A Little More on Taboos — and Censorship

I observed two events today in the world of publishing and book distribution that alarm and offend me.

First, it appears that Kobo has removed all directly self-published titles and many of the titles distributed by third parties (such as Smashwords and Draft2Digital) from its UK e-store. This was done in response to complaints about erotica being sold through that store. Apparently it’s only the UK store that’s involved here, so Kobo outlets in other countries including the U.S. are still carrying self-published titles.

Second, and a bit more disturbing because the distributor is much bigger than Kobo, Amazon appears to be engaged in its own overreaction to complaints about erotica, or certain kinds of erotica. An author of erotica I’m aware of has seen a book pulled by Amazon because it had a title that was suggestive of incest (even though that’s not the subject of the book).

Our culture is in the end stages of a transition from one paradigm of sexual morality to a new one. It’s not difficult to confuse that conflict between the old and new paradigms with the much older and in some ways more basic conflict between any set of sexual taboos (old or new) and freedom of speech and expression. Advocates of the new sexual morality are just as prone, it would seem, to excessive zeal and to imposing unacceptable restraints on freedom of speech as advocates of the old one ever were. To a creative person, to someone who values artistic liberty, this is not made any more tolerable by the fact that I agree with their views on sexual morality as such. These people may not be objecting to the expression of sexuality itself; they may not have the idea that women should be virgins until marriage or that sex in itself is obscene; they may not attempt to ban all expression of homosexuality. Their objections — as applied to actual sexual behavior — to treating women (or men) as objects, to exploitation of teenage children, to the abuses of the sex trade, to incest, and in general to abuses of power in connection with sex, may in my opinion be well-taken. I may agree with them completely as far as actual sexual behavior is concerned.

But that doesn’t change the fact that they make themselves enemies of art, of creativity, of the imagination, and of freedom itself, by attempting to restrain creative expression according to the same rules that apply to actual behavior.

Censorship was not abhorrent in the past merely because the standards applied to censor books, movies, and other creative expression were outdated and inappropriate to today’s world. It was also abhorrent because censorship is always abhorrent. It is not less abhorrent when applied to creative works that describe things which are forbidden by our modern, up-to-date taboos.

After all, we have plenty of ideas about wrongful behavior that have nothing to do with sex. Crime. War. Murder. Corporate greed. Religious intolerance. Would it be appropriate to censor books containing descriptions of that sort of wrongful behavior? Should we ban all detective fiction because it includes nasty behavior on the part of criminals? Should no war novel ever again be published?

But when it comes to sex, some people seem to see nothing wrong with using whatever tools they can to silence talk, to ban books, to put the creative imagination in shackles. No artist should tolerate this, not in the past, not now, not ever.

We are protected by the First Amendment in the United States, and by parallel laws in most other advanced nations, from fear that the government will impose censorship. But nothing in the law protects us against censorship by corporations engaged in the publication or distribution of art, in response to demands by the neo-Puritans among us. Unless we protect ourselves, by demanding that freedom of speech and expression be held as more precious to us than sexual purity, even according to modern standards incorporating feminism and gay rights.

We are in many ways living in a golden age of art. The Internet, electronic communication, self-publishing not only of the written word but of the visual arts and music as well, these free artists from the control of those who want to exploit them. But this freedom is not invulnerable. It must be protected.

Next week: More on contemporary fantasy, as I originally intended to write this week before I became sidetracked (or sideswiped) by outrage.

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Quality: Editing

This post was sparked by a heated discussion on social media regarding the necessity of professional services for independent writers (editing, formatting, and cover design). I do not believe in that necessity — a statement that requires, however, a huge caveat. I do believe in the necessity of professional quality in these things, particularly editing. But it isn’t (absolutely) necessary to pay for them in order to have that quality.

Nor is it altogether a good idea, at least when a writer is starting out his or her career, for two reasons. To begin with, the first X number of books published by any writer (the value of X varies but is almost never zero) will not sell well no matter how perfectly they are edited and packaged. The writer is unknown. He must connect with his potential audience. Also, he must develop his abilities as a writer and there is only one way to do that: write. Your first novel, almost surely, won’t sell well because it won’t deserve to. It won’t be a good enough story and you won’t be good enough at storytelling to make it stand out from the crowd of other self-published books. You can expect to sell a few copies, but not very many. For that reason, professional services to make it as good as it can be amount to very expensive lipstick on a pig. It is unlikely in the extreme that the book will sell enough to cover the cost.

The other reason is even more important. These three skills — cover design, formatting, and especially editing — are ones that you really should have in your toolbox. As with writing, there’s no way to learn them other than by doing them, and if you’re always paying for someone else to do them you won’t learn them. The practical reality is that you can do almost all of them yourself if you develop the skills to do so. There is one extremely important exception and it’s a part of editing. But even with editing, you can do two-thirds of the tasks (which constitute nine-tenths of the work) yourself, and get help from someone else (or, better, at least two someones else) with that all-important third task.

If you don’t want to spend a lot of money on these services, or just plain don’t have it to spend, then there are three rules to doing without the pros.

1) Learn the skills.

2) Do it.

3) Get good beta readers.

In other words, quality requires either money or time, and if you don’t have the money you must invest the time. Far too many indie writers don’t. So let’s deal with those three things that you need to be able to do (besides writing) to make your book the best it can be. I’ll start in this post with editing, which is far and away the most important of the three.

Editing involves not one task but three, and only two of those can you do yourself without help. This is why we’re often told that “you can’t edit your own work.” There’s truth in that. You can’t do all of your own editing. But you can do two-thirds of it.

The three tasks of editing are proofreading, copy editing (also called style editing), and content editing. The last of those is the one you’re going to need someone else for. Luckily, it’s also the most enjoyable of the three and the least tedious, so getting help isn’t that hard, where if you want someone to proofread your work you’re almost certainly going to have to pay for it.

Proofreading. This task involves going through the book to find and correct misspellings, grammatical errors, punctuation errors, and so on. Yes, your word processing software comes with spelling and grammar checkers, and these can help, but they are not a substitute for proofreading by a human being. They just make the job a little easier. Spell checkers won’t correct a word that’s spelled correctly but is the wrong word. For example, if you were to write, “The burden was more than he could bare,” neither the spell checker nor the grammar checker would say boo. “Bare” is a real word, it’s correctly spelled, and it’s a verb where a verb is called for, but it’s still wrong. (Actually I just experimented and found that my Word grammar checker does catch this one, which is pretty amazing. But don’t count on that. I’ve seen it do some very stupid things.)

You must know how to spell, and you must know correct English grammar. (Just to make things more complicated, you must know the correct spellings for the type of English you are writing — American English has many words that are spelled differently than the same word in the UK, Australia, or Canada, thanks to the fact that English didn’t even have standard spellings until right around the time America became independent, and then the country developed its own standard spellings in parallel to the ones set down in England.) (I really pity people learning this tongue as a foreign language.) You must also know the correct spellings of any made-up words or names that you use in your writing — you’re an absolute authority on how they are spelled in that case, but you must be consistent. You must go through your book repeatedly. One pass is not enough. (You can do proofreading at the same time as copy editing and plain old reading to revise, though, so it’s not quite as awful as  it sounds.) Make no mistake: this is work. It’s not as much fun as writing that first draft, but it’s a labor that must be done. Spelling and grammatical errors in a book are distracting; they pull the reader out of immersion in the story and they annoy. Two or three of them in a full-length novel don’t meet my standards, but if you’re not as much a perfectionist as that, they’re probably allowable; most trade-published books have a few errors. But two or three on a page is absolutely not acceptable. And you will not catch them all the first time you proofread the book. I don’t care how good you are.

How many times must you go through it looking for errors? Until you don’t find any, and then once more. When you have gone through the book twice and found no errors, it may not be error free, but it’s surely close enough that the reader will forgive you for the few that remain, and professional publishers won’t do any better.

Copy editing. This task is somewhat similar to proofreading, but instead of looking for spelling and grammar errors, you’re looking for clumsy style or language that could be shortened, tightened, made stronger. I look for sentences that are too long (my great stylistic failing), and also for repeated words. Except for articles, conjunctions, and prepositions, I don’t like to use the same word twice in the same half a page. I like to read through it aloud, and if I hear a word used too often I change it so that no longer happens.

Go through with a merciless pair of scissors. Cut out anything that doesn’t need to be there to say what you want to say. Be particularly ruthless with adverbs. There’s a somewhat exaggerated rule in writing style that you should never use adverbs; that’s not true, but it is true that novice writers use far too many of them. Many times a sentence can be strengthened if you just cut out superfluous words. Occasionally, the opposite is true and something needs to be added.

The rules of style aren’t as hard and fast as those of spelling and grammar, but they do exist. I suggest picking up a copy of a good literary style guide, such as the classic Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style and reading through it, focusing on the type of writing you want to do. These are rules that can be bent. But before you can bend them appropriately, you need to understand them. Also, the more reading you do of the same type of book you are writing, the more you will have a feel for what makes good writing style.

How many times should you go through and revise a book for style? The same rule applies as for proofreading, with one extra proviso. Do it until you don’t find anything that needs changing. Then put the book aside for a couple of weeks minimum. Then do it again. When you have gone through it twice (with some time off in between) and not found anything to change, then it’s ready.

Some people argue that a writer shouldn’t do his own copy editing. I don’t agree, unless you are unfamiliar with what makes for good writing style, and in that case you should still do your own because that’s how you’re going to learn. (Although it won’t hurt to have someone give you a second opinion.) It’s the third task, content editing, that requires someone else.

Content editing. This last task that’s bound up in the overall concept of “editing” is looking at the flow of the story, the characterization, the pacing. It involves looking for plot holes, inconsistencies, places where developments aren’t clear, actions on the part of a character that don’t seem right, events that seem out of order.

You can’t do your own content editing — and yet you have to. Say rather, you can’t do the content editing by yourself. Sure, go through it and look for things like this, and you’ll find some of them and fix them and also see ways to make the story better and more compelling. But guaranteed you’ll miss things. You’re too close to the story. You know exactly what you’re trying to say, and so you’re not the best judge of whether you’ve succeeded in saying it.

This is the biggest service a professional editor will do for you. It’s the only thing that a pro will do for you that you can’t do just as well for yourself if you work at it. But while someone else looking at your work is mandatory, that someone does not have to be a professional editor. An experienced writer can be just as good. The skill sets are very close to identical when it comes to content editing. A common approach is to do a trade, paying for someone else helping you with content editing by doing the same for her. Content editing, especially if the proofing and style editing have been largely done already, is actually fun. It doesn’t take a lot of persuasion to get people to do it for you. It gives them a free book to read, after all! And they get to tell you where you’ve screwed the pooch, and get thanked for it!

Whatever arrangement you make with your content editor(s) (I would recommend having at least two), pay attention to their recommendations. Even if you decide in the end that a suggestion isn’t appropriate, you will have gained much by considering it, especially if it had never occurred to you before.

As with the other editing tasks, content editing should be done until there’s nothing more to change — and then once more after waiting at least couple of weeks.

Work at it!

Does this sound like a lot of work? If so, then I’ve communicated the main thing I want to. Quality doesn’t come without work, either your own or that of someone else you hire to do it for you. Right now, the indie book scene — a large portion of it, anyway — is a sad travesty. There are far too many books out there that haven’t been edited properly, which gives people who want your money an excuse to say that you have to pay them or your book will suck. They’re wrong about that. But it will suck if you don’t put the necessary work into it, whether that work comes from your brain or from your wallet.

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The Worm of the World

In building a fantasy world, one of the most enjoyable activities is to add its monsters. Here’s one of mine. Of all the creatures I’ve introduced into any fantasy work I’ve ever written, I believe my favorite is the Worm of the World, which appears in The Green Stone Tower and in my upcoming Goddess-Born.

In some superficial respects my Worm is a stock beastie. It borrows from the Ouroboros image of the serpent devouring its own tail, which has significance in alchemy and in some mythologies, relating to the cyclical nature of time and life and the circular quality of the alchemical Great Work. Larry Niven also used a superficially similar creature in The Magic Goes Away, where the World-Worm was a dying god. However, I think there are aspects to my own Worm that make it sufficiently different certainly from what Niven did and as far as I know from what anyone has done. (I’m sure that if I’m wrong about that, someone will correct me.)

The Worm is one of the Not-Gods of the world of faerie or the New World as its own inhabitants call it. Some ten thousand years ago, the gods decided to concentrate all of the magic among humanity in the hopes of making it stronger and eventually raising more human beings to godhood. They did this by transporting the magicians to another world through the passageways afforded by the Green Stone Towers. The gods themselves followed the magicians to this other world, and there they and the magicians built an evolving society that had become very magical indeed by the time my tale begins.

But the New World had divine powers of its own: the Phoenix, the Moonbird, the Turtle King, the Wolf Lord, the Tree Spirit, the Mightiest Troll, and, greatest of them all, the Worm of the World. These beings, although similar to the gods in power and wisdom (well, except the Mightiest Troll, who is not very wise at all), were not gods. All of the gods were once men and women who had made a journey beyond death to become truly immortal. Since they were like the gods, but not gods, the People (as the magicians’ descendants took to calling themselves — the people of the Old World refer to them as the faerie-folk) called them the Not-Gods.

Here is how Malatant, Lord of Shadow, the god of cold, shadow, and the evil in the hearts of men, describes the Worm of the World:

“The Worm is the greatest of the powers of the New World, the beings called the Not-Gods. It is the keeper of the world’s magic and the guardian of all its life and health. It takes the form of a mighty serpent that circles the whole world. In the mountains far from my city there is a high peak with a cave at its base, and from this cave the head of the Worm comes to work its magic, speak its rare words, and devour its prey. The Worm always chooses its prey from the flawed, the selfish, the cruel, and the powerful who, if left alive, can work great harm in the world. In this it is not unlike me, but when the Worm has chosen someone to consume, it puts the death of its prey to a good use, which I generally don’t. Understand that the Worm is not a true beast and does not need to consume flesh as beasts do. In a sense it feeds on the pain of its victims, but even that is only incidental. What it actually feeds upon is their struggle, their desperate and futile attempt to keep themselves alive. The pain is merely a way to ensure that they do struggle.”

“Pain?”

“The Worm swallows its prey whole and they slide living into its stomach, where they are digested alive. The process is very painful, as you might imagine.”

This in essence is my Worm of the World:

1) It takes the form of an enormously long snake that circles the world underground.

2) It is the guardian of the New World’s life, health, and magic. It keeps watch over the ecosystem and promotes the well being of all life in the world that is its domain.

3) As part of this responsibility, the Worm summons the most evil and powerful individuals from among the People, using its vast telepathic strength, and eats them. It swallows its victims alive and subjects them to a long, intensely painful demise in its belly, feeding on their desperate struggles against the pain and converting that energy into health, life, and magic for the world.

For those who aren’t chosen by the Worm as its prey, it is a powerful benefactor whose work helps make the New World a more magical place than the Old World. (Although the People still avoid it — the Worm is just plain scary!)

For those who are chosen to be devoured by the Worm, though, it’s an incredibly terrifying monster! As described by Gilusa, the evil priestess who has escaped its lure by coming to the Old World, in a conversation with Edwin (who is also not at all a nice person):

“It eats people, and I knew it wanted to devour me, and if I had stayed in the other world, by now I’m sure it would have. I used to dream of the Worm, Edwin. I had awful nightmares about it as a girl, dreaming that I stood by the Worm’s cave trembling in fear. I saw the great serpent head come from the cave and the terrible eyes fix on me. I could do nothing but stare back as the huge mouth opened and it came for me to swallow me whole. And then I would wake up screaming.”

“What a horrible dream! Is there really such a creature?”

“Oh, yes, the Worm is real. It devours only the strong-willed and only the magical. It feeds on their magic more than on their flesh. Maybe it feeds on their pain. I doubt it needs food at all in the ordinary way of a beast. To be eaten by the Worm is the most dreadful death I can imagine. One is swallowed whole and burned to death by the acids in its stomach. It’s even worse than it sounds, because the chosen prey is always a sorcerer and my power would work to heal me and keep me alive in the Worm’s belly to suffer even longer until I was too exhausted to heal. The Worm can feed on someone for a long time if the mind is strong. I don’t know how long I would last, but it would not be brief.

“Worse still, it called to me, Edwin! It was so powerful, so hard to resist! I knew what would happen to me if I went to the Worm, but when I heard that horrid voice in my mind, I wanted to go. It was terrifying! It started calling me when I was a teenage girl and resisting it got harder and harder as the years went by. Sooner or later, I knew the Worm would win. I knew that I would suffer and die horribly in its stomach. It was only a matter of time.

“So as you can imagine, I was very happy to receive this mission from the God of Shadow, for the Worm cannot reach me here and I cannot be drawn by its call. I haven’t dreamed of the monster since I climbed the Tower.”

Good incentive to climb the Green Stone Tower and escape to the Old World, clearly!

So that’s my Worm of the World: a benign power of good providing health and magic to the world, and at the same time a terrifying monster that summons its helpless prey with irresistible power and subjects them to a grisly, horrible death. The ambiguity of it is one of the main reasons it’s my favorite among all my creatures.

Goblins, Ogres, and Other Sub-Human Beasties

Let’s consider another staple of fantasy fiction: brutish goons.

These are creatures that present an ugly caricature of ourselves: goblins, ogres, trolls, giants, and similar creatures. Their depiction involves a certain stretching and distortion of human capability both physical and mental along with a sharp downgrade of human behavior in its moral dimension. Either intelligence or physique is downgraded; if intelligence is low then physical capacity may be superhuman, but certainly not both. Sometimes a sub-human beastie may be as intelligent as a human being or even a little more so in terms of tool-use capacity and low cunning, but shrunken physically. At other times it’s the opposite: the creature is as dumb as a stump, but big and very, very strong. And ugly. And usually hairy, or perhaps scaly. Its social intelligence is far below the human norm even when its technical intelligence is reasonably high; these things can’t get along with one another for five minutes without lethal fights breaking out and as for coexisting with their neighbors, they make the Balkans look like a pacifistic Buddhist ashram.

There’s a strong tendency to put creatures like this into any fantasy story. I do it myself. Both trolls and goblins found their way into my Star Mages trilogy, and I put a species of troll into The Green Stone Tower as well. On stepping outside the bounds of humanity and introducing quasi-humans into a story, it seems there’s an irresistible urge to make at least some of them into sub-human brutes. The impulse is common enough to ask what this means on a mythic level.

It doesn’t really work to say that sub-human brutes are a dim perception or memory of our evolutionary forbears or our primate cousins, does it? While some primates superficially resemble a category of sub-human fantasy beastie — gorillas are much stronger than humans physically but not as intelligent — their behavior doesn’t match the “brutal” quality of fantasy beasties and there are no smaller-but-smarter examples; monkeys are less intelligent than we are as well as being smaller and slighter. While our evolutionary forbears are extinct, making similar observations about them impossible, we have no reason to believe them to have been moral degenerates comparable to Tolkien’s orcs.

So sub-human beasties are not dim cultural memories of Neanderthal or Homo erectus with whom our distant ancestors once shared the planet. They mean something else to us, something more in the nature of metaphor and myth — something with which we contend today.

Human beings, struggling into self-awareness and evolving socially and technically towards — well, towards something (it’s often a little hard to tell what, and a subject of some controversy) — we have a disconnect between our animal natures and what we choose and strive to be. We’re the only animal species that suffers from this weird kind of schism in our personality. We evolved with instincts designed by natural selection for a radically different milieu than the one we actually inhabit. Our earliest ancestors to be considered of the species H. sapiens were born between a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand years ago. The forerunners of civilized life, what might be called proto-civilization, first appeared some ten thousand years ago in the first neolithic farming communities, and civilization proper — life in cities — came into being maybe two thousand years after that. Between the birth of the first true human beings and the establishment of the first proto-civilized communities lies a span of at least ninety thousand and perhaps as much as a hundred and ninety thousand years: at least nine times as long and possibly nineteen times as long as we have been even remotely civilized. During that time, our ancestors lived in small bands where everyone knew everyone else and most people were related. They had no formal government or hierarchical religion. Everyone worked, but no one had a “job” in today’s sense; you went and hunted or harvested wild food plants or made tools or clothes or did what needed to be done and what you had the skill to do.

Obviously, the life we live today is very different from that. And so we have a disconnect between our natures as human animals, our instincts, and the conventions and norms of civilized behavior that is suffered by no other animal species except those we raise as pets.

Sub-human beasties, perhaps, represent our animal nature, severed from our human, conscious intent and moral values, and so operating not in a truly animal fashion but in a monstrous one. This is the upwelling of our own capacity for cruelty and depravity. We see it perhaps in war: the human being given destructive power far beyond what our distant ancestors could wield and allowed — no, required — to make use of it. Soldiers on the battlefield, terrorists, controllers of military drones, all exhibit goblin-like cruelty or ogre-like brutality as a matter of course in the mad circumstances of their lives. The mass-murderer, the serial killer, the lynch mob, the race riot, all show the descent of human beings into sub-human brutality. The sub-human beastie is the human being when the moral self goes silent. It is the festering sewer in our depths, the evil to which we can sink if we allow it.

And that’s why it’s such a compelling fantasy theme. It’s a way of depicting monstrous evil without any of the softening and restraining features that are normally present in human beings: a whole society of depraved, cruel things living in a nightmare of violence, betrayal, and loveless wickedness. We can stand to write about this and to read about it more easily because, hey, this isn’t really us.

But it is, of course. And if a writer is really skilled at using this motif, the connection between the sub-human beastie and human beings will be sufficiently clear.

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The Goddess

In our quest to understand the incomprehensible, driven by the urges and inspirations of the god sense, we imagine the divine in many different forms. That-which-Is is neither this nor that: neither male nor female (or both at once); both human and non-human; it has no personality and yet contains all personalities; it is not a living thing and yet in it are the roots of all trees and the eggs of all creatures; it is at once Many and One, All and None.

As we make the transition from a male-dominated world into one of gender equality, it’s only to be expected that our imagination of the sacred would spark a return of the Goddess.

Hear now my call, beloved Mother, from whom all things proceed, and embrace my heart, that I may move beyond the boundaries of myself into oneness with you.

The Goddess has had a troubled history. Female visions of the holy first emerged in the late paleolithic or neolithic period, as people began to imagine the gods in their own image and naturally some of those images were female: the Great Mother, the Passionate One, the Lady of the Mysteries. By the time the paradigm of agrarian civilization with its full patriarchal structure came into existence, the Goddess was firmly enshrined in our ancestors’ worship and could not easily be dislodged. Religion can be a very conservative thing. The Goddess could be demoted to a subordinate role (compared to the gods, that is, not to mere men); she could be re-mythed as the wife of a god rather than the independent authority she had originally been (as was done with Hera and Aphrodite, Lakshmi and Sarasvati); male deities could be promoted over her to dominion of the pantheon, but she was still loved, still worshiped, still cherished and could not simply be done away with. A religious revolution and the emergence of faiths with no roots in pre-civilized life allowed the assertion of a male god with no female counterparts — even though thinking theologians recognized that God has no gender or encompasses both — but even so, the Goddess was never entirely lost, pushing her way into consciousness in the Hebrew propensity to worship Astarte, in the emergence of Sophia and the Virgin Mary within Christianity, in the many goddesses worshiped by Mahayana Buddhists. Still, the agrarian age was not a good time for the Goddess, as it was not a good time for women.

These days are better.

Sing to my soul and awaken my spirit to your desire and your rapture. Open my ears to the sacred song of life, that I may remember the source of my being.

The idea of the Goddess will of course be familiar to all of my Neopagan and Wiccan readers, but mainly in this post I want to explore how she is manifesting outside that religious structure in other religious imagining and practice, and also — as always — in fantasy fiction.

A search for “goddess in Christianity” reveals the existence of Christian movements to assert the bi-gender nature of God (as Mother, too, not just Father), and (naturally enough) diatribes by some against this movement. One may find articulation of the concept of the Shekinah, a Jewish feminine mystical conception that, in this thinking, morphed into the Holy Spirit of Christianity, and hence we find the Holy Spirit asserted to be a form of the Goddess. (Not orthodox Christian doctrine, obviously, but that’s beside the point.) Sophia, the Gnostic Goddess, has been revived by some Christians and merged in identity with the Holy Spirit as well.

A search for “goddess in Islam” reveals similar online currents. The Goddess in some Muslim thought that is gaining increasing prominence (particularly in the West, as one might expect) rises in the myths of Allah’s daughters (a pre-Muslim myth concerning the moon god of Arabic paganism who morphed into the universal deity of Islam), as well as worship of Mary (mother of Jesus), and of a feminine conception of God that is particularly powerful among the Sufi. It’s reasonable to expect that any Goddess manifestation possible in Christianity or Judaism could also spring up in Islam, but Islam seems to have its own versions that are not so pertinent to the other Abrahamic religions.

Are these Goddess manifestations orthodox and canonical according to the authorities within these faiths? Certainly not, but that’s all part of the revolutionary change happening in religion today. The Goddess emerges again both within and outside the established religions and there is no way to bar her path.

Let my face be the mask you wear to dance with your lovers. Let my words speak your wisdom and my voice resonate with your praise and the deeds of my body be offered in your worship.

In fantasy, the appearance of the Goddess, both literally as part of a pantheon and in the form of great (especially immortal) sorceresses, is too ubiquitous for anything approaching a complete list. Even Tolkien, who was in some ways quite misogynistic, felt  compelled by his muse to slip goddesses into his pantheon and to present goddess-like characters along the lines of Galadriel. The Goddess was prominently on display in Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon. She was dealt with delightfully in Diane Duane’s Door Into Fire series. A browse through recently-published works reveals The Goddess Chronicles by Tracy Falbe, The Goddess Prophecies by D.R. Whitney, The Goddess Test by Aimee Carter, and enormous number of other titles with or without the word “goddess” in the title. It’s a growing theme on all levels of myth-making.

The return of the Goddess fills a hole in us that has been empty for a long time. It means the return of the sacred feminine: mythos itself, intuition, sensuality and loving passion, and a restoration of spirituality to its rightful place alongside and complementary to the rational and the linear. The thousands of years of agrarian civilization have been a dark, dark night and we are finally seeing the light of dawn. It remains to be seen what we will make of it, but among all the dangerous and frightening portents that face us, the return of the Goddess offers hope.

You are the Mother of all the universe. From you I proceed, to you I return, as a flame to the heavens or a raindrop to the sea, one with all in the embrace of your love, now and forever.

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Dragons

As I’ve suggested in many posts on this blog, there’s a lot of crossover between fantasy fiction and spirituality. In my case, that’s especially true of dragons. Dragons are fantasy creatures appearing in many different forms in many works of fantasy. In all cases, dragons are big, powerful, and potentially very scary. Often they are also highly intelligent and cunning, although sometimes they are just big scary beasts. Dragons have elemental, magical powers in many conceptions that are normally denied to big scary beasts, including flight (I mean, seriously, consult some basic physics and biology — even an ostrich is too big to fly, let alone a reptile the size of a mansion), fiery breath or another form of elemental long-range armament, and sometimes magic itself.

Many fantasy treatments make dragons hostile, evil creatures. That was certainly the case of Tolkien’s dragons, which were creations of the Dark Lord Melkor/Morgoth intended to spread destruction and ruin. A dragon appears in the Book of Revelations in the Bible as an image of evil, a form of Satan. Some make dragons benign, more in the spirit of Chinese dragon lore in which the dragon is an icon of the creative force or of Heaven. In a few cases, notably Robin Hobb’s treatment of the creatures in her fiction set in the world that includes the Six Duchies and the Rain Wilds, dragons are neither good nor evil but simply magnificent creatures with whom humanity shares the world. That was also somewhat the case in Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy, although those books were written from a more narrow human perspective and the dragons were hostile to humankind, yet beyond human moral judgments.

The dragon is particularly important to me because it is my primary totem image. In a vision achieved through shamanic vision quest stimulated by fasting, drumming, and trance, the dragon answered my call and has been a guide and protector to me ever since. (I wrote a poem recounting the experience and the insights the dragon has brought years ago: Hymn to the Dragon Spirit.) So for me, the spiritual implication of the dragon in real life is very important.

I haven’t used dragons a lot in my fantasy writing so far. I did include one inThe Child of Paradox (Book 2 of The Star Mages) where a dragon appeared in the Background Realm (a vehicle for just about any fantasy element I wanted and a way to sidestep the limitations of contemporary fantasy) and gave advice to Falcon, Dolphin, and Angée involving a disturbing development in their conflict with the Sword. But that dragon, Azure, was not a main character nor a main plot line.

The ambivalent way in which dragons appear in both fantasy and myth — benign or hostile, good or evil, sacred or devilish, but always powerful and frightening — makes them an interesting element to think about, and that’s what I want to discuss today.

The dragon is reptilian, and yet it’s usually much more intelligent than any reptile, and that means, taking advantage of modern knowledge that was unavailable to our distant ancestors who first crafted this myth, that perhaps the dragon is more a fantasy dinosaur than a fantasy reptile. (Dinosaurs are no longer classified as reptiles; many of them are believed to have been warm-blooded, quite likely feathered, and the ancestors of modern birds.) It is an aspect of nature  foreign to human beings, more so than dangerous mammals such as big cats or wolves who are more closely related to us. The dragon is a mythic image of nature in all its wildness, indifference to our well-being, beauty, power, wisdom, and danger. This perhaps accounts for the different treatment of dragons in Christian and ancient Chinese myth. Christianity is entirely human-centered, with man as the center of the universe and the absolutely unique object of divine interest (God having sacrificed His “only begotten son” not for the world or nature in general but for us), while the older Chinese mythic structure has a little closer tie to the pre-civilied view of man as a part of and subordinate to nature and of nature itself as being divine. The same mythic/fantasy concept is touched upon in both conceptions, but in one it is good because it is an embodiment of sacred nature, while in the other it is evil because it is untamed and (at least potentially) hostile to humanity. The difference is not in the creature itself but in our own attitude towards it, and whether we are capable of reverencing nature when it presents a danger to ourselves.

(Remember that the imagination has power and myth has its own reality; we are not free to imagine dragons or anything else entirely as we please, without losing the essence of the myth and its power over our souls. Dragons have been stripped of their mythic qualities in a few works of fantasy but always with humorous intent. In serious fantasy, the dragon is always an awesome and terrifying creature to be treated with great respect, if not necessarily with reverence.)

In an earlier post (Fantasy, Spirituality and Environmentalism), I noted that as our moral and spiritual views evolve in the course of transitioning from classical to advanced civilization, we are adopting a third view of man’s relationship to nature, neither the “man as subordinate” view of pre-civilized cultures nor the “man as dominator” view of agrarian civilization, but a man as caretaker view in which it becomes our responsibility to protect the natural world, first from ourselves, and then from anything else that may threaten it. In this view, a dragon as a mythic embodiment of nature itself would be approached properly by us neither with “It’s great and holy and we must reverence it (and if it eats a few of us that’s a sacred sacrifice),” nor with “It’s an abominable, evil creature and we must destroy it,” but with “It’s beautiful and irreplaceable and we must protect it lest it be lost forever.” There have already been two fantasy treatments of dragons that fit this motif. One is Robin Hobb’s remarkable dragons in her Liveship Traders and Rain Wild Traders books. The other is George R.R. Martin’s dragons in his Song of Ice and Fire, where dragons are the source of all the magic in the world and if they become extinct (which nearly happened) we will be much the poorer and our survival itself will be threatened by the forces of ice, cold, and death.

Which can also be said of nature itself.

Image credit: ancello / 123RF Stock Photo

The Evolution of a Story

I’m not quite halfway through the writing of Goddess-Born, the sort-of sequel to The Green Stone Tower. When I say “sort-of sequel,” I mean that it’s really a separate story. A Tale of Two Worlds will, as I currently envision it, be published as four novels, but it’s not a tetralogy — not one story separated into four volumes. My feeling is that when you’re e-publishing, it doesn’t make that much sense to publish stories broken up into multiple volumes like that, although this is a late revelation and The Star Mages is in fact a trilogy. (The only sense it ever made was when a story was too long to make a convenient printed book size.) But Goddess-Born although it occurs after the events of The Green Stone Tower takes up an altogether new story. Two of the minor characters from Tower have become major characters in Goddess-Born, while the two major characters from Tower appear as minor characters, and there are very important characters in Goddess-Born who were newborn babies at the end of Tower. So there’s a connection, but it’s really a whole new story, and I plan to do the same with The People of the Sea and Light and Shadow. (That also means there’s no reason to wait to read The Green Stone Tower until I’m finished with the whole series. I’ve done that with multiple-volume stories in progress, too, and I’d prefer not to give my readers that sense of frustration.)

What I want to talk about today is the way a story evolves in the telling for me, using Goddess-Born as an example. It’s not unlike the process of biological evolution, as well as other kinds of change, in that its engine is a random process, but the end result is non-random. Randomness generates the content that falls into a pattern — non-randomness — through the power of skewing and selection.

To begin with, all I had of Goddess-Born was one character, Sonia, and only the barest outline of her. In the final scene of The Green Stone Tower, Sonia’s mother (a goddess) left her with the young wife of a wealthy merchant who had just lost a baby of her own. I knew that Sonia had black hair and blue eyes, that she would have a difficult life, and that she would be a great sorceress, because her mother said so when she fostered her. And that’s all! At the last minute in writing The Green Stone Tower I changed the gender of another character, Malcolm, also newly born, from female to male and moved his location from the southern island home of the faerie-folk to Grandlock, deciding he would be a part of Goddess-Born as well (the title can refer to either Malcolm or Sonia or both). I had previously established that Malcolm would be a great artist and would one day paint a famous portrait of Sonia. So now I know:

• The location where the story takes place (Grandlock, also the location of the first part of Tower)
• The names and a few framing bits about two main characters
• One probably-not-defining plot element, or more likely side-plot element

This is the attractor of the rest of the rest of the story, which sets the direction for skewing. As I thought about what to write, my mind tossed up ideas randomly, but they were always skewed towards the attractor. All the ideas that presented themselves had some connection, however tenuous, with Grandlock, Sonia, or Malcolm.

The first thing I considered was when to start the story. I originally intended to begin it in Sonia’s childhood and present tales from her growing up, which her mother said would be difficult. But I rejected this idea in the end because I knew the main story would happen when she was a young adult, and I wanted to get right into it, working the events of her childhood in as backstory.

This shows the work of the other de-randomizer: selection. In biological evolution we call this “natural selection,” and I suppose that’s the case here, too, insofar as I’m natural, which has occasionally been the subject of doubt but of which I’m fairly convinced. A random idea, telling stories from Sonia’s childhood, was selected out. Other random ideas which popped up have been selected in.

One random idea that made the cut was incorporating two not-major characters from The Green Stone Tower, General Tranis and Anne Fircone, as major characters of Goddess-Born. Tranis is sent from the other world by Sonia’s goddess mother to do something mysterious but portentous and described only by hints. (Incidentally, cryptic hints from a goddess are a great way to disguise the fact that, in creating the story, at that point the author has no clue what is going to happen, which I didn’t and in some ways still don’t, although some things have crystallized.) Anne, it turns out, is Malcolm’s aunt by adoption. She was the faithless lover of one of the main characters in Tower, who did him a terrible wrong, and that story and all that went with it have bubbled into her more mature persona in Goddess-Born, twenty-one years later.

So I began the story not in Grandlock but in the other world, with Tranis being sent on his mission, his experiences in the city of Watercourse, and his encounter with an agent of a secret society called the People of the Shadow, which was another random idea that popped in and was not selected out. And in telling the separate and interacting stories of Tranis, Sonia, Malcolm, and Anne, all in third-person limited point of view, the major plot elements, involving a democratic revolution, a nasty sorceress, and the machinations of this secret society, have sketched themselves in outline.

And that’s more or less the way my stories evolve. I always have an idea or two, a character, a concept, an overall theme, but I have never sat down to write a story and had it all planned out in my mind before my fingers touch the keyboard. It grows organically on the way.

Now, I’m certainly not saying this is the only way to tell a story. Other writers use more up-front planning. There’s no One Right Way when it comes to art. But I thought I’d describe the process because it’s a nice illustration of the way that order and coherence can emerge from randomness, through the influence of skewing and selection.

Image credit: veneratio / 123RF Stock Photo

Fantasy, Spirituality and Environmentalism

Our culture is going through massive changes. The transition we face is every bit as huge as the change from pre-civilized life to civilization that began some ten thousand years ago. That transition was complete, the important political, economic, social, and cultural features of agrarian civilization all in place, by about eight thousand years ago in the earliest places it developed. Those features included technologies (farming, the wheel, metal-working, written language), political and social developments (classes of warrior nobility, commoners, and slaves; monarchy), and religious and moral developments, which are the ones of concern for the present purposes (not to say the others were unimportant, of course). So the entire transition took about two thousand years. Our own metamorphosis has been ongoing for about five hundred years. It may take just as long as the earlier one, or it may not; at this point it’s impossible to say.

We have developed new technologies as part of our transition (artificial energy, computers, new communication technologies from the printing press to the Internet). We have replaced monarchy with the democratic republic as the standard, prevailing political form. We have abolished slavery and serfdom and the old warrior nobility. These changes are huge and wrenching and they’re not finished yet — we’re not in the forms, political or economic or cultural, that we will have when the change is done, although we’re no longer in the old ones.

We have also made changes to religion and values. In the last post, I wrote about one of the most important of those changes, the rise in the status of women, the return of gender equality (arguably to an even greater degree than it existed in pre-civilized times). Another huge change is the way that we see mankind’s relationship to the biosphere of which we are a part. Environmentalism is potentially almost as big a change as feminism.

The religions that emerged during the agrarian civilized age, which includes all of the so-called “great” religions, saw man as dominant over nature. This was a huge shift from the prevailing view of pre-civilized humanity, that we were subordinate to nature like every other species of animal. That view was not compatible with an economy that depended on the enslavement of nature for prosperity: one cannot plow the soil and dictate what will grow, or domesticate (which means enslave) animals for meat, milk, hides, or labor, if one views oneself as subordinate to nature. In fact, pre-civilized peoples surviving into modern times are known to view these activities with suspicion and distaste.

The view of man as nature’s tyrant is appropriate to agrarian civilization; it frees humanity to tame the wilderness and exploit nature for human needs and desires. The moral belief that man is entitled to do this is expressed in the Bible in Genesis 9:1-3: “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.” Religions outside the Abrahamic faiths have similar beliefs.

But just as the technological changes opening the way to agrarian civilization made the old man-as-subordinate view of pre-civilized life inappropriate to the new circumstances, so has the technological revolution of our own times done with man-as-dominator. Our power over nature has grown so vast that we can no longer afford to see it as ours to exploit at will. We are capable of undermining the basis of life on Earth now, and in doing so we would destroy ourselves, for our original status as dependent on the biosphere has not changed. We cannot return to the pre-civilized view of our place in the world; we have far too much power for that to make any sense. We cannot continue with the view of agrarian civilization, either, or we’ll destroy ourselves. A third approach, man as caretaker of nature, must be adopted, and is being adopted. It remains to be seen whether the transition will be complete before we do in fact destroy ourselves, but the attempt is being made.

Like feminism, environmentalism has a major impact on both spirituality and fantasy storytelling (although in fact, the impact of environmentalism is greatest not in fantasy but in science fiction). We’re seeing environmentalism emerge as a major moral tenet in such unlikely religious traditions as evangelical Christianity, at the same time as new religions such as Neopaganism incorporate it from inception. That we are no longer entitled to exploit all life for our own benefit without restraint, but must pull our punches and protect the planet both from ourselves and from anything else that threatens it is where this is going. From a clever animal, to nature’s tyrant, to nature’s protector — that has been our transition over thousands of years.

As I said, in terms of storytelling we see this more in science fiction than in fantasy. David Brin is a major proponent; it’s all over his Uplift series and the entire theme of Earth. But it does emerge in the myth-making of fantasy, too. It was a part of the ethos of the Lords in Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series, for example. In other fantasy the myth-making is a bit more subtle. The backlash of nature against human fecklessness or wickedness is one way in which it’s presented; this can take the form of old sleeping gods being awakened or guardians of the land arising to punish human greed. The disturbing of balances that redress themselves in vengeance against those that do the disturbing is a motif with broader applications than environmentalism but it has relevance to that as well.

One thing about fantasy is that one can approach a subject indirectly through metaphor, and most of the time that’s what is done, especially in regard to environmentalism which has little direct significance to a low-tech world (where most fantasy other than contemporary fantasy is set). When we see a culture in which old ways must be set aside and new ones taken up; when we see powerful forces unleashed by human greed, power-lust and stupidity threatening to destroy a civilization if a change isn’t made; then we see mythic treatment of the theme of environmentalism.

Logos and Mythos

I mentioned the two ways of thinking referred to as logos and mythos in earlier posts, but the concept needs more exploration, I think. It lies at the heart of myth-making and therefore of both fantasy writing and spirituality.

Logos and mythos are both types of thinking that employ symbols: language, pictures, and mathematics for the most part (although mythos also employs music, and for some very limited purposes so does logos). A symbol is one thing that refers to another thing. For example, the letter T in English refers to a sound made by snapping the tip of the tongue against the palate just behind the upper teeth while exhaling voicelessly. The word “cloth” is also a symbol. It refers to a type of material made from woven plant, animal, or synthetic fibers and used to make clothing and other items. Both logos and mythos employ symbols to think with. They manipulate symbols, put them in different combinations allowed by the rules and from this generate new ideas.

As far as symbols are concerned, the main difference between logos and mythos is this. In logos, each symbol has one and only one referent. The more formal the logical discipline, the more perfectly true this becomes. In science and mathematics, which are the most formal of all logical disciplines, each term must be explicitly defined so that there can be no ambiguity about exactly what it is referring to. As long as you understand the definitions and can follow the reasoning, there can be no fuzziness, no way to misconstrue what is said. Even if it’s something like imaginary numbers or quantum mechanics that defies intuitive comprehension, you can still follow the mathematical reasoning and understand what is being said that way. For the purposes of logos, this one-to-one correspondence of symbol with referent is very important. It’s a large part of what allows logos to function.

In mythos, each symbol has more than one referent. In fact, each symbol has an infinite number of possible referents. The goal in mythos is not to communicate simple, linear truths precisely and without ambiguity as it is in logos, but to open the doorways and windows of the imagination and expand the mind. The truths with which mythos is concerned cannot be communicated, they can only be discovered, and discovery requires that the mind be pushed out of its accustomed, habitual pathways. In mythos, a symbol is not a tool for precise, unambiguous communication of easily-comprehensible truth, as it is in logos, but rather it is a tool for connecting ideas that may have no logical and obvious connection and so causing a person to think, feel, and imagine in new ways.

Why these two radically different ways of using symbols? Because each serves a completely different purpose. The purpose of logos is, in the end, technology. All of its questions are of the nature of “how does it work?” What is the best way to describe this or that natural process, so that we can effectively alter it if we want to without making a ghastly mess of things? (I realize that in applying knowledge gained by logos we often have made a ghastly mess of things; however this comes from acting before our logos-acquired knowledge is sufficiently complete. It’s a problem caused by a deficit of mythos, not by an application of logos per se.) The purpose of mythos is not technology but understanding, and that in terms of meaning more than mechanics. Logos asks how. Mythos asks why. The two should never be in conflict, as they aren’t approaching the same questions and therefore can never provide conflicting answers.

I can best explain how mythos functions with examples, and I’m going to choose three from three different religions.

First, from Islam, the phrase in Arabic pronounced (roughly) “la ilaha ila Allah” and usually translated as “There is no god but God.” Part of this is straightforward enough, but what precisely is a “god”? Clearly the shadada or testament of faith is proclaiming that there is only one of these entities, whatever it is, but “god” could mean any number of different things. We can begin the way most Muslims think of this phrase, as saying that people should worship only one deity, and on this basis they object to polytheism, but even orthodox Muslim thinkers take it a step further and say that one should not worship or revere anything above God — money, pleasure, and power being among the most common “other gods.”

The phrase can also be interpreted to mean that however different the deities worshiped by various religions and cultures may seem at first glance, all of them are One — literally, there is no god but God, and all (seeming) other gods really are God. This is of course not an orthodox Muslim interpretation of the words, but it is one that follows from their possible meanings.

Finally, let’s recognize that, as Muslim teachers observe, anything in the world can be worshiped as a god. That being the case, all things really are God (as there is no god but God), and God is all the world. (This by the way is how the Sufi usually interpret the phrase.)

Which of these is the “real” meaning of the Shadada? There is no one “real” meaning; that’s the point here. To assign it one “real” meaning would be to improperly subject it to the rules of logos, when it properly belongs in mythos.

Second example, from Christianity, words attributed to Jesus: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.” Now, the way that Christians have often interpreted this is to say that only by being a Christian can one find God — a claim that is of course absurd, and easy enough to disprove — and in fact Jesus made no mention here of Christianity (which did not yet exist) nor of any other religion; he referred only to himself. Setting that aside, Jesus is clearly saying here that nobody comes to God except “by me.” What does that mean?

“By me” could mean, “by following my teachings.” Or, it could mean, “by devotion to me as the Son of God.” Or, it could mean, “by what I’m going to do for you — it’s not something you do.” All of these are meanings appropriate to the words used.

Here’s another possibility. In other statements, Jesus often emphasized that what he was, others are, too; that we are all children of God, all one with God, all capable of the same miraculous feats as Jesus himself and more. Also we should recognize that this was a spiritual teacher much given to being cryptic. And so another possible meaning of “by me” is “the way that I have done,” with “me” here referring to the union of God and man which Jesus was — as are we all, the difficulty being to become aware of this.

As with the Shahada, this claim of Jesus does not have one single meaning, but all of the ones listed above and more.

Finally, from Wicca, the words of the Goddess in the Charge: “I have been with you from the beginning, and I am that which is attained at the end of desire.”

Most simply and simplistically, the Goddess is here proclaiming her eternal nature and promising to be with us to the end and beyond. But look at the words chosen: “end of desire.” And consider the words from the Charge that come before these: “If what you seek you find not within yourself, you will never find it without.” This gives a different depth to “I have been with you from the beginning,” suggesting that she is within us, not merely with us.

“At the end of desire” carries a possible meaning of death, but also of attainment of the same goal as in Buddhism, the overcoming of desire. The Goddess is what we find when we achieve “the end of desire.” But what is that? Without desire, there is no action, not even the act of perceiving, and without perceiving there is no world. So “I am that which is attained at the end of desire” can also mean, “I am what the world is when it comes to its end.”

As with the Muslim and Christian examples above, there is no single “right” interpretation of these words from the Charge of the Goddess. The point is not to discover a meaning which can then be conveyed to others in different words. The point is to make the journey of discovery yourself, allowing your mind to be opened and expanded. That’s the way that mythos works, and in all cases the process of discovery is more important than what is discovered.

What Is Fantasy Fiction (Part 2)

Fantasy, the Imagination, and Spirituality

Any fiction has to connect with its readers and relate to their lives in some way, while also stretching beyond the banal. We don’t read stories where we can’t identify with the characters, but at the same time we don’t read stories that are exactly like ordinary life. We want to engage both sympathy and imagination. The reader wants to feel a connection and kinship with the characters and to imagine being the characters, but in doing so wants to experience things that are outside of – and more interesting and exciting than – what he goes through day to day. In fantasy, the stretching is accomplished primarily although not exclusively through the fantasy elements. Connection with the readers? That’s accomplished, as always, by good writing.

Another common but not quite universal attribute of fantasy fiction is that a lot of it has a theme or sub-theme that’s religious or moral or spiritual in nature. By this I don’t mean that the theme conforms to the doctrines of any particular religion (although that’s possible; C.S. Lewis’ fantasy fiction, for example, was strongly Christian, while Marian Zimmer Bradley wrote fantasy with a Wiccan theme). I mean that it involves questions that religion attempts to answer, such as:

• What is the ultimate nature of man/the universe/the divine?
• What should the goal of a human life be?
• What is the right choice of action in any particular circumstance?

Within the context of the fantasy story, questions like these, great or small, are often posed and sometimes answered, the answers always being of a mythic rather than a straightforward character. That is, they are not literal statements but metaphors for truths that can’t be put into words, impacting our understanding on a non-verbal level – tricky when one’s artistic medium is entirely verbal, but by no means impossible as every poet knows. It’s a type of knowing that arises from mythos, not from logos.

(One may also observe that the pitfalls of any type or genre of writing, where it can easily go wrong, arise from the same source as its defining characteristics. One such pitfall for fantasy is the danger of becoming “preachy” and giving the reader the feel of being lectured. That’s a common mark of bad fantasy and it’s something to be aware of and avoid.)

Sub-Genres of Fantasy

Fantasy is a broad enough genre that several sub-genres exist. First one may distinguish between so-called “high” and “low” fantasy. Low fantasy is mostly another sort of story (any kind, really) but contains a few fantasy elements, such as minor magical or psychic ability on the part of one or more of the characters, interaction with a ghost or demon or angel or elf or some such creature, the impact on the characters of a talisman, etc. High fantasy is a story in which the fantasy elements are more pronounced, typically taking place in an alternate world, and pervasive throughout that world.

(Side note: I’ve seen low fantasy characterized as being set in the “real world,” while high fantasy is set in a “fantasy world.” While that may be a good rule of thumb, I don’t believe it’s the important distinction here; one may have a high fantasy as I’m using this phrase that’s located in the real, contemporary world – actually, my own Star Mages trilogy is exactly that, as is the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling – or a work of low fantasy set in an alternate world, provided the alternate world is mostly non-fantastic. A work of alternate history, such as Harry Turtledove often writes, is set in an alternate world but it is not necessarily high fantasy and most of Turtledove’s alternate history isn’t fantasy at all.)

An example of low fantasy is Stephen King’s Firestarter, which is basically a thriller/horror story with psychic powers as part of the plot and character development, while Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is high fantasy.

Another distinction is between the sub-genre of contemporary fantasy and – well, fantasy that isn’t contemporary. While the classic fantasy template has the story take place in an alternate world or in the legendary past, contemporary fantasy is located in the world we know with fantasy elements added. In contemporary fantasy we have all of the technology and cultural features that exist in modern life, while non-contemporary fantasy is often set in an ancient or medieval milieu. There are a number of sub-sub-genres of contemporary fantasy, such as urban fantasy and paranormal romance, which I won’t go into beyond mentioning they exist. One can pigeonhole a story to the point where the main goal – to tell a good story well – is lost, in my opinion, and anyway it’s better to classify a story after the fact. (I’ve never been a believer in using rigid formulas for writing.)

The main point in even acknowledging the different sub-genres of fantasy, other than being able to choose an appropriate genre designation when indie publishing at Amazon or another outlet, is to show the range of story that can contain fantasy elements. It’s wide open. The technological sophistication of the society of the story can run from the Stone Age to science fiction, and the prevalence of fantasy elements can range from minor to all-pervading. Fantasy provides the writer with a varied canvas and pallete and can’t be simplified to a single formulaic template.

Can Fantasy Be a Crossover?

Of course it can. Why not? Writing from any genre can appeal to an audience outside that genre’s usual readers, if it’s good writing, not overly formulaic, and of broad general appeal – in other words, if it’s a good story told well.

Some fantasy titles have already become crossover books. One example is Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, a retelling of the Arthurian legends from a perspective that was both feminist and Pagan. This was a sufficiently original concept and execution that it appealed to a lot of readers who don’t normally read a lot of fantasy. (Also, it may be that because it’s old and respectable, many don’t consider the Arthurian legends to be fantasy stories. They are.)

There are a number of other fantasy authors whose books have crossover potential, and also there are some fantasy titles that already do straddle the border between fantasy and some other genre. Much of Stephen King’s writing falls into this latter category.

Since fantasy is defined in such a broad way – any story containing fantastic or mythic elements – it’s particularly likely to achieve crossover, compared for example to romance, mystery, or thriller, all of which are defined more narrowly. The range of stories that could be called “fantasy” is simply enormous, and if one avoids formulaic writing and strives for originality, solid characterization, strong plot, and all those other good things that characterize good storytelling, the potential appeal is equally huge.