The Land of the Lost

How to map the borders of Eartherea?

Today I found on http://del.icio.us/writing a link to a fantasy-author’s post on ‘hard fantasy’ as a sub-genre. There are, it turns out, a good half-dozen or more blog posts considering this term, none of which exactly agree as to its meaning, all of which seemingly take up the term, wonder aloud as to ‘what might it mean?’ and attempt to muddle through to a definition.

In other words, the term has its own strange and fantastical life, a life that has no roots in any coherent body of tales.

It is not as though there were a movement of talesmen who proclaimed, ‘We sing of hard fantasy!’ — not in the way that there was such a group of science fiction authors who sniffed, ‘We delineate hard sf!’

Rather it seems that ‘hard fantasy’ is more a critic’s term, applied to several talesmen who were simply writing and telling tales as they liked them in the fields of Eartherea, and whose works later came to fall under this term. Something like ‘film noir’ if you will — a kind of movie, none of whose practitioners had heard of the term, none of whom knew that ‘film noir’ was what they were making, and a term over which film critics will come to blows — ‘This is not film noir!’ ‘Oh, yes it is!’

My aim here is not to define ‘hard fantasy’ by any means. I’ll leave that for pedants to pick over. All I will say is, that those who write ‘hard fantasy’ are, like the proponents of ‘hard science fiction,’ at heart ashamed of what they do, and that is a pity, that any man should blush at what he loves, and try to pass off his love as something she is not.

As for ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ fantasy, let alone ‘high’ and ‘low’ fantasy, we can only say that Eartherea is a continent vaster than Asia would appear to ants building on Portugal’s shore. Vladivostock is far away, and artificial distinctions between ‘hard’ and ‘high’ and all the rest (and between ‘fantasy’ and ‘science fiction’ for that matter) are as meaningless on the ground as the border that is said to divide ‘Europe’ from Asia.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, July 16, 2008)