading.  A good example of this is from the Prologue of the Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan.  The first character we meet is one that will never directly be a character in the book until well into the fifth or sixth novel.  But he towers over the entire universe of the novel.  He is the Dragon, Lews Therin Telamon--and in the first ten pages of the novel we learn he is mad, extremely powerful--and destroyed his entire family, as well as doomed the world to three or four generations of suffering.  And he's one of the series heroes!

Cliche:
Which brings us to another factor.  Fantasy uses a variety of tropes, and cliches.  Many people use this fact to condemn fantasy literature as schlock, drivel and pulp.  While all of that may be true, depending on the author and the publisher, the compelling use of cliche is what makes good fiction, great.  There are many common fantasy cliches, and I won't waste your time with all of them.  The first and most common is a "Coming of Age" cliche.  Here's an example, Eye of the World, and Sword of Shannara, both start with this cliche.  This cliche may have first been used by J.R.R. Tolkien in the Fellowship of the Ring.  You have an innocent, fairly young, but good and pure of heart, who either by birth, or by sheer happenstance is thrown into extreme danger.  The novel becomes a progress, a quest, over which the character grows up and has a series of fairly commonplace revelations as he does so.  S/he falls in love.  S/he confronts danger and fails.  S/he is afraid of taking responsibility for what s/he must do.  S/he deals with success and its arrogance.  S/he deals with loss.  These are all factors and cliches that take place in ALL fiction, and yet, are unfairly condemned in fantasy fiction as cliched.  A good fantasy acknowledges these cliche's and either breaks through them, or enlivens the characters so well, that they become real people, and thus escape the chains of repeated habit.

Scope:
All fantasy novels must be huge in scope.  But it's tricky.  The lesser type of fantasy novel takes a well developed fantasy world, and writes it for one novel.  When the Ancient Evil is destroyed, and the publisher wants more, suddenly the world is expanded, the conclusions rewritten.  A good example of this is the series written by Terry Goodkind, the Sword of Truth Series.  The first novel was quite good, as were the second and third.  Yet I couldn't help but feel that there wasn't an overiding, overaching plan.  Each entrance into the series would start with a new ultimate villain.  I think this began to change around the time I stopped reading.  Goodkind is a very good story-teller.  But in my mind, his world lacked the scope of a truly excellent fantasy series.  Scope means that the history of nations is established and old hat to the writer from the first page.  The author doesn't need to explicate the history of the city-state of Tear, every descriptive sentence about Tear describes a history, vivid and ongoing.  The author doesn't need to explain the relationship between Tear and Illian, his mere mention of the two provides centuries of war, economic and religious strife.

Magic:
This is the easiest qualification to meet for good fantasy.  Afterall, what's more exciting and dramatic, than magical powers.  Nonetheless, creating a world that operates by all the usual physical laws, gravity, etc., is easy, creating a world that operates with all of those elements, and yet can, in certain cases throw off these rules in orderly and consistent ways, is quite difficult.  Dungeons & Dragons created a world of magic that operated along fairly traditional lines.  Lines stretching back throughout the course of history, using a combination of alchemy and spell books to cast powerful spells was adequate to the fantasy writers of the 50s through 70s.  But after that, magical powers began to grow.  Truly fabulous worlds exist now, whose magic operates on well defined rules, and yet never ceases to amaze and awe.  The consistency factor is highly important here.  A reader can suspend disbelief in fantasy, but the mystery of magic must have some theoretical explanation, or else it seems spurious, a convenient ruse for the author to escape from poorly written situations.  Also, magic is linked to the fifth category, theme.  The magic of a fantasy world sets the tone of the entire novel.  Since magic is so closely aligned with theology, philosophy, and yes, science as well, how the system works and on what operating basis sets the characters in place more firmly than the laws of thermodynamics.  As writers have grown with new technologies, so have magical powers.  Magic is more than just power to kill, burn, break or heal.  It's the power to communicate, network, demonstrate, and travel.

Theme:
The last of the five, is theme.  Theme is always hard to define.  And to me, it's always been closely linked to writing style.  Compare the styles of Jordan, Martin or Cook, and you see a wealth of similiarities and differences.  Each stylistic element adds a depth of tone that is difficult to describe.  Some of the worlds are heavily based in real life, some are incredibly dark, some are highly theoretical without overt description.  Donaldson and Tolkien created very dark worlds like these, as did Cook, recently.  Themes in fantasy aren't created so much by what is said, by then what is not said.  As Rembrandt would have called it, chiaroscuro, light and dark.  Or what my highschool art teacher would have described as negative and positive space.  Each space has a physical body, a presence in the mind of the onlooker or reader.  And around that physical object is the negative space.  The cutout that defines the object more clearly than the object itself.  Well defined fantasy expresses both.  Theme is the fifth and most crucial piece of information.  It really is the magic behind the story.  For any fiction, theme breathes life into what could just be a set of instructions or a screenplay.  Some readers and critics call this "voice."  You know it when you see it.  And you definitely know it when you don't.

Next stop the Briar King