Reckon Fantasy or Sci-fi is just a setting or dressing to tell a story. Take any fictional story, have a unicorn walk past in a scene and now it’s a “fantasy” book.
Its more down to tropes and other narrative devices to make it “power” or else. Look at romcoms or coming of age movies, they also often employ the tropes of “beauty/selfworth/goodness comes from inside” which is the equivalent to a farmboy realizing his magical power came from within all along.
Guess it’s the same with the trappings: call something “fantasy” and everyone thinks elves, dwarves, dragons and not necessarily vampires in Manhatten.
As to Abercrombie, I read the first trilogy and it’s not all that much ‘fun’. It really tries to fulfill the ‘dark and gritty’ nomenclature. Interesting as a counterculture experiment but I have no desire to read more or to even recommend it to anyone…
EDIT: eh, I realized I didn’t actually make much of a point here and this post is just a reflection of some thoughts bouncing around my head!
Just move on & don’t mind me…
Remember that it was not Frodo who destroyed the One Ring, but Gollum. You could argue one of the points of the story is that, ultimately, only Evil can defeat Evil.
I disagree, genre (for me) is more than just a dressing, it’s a fundamental dramatic construct. As well as tragedy as a genre has a very specific meaning, science fiction also does. Fantasy is harder for me to pin down, but I have read much less fantasy than pretty much any other mainstream genre.
That doesn’t mean genres are constraining. They overlap and mutate, but in my opinion there’s more to them than just a world-building background. But I do have weird ideas about genre, so don’t mind me much.
PS: to me the most interesting question is not wether all fantasy is a power fantasy (it’s clearly not all, since it would be trivial to write something that doesn’t conform), but whether there is a fantasy work without a power fantasy or its subversion (so whether the possibility of a power fantasy/hero’s journey is part of the theme of the book). Fantasy seems to be about the possibility (or lack thereof) of the exceptional (or fantastical) in the individual. But again, I’m not very well versed on the genre…
I’ve only read the first book in the series and that was a long time ago, but Daniel series was about an ordinary, if smart protagonist inheriting a familiar to solve a Wizards death. The protagonist never does learn about magic.
Also, there is the Jhergal series, but that might just be a classic power fantasy.
The Black Company, of course. That’s a pretty classic trope-buster.
Prince of Nothing (trilogy). What if the generational hero with the magical powers from the secluded monastery is actually a total fucking sociopath but he’s still the only one who can save the world from the coming scourge? I really enjoyed these.
For wizard detective (non-power-fantasy edition) stuff, Midnight Riot (US) / Rivers of London (UK) and its sequels by Ben Aaronovitch are fabulous. Main guy is a PC in London who has some minor wizardly powers but is absolutely outclassed by, well, everyone and everything he deals with.
Glen Cook (Black Company author) also wrote (writes?) the long-running Garrett, P.I. series which is basically a gritty-ish Discworld knockoff that follows a hard-boiled P.I. with no powers but his knack for gettin’ in good with high-class dames and two sets of bruised knuckles. They’re pretty great.
Other fantasy novels that aren’t genre power-fantasies: Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside, Gene Wolfe’s Peace, Castleview, the Latro books, The Land Across, most of The Island Of Doctor Death And Other Stories, Octavia Butler’s Seed to Harvest novels, Edward Eager’s Half-Magic, Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, E.B. White’s Stuart Little, Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father, Magnus Mills’s The Restraint of Beasts (maybe more horror than fantasy), pretty much anything by Alasdair Gray, William Kotzwinkle’s Doctor Rat and The Bear Went Over The Mountain, Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There, JG Ballard’s The Unlimited Dream Company, Jorge Luis Borges’s stories like “The Secret Miracle” and “Funes the Memorious,” Nicholas Meyer’s Time and Again, most if not all of Marquez, really I could double or triple this list without too much effort even if I kept leaving out Russia.
Genre fantasy is a narrowly constrained subset of fantastic fiction. I think if you define those constraints narrowly enough you’ll be able to exclude anything that’s not a power fantasy, but I don’t see any good reason to do that. You can make a very boring argument for Avram Davidson’s “Or All The Seas With Oysters” not being fantasy, but why?
While a lot of fantasy certainly fall into the same groove, there are authors that certainly bend/break the mold. The works of China Mieville often have fantastic settings but don’t feature anyone who can exercise much power to alter the wider world (The Scar, The City & The City, Last Days of New Paris, This Census Taker, etc).
Even works that seem at first glance to fall into (or define) that mold often subvert it - by having an all powerful antagonist who can only be defeated by the diligence or cleverness of a distinctly non-powerful hero wielding powerful forces that originate from others. Lord of The Rings and Frodo with the One Ring - famously - is no one without the ring (and Sam). The power is never his to wield.
But more recently the Wolfhound Century and its sequels, Stella Gemmel’s The City, and other books certainly fall into that tilt of the genre. Otherwise ordinary people who can only defeat evil by using the uber-artifact, and are otherwise quiet powerless without others to back them up.
I think you could slot in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods/ Anansi Boys into fantasy that isn’t power fantasy. They are neither a deconstruction of such either. But their roots as modern interpretations of mythical tales might make them something other than your standard fantasy fare.
No, there are story elements that are part of each genre. You could write a story with dragons and unicorns but not the right story structure and call it fantasy but it would be a bad story. You can also right a contemporary fantasy (like the previously mentioned Big) that has no dragons or unicorns. It is still Fantasy.
Breach is a force/entity outside of the characters. There are Powerful forces in Mieville’s works - but rarely do his characters have any access or control over them.
Can you recommend that? Read all of David’s books and enjoyed them as pulpy action novels with a gruff antihero. Wasn’t too fond of his last book about Troy that Stella finished for him, so a bit uncertain if i should check out her solo work.
I’ve generally thought that to be considered fantasy, the work has to showcase some major difference from our observed reality. This can be traditional sci-fi or swords and sorcery stuff, or something as mundane as a world where people don’t lie, rob, or murder. In this way, fiction that has absolutely no connection to elves, orcs, hyperdrive, or whatever can still be fantasy. Hell, I consider _The Shawshank Redemption _ and Forrest Gump fantasy, because both are giving us worlds where things happen unlike the normally do, whether it’s Andy getting free or Forrest, well, being Forrest.
Second the recommendation for the Long Price series. Separate from all the things mentioned it incorporates economics in ways fantasy novels usually do not!
(It also has a super cool poetry based magic system…)
Well just like not all fantasy is power fantasy, not all horror is either. Horror can be just a setting, so to say that all horror is one thing or another is missing the same point that is being missed for all sci-fi/fantasy. You’re going to have to narrow down horror quite a bit to actually exclude a ton of material that is label horror today in order to claim that.
