On Fantasy

Genre is kind of an arbitrary thing, and it's at once useful and wasteful to talk about. They tend to be broad umbrellas, but at the same time, there's a pattern and a set of reoccurring themes that people gravitate towards.

While I write dark fiction, I consider myself more of a fantasist than anything.

Ultimately, I think the strength and the attracting factor of the genre is the dynamic tension between the real and the unreal. We live in a world that can be described by science. We understand cause and effect. We have a mental library of observations and learned formulas against which we measure what is likely to be true. We're creatures of the real.

But we can imagine something outside of that.

It's probably fair to say to a certain extent that all fiction is fantasy. If a character is hit by a Mac truck, simply saying so isn't enough. You need to describe your hypothetical truck with the trappings of the real: weight, force, velocity, mud on the tires, candy wrappers in the cab, and so on. But the trick, the magic, and the fun of fantasy, in my opinion, is taking those trappings of the real and hanging them on something purely imaginary. It's not enough simply to say there was a unicorn. Putting something unreal into a story displaces the world around it like Archimedes' gold into a glass of water. You can test the validity of its composition by how it affects the real and measurable things around it. What is the smell of a unicorn? Has it ever had to put its horn through a wolf to defend itself? What does it eat? Where does it rest? What are the consequences. How is what we would expect of the real world changed logically by its presence?

There are dozens of admixtures of reality and whimsy that fall under the genre umbrella: the surreal, where the familiarity of dreams and the re-blending of everyday and fantastic symbols makes up for the strange internal logic; the allegorical, where things that cannot be stand in for things that are; the mythological, where the accumulated weight of history, folklore, and tradition lend credibility to fantastic claims; the romanticized historical; the scientific gone wild; and so on.

For my own writing I tend to lean heavily on the surreal and mythological. It's still important that things feel real, even if it's primarily accomplished by identifiably human characters having understandable, real-seeming reactions to the impossible.