Do most fantasy novel nowadays have traceable elements of Tolkienism in them?

[jallanite]

[quote=Nerwen;684340]

Originally Posted by Nerwen

True– but it is none the less quite common for post-Tolkien fantasy writers to feature Elves who are obvious direct copies of Tolkien’s (often filtered through D&D). As I said, there’s a difference.

The first such story that I recall reading was Excalibur by Sanders Anne Laubenthal ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excalibur_%28novel%29 ) and I thought it was atrocious. It was a copy of Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams, almost a paint-by-numbers story, in which in one incident the protagonist entered another world which was pure mock-Lothlórien, though this was implied to be an American aborigine fantasy world. Personally such sloppy fantasy writing simply doesn’t interest me.

But I realize that many readers don’t even notice.

For man-sized Elves or Fairies, one may also go to Lewis Carroll’s Bruno and Sylvia, which I feel was very bad, but for other reasons. I realize that Tolkien’s man-sized Elves in The Hobbit didn’t surprise me at all when I first read it. I suppose I must have encountered similar beings in other books that I no longer remember. I do remember the human-sized Fairy of the Turqouise Hair in the original story Pinnochio, whom in Disney’s version becomes the winged (but still human-sized) Blue Fairy.

For fantasy I can think of two other older writers missing from my list: William Shakespeare (not only for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest but for Hamlet and Macbeth) and E. E. Chesterton. And might as well add Sir Thomas Malory, as a writer still much read outside of university course work untranslated. Perhaps also add Howard Pyle.

Originally Posted by Zigûr

I've heard that Atwood is keen to have her work regarded as "speculative fiction" rather than "science fiction" (to avoid the alleged 'genre ghetto', perhaps?).

For Margaret Atwood’s own definitions of what she writes, see http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=129324791 and http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/...ptic-optimist/ .

But others have different definitions for speculative fiction. See Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_fiction and a talk page which largely disagrees at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Speculative_fiction .

Personally speculative fiction seems to be normally used as a more pretentious term for what most people simply call science-fiction or sf. After all, all fiction is speculative, or it would not be fiction. Fictional fiction?

I once had a brief discussion with another student in an undergraduate tutorial years ago about Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle and whether or not it was "science fiction", my view being 'not necessarily'; it was motivated by the discussion the novel's characters have about the genre of their own (meta)fictional alternate-history narrative and whether or not it was sci-fi. My suggestion was that if we strictly classify a novel like that as science-fiction without flexible boundaries, we may as well call something like Atlas Shrugged science-fiction as well.

Sure, call Atlas Shrugged science-fiction if you want. The conference actually got into stories set in the supposed near future which were mainly about politics. The consensus seemed to be that they were not really sf books.

So invent a new name like political thriller. Genres are invented when a lot of works are seen as so similar that they belong together, and they provide a reasonable handle to talk about them and compare them. But there are always works on the fringes of a genre, however you define it, and peoples’ definitions differ somewhat from one another.

For example, I note that no-one has called me out for implicitly including dream-tales among my fantasy works by including Lewis Carroll and Charles E. Caryl among my fantasy authors. Well, I feel these stories are dream-stories but are also fantasy stories. Note that in his essay “On Fairy-stories” Tolkien writes that dream-tales are not fairy-tales, not that they are not fantasy.