fantasy

in which the author examines the current popularity of fantasy novels and how that pertains to certain trends in our society

When you query a manuscript you look through a lot of literary agencies, and a lot of agents, and patterns start to emerge.

Not a lot of agents are looking for science fiction right now.

Literary fiction is popular. Romance is popular. And if I see “women’s upmarket fiction” one more time in a wishlist, I’m going to scream. (Just looking at adult fiction, here - I’m not considering YA/children’s or nonfiction in this breakdown). A good number of agents want fantasy, and some will have science fiction tacked on there, but almost always with other phrases like “hauntingly beautiful” or “lyrical” or “cozy” that make it clear they’re not looking for science fiction that digs its teeth in until it draws blood. Even rarer are the agents who are actively representing science fiction, even rarer still the ones who are currently open for queries!

I was at Barnes and Noble the other week, last bastion of corporate book retailers, and took a survey of the shelves in the adult fiction section. Fantasy had eight shelving units dedicated to it. Romance, eleven. Mystery, twelve. Science fiction?

Four.

Four, and in those four shelves, barely any new releases or debut authors. Half the space was occupied by Isaac Asimov, Octavia Butler, Frank Herbert. Arthur C. Clarke. Authors from a bygone era. Christopher Paolini made it in there (remember him? the Eragon author? He put out a couple of scifi novels in the last few years.) Who’s the latest science fiction author to make it big? Andy Weir? The Martian was published in 2011. Cixin Liu and Martha Wells both got big streaming deals out of their books, but they’re not exactly household names. While movies and TV have had a scifi boom in the past couple of decades, particularly streaming series, there hasn’t been an upsurge in scifi books to match.

Not the way that fantasy has had a resurgence lately.

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What’s in a genre, anyway?

More than one agent, when reviewing my query and opening pages, has seemed confused by the “science fiction” label. but where are the flying cars? the advanced technology? they’ve asked, apparently befuddled by the far-off, ever-so-distant future of 2054 still feeling relatively recognizable. your characters have powers, I thought that meant this was fantasy.

Star Wars, one of the most popular scifi properties of all time, happens “a long, long time ago” and features characters with magic powers who can do everything from telekinesis to necromancy. The original Star Trek series brings its spacefaring characters into contact with Greek gods. Dune may have interplanetary travel and water reclamation suits but it also has giant wyrms guarding a treasure men go mad over and a society of powerful witches. The Wheel of Time books, a hallmark epic fantasy series, take place millennia in the future of our current world. What about N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth books, featuring earthquake magic, living statues, and a moon colony reached by rockets? Dragonriders of Pern, where riders and their telepathically-bonded dragons discover the spaceship that brought their ancestors to the planet? Science fiction or fantasy?

Genre is bias. It is a way for us to attach preconceived notions of what a book will or won’t include before we even open the cover. It is a marketing concept, neat little boxes that our books get stuffed into so the bookstore staff know what shelf to put them on. It is defined far more by what we expect of it than what it actually is.

So what do - or don’t - we expect of science fiction?

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Ask anyone why romance and fantasy are so popular right now, and you’re probably going to hear something along the lines of “It’s wish fulfillment.” It’s an escape. It’s fantasy. In a crazy, scary world, it’s spending some time in a world that isn’t. But can’t scifi do those things too? Cozy, low-stakes science fiction exists (look at the oeuvre of Becky Chambers). Science fiction can do romance too. What does fantasy satisfy - in our expectations, at least - that scifi doesn’t?

• We grow up with fairy tales. Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty - some of the earliest stories we internalize are the ones about fairies and dragons and beautiful, beleaguered maidens who find their happily ever after in the arms of a rich man. What brought us comfort as children, we turn to as adults - the power of nostalgia.

• Fantasy novels often have defined social roles. Kings and queens, warriors and mages, pirates and witches, and so on. And once a character has their role assigned, they very rarely deviate from it. Their social role determines who they are as a person throughout the narrative.

• On that note, defined gender roles, especially when it comes to romance. Heroines are beautiful and slender and soft; even when they’re good at fighting, it’s because they’re fast and agile, never aggressive and muscular. That’s reserved for the heroes, who glower sexily and immediately exert their control over their designated women. And women who achieve power do so via their sexual coupling of men with socioeconomic wealth.

  • (What’s the wish fulfillment aspect of an emotionally-constipated male partner who expresses his attachment issues as jealousy and controlling behavior? Those are a dime a dozen in real life.)

• Static landscapes and history - here is the map. Here is where the borders are. Here is the legendary history that everyone knows and no one disputes (unless they’re Evil). This is how the world is.

• Moral superiority - a supreme good versus a supreme evil and the heroes always have the moral high ground, even when they’re committing war crimes.

No, not every fantasy book is like this - of course not. There are innumerable excellent fantasy books out there that challenge some or all of these aspects, and there is plenty of science fiction that is just as formulaic and restrictive (and misogynistic). I also want to be very clear that I don’t think people are in the wrong for enjoying fantasy books that hit these criteria. One of my all-time favorite series is The Lord of the Rings, and, well…

And if we leave aside for a moment “fantasy,” I do not think that the reader or the maker of fairy-stories need even be ashamed of the “escape” of archaism: of preferring not dragons but horses, castles, sailing-ships, bows and arrows; not only elves, but knights and kings and priests. For it is after all possible for a rational man, after reflection (quite unconnected with fairy-story or romance), to arrive at the condemnation, implicit at least in the mere silence of “escapist” literature, of progressive things like factories, or the machine-guns and bombs that appear to be their most natural and inevitable, dare we say “inexorable,” products.

“On Fairy-Stories,” J.R.R. Tolkien, pub. 1947

We’ll come back to this quote in a second.

But the appeal and escapism of fantasy isn’t the magic and the sparkly gowns and the bright swords, not really (though whom amongst us doesn’t long for those things); it’s a world where nothing truly changes, where the Good Guys Always Win, and everyone behaves according to their station. It’s the comfort of conformity. It’s the easy escape of a world where all the rules are laid out for you and all you have to do is follow them and you will be Okay.

Science fiction doesn’t offer that comfort. On one level, so much of what we associate with the genre - rapidly-advancing technology (including AI), murdered ecosystems and life in sterile spaceships, hegemonic power structures - directly reflects our fears in the current moment. But in the same way, science fiction pulls tradition and stability to pieces and says “what now?” How do you make a map for a constantly-changing universe? How do you define morality when faced with impossible-to-win scenarios? What does gender mean when dealing with nonhuman sapient species? The purpose of science fiction, as a genre, is to examine the world we live in now, and ask what it might be, and if that’s really the way it has to be.

That’s why we need it now more than ever.

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We also can’t ignore gender when we look at the discrepancy between the demand for fantasy vs. science fiction.

Fantasy - especially now that romantasy has come on the scene - is a genre primarily marketed towards women. Booktok is a female-dominated arena. Science fiction is still considered “masculine,” despite the many female authors writing incredible works in the genre. It’s an arbitrary division, but arbitrary decisions are what marketing thrives on.

Remember the genres most agents are seeking? Literary/upmarket fiction, romance, fantasy, mystery, book club, women’s commercial fiction… if I were trying to sell one of these, I would have my pick of agents. I rarely find an agent looking for science fiction, or thriller/crime (aka romance novels For Him). The genres that are being sold right now are the ones marketed at women.

Verilybitchie’s “The Fashion of Sci-Fi Futures” brings up a fascinating dichotomy - in so many of these imagined futures, femininity is associated with elitism, intellectualism, academia, and an “ascended effete.” Masculinity, on the other hand, is down-to-earth, combative, practical, physically capable.

This attitude isn’t confined to movies. If I say “real men don’t read,” it’s parody, but not by much! As the cost of college education has skyrocketed, the perception of education and intellectualism as something impractical and reserved for the elite has grown correspondingly. Reading has become linked with leisure, with aesthetic photos, with lifestyle content - and out-of-touch liberalism. The real working class, the bastion of traditional values, doesn’t have time to read. They don’t need to read.

The biggest grift the political right ever pulled was convincing people that education makes you susceptible and weak.

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I agree with Papa Tolkien about fantasy and escapism - mostly. Modern life is scary! Technology is advancing at unprecedented rates and disinformation is rampant and so much of our lives are governed by uncontrollable, unforeseen forces that we barely even have the comfort of religion to explain away. We are bombarded with a 24/7 news cycle of dire circumstances and crises in a way our little monkey brains were never meant to cope with. And believe me - I was an introverted child who read to escape during school. I understand the appeal of fantasy lands and unicorns and magic swords as much as anyone else.

I also understand the importance of respite. How cozy fantasy - such as queer cozy fantasy - can be a welcome break from a hostile world, for example. How being able to recharge our souls, to bring ourselves peace, if even for just a few hours, is vital to our survival.

(I want to make a note, here, in case it wasn’t clear - that I’m not concerned with individual motives for escapism, or preferences in reading material - I’m much more interested in broad societal trends.)

But in the same way that self-care, once a term of resistance, has now been thoroughly cannibalized into a vehicle for commercialism and over-consumption, we have to be careful - or at least cognizant - of what we’re escaping to. The same desires for safety and security, for falling back on comforting tradition, for avoiding the discomfort of the Other, are fueling the rise of conservative ideology and media, everything from tradwives and homesteading content to right-wing politics.

I subscribe to Martijn Doolaard, and his videos of renovating two cabins in the Italian Alps and building a life for himself are absolutely idyllic. He builds and crafts with attention to detail, cooks the vegetables he grew himself over a fire, and enjoys spectacular scenery. But when his (very traditionally-dressed) girlfriend joined the scene, suddenly the flip side of the fantasy life he portrays became more evident. (And to be clear - I’m not speculating on the nature of Doolaard’s relationship with his girlfriend, or any dynamics they might have. Merely on the perception of it.) Too often our fantasies of a simpler time, of a more traditional life, are uncomfortably intertwined with modesty and purity culture, with misogyny, with gender and sexual repression. How many fans of his channel use the life he’s building as fuel for their own fantasies, that include not just a simple craftsman’s life but a subservient, obedient female partner?

So much of fantasy hinges on a “Chosen One” figure. A rightful king, a hero ordained by fate or divinity, a single person on whom the fate of the world rests. We long for chosen ones in real life. How much simpler, better, would it be if we could only choose The Right Person who would then fix everything for us? Not just a leader, but a savior? And so we succumb to authoritarianism because the fantasy of a Chosen One is more appealing than the hard, messy work of democratic process.

Fantasy can be an escape, but not for everyone, and not all the time. We must not run back into our prison cells because we have known them all our lives, and are frightened by the open meadow and bright sky.

We must not mistake the familiar for the free.

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Cover picture: Illustration of Beauty and the Beast by Henry Justice Ford & George Percy Jacomb-Hood for The Blue Fairy Book, published 1889.

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