Fantasy

• 1. Introduction

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  Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction built on a simple but radical premise: the rules of the real world do not apply. Magic can be real. Creatures that could never exist can walk, fly, or breathe fire. Entire worlds can be conjured from nothing. And yet, the oldest surviving traces of the genre stretch back not to the printing press or the pulp magazine, but to clay tablets inscribed in ancient Babylon. How does a genre that seems rooted in escapism connect the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh to a 21st-century bestseller? What separates fantasy from its closest neighbors, science fiction and horror? And why did a Scottish minister named George MacDonald, writing in 1858, end up shaping the imaginations of two of the most celebrated authors of the twentieth century? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. Worlds Without Rules

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  Realistic fiction, however strange or dramatic its plots, is bound by a contract with the reader: it must respect the laws of history and nature. Fantasy tears that contract up. An author constructing a fantasy world uses what critics call worldbuilding, the creation of characters, situations, and settings that may not be possible in reality at all. The only requirement is internal coherence, not scientific plausibility.

  This is the key distinction between fantasy and science fiction. A science fiction narrative is unlikely, but it gestures toward logical scientific or technological extrapolation. Fantasy makes no such gesture. To work, it asks readers to extend suspension of disbelief: an acceptance of the unbelievable or impossible, freely granted for the sake of enjoyment.

  Horror shares the supernatural with fantasy, but its mechanism is different. Horror primarily evokes fear through the protagonists' weaknesses or their inability to deal with the antagonists. Fantasy tends to empower rather than terrify. The supernatural elements most associated with the genre, magic, sorcerers, witches, and magical creatures, are tools, settings, or plot engines, not sources of dread.

  Many fantasy authors draw heavily on real-world folklore and mythology as inspiration, so the line between invented and inherited can blur. But the supernatural element is not even strictly required. What defines the genre at its core is the author's freedom to build narrative elements that owe nothing to history or nature for their coherence.

• 3. Ancient Roots

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  The ancient Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish, features the god Marduk slaying the goddess Tiamat in a cosmic battle between good and evil. That conflict, written in the deep past, maps almost perfectly onto the thematic skeleton of modern fantasy. The genre did not invent these preoccupations; it inherited them.

  Egyptian funerary texts preserve the myths of Osiris and his son Horus. The Tales of the Court of King Khufu, preserved in the Westcar Papyrus and probably written in the middle of the second half of the eighteenth century BC, blends historical fiction, fantasy, and satire in a single collection. These were not fringe curiosities; they were the literature of their time.

  Ancient Greek myth with fantastic elements aimed at adults was a major genre in its own right. Aristophanes, in his comedy The Birds, sends an Athenian man to persuade the world's birds to build a city in the clouds and challenge Zeus's authority. Ovid's Metamorphoses and Apuleius's The Golden Ass both weave mythic elements into personal narratives in which humans are transformed into animals or inanimate objects. Both works fed directly into the development of modern fantasy.

  The ability to find meaning in a story that is not literally true, a habit cultivated by Plato through allegory and by early Christian writers through their reading of parables, became foundational for everything that followed. One Thousand and One Nights, the compilation of ancient and medieval Islamic folk tales, sent characters like Aladdin, Sinbad, and Ali Baba into Western culture as enduring icons. The Panchatantra used animal fables and magical tales to illustrate Indian principles of political science. Norse mythology, collected in the Elder Edda and Younger Edda, introduced Odin, dwarves, elves, dragons, and giants to readers who would later transplant those figures wholesale into fantasy works. Beowulf shaped the English-speaking world's conception of the heroic; John Gardner's novel Grendel is one example of a fantasy work that retold that story directly.

• 4. MacDonald and the Modern Turn

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  George MacDonald, a Scottish author, published Phantastes in 1858. It is widely considered the first fantasy novel ever written for adults. MacDonald was a major influence on both J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, two writers who would later define the genre for millions of readers. William Morris, an English poet, followed in the latter part of the same century with novels including The Wood Beyond the World in 1894 and The Well at the World's End in 1896.

  Despite this early creative activity, fantasy did not reach large audiences until the twentieth century. Lord Dunsany established the genre's popularity in both the novel and short story forms. H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, alongside Abraham Merritt, built the lost world subgenre, which became the most popular form of fantasy in the early decades of that century.

  Children's literature played an unexpected structural role. Juvenile fantasy was considered more acceptable than fantasy aimed at adults, so writers who wanted to reach adult readers sometimes had to work within forms aimed at children. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865, created a circular effect: virtually all fantasy, including the later Lord of the Rings series, was classified as children's literature for years. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote fantasy in A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys for children, while his works for adults only edged toward the genre without fully entering it.

  Pulp magazines changed the landscape. Weird Tales, the first all-fantasy fiction magazine, appeared in 1923. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, founded in 1949 when the pulp format was at the height of its popularity, brought fantasy fiction to wide audiences in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

• 5. Tolkien and the Mainstream

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  By 1950, sword and sorcery fiction had found a wider audience through Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories and Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. But it was high fantasy, defined by plots and themes of epic scale often set in alternate worlds, that carried the genre into the mainstream.

  J. R. R. Tolkien's novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings reached new heights of popularity in the late 1960s. C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia and Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea helped to sustain and deepen the genre's hold on readers in the decades that followed.

  The twenty-first century brought a new wave. J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen, Brandon Sanderson's The Stormlight Archive and Mistborn, and A. Sapkowski's The Witcher all reached bestselling status. The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, directed by Peter Jackson, and the Harry Potter films became two of the highest-grossing film series in cinema history.

  Political conditions have always shaped the genre's reach. In early twentieth-century China, the New Culture Movement's enthusiasm for Westernization and science led to condemnation of the fantastical shenmo genre of traditional Chinese literature; the spells and magical creatures were viewed as superstitious and backward. Denunciation continued after the Communists rose to power. A revival in fantasy on the Chinese mainland came only after the Cultural Revolution had ended.

• 6. Fantasy Beyond the Page

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  Dungeons and Dragons was the first tabletop role-playing game, and it remains the most successful and influential. A 1999 survey in the United States found that six percent of people aged 12 to 35 had played role-playing games. Of those who played regularly, two thirds played Dungeons and Dragons. Products branded Dungeons and Dragons accounted for over fifty percent of all role-playing game products sold in 2005.

  The Final Fantasy video game series became an icon of the role-playing video game genre and, at the time of reporting, remained among the top ten best-selling video game franchises. Magic: The Gathering, which carries a fantasy theme, was the first collectible card game and became similarly dominant in its industry.

  Fantasy conventions connect a sprawling subculture of publishers, editors, authors, artists, and scholars. The World Fantasy Convention has been held annually since 1975, in a different city each year, with the World Fantasy Awards presented at each gathering. Science fiction conventions, anime conventions, and crossover events also serve fantasy audiences. Conventions frequently host cosplay communities, fan fiction communities, and fan video communities alongside their main programming.

  According to statistics from fantasy publisher Tor Books gathered in 2013, men outnumber women by 67% to 33% among writers of historical, epic, or high fantasy. Among writers of urban fantasy or paranormal romance, the ratio reverses: 57% are women and 43% are men.

• 7. Theorizing the Fantastic

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  Tzvetan Todorov, the French literary theorist, defined the fantastic as a liminal space, characterized by the intrusion of supernatural elements into a realistic framework, accompanied by persistent uncertainty about whether those elements are real. His definition is precise and influential, but it is not the dominant one in English critical literature. The French term fantastique is used to distinguish his narrower concept from the broader English term fantastic.

  Rosemary Jackson's 1981 book Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion directly challenges Todorov's framing. Jackson rejects the idea of the genre as a vehicle for wish fulfillment in worlds presented as superior to reality. She argues instead that fantasy is inseparable from the social and cultural contexts in which each work is produced. The unreal elements in fantastic literature, she writes, exist only in direct contrast to the boundaries set by the cultural order of their time. By undoing and recompiling the structures that define society, the fantastic illuminates the unseen limitations of those structures. Jackson also draws on Freud's theory of the unconscious, arguing it is integral to understanding the fantastic's connection to the human psyche.

  A separate thread of scholarship connects the genre to gender. Lizzie Harris McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell, and Rebecca Soares, in their introduction to The Female Fantastic: Gender and the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s, describe how the social climate of the 1890s and 1920s enabled a new era of fantastic literature to emerge alongside women's expanding freedoms. The fantastic, never purely supernatural and never entirely mundane, mirrored the uncertain and shifting position of women in society during those decades. Women writers of that era began to blur lines between genders, allowing for multiple interpretations, and the fantastic genre reflected these shifts by breaking analogous boundaries in the supernatural realm. Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy, published in 2008, offers yet another framework, proposing a taxonomy determined by the means by which the fantastic enters the narrated world, while acknowledging that some fantasies fit none of her categories.