Comments on: How did the fantasy trilogy come to be?

By: hrugaar

hrugaar — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 04:14:00 +0000

‘…I was asked to edit out all the SF that was in my second fantasy novel before it was published…’

Now that’s just absurd.

By: Satima Flavell

Satima Flavell — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 23:16:00 +0000

Yes indeed – and may it go on forever and ever and ever:-)

By: Glenda Larke

Glenda Larke — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 16:05:00 +0000

Some interesting stuff there that I had forgotten, Satima. It’s almost as if Tolkien was just fitting in with the trend that was already developing, and all it needed was a slight push to really get going in the latter part of the century.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 17:57:00 +0000

Sorry I've come in late on this one: I've been moving house:-) But this is a topic I find fascinating.

A lot of modern fantasy sneaked in under the doors of Sci Fi and the historical novel, but it was definitely fantasy, even if most of the books were stand alones. There were exceptions, however: L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt hail from the 1940s and many of their stories involved the same characters and settings: "The Incomplete Enchanter" and "The Castle of Iron" were collections marketed as what we would now call a duology. And Ursula LeGuin's first Earthsea book came out in 1968 and eventually became a quartet. (Of course, books tended to be much shorter in those days. Forex, Roger Zelazny's Amber series, which can be found today as a single volume, was published in 10 parts betweem 1971 and 1985.)

Arthurian spin-offs have been around for yonks - T.H. White's "The Once and Future King" was copyrighted in 1938, (although I don't think it was published then). "The Crystal Cave", the first book in Mary Stewart's Arthurian trilogy, came out in 1956. Do we read these as fairy tales or fantasy?

Fantasy as we know it does seem to be a C20 phenomenon, and the trilogy a development that dates from Tolkien's publisher's inability to fit LOTR into one volume. (It took Tolkien a while to take off: when I was at Uni in the 1960s he had a cult following but little popular appeal.) Yet is there really so much difference between the "cautionary tales" of folklore, satirical novels such as "Gulliver's Travels", works of religious allegory from Bunyan to C.S. Lewis and modern stories such as Glenda's, which, as she has pointed out, contain picaresque themes that we might see as harking back to "Robinson Crusoe"?

Regarded in historical perpective, fantasy's line of succession is not easy to divide into periods with distinct styles. There has, I believe, rather been a steady development from the fairy tale to The Isles of Glory and beyond.

May it long continue.

By: Glenda Larke

Glenda Larke — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 19:26:00 +0000

Karen – that’s about how I remember it, too. Strange, isn’t it, that LOTR didn’t have a more immediate influence. As I recall it was published in 1947?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 13:32:00 +0000

I believe that is was Del Rey with the Brooks Shannara books that started the ‘modern’ fantasy publishing boom, with first trilogy then series of books with purely fantasy elements. The next big name that springs to mind is Eddings. I can’t think off hand which publisher started him, but I think it was DR again. McCaffrey, DR, although the Pern books were nominally SF, appealed to the fantasy crowd with dragons … and we were off to the races.

This was in the 70s.

By: ink paw prints

ink paw prints — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 04:13:00 +0000

aw, maybe some day you could have it republished in its original form 🙂

By: ink paw prints

ink paw prints — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 04:10:00 +0000

When I said modern genres I meant Fantasy and Scifi... I'm not sure if there are any others. (I made a concious decision when I was 16 that I wanted to be a fantasy writer and have been trying to conquer the genre ever since! So I'm not terribly knowledgable outside fantasy at the moment.)

--before anyone says that I should keep my mind open, it is open, I'm just specialising currently. Also when I say I want to be a Fantasy writer, I only mean that as far as wishing to write stories set in worlds that I have imagined, usually with some form of magic.

I agree completely that writers and stories shouldn't feel that they are being limited by their genre(s).

By: Glenda Larke

Glenda Larke — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 03:53:00 +0000

I know I was asked to edit out all the SF that was in my second fantasy novel before it was published…sigh.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 23:15:00 +0000

I might be a fangirl, there are a lot of people I am still in frank awe of, but I've also been a pro for a decade - and I don't THINK I was being snippy although with a certain lack of caffeine in my system anything is possible. I do, however, think before I post.

However, apology accepted.

You said:
"I do completely understand where you're coming from though. A lot of people are so dismissive of modern genres, and anything modern, as if people have to live at least 100 years ago to do something worthwhile. I guess it's a cheat way to bypass some of the rubbish that time whittles out."

I think that a lot of what you might be thinking of as "modern genres" were inventions which were implemented to make booksellers' lives easier, and that more and more books are fighting to get out of the artificial ghettoes that has been producing over the years - if the current crop of "Genre-bending" or "genre-busting" novels is anything to go by. I don't think you can trammel story permanently - sooner or later it escapes and goes grazing in forbidden paddocks. I can see how it can make for commercial headaches, but as a writer I'm rather gleeful at it all. I"m kind of sitting here on the story side of the barricades yelling "freedom or death" with the best of them...

however, now it's MY bedtime, so I'm going to leave it at that...