Last month I was wrong to call Appendix N and adjacent works “pre-genre” — they definitely were written and marketed during an era in which “Fantasy” was understood as a distinct literary genre (hence the Ballantine Adult Fantasy publishing line).
I think, perhaps, the better way to describe these works from the mid-20th century is not pre-genre but early genre, pre-classical phase, or primitive phase. Perhaps the sixties and seventies were a bridge between the primitive and classical phases. Or perhaps the classical phase starts with Tolkien and I’m just totally wrong.
Anyway, these distinctions and classifications are less important to me than the effect these stories have. Books like The Last Unicorn and my current read, Jack of Shadows, are thrilling — in part — because they feel so unpredictable. There’s a sense that almost anything could happen, and that the world within these stories doesn’t map perfectly onto what we think of as “fantasy worlds.” Jack of Shadows mixes elements of science fiction with fantasy. The Last Unicorn uses anachronisms like “taco” and “magazine” and references to various twentieth century folk and popular music (in the scene with the butterfly). The conventions of what makes something “Fantasy” don’t feel as fixed. Even if, in the end, The Last Unicorn stays firmly rooted in a fairy tale/fantasy world, the tone and anachronisms keep the reader off-kilter just enough to make the reading experience unpredictable.
Jack of Shadows even more so. When Jack moves to the light side of Earth, the genre expectations completely change. Suddenly we are in a technological world very much like contemporary (for the time) late sixties/early seventies United States. Somehow Zelazny balances weird fantasy, sword and sorcery, and something akin to proto-grimdark with contemporary science fiction and it all inexplicably works. What kind of fantasy is Jack of Shadows? It’s hard to define. It doesn’t fit neatly within the classifications we’ve come to expect as 21st-century readers. The Last Unicorn too. These books exist outside of the many conventions and tropes we’ve come to expect from our fantasy literature.
Thinking about genre more broadly, what’s more important, imagery or structure? Is what makes a Western the horses, guns, cowboys, and “Old West” setting, or is it the structure of the lone man living up to his own code of honor against forces that want him to compromise or quit?
I tend to side with the imagery view. It’s a Western if it has a cowboy. Or some horses. Or takes place in the rural West. Certain genres might tend toward certain narrative structures, but these aren’t what define the genre or make it distinct. What makes something fantasy isn’t the quest narrative; it’s the magic. By my definition, it’s fantasy if it has magic. And “magic” is a broad concept. A monster will do. Or some bit of something that goes beyond the known laws of science. Even science fiction is fantasy (or speculative fiction, as some would say).
This approach leaves me open to critique, I know, because the effect of reading a science fiction novel is often very different from the effect of reading high fantasy (or grimdark or urban or whatever). A Canticle for Leibowitz is not the same as The Silmarillion is not the same as UBIK is not the same as Neverwhere. Obvious differences of tone, style, and plot aside, the effects of these stories differ because of the different imagery in each. The underground grime and urban decay of Neverwhere is wholly different from the splendor of the trees of Valinor in The Silmarillion. The imagery matters.
C.S. Lewis wrote about this in his essay, “On Stories”:
Jack the Giant-Killer is not, in essence, simply the story of a clever hero surmounting danger. It is in essence the story of such a hero surmounting danger from giants. It is quite easy to contrive a story in which, though the enemies are of normal size, the odds against Jack are equally great. But it will be quite a different story. The whole quality of the imaginative response is determined by the fact that the enemies are giants.
This explanation feels right to me. A story about giants is different from a story about dragons. Both may be fantasy in my broad definition, but their effect on readers may differ because of these particular elements.
To say one likes fantasy means, in general, one is open to stories about both giants and dragons (and whatever else magic can entail). This is why genres spawn so many sub-genres: It’s a way of saying, “Yes, I like giants and dragons. But no vampires, please.” The difficulty is that fantasy and its many sub-genres tend to grow more rigid as time goes on and more sub-groups are created. Storytelling tropes and narrative structures get associated with these sub-genres so that imagery and narrative structures are hard to disentangle. If I write a fantasy about vampires, there’s a sense that this must be paranormal or urban fantasy. If my vampire story is high fantasy instead, there’s a tendency to think these vampires must interact with elves and dwarves somehow because elves and dwarves are “high fantasy.”
(Please note that many writers subvert these genre expectations, which is perfectly fine, even good. Not everybody writing high fantasy these days includes elves and dwarves in their tales. But we know these things are a subversion because we still have a set of fixed images and ideas in mind when we speak of these sub-genres. Perhaps these fixed ideas are starting to or will change as time goes on, but I contend that the expectations for each sub-genre will change with them, codifying into new conventions and tropes that we will come to expect and then want to see subverted. This is the nature of genre itself.)
If I do decide to put vampires into my high fantasy (sans elves and dwarves), then what I’ve done might spawn a new sub-sub-genre: the grim-high fantasy, or the high-grim, or the paranormal-high-grim, or whatever. The new melding of imagery either serves as a subversion of the old sub-genre or spawns a new sub-sub-genre categorization. What happens, thus, is that at a certain point everything can feel like a reaction to or subversion of different genre conventions. That’s when we move into the later stages of genre, the “revisionist” and “parodic.”
And this is the problem of genre: It gives us tools for talking about what we like in a work of fiction, but then the tools become more important than the fiction itself. Witness the emergence of TV Tropes and countless threads about, “What’s your favorite/least favorite trope?” We approach our literature through the constricting lens of genre: “I like stories about giants,” etc.
But then stories about giants become old-hat, because genre by its nature moves through phases — from primitive to classical to revisionist to parodic and then back again to neo-classical or neo-revisionist or whatever. So one can no longer find stories simply about giants because they’ve all become vampire giants, which is in many ways just as much “fantasy” as ever, but in other ways very different from fantasy simply about ordinary giants. This isn’t a value judgment, by the way. I would very happily read a novel about vampire giants. Perhaps I’ll even write one! But there is something different in that kind of fantasy and the kind of fantasy that has “normal” giants in it.
I’ve been thinking about the phases of genre this month due to the three books I read most recently: The Last Unicorn (a reread), In Calabria (also by Peter S. Beagle), and Jack of Shadows (by Roger Zelazny). The Last Unicorn and Jack of Shadows are from the late sixties/early seventies, a time I’ve already categorized as a bridge from primitive to classical. Yes, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings had been released a decade earlier, but its huge explosion in popularity was only just beginning in the late sixties. The Lord of the Rings was ushering in the classical phase of Tolkien-esque high fantasy (which would culminate in the eighties and early nineties), but in the late sixties, I contend, the genre was still in that primitive/bride phase. The “rules” and conventions as such hadn’t solidified (or become dollar bill signs in the eyes of publishing houses looking for the next Lord of the Rings). The narrative structures and tropes hadn’t hardened the way they would throughout the eighties, nineties, and early 2000s.
This is why Unicorn can have so many strange anachronisms and feel at times like it’s taking place in our world and at other times it’s totally a secondary, fairy-tale world. This is why Jack of Shadows can jump from fantasy to science fiction and back again.
In Calabria, the most recent of the three (from 2017), has nothing in it that marks it as fantasy except one thing: there’s a unicorn in it. The rest of the book involves a modern-day farmer in Italy, a gangster, reporters and such who want to see the unicorn, and mostly regular, everyday people. By my earlier definition of fantasy, the unicorn is enough to make the novel part of the fantasy genre, even though nothing else about the story is “fantasy.” In Calabria is that sub-genre we call magical realism.
Magical realism is an interesting outlier within the fantasy family because it often doesn’t “feel” like fantasy. Most readers, when they say they like to read fantasy are not primarily referring to magical realism. Magical realism is more “literary” (whatever that means), it doesn’t follow many of the standard tropes or narrative structures, it gets marketed often as general fiction, it keeps its distance from the other sub-genres. When self-described fantasy fans say, “I love to read fantasy!” they are not often referring to books like In Calabria. It’s too much like realistic fiction. But then, those who like realistic fiction often don’t care for magical realism. It’s too “fantastical.”
Labeling something “Magical realism” serves the purpose of letting readers know what they’re in for when they pick up a book. These sub-genres are shorthand for letting us know what we like. If I say, “I like high fantasy,” a certain type of book comes to mind. And if I say, “I like urban fantasy,” another type of book comes to mind. And this is useful. We know what we like and we want to find more of it. Genre classifications help us find more of the giants and dragons we want (or don’t want).
But there’s something limiting here too. The Last Unicorn is really nothing like Jack of Shadows except they both share this free-form unpredictability, this sense that there are no rules yet. But once we get the genre rules, once we categorize and classify — a useful sense-making, for sure — we lose that unpredictability, that feeling that the author is making it all up as they go along. In Calabria — despite the surprises of the plot — does not have that same reckless unpredictability. We know what kind of story it is; Bianchi is not going to suddenly talk to a butterfly and join a traveling sideshow, or drive across the day-lands to Twilight, or compete for the Hellflame. I wouldn’t love In Calabria as much as I do if it was that wild and reckless in its storytelling.
The constraints of genre — and the constraints of good storytelling in general — can make for brilliant art.
But there’s something golden in the messiness of these primitive/bridge fantasies — in the old pulps and later in novels like Jack of Shadows and The Last Unicorn. Before we all started knowing with our eyes closed the conventions of fantasy, we had to travel with these dangerous explorers, drawing the maps in the dark.
I love the concept of genre, and it is helpful to classify. But there is also something limiting that happens when we do. Both as readers and as writers, we can’t help but draw lines around what we love and say, “This is what I want. This. Not that.”
I enjoy magical realism. I also love high fantasy. I’m not a fan of paranormal romance. But what am I missing by drawing these distinctions? How much do these distinctions hem me in? Particularly as a writer, how much are these distinctions closing me off from finding something new?
I love giants and dragons, but maybe I need to invite some vampires in too. And watch them give birth to unicorns.