Fantasy novels and stories cast a spell on readers, with
their vivid worlds and complex characters. But just like any other kind of
spell, there are different types, and rules. You need a magical lexicon. So here
are 10 commonly used terms you’ll need to know, that describe the different
sorts of fantasy worlds and stories.
Top image: Zippo514 on Deviant Art
1) Portal Fantasy
C.S. Lewis’ Narnia is a perfect example of a “portal
fantasy,” in which somebody goes through a gateway or portal, and
winds up in a magical world, where everything is different and wonderful. Wizard of Oz is another example, where
the portal is not literally a portal. Instead of encountering magic in our
world, or starting out in the other world, the protagonist travels from our
world to the magical place. Often, the portal fantasy involves a heroic quest
of some sort.
https://gizmodo.com/walk-through-this-portal-with-me-into-another-world-5683053
According to Farah
Mendelsohn, the opposite
of “portal fantasy” is “intrusive fantasy,” where
something magical breaks through and comes to our world. There’s also
“liminal fantasy,” where someone doesn’t quite cross through the
gateway, but just stays on the border between our world and the world of magic
and adventure, causing leakages in both directions.
2) Secondary World
A “secondary world” is a place that’s entirely magical,
like fairyland: the sort of place where fairytales happen. When this term was
coined by J.R.R. Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy Stories,” secondary
worlds often included “lost continents” like Lemuria or Atlantis, or
other undiscovered magical places on Earth. But nowadays, when people talk
about secondary worlds, they usually mean someplace that’s basically another
planet, like Westeros. An Earthlike planet where there are (usually) humans and
a culture that’s vaguely recognizeable to humans, but it’s not just an
alternate-history version of Earth. Like Westeros, for example. When you stop
to think about it, it’s kind of odd that there are so many Earthlike planets
where humans live in socities that resemble European (or sometimes Asian)
history — but it’s one of the conventions of the genre. Image: Kerembeyit/Deviant Art.
3) Epic Fantasy
An epic fantasy is a long story, told over several volumes,
and it usually takes place in a secondary world — or at least, an epic tends
to be an “immersive fantasy,” which means that you start out fully
immersed in the magical world from the beginning. (In an immersive fantasy,
nobody goes through a portal or has magic intrude on the normal world — people
just live in the world where magic exists.) An “epic poem” is a long
narrative poem, that features legendary heroes, and Tolkien’s Middle-Earth saga
was seen as an attempt to “synthesize the epic that Old (i.e., pre-Norman
Conquest) England never had,” says scholar and author Brian Stableford. After the
success of Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin, publishers put out a ton of
epic fantasy series in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Image from Lin Carter, Imaginary Worlds.
Another term that’s used somewhat interchangeably with
“epic fantasy” is “high fantasy” or “heroic
fantasy,” both of which connote something a bit fancy. According to
Stableford, the term “heroic fantasy” was coined by “critics who
thought sword and sorcery sounded too downmarket while fantasy was struggling
to assert its independence as a genre.” “High fantasy” was coined
by Chronicles of Prydain author Lloyd
Alexander, to describe a fantasy that takes place entirely in a secondary
world.
4) Sword and Sorcery
So what is “sword and sorcery,” and why was it
considered “too downmarket” when “heroic fantasy” was
considered a saleable genre? Basically, as Pyr Books editor and Frostborn author Lou Anders is fond of saying,
it’s like Dungeons & Dragons —
in fact, Dungeons & Dragons and
similar RPGs may have kept sword and sorcery alive, as a genre, while everybody
was doing heroic fantasy instead. Sword and sorcery is less “heroic”
than heroic fantasy, and tends to include a lot more rogues and thieves. Heroic
fantasy takes place in the palace, sword and sorcery takes place in the dark
understreets of the city. Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray
Mouser stories are classics of the genre, but early practitioners include
Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany and C.L. Moore. L. Sprague
deCamp edited a 1963
anthology called Swords & Sorcery,
that includes all the classics.
5) Urban Fantasy
Basically, it’s a fantasy story that takes place in the city
— often, a modern city, rather than a Medieval or Victorian one. This city is
often in “our” world — and in fact, I’ve heard “urban
fantasy” used as a shorthand for “an immersive fantasy that takes
place on Earth rather than on a secondary world.” If it takes place in New
York or London, it’s an Urban Fantasy.
But in fact, a lot of the tropes of urban fantasy, such as a
hero living in a society that includes vampires and witches among normal
people, often take place now in small towns or suburbs — think The Vampire Diaries’ Mystic Falls. So
some people have suggested that we start using the term “suburban
fantasy” or “rural fantasy” to describe these — or just admit
that “urban fantasy” doesn’t have to be urban.
6) Folklore
Long before Tolkien or Lord Dunsany, there were magical
stories being passed down through the oral tradition — including “forms from major to minor such as epics, myths, legends,
fairytales, fables, proverbs, riddles, songs, jokes, insults, and toasts to
nursery rhymes,” as Julie
Carthy puts it. Every culture has folklore, and it provides the basis for a
lot of fantasy storytelling — there are fairytales, such as the Brothers Grimm
went around collecting and synthesizing. And there are fables, which are
stories for children with a clear moral lesson at the end. And folk-tales or
folk-legends, which purport to be real stories about something that happened
locally, in the past. These stories give us a lot of motifs that stick with
fantasy storytellers, from the troublesome giant to the wicked stepmother.
7) Magic Realism
Magic realism (or “magical realism”) usually
refers to literary fiction where magic is part of everyday life, and there’s a
touch of the surreal about the storytelling. Magic isn’t something separate and
different from everything else, but just an extension of the real world.
According to Stableford, the term was first used to describe the poetry of
Pablo Neruda, but became widely known with the popularity of Gabriel Garcia
Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of
Solitude. Many of the most famous practitioners of magic realism are Latin
American, although the term has been used to refer to other authors — for
example, Kelly Link’s dreamlike storytelling is often referred to as
“magic realism.”
8) Gothic
In a nutshell, gothic fantasy contains a lot of supernatural
horror elements, such as ghosts or vampires or other monsters — but there’s
also an element of romance, such as a romantic hero. Plus a decaying, ruined,
formerly-grand setting and a sense of encroaching despair. Gothic fantasy is
also sometimes called “dark fantasy,” especially if it takes place in
a secondary world. Gothic literature doesn’t need to include fantastical
elements — for example, Southern Gothic literature, as written by William
Faulkner and Eudora Welty, includes elements of the grotesque without any
supernatural elements. But a common denominator in gothic fiction is the sense
of dread, and the danger of succumbing to madness. Image: Elise Kroese.
9) The New Weird
Back in the day, supernatural horror fiction was often
referred to as “gothic” fantasy — but if it got weird enough, like
the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, then it was called “weird fiction.”
Basically, horrific tales of strange creatures and somewhat inexplicable
encounters, with a fantastical edge to them. And in the past 20 years, people
have started talking about a genre called the “New Weird,” which
blends together science fiction, fantasy and horror with a distinctly literary
edge to it. People were trying to jumpstart this subgenre in the 1990s — but
it received its foundational text in 2000, when China Miéville
published Perdido Street Station, a
novel set in a secondary world featuring bizarre creatures, an arcane science
and a horrifying arc. Since then, editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer have
championed the idea of the New Weird, publishing
an anthology of stories that take Lovecraftian motifs into a more
stylistically ambitious direction. There’s some overlap between “New
Weird” fiction and “Slipstream,” which is a term for genre-blending
storytelling with literary ambitions.
10) Grimdark
Lately, you hear a lot of people talking about
“grimdark” fantasy. This is, essentially, fantasy that takes place in
a secondary world that’s dark and edgy and excessively violent. Featuring
anti-heroes or morally gray heroes, and a lot of brutality. People point to
authors like Richard K. Morgan and Joe Abercrombie as examples of the new wave
of “grimdark” writing. Over here,
Morgan reacts to “grimdark” as being a pejorative term that includes
not only his work and Abercrombie’s, but also George R.R. Martin’s Westeros
novels. I’m not sure if “grimdark” is always used pejoratively, but
there are certainly many of us who like that sort of thing and use the label
approvingly.
Sources: Brian
Stableford, Farah Mendelsohn,
Jenniliisa
Salminen,
Julie
Carthy and Anne-Kathrin
Höfel
