The Christendom of Fantasy

I'm a big fantasy fan. It is my literary vice. But the fantasy genre as currently written has two major flaws: it is too damn long and it is not fantastic anymore.

In order to write fantasy today, authors seem to be required to write stories that stretch over at least three books and often four or more. David Eddings has written four of them and their total page count is still less than Jordan's Wheel of Time. And these are stories which could be better told in one or two books simply by focusing on the primary protagonist. If you want depth, flesh out the sideplots later in short story collections or short novels like L.E. Modesitt did with Recluce. Why are they like this? Because the market expects it and will buy these monsters.

The second problem is that modern fantasy is highly derivative. John C. Wright notes a side effect of this in a comment buried on his blog:

But let me make a comment about D&D. The generic fantasyland that Gary Gygax tried to erect, is, ironically enough, Christendom. Many of the features unique to the European Middle Ages -- features that do not make sense absent the context of local princes and a universal church -- are predominant. ... Now, of course, to make it palatable to the modern audience, Gygax stripped out the too-obvious Christian ideas, and substituted a pantheon for a monotheism -- but polytheists never had religious orders like the Roman Church in the middle ages. Rites were perform by the leading aristocrats, not by specially-devoted clerical brotherhoods.

In George RR Martin's GAME OF THRONES, the author there runs into the similar question. He wants to have the 'Dark Ages' flavor of ecclesiastic churchmen in the cities and paganism in the countryside, but he does not want to introduce a jarring note of monotheism, and so he has 'The Seven' gods of the official pantheon, and the groves and 'high places' of the older worship in the countryside.

When was the last time you didn't seen medieval fantasy? Even though you can't have medieval society without the Church. But if medieval society wasn't bad enough everybody is recreating Tolkien, largely because of Dungeons and Dragons. Tad William's Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn Trilogy is just Middle Earth run through a blender. I pick up a fantasy book and wonder how this guy is doing elves, dwarves, and dragons. And if they're not redoing Tolkien they're cribbing notes from Jordan or someone else.

In short, keep it short and original.