Heroic fantasy
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Heroic fantasy is a sub-genre of fantasy literature which chronicles the tales of heroes and their conquests in imaginary lands. Typically it emphasizes the conflict between good and evil. Frequently, the protagonist is reluctant to be a champion. The term is often used to avoid the garish overtones of sword-and-sorcery.
Since its beginnings, heroic fantasy has evolved. While it was at first all about heroes (from Greek or German mythology to Tolkien, through Arthurian tales), it now features both multiple-viewpoints stories by, for instance, George R. R. Martin and the ability to make fun of itself.
Many new authors now shed, at least partly, the traditional concepts of heroes and even of good and evil. They tend, like Robert Jordan or Robin Hobb, to use several viewpoints, of "heroes" or "villains", and to blur the distinction between those two categories. A recent rewriting of the Tolkienian myth by Jacqueline Carey that, while not located in the same world, also describes the struggle of a company against an evil god and his army, shows this evolution well. The main characters of the book are actually the "villains", who are shown not as "evil", but as normal people who suffered from betrayal, or just made some bad choices. On the other hand, the "heroes" are rather arrogant, narrow-minded, and unforgiving. In other words, there is not much difference between the two sides. Even the "evil" god has been forced into the role, not by fate, but because of his brother's pride.
Perhaps an even better example of this evolution is the rise of irony and self-derision in heroic-fantasy. Authors like George R. R. Martin like to break the clichés of the genre, by featuring "usual" heroes, like knights, as murderers, bullies and rapists, while kings and the like are devious and uncaring manipulators. The only decent people are powerless commoners, who struggle to survive during a civil war that does not concern them. There is little that is "heroic" about them, however, at least not in the usual sense. Other authors like David Gemmell write the same kind of stories. Another type of irony is to use "anti-heroes", like Jacqueline Carey's Phèdre, who is essentially a clever, resourceful and caring young woman... who incidentally happens to be a masochistic prostitute too. But by far the best example of heroic-fantasy making fun of itself is provided by the famous British writer Terry Pratchett, whose parody of the genre are widely acknowledged as a prime example of British humour.
To put it in a nutshell, heroic fantasy has matured and certainly does not deserve any longer its image as some kind of sub-science-fiction, minus the imagination and literary skills. It has become a genre of its own, the best examples of which are worthy of real praise.
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[edit] Selected authors
- Robert E. Howard
- Jessica Amanda Salmonson
- Sir Henry Rider Haggard
- David Gemmell
- Charles R. Saunders
- Edgar Rice Burroughs
- Karl Edward Wagner
- Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany
- Michael Moorcock
- J. R. R. Tolkien
- Terry Pratchett
- Robert Jordan
- George R. R. Martin
- Jacqueline Carey
- Mercedes Lackey
[edit] Quotations
"Heroic fantasy" is the name I have given to a subgenre of fiction, otherwise called the "sword-and-sorcery" story. It is a story of action and adventure laid in a more or less imaginary world, where magic works and where modern science and technology have not yet been discovered. The setting may (as in the Conan stories) be this Earth as it is conceived to have been long ago, or as it will be in the remote future, or it may be another planet or another dimension.
Such a story conbines the color and dash of the historical costume romance with the atavistic supernatural thrills of the weird, occult, or ghost story. When well done, it provides the purest fun of fiction of any kind. It is escape fiction wherein one escapes clear out of the real world into one where all men are strong, all women beautiful, all life adventurous, and all problems simple, and nobody even mentions the income tax or the dropout problem or socialized medicine. — L. Sprague de Camp, introduction to the 1967 Ace edition of Conan.
