When I attended a talk that the great Rebecca Kuang GRD ’27 (author of the New York Times Bestselling Poppy War Trilogy, Babel, and Katabasis) gave, she vocalized a long-held grievance of mine. She pointed out how literary critics often ignored or overlooked fantasy literature as a whole, and how strange this was considering that the literary world celebrates speculative fiction, with Kazuo Ishiguro winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 201
This ignorance of fantasy has always felt strange to me. From the top ten best-selling individual books of all time, five are fantasy, including familiar titles like Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Rowling’s Harry Potter. Furthermore, if I yell “EXPECTO PATRONUM” in the middle of the street, many people are likely to recognize where it’s from. Lines from The Lord of the Rings like “They’re taking the Hobbits to Isengard” have become a quintessential part of internet culture as a meme. Beyond numbers, it seems, the felt cultural impact and influence of fantasy literature on the world is undeniable. Yet, within Books of the Century, the New York Times Bookreview’s collection of what they considered their most important criticism, only 9 fantasy entries could be found out of 538 articles – a shocking 1.7 percent. The critics, it seems, do not take fantasy as a subject worthy of serious analysis and criticism. The question is, why? A possible answer is they simply don’t know how. After the talk, when I approached Kuang to ask her what makes a fantasy novel good or bad, she responded that there was no good answer to that question. When I asked a similar question to Stanford English Professor and new literary history expert Mark McGurl during a different guest lecture hosted by the Yale English department on the fantasy genre, he responded that the heuristic might be the same as any other genre: prose, structure, pacing, character, and so on, namely in its execution.
Of course, execution, regardless of medium, is a criterion that matters deeply for a fantasy story as long as it is a story. I cannot help but feel, however, that the fact that we do not have standards specific to fantasy is a part of the reason why critics often overlook or ignore fantasy: with only execution as the standard to guide them, they are often more compelled to criticize so-called “literary” fiction, which, by its nature, focuses more on the technical aspects of writing than fantasy typically does. While fantasy certainly can and should be criticized for its execution also, there are other dimensions to fantasy such as the believability of the world, or the originality of the magical system, which matter just as much as execution. This, as I see it, is a problem. For an art form to grow, serious conversation around it is absolutely necessary. There should be active dialogue around what works and what doesn’t. The utility of criticism wouldn’t just be to help practitioners strive for greater heights, but to piss them off if someone says something egregiously wrong about what fantasy ought to be, so that they create to prove this offending critic wrong.
Before we jump into fantasy, let’s pause and understand the bounds we’re working within. What even is fantasy? The standard answer (or as I like to call it, the boring answer) is that it’s fiction that involves supernatural or magic elements, including completely imaginary creatures and realms. That is descriptively correct, but I want to get a more nuanced definition. Let’s zoom out a bit. What even is fiction? Of course, there are many definitions, none of which are all-encompassing, but the favorite way I’ve heard it put is during a lecture for Intro to Creative Writing in my first semester by my professor and speculative fiction writer Marie-Helene Bertino:
“Fiction is truth told under imaginary circumstances.”
I am fond of this definition of fiction because I think it captures the delightful paradox that is “stories.” They are quintessentially just elaborate, convincing, and entertaining lies that some guy came up with, yet through them we learn truths about what it means to be a human being. It also segues very nicely into my definition of fantasy. If fiction is truth told under imaginary circumstances, then fantasy is truth told under impossible circumstances. This gives us some good ground to work with. The difference between fiction and fantasy is the latter’s unique ability to incorporate the magical, the impossible, the otherworldly. It is far more flexible in its imaginary circumstances, which gives it the unique ability to dramatize to an extent that other genres cannot.
Based on this observation, I would like to establish two terms. The first will be “Element” and the second will be “Essence.” By “Element,” I mean the impossible circumstances that the fantasy story offers: dragons, magic, malign spirits, and so on. The second, “Essence,” is a little bit harder to describe. What I am trying to name here is the “truth” that we touched upon in our definition of fantasy as “truth told under impossible circumstances.” The closest thing to Essence in our vocabulary would probably be theme, but I think that is reductive. I understand Essence as a complex web made of insight, motif, and theme, that forms a coherent and nuanced worldview or perspective. But I don’t mean some kind of clear-cut message or takeaway. I mean more so the complex perspective that the story imparts upon the audience. Essence is universal in every fictional story, while Element is unique to fantasy alone.
If the unique components of fantasy are Element and Essence, then perhaps we should evaluate them to measure a fantasy story’s success. Having specific standards for Essence is not really possible because it depends heavily on the reader’s intuition, and if I had somehow discovered how to perfectly judge Essence, then I would have solved all literary criticism forever. I’m really not qualified to do that. The evaluation of Element, however, is quite achievable, and I daresay the first real standard by which fantasy stories can be held. There are multiple diagnostic tests for the Element. What is the speculative element? How much does the author use the central speculative “twist” and branch it out to its full potential? How striking and specific is the worldbuilding? Is it simply a regurgitation and a cliché? Or is it something the likes of which have not been seen before (Ursula Le Guin invented the idea of the “Wizard School”), or to such a scale and effort that dwarfs every other author (Tolkien famously made several languages and thousands of years of history for Middle-Earth)? It seems we can evaluate the success of a fantasy story’s Element through originality, complexity, depth, and so on.
While Element Success is an effective metric, it is incomplete. Let us recall our definition of fantasy: truth told under impossible circumstances, or in our words, Essence conveyed through Element. So far, we’ve examined Essence and Element individually. However, what makes fantasy unique isn’t simply the existence of Element, it’s the relationship between the Essence and Element. To explain, let me reference the Odyssey. The epic isn’t a “fantasy novel” considering it existed far before the fantasy genre, but the parallels are illuminating. Within the Odyssey, a part of the Essence which it explores is “xenia,” or the guest-host relationship. Within the “telemachy” we see ideal forms of xenia being displayed towards Prince Telemachus, especially from Melaneus and Nestor: serving their guests, giving them gifts, letting them leave when they want. Now, that’s about what a writer can do in the realm of more “realistic” fiction. Perhaps a horrible host, or a terrible guest, all within the realm of reality, to dramatize and explore the idea further. We do actually see more of this later on when Odysseus pretends to be a beggar.
But Homer isn’t bound to reality. It would be factually incorrect to call him a “fantasy writer,” but he certainly has access to the mythological. So in order to explore the Essence further, he introduces the Cyclops: a barbaric, cannibalistic giant. After all, the greatest inversion of a host feeding and giving gifts to their guest is a monster that traps and eats their guest. Circe, who turns her guests into pigs, would be another salient example—the Element allows for a more dramatized and interesting exploration of the Essence than would have been possible without it. This sheds light on another fundamental standard for fantasy: the relationship between the Element and Essence should be sufficiently intimate.
Now what do I mean by intimacy? Let’s pause and talk about general creative writing theory for a second. How do metaphors and similes gain strength in the first place? As writers eventually discover, either through reading or writing, it has a lot to do with specificity. Good metaphors and similes are incredibly specific and sometimes surprisingly unrelated to the object that is being described through that metaphor and simile, while at the same time just related enough to be insightful. My personal favorite example of such a metaphor is within Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. It’s known as the Alphabet Metaphor. In a scene of intense pondering, Mr. Ramsay, a metaphysicist, imagines human reasoning like reciting the alphabet from A to Z. Mr. Ramsay can only reach Q, and cannot grasp what R is, though he can feel that it exists. He knows that only geniuses reach S, and only one talent every generation reaches Z. Through a metaphor, Woolf characterizes the sequential and analytical way that Mr. Ramsay thinks, captures the sensation of knowing that there is something beyond the scope of one’s current thought, and suggests the potential limitations to Mr Ramsay as a person. In this way, writers can use metaphors and similes to highlight or accentuate a particular quality about the object of observation that would otherwise not have come to light.
What I mean by Element-Essence intimacy functions analogously to how a good metaphor or simile functions. The Element is most successful when it is specific, almost inseparable from the Essence that it aims to convey. A good diagnostic for whether the Element is specific enough is through what I call the “replacement test.” It’s quite simple. Try to replace that particular Element with another, and see how much the Essence of that story is impacted. If it is barely or not impacted at all, then it is likely not specific enough—similar to how a cliched metaphor about the sword being “sharp as shattered glass” is not very impactful as a metaphor even though it does its job.
However, I’m not claiming no literary scholarship exists around fantasy. The great Tolkien himself wrote On Fairy Stories in 1947, and contemporary authors like Brandon Sanderson have proposed his own theories surrounding what I call Element Success. That being said, I still think that the conversation around fantasy is much smaller than it ought to be, considering its size and influence, which, as I have argued in the beginning, perhaps is caused by the lack of critiquing language. Furthermore, I am well aware that execution is an obvious and important component in evaluating a fantasy story’s success. But I wanted to focus primarily on evaluative criteria unique to fantasy. Finally, I understand that another popular standard of success cited is entertainment value and popularity. I cited this standard myself earlier to argue for fantasy’s self-apparent relevance in the world of stories. I see financial success, however, as a test of how legible the story was to a wide audience, a separate skill included within an evaluation of a story’s execution, which is why I didn’t focus on it. The popularity of an art piece also doesn’t seem to always correlate with its quality.
Fantasy, if it wasn’t obvious already, is my absolute favorite thing in the world. I hope that my contribution will lead to more productive discussions surrounding fantasy, from practitioners and enjoyers alike, so the art form can advance even further, allowing us all to enjoy even better stories. Perhaps I will also attempt to do just that with my own stories, someday in the future.
