Is there such a thing as Hard Fantasy?
LORD OF THE RINGS is “Hard” fantasy. Here was a fantasy tale with dwarves and elfs, dragons and wraiths, noble kings and wicked counsellors, and all the trappings of medieval tales–but with the travel times and hardships of the journey all mapped out in meticulous detail, the language and solid appearance of its nonhuman races mapped out, given a past. Compare Lothlorien with the Forest of Arcadia in MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM. Surely the elves in the Golden Wood seem more realistic, more hard. This was a book written by a man who’d lived through the Great War, and his attempt to combine the Great War feeling and realism with the War of Elfland was so successful that it is hard to remember what an unrealistic, fantasy-flavored fantasy is like. Read THE WORM OROBOROUS if you want to savor the contrast: that is spectacular fantasy for the sake of fantasy, with no hint of real world suffering or sorrow in it.
Lord Juss at the end of WORM OROBOROUS gets exactly the fate Galadriel was punished by expulsion from Heaven for wishing: a way to bind up time, and keep the good life of a few brief years alive and young and fresh forever. It is an immature ending, voluptuous and dreamlike. It is valhalla: a life of endless and glorious war. The departure of Frodo the Last Ringbearer to the West in the end of LOTR, by contrast, is as real and poinient as a sunset. Sam returns without any trumpets to his wife, and the only place that Elenor and Nembrithel, the elfin flowers, will bloom again in Middle Earth, is in the names of Sam’s rosey-cheeked children. That is hard and real.
DEED OF PAKSENARION by Elizabeth Moon: I notice a scene where the Amazon-ish warrior women are given contraceptives, so they don’t get pregnant in combat: I notice a scene where the troops drilling with spears so they learn how to march. All these are realistic details.
A GAME OF THRONES by George RR Martin is practically a history book. It does not get more realistic than this.
All these are what I would call Hard Fantasy.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
