Micro-post #55: A thoughtful interview about classic fantasy novels

"Classic Fantasy Books" as recommended by Matthew Sangster, interview by Sylvia Bishop (Five Books)

Fantasy novels are one of those things that I should, ideally, find interesting but I always get thrown off by the Ren Faire "hey-nonny-nonny" feel that they used to give off during the 1980s and 1990s. This interview between Bishop and Sangster makes a good case to throw that stereotype out the window and embrace how deeply weird a lot of these books actually are and accept how that approach can be both daunting and freeing.

Photo by Ricardo Cruz (Unsplash)

"There’s an assumption that people have inherited from Romanticism that good literary work is made by geniuses doing things that people have never done before. But people are always using existing resources. No one invents language or culture from the ground up when they start writing. A nicer way to think about culture is that we have a common stock of stuff that we’re interested in, that we agree is good, but that we’re also prepared to critique: a toolbox that we take things out of so we can modify them and put them back. We’re able to make old stories and tropes do things that they weren’t doing before, making them new and fresh again. And I think fantasy is the genre that most clearly models that. Perhaps fairy stories are the obvious example: people pick up a fairy story and think, “What about this character who’s been pushed to the side?”, or, “I don’t really like the passivity of this character. Let’s write it with them doing a bit more…”, or, “This character resonates with this experience that I have with my sexuality, or with neurodivergence, or something else… Let’s take the story and play with that”. So stories become facilitative means of talking about our lives, rather than closed systems that you can only look at and say, “Oh, that’s great, but I could never do something like that.” I think the best thing about fantasy is that it teaches you how to construct fantasies of your own, empowering you to tell your own stories." - Matthew Sangster