Here's an interesting article entitled 'The Aesthetics of Fantasy', on the blog of Jonathan McCalmont, discussing the format that most people think of when they hear the word 'fantasy', to wit, epic fantasy, or what he calls 'fat fantasy' (referring to the thickness of the books). Some people seem to find the concept of 'fat' perjorative, which is not how he seems to mean it (anyway, let's have some respect for different body types here, people), but to avoid annoying anyone more than I usually do, I'm going to use the phrase 'tome fantasy' instead, as less alliteratively pleasing but possibly less controversial as well.

He makes, among many interesting points, one that I've thought myself but have seldom seen expressed: namely, that the fantasy genre has a strong streak of conservatism in it. It's not what you'd expect; fantasy readers tend to think of themselves as unconventional, and in a fantasy world you can have more or less anything, which ought to lend itself to endless variation, but in fact, the market drive for more-of-the-same means that many of your bestselling authors are going to conform quite closely to the conventions that this relatively young genre has quickly accrued, and new authors are likely to be judged in the light of these conventions by conservative readers whether the writers are particularly interested in those conventions or not.

I have a theory that when it comes to fantasy, there are two main ways to make a success: either you conform closely with the prevailing fashions and establish yourself as a heavy-hitting deliverer of the conventional goods, or you engage aggressively with them and write a book that directly challenges and subverts them. McCalmont opines in another article, 'The only good fantasy novels are those that set out to pick a fight with the very foundations of the genre.' It certainly can make for a successful fantasy novel - but there's a problem: by the act of rebelling against those foundations, you implicitly acknowledge their authority. The rebellious type of book can net you considerable admiration, as people who are accustomed to the tome fantasy traditions will see you as extremely innovative, but I personally have my suspicions: it's fairly innovative to do a new take on the wicked stepmother, comic sidekick or boy-who-would-be-king tropes, but it's much more innovative to simply come up with new characters and situations without referring back to the cliches at all. If there was a law saying you had to have a comic sidekick in every story ever written, then the most original stories would be ones where the sidekick didn't behave as expected, but as no such law exists - or at least, not if you set aside tome fantasy conventions - writers are free to be entirely original if they please.

Hence the third way, which is to ignore the conventions altogether and simply write a book the way you think it should be written - but that is likely to net you a smaller audience. If your book is sold under the label of fantasy (which tends to make an author dependent on the fantasy market, as it's one of those genres many people who aren't fans simply won't touch) but fails to acknowledge the conventions, a proportion of the fantasy market is going to have difficulty knowing what to make of it. The tropes are so present in the genre that, for people who read little else, how the author engages with them is as much a criterion for assessment as how they handle fundamentals like plot, pacing and characterisation. An author who doesn't engage with the tropes at all can be found as confusing as an author who eschews plot. Hence there's a pressure from the readership to perpetuate the traditions - sales figures - which encourages publishers to find marketable authors who will keep the conventions alive. Traditionalist readers read them, and so the conventions remain.

So fantasy has a tendency towards aesthetic conservativism, or at least, certain kinds of fantasy do. But McCalmont goes further, and raises the subject of political conservatism:

It is rare for fantasy stories to be about changing the world for the better, instead they tend to revolve around protecting the status quo against an evil threatening it (Lord of the Rings) or undertaking a quest that wrenches the protagonists away from an idyllic childhood (A Song of Fire and Ice). It also explains the popularity of setting fantasy novels in what are essentially post-apocalyptic dark-ages where some earlier age of enlightenment or advancement has passed leaving only ruins, relics and legends. This results in stories that are about recapturing a by-gone age either figuratively by seeking a powerful object from that age or literally by changing the current world so that it resembles the old one more ... The tendency of fantasy novels to look backwards rather than forwards combines with unpleasantly racist and reactionary genre staples such as a confrontational attitude towards the Otherness of non-European cultures to give an impression of unpleasantly right-wing politics. This is most unfortunate as this is not necessarily reflective of fantasy writers being particularly prone to reactionary views but rather a result of sticking too closely to tropes drawn up at a time when unthinking racism and hostility to Otherness was very much the norm.

By this logic, even a left-leaning author is handling an essentially authoritarian story structure, because of the time at which such stories were first popularised. He probably has a point, but there's another element that occurs to me, due to the nature of authoritarianism. (Credit for this theory should really go to my boyfriend, who pointed it out as we discussed the above article.)

I've already recommended Bob Altmeyer's oustanding online book The Authoritarians, and I'll probably recommend it again; anyway, one of the many things he says is that authoritarianism is intimately linked with a sense of crisis. Chapter Two discusses the roots of authoritarianism, and the main one is fear: the feeling that the world is on the edge of collapse. As he puts it, 'Authoritarians score highly on the Dangerous World scale' (referring to a test that asks if you agree with statements like 'Any day now, chaos and anarchy could erupt around us.'). He continues:

[Authoritarians] are, in general, more afraid than most people are ... Events like the attacks of 9/11 can drive large parts of the population to being as frightened as authoritarian followers are day after day. In calm, peaceful times as well as dangerous ones, [authoritarians] feel threatened.

In the mindset of an authoritarian person, the barbarians are always at the gate.

Now, think about the nature of the standard tome fantasy plot. There's a Dark Lord, right? And probably hordes of minions. There's a quest that needs to be undertaken, and if it fails, the world will be plunged into darkness. The barbarians are, in fact, actually at the gate. The world in a fantasy novel really is the way authoritarians believe it to be.

The real world is seldom this black-and-white, right is seldom entirely on the side of good Us as opposed to evil Them, and considering that people have been on record complaining that things are going downhill and society is on the edge of moral collapse pretty much since humanity worked out how to write*, I think we can assume that humanity as a whole, if not fragile individuals, is a bit more robust than the panickers imagine it to be. But the very fact that people have been saying we're going to the dogs as long as they've been keeping records suggests that there's a recurring personality type that considers the world at bay from the forces of darkness, no matter what the current political situation.

In a fantasy novel, in short, the world is beset by crisis in a way that very seldom happens in the real world - but to authoritarian instincts, such a scenario expresses how things actually seem to be.

Which is to say, the tome fantasy plot has an authoritarian ring to it not because fantasy writers are authoritarian, but because authoritarians are fantasists.

Of course, some fantasy writers may well be authoritarian, but the problem is more with the story structure than with the writers. Stories express a world-view, and, even to a low-authoritarian, easygoing novelist who's more attracted to the tome fantasy story by the shimmering swords and sense of adventure, it's difficult not to in some way express a world-view that lends itself to authoritarian thinking. I suspect that in less authoritarian writers, this may present something of a puzzle. I tend to be pretty low-authoritarian in my thinking, and this led to some story issues becoming essential in Bareback: the principle that if a society was divided into two groups, there had to be wrongs on both sides; the fact that thinking ethnocentrically leads even nice people to act badly; the belief that power is easily abused and that those who have power are just as fallible as those who don't; the presence of a somewhat unreliable narrator, as I have a lot of trouble creating characters who are right about everything - it goes against the grain of how I think people really are, and the more perfect they are, the more bored with them I become. But then, the thriller structure, which is what I was using, gives you a lot of flexibility, with everything from the square-jawed government enforcer to the humane, free-thinking maverick being perfectly possible. I don't think I'd ever write a stop-the-barbarians quest, because I'd either have to demonise the barbarians and get bored as all get-out, or I'd have to humanise them and then the quest wouldn't be a good idea. But then, no writer is a perfect yardstick for any other, and there may be other unauthoritarian authors who feel better able to handle the difficulties.

To a writer who does have an authoritarian temperament, on the other hand, handling such a story will be a snap. It's a simple structure that expresses what they consider to be a fundamental truth about the world.

Does this necessarily mean that tome fantasy is a politically questionable genre? Well, to a certain extent that's going to be subjective. If you're authoritarian, you'll probably consider it expressing a higher truth, whereas if you're not authoritarian, you're either going to consider it merely enjoyable and not bother worrying about the implications, or you'll find it, if not offensive, then possibly less engaging. One reason I could never get into Tolkien, despite many recommendations, was that I simply didn't buy the idea of a Dark Lord. Even though Tolkien tries for moral complexity, and I'm sure he was a moral person (I have no idea how authoritarian he was), the closest he comes to complexity is the temptation of good people; good is definitely over Here and bad over There. There is a simple acid test for morality: either someone wants the ring destroyed, or they want it preserved. I just couldn't swallow the idea that morality was that simple, and it left me feeling less interested in the whole thing. I wonder if boredom may be a factor with moral incompatibility.

Is there a connection between conservative plotting and conservative politics? I'd be extremely wary of making such a generalisation. McCalmont remarks that:

...fantasy frequently includes a strong moral element, but that it rarely actually discusses the content of the morality in question. Instead, people fight to destroy things such as the forces of evil or ancient dead gods or corrupting artefacts or they wage war on people such as demented wizards and witch queens. In essence, morality in fantasy is not so much a question of commandments or rights, it is about wanting rid of a certain object or being on the same side as some particular person.

This is a fairly authoritarian mindset: the law is the law and you have to find the grail/get rid of the grail because that's just how it has to be. Evil is a given at the outset. To a writer who's interested in genuine moral complexity, that's a rather stymieing standpoint, and you can handle morality more flexibly if you abandon it. But what about writers who try it and are genuinely uncomfortable with authoritarianism? I'd take J.K. Rowling as an example; she has a basic morality of alliances - pretty much nobody who sides with Voldemort can be considered a good person - but complicates it by including the fact that, while you can't be for the Dark Lord and good, you can be against the Dark Lord and bad. Consider Dolores Umbridge, Blairite inquisitor and Kafkaesque torturer of children, who subjects teenagers to scarring torments in detention if they question the Ministry's party line: she's not in favour of the bad guy winning, but there's no question that she's a nasty piece of work. And, it's worth pointing out, her politics are rather close to Blair's policy of Spin: making everybody believe that everything is all right is more important than admitting there's a problem and fixing it. Which is to say, she's satirising the authorities under which the book was written. All of which suggests a pretty open-minded and non-authoritarian author.

However, there's at least a case to be made that the morality of alliances remains in some ways essential to the structure. If you look at the anti-Voldemort-but-bad people, they all have an alliance as well: they're on the side of the Ministry. People can be irritating, or peculiar, or even mean, and on the side of good, but broken down to its essentials, Rowling's story complicates morality by a rather clever device: there are three sides rather than two. The Ministry serves the function of the other bad guys; bad guys who emerge as bad over time rather than presenting as bad right away, but still, follow the story of Percy Weasley, and you'll see how the moral trajectory works: either he sides with his family under Dumbledore and is a good guy, or he sides with the Ministry, in which case, nuts to him. Rowling makes a bold attempt, and is gifted enough at writing compliicated good characters that not all the evil is on the side of the Dark Lord - people on the good side do some pretty bad things, even among the Dumbledore-followers - but as the story requires a battle structure, alliance remains at least a strong hint as to someone's basic nature. (I say this as a Rowling admirer, by the way: her psychological insights, especially with flawed 'normal' people, are pretty sound, and on the whole I think she makes an excellent fist of writing a battle-fantasy structure from a non-authoritarian viewpoint. Her solutions are, I'd say, interesting examples of the kind of choices you have to make when you want to write a morally flexible story around a structure where alliances are an essential component.)

I suspect that a major reason for this difficulty is that everyone is more inclined to authoritarian thinking when the authority is their own. And an author has absolute authority over their own stories: characters live or die by their words, and nothing gets done without their will. If you say your own character is good or bad, you're right: an author cannot run a fictional world like a democracy, because unreal people are incapable of casting votes. As a result, authors are more likely to become authoritarian when they write. In the real world, it's generally incorrect to say that a particular person or group of people are bad, but if an author says it about their own characters, they can't be wrong. They can be unconvincing, but they can't be incorrect.** Hence, the tendency to pronounce on other people's characters that is a vice in overly authoritarian personalities becomes a practical necessity for a fiction writer.

You can get away with this if you avoid classifying good and evil sides, but if someone is definitely bad, then it's a slippery slope. I'd need a lot more space than a blog entry to explore the topic properly, but I think it is this reason, rather than the fact that epic fantasy as a genre began in a more imperial age, that explains why it feels so conservative. Authoritarian personalities tend to experience life more like an epic fantasy than most people, and such experience motivates their behaviour and opinions. Combine this with the fact that, when you're writing a book, you are the authorities, and it seems hard for a liberal author to escape falling into a plot that inadvertently views the world through more authoritarian eyes than the author's workaday ones. This may not be a universal rule, of course, and as my knowledge of tome fantasy is pretty limited, it not generally being to my taste anyway, there are probably counter-examples. But I do think that as a rule, tome fantasy, a genre that's heavily indebted to a few major influences, has a tendency to be structurally conservative, certainly artistically, and at least skirting the edges of politically as well.

What do y'all think? I should say in advance that if you cite examples I may not have read them, but in general?