Episode 171: The Different Genres Of Fantasy

In this week's episode, I take a look at 10 different types of popular fantasy. A preview of the audiobook of DRAGONSKULL: TALONS OF THE SORCERER as narrated by Brad Wills is included at the end of the episode.

It is once again time for Coupon of the Week!

This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of CLOAK OF DRAGONS, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of CLOAK OF DRAGONS for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code:

OCTDRAGONS

The coupon code is valid through November 3rd, 2023, so if you find yourself needing to listen to something as the days get shorter, we have an audiobook for you!

TRANSCRIPT:

00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates

Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 171 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October the 15th, 2023 and today we're going to discuss the different genres of fantasy. Before we do that, let's have Coupon of the Week. This week's Coupon of the Week is for the audiobook of Cloak of Dragons as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Cloak of Dragons for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code OCTDRAGONS and that is OCTDRAGONS. Again, that's OCTDRAGONS. You can get the coupon code and the links in the show notes. The coupon code is valid through November 3rd, 2023, so if you find yourself needing listen to an audio book as the days get shorter, we have an audio book for you.

And before we get into our main topic, let's also talk about my current writing projects. I am pleased report that Ghost in the Serpent is finished and should be out at most of the ebook stores. You can get it right now at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and my Payhip store. And it should be out in Scribd in a few days, hopefully. It’s selling briskly and very well. Thank you for that. I am excited to see that many people are excited to return to Caina's world. So that makes me look forward to writing the sequel, Ghost in the Veils, which I will probably write after I finish Cloak of Embers. Speaking of Cloak of Embers, that is my current writing project. As of this recording, I am on Chapter 2 of 22 which puts me at 14,000 words into the book and hopefully…hoping to have it out before American Thanksgiving if all goes well, though, it might slip to December depending on how much home maintenance and suchlike I need to do in October and November.

In audiobook news, Ghost in the Serpent will be recorded as an audio book starting on November 7^th, I believe. So, hopefully it should be out in December-ish in audiobook form. And Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer is finished. It just has to get through quality control and proofing at ACX and Findaway, so it should not be too much longer to hear that and we will include a sample of that audiobook as excellently narrated by Brad Wills at the end of this episode. So that's where I'm at with my current writing projects.

00:02:13 Main Topic Introduction: Different Genres of Fantasy

Now on to our main topic. I've written a couple of different kinds of fantasy, so today I thought I'd talk about the different kinds of fantasy and what differentiates them from each other. I should mention this isn't intended to be a comprehensive list nor a rigorously academic one. Genre is one of those topics that invariably seems out to bring out the “well, actually” commenters from the woodwork to argue over the finer points of what exactly constitutes hard science fiction or sword and sorcery. I don't think it is useful to consider genre as a strict taxonomy of stories like phylum and kingdoms and species for different types of animals. My view is that the writer needs to think first and foremost about what will make a good story. The overall kind of story you are writing is reflected by the genre and where there are certain underlying assumptions that the reader will expect for that genre. Genre is merely a useful shorthand of specifying what kind of story the reader expects to get when he or she picks up your book. Like if your cover and title make the reader assume that your book is contemporary romance, the reader will be very surprised and probably annoyed if the book turns out to be a grim detective story. With that in mind, let's take a look at some of the popular genres of fantasy that are predominant nowadays.

00:03:30 Type #1: Epic Fantasy

Number one: epic fantasy. Everyone knows what this one is: it's the genre inspired by the Lord of the Rings: big sweeping story with multiple point of view characters and numerous different settings to visit. There will often be large battle scenes or sequences. Usually a lot of traveling is involved. There will often be a large overarching quest that is the main plot or conflict of the story. Almost invariably, the epic fantasy doesn't take place on Earth, but on a constructed world designed by the author. A map is often required. Epic Fantasy also tends to be really, really long, with both long individual books and long series overall. This has had kind of a deleterious effect on the genre in recent years, since sometimes authors run out of gas and can't finish the series, and sometimes publishers pull the plug because the sales just aren't high enough. Epic fantasy also tends, but not always, to have clearly delineated lines between good and evil. If there's a morally ambiguous antihero, he or she will tend to reform, die heroically, or become one of the bad guys. Epic fantasies that I've written include Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, Dragontiarna, Dragonskull, and the Demonsouled series.

00:04:42 Type #2: High Fantasy

Number two: high fantasy. This term tends to get used interchangeably with epic fantasy, but in the strictest sense, high fantasy is fantasy that takes place in a constructed world like Middle Earth or Narnia or the Forgotten Realms. The proper term for that is secondary world. I've done numerous secondary worlds, the setting of Frostborn, the setting of Demonsouled, the setting of the Ghosts are all secondary worlds. Even though Cloak Games/Cloak Mage has other worlds, it takes place primarily on Earth, so it doesn't quite count as a secondary world, which leads neatly to our next type of fantasy.

00:05:17 Type #3: Low Fantasy

Number three: low fantasy. As with high fantasy, this is one of those terms that tends to have a mutating definition, like in the original sense low fantasy simply meant a fantasy that took place on our world rather than a constructed world. This obviously can cover a wide range of stories, from literary magical realism and a Gothic ghost story to urban fantasy like the Dresden Files. Low fantasy has also acquired a couple different definitions: fantasy story without an epic plotline or one with a morally ambiguous antihero as the lead. But in the original sense of the word, it was a fantasy story that took place in our world rather than a constructed world like Middle Earth or Westeros. Cloak Games and Cloak Mage would be the biggest low fantasy series I've written. Some of the short stories in my Otherworlds anthology would count as well.

00:06:04 Type #4: Sword and Sorcery

Number four: sword and sorcery. Everyone knows what this one is: Conan the Barbarian. You have a protagonist or group of protagonists making your way through a fantasy world fighting evil sorcerers, sinister cultic priests, and tyrannical local nobles. Usually, the protagonists are looking out for themselves or hoping to get rich instead of undertaking a grand high fantasy quest. If the series goes on long enough with the same main character, then eventually the scope might expand in scale. Conan himself started out as wandering vagabond and ended up as King of Aquilonia and in the one and only full length novel that Robert E. Howard wrote, Conan has to reclaim his throne and keep the evil sorcerer Xaltotun from bringing back an ancient dark empire, which is quite a bit more epic in scale than many of the other Conan stories. Sword and sorcery typically has a darker edge to it than epic fantasy. The protagonist might be greedy thieves or raiders, though they will still have the core of honor to them. Of course, a lot of modern sword and sorcery tends to veer over into grimdark, which we will talk about shortly. In my books, sword and sorcery elements turn out frequently in all my epic fantasy novels: Frostborn,  Demonsouled, and the Ghosts. Ridmark and Mazael both spend time as wandering knights, having adventures and Caina in the Ghosts frequently breaks into the strongholds of corrupt lords and evil sorcerers to steal stuff from them.

00:07:17 Type #5: Urban Fantasy

Number five: urban fantasy: fantasy set in the modern world of the 20th and 21st century, where you might have wizards and elves and vampires walking around next to modern lawyers, policemen, and politicians. Generally, urban fantasy tends to break down along two different lines. The first is the masquerade, a term popularized by the old Vampire The Masquerade role playing setting. The idea is that there's an expansive supernatural world, but for whatever reason is kept secret for most people who don't know about it. The reasons might be that the normal world might rise up in wrath and destroy the supernatural if its existence came out, or that the supernatural world preys on the normal one like vampires, and prefers to remain secret, or you have to be actually able to use magic to be able to perceive the supernatural world at all.

I think the most famous current example of the masquerade world is actually Harry Potter. The Harry Potter books aren't technically urban fantasy, but the book’s division of the world into the Muggles who can't use magic, and the Wizards who do is a good example of a masquerade. The other version is a world where magic exists, everyone is aware of it, and society has adapted to it. This can be played for laughs like you have an elf as head of the neighborhood HOA and a dwarven blacksmith who is running for Congress under the slogan of “hammering government back into shape like iron upon my ancestral forge.” Or it can be played dead serious with rival magical factions holding sway on various parts of Earth or the US government forcing all mages into a secret program and so forth. One variant that a commentator mentioned (commenter Grace) added when I talked about this on Facebook: “I'd alter how you break down urban fantasy slightly differently. Obviously there's the masquerade as you defined it but the other form I see most often is what I call magical apocalypse, best defined by Ilona and Gordon Andrews’ Kate Daniels series. Basically that's (unintelligible word-9:09) genre is that magic came back to the world of the vengeance, changing everything suddenly and at least somewhat disastrously.” That is a good point from Grace, and I used some of that in my Cloak Mage/Cloak Games series where magic returned to Earth quite suddenly in the year 2013 when the elves invaded and conquered Earth. So as I said, Cloak Mage/Cloak Games series are my urban fantasy books.

 

00:09:29 Type #6: Lit RPG

Number six: LitRPG. This is a new genre that has arisen in the last few years. Basically LitRPG are science fiction and fantasy stories told using the conventions of science fiction and fantasy role-playing games, especially MMORPG style games. If you're not familiar with that acronym, it's a massively multiplayer online role-playing game like World of Warcraft, Elder Scrolls Online, Star Wars the Old Republic, and similar games. Of course, characters entering a game world isn't exactly new. Jumanji was basically LitRPG with a board game, and in the new movies from the 2010s, the characters explicitly enter a video game world and have stats and special abilities. In the 1970s, Andre Norton wrote a novel called Quag Keep with some characters get pulled into the Dungeons and Dragons world via magical gaming figurines. I think it's on Kindle Unlimited now if you want to read it. Ender's Game is a science fiction version of the trope where Ender discovers that game he is playing has deadly consequences. I think there are generally two strains of LitRPG. In one, the protagonist is pulled entirely into the game world, leaving Earth behind and lives there completely. In the other, the protagonist is playing the game and trying to balance it with his or her real life, maybe financial pressures, maybe the game has a dark secret, something like that. Both versions lean heavily onto the tropes of MMORPG games. The protagonist selects a character class, levels up, faces bosses, might join a guild or start a stronghold, and so forth. LitRPG is mostly an indie author phenomenon; not many legacy publishers have published LitRPGs. An exception to that might be Ready Player One, but that was only a couple books and that's only really the really high profile example I can think of. Currently the only LitRPG I've written is Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation, but as of this writing I’m 19,000 words into the sequel, Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling.

00:11:30 Type #7  Cultivation/xianxia

Number seven: Cultivation, also known as xianxia Fantasy, which I'm that is as close to the actual pronunciation as I can come. The term is derived from the Chinese word xian, which means immortal being. Cultivation is a relatively new genre in the West but has come over from China thanks to the Internet. It's hugely popular in China but less so in the US, though it does have a devoted fanbase. The idea is that by essentially unlocking or cultivating one's energy, usually called qi, you can gain fantastic abilities of mind and body and become a xian. Some xian are become so powerful that they can conquer galaxies. Sometimes there are rival clans of xian engaged in conflict with each other or who follow different paths in school of training like martial arts schools in a samurai movie. If you’ve ever seen a wuxia film with supernatural martial arts heroes following secret training traditions, it's a lot like that, except with more abilities and a greater scope in the setting. American readers are sometimes surprised at how harsh Chinese written xianxia fantasy can be, but I suspect that's because Chinese culture in general is a lot less individualistic than American culture and is generally less forgiving of victimhood than American culture is, though of course, as with all cultural statements, that can be something of a generalization. I've never written any cultivation fantasy, though elements that do pretty frequently appear in LitRPG since the leveling up in a LitRPG is at least superficially similar to the paths of cultivation in xianxia fantasy. Nadia’s journey through Cloak Games/the Cloak Mage is superficially similar to a cultivator's journey. But I don't think that's a valid comparison because I started writing Cloak Games in 2015 and I never even heard of xianxia fantasy until late 2021. And so therefore I don't think I can say that was an influence.

00:13:26 Type #8: Historical Fantasy

Number eight: Historical fantasy: historical fiction with a fantastical twist, like Henry the Fifth was secretly allied with the king of the elves when he invaded France, or the Library of Congress is actually a secret magical society that has pulled the strings of American history from its founding. The degrees of fantasy and historical accuracy can vary wildly between authors in how much research they happen to do. This, of course, can easily blend in with urban fantasy. To return to our Library of Congress example from earlier, if the plot is set in the 1880s, it's historical fantasy. If it's set in the modern era, then it's urban fantasy, though the 1880s plot line can still obviously influence events. I've never written any strictly historical fantasy, though Frostborn assumes a somewhat magical past on Earth, and Cloak Games has the elves arrive and conquer Earth in 2013, which was 10 years ago now, so sheer longevity has given that series an element of historical fantasy.

00:14:20 Type #8: Grimdark

Number nine: grimdark. This is less than a genre and more of a tone. Grimdark was largely inspired by George R.R .Martin's a Song of Ice and Fire, and to a lesser extent, Joe Abercrombie’s books. Grimdark books are brutal, bloody, and violent, often explicitly so. Expect most of the characters to die in various horrible ways, often described in exacting detail. All the characters will be morally bankrupt, with those who are not becoming easy prey for those who are. In grimdark, the bad guys wins, but all the characters are the bad guy. I came to dislike grimdark quite a bit because in my opinion it embodies a sort of adolescent nihilism that some people never quite grow out of. This isn't to say that A Song of Ice and Fire didn't do it well, at least in the early books, but its many imitators did it less well. I consciously avoid writing grimdark because I don't like it. That said, it can be done well. The movie Sicario about the US intelligence apparatus playing an underhanded game against the drug cartels is a masterpiece of a film but very, very dark.

00:15:23 Type #10: Space Fantasy

Number ten: science/space fantasy. This is a science fiction story with strong fantasy elements. Doctor Who and Star Wars both come to mind as immediate examples, since both have strong fantasy elements that they dress up in scientific sounding explanations. Doctor Who essentially is about a space wizard with a magic space box, who flies around having adventures, preferably in the company of one or more attractive female companions. The show traditionally seems to suffer when it strays from that formula. The proportion of science fiction and fantasy within Doctor Who varies depending upon the writer and the showrunner. Likewise, Star Wars is basically about magic space samurai who fight each other with laser swords and space magic.

Another example might be Warhammer 40K, which does have space orcs and space elves fighting each other with space magic, though the bigger influences are probably grimdark science fiction and horror. All three franchises have been around long enough that they sort of created their own genre of space fantasy. Like LitRPG, it hasn't really hit the legacy publishing business, but you see lots of indie books that use science fiction and fantasy to the point where you have mages flying around on starships. I've never really written anything in space fantasy. Even the more supernatural elements of Silent Order like the Great Elder Ones and the Macrobes come from more horror than fantasy and the science fiction elements in Cloak Mage that have appeared in recent books are straight up science fiction that I've added to an urban fantasy setting, not science fantasy type stuff. Though interestingly, Brandon Sanderson's books sometimes come at science fantasy from the opposite end, where the book's magic system is so intricate and detailed that the setting can build a technological society off it. I think his very newest book, The Sunlit Man, is a very good example of that.

00:17:08: Concluding Thoughts

Conclusion: so those are ten different types of fantasy that I think are popular nowadays. No doubt I missed some, and they're probably genres of fantasy popular right now that I haven't heard of yet, like I hadn't heard of xianxia fantasy until 2021. That said, for a writer, especially for an indie writer, the main value of genres is to add…is an aid to think about marketing, like my Cloak Games/Cloak Mage series, and mainly urban fantasy. But there's also elements of historical fantasy in it, and more and more science fiction elements, especially in the last few books but it’s mainly urban fantasy, so I designed the covers to look like urban fantasy and I market it as an urban fantasy book. It's good to be conscious of what you are writing. Like Frostborn and the other Andomhaim books are primarily epic fantasy, so I try to stick to the accepted tropes, but I do let other stuff bleed in as I find it interesting, and I think it would enhance the story.

And as always, thanks for reading my books, whatever genre they turned out to be. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you find the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes of the show on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. It really does help. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.