Only a few more days now until the end-of-year holiday is upon us all. (And am I ready? No! It’s coming though, all the same … Like winter—you know, A Game of Thrones, the Starks of Winterfell and the dreaded ‘winter is coming’ … ;-))

This means that it’s the time of year when it’s traditional (as I alluded to on Monday) to begin reflecting a little and looking back over the year that’s been. I’m sure I’ll get around to another “E” word (as in E is for Earthquakes, over 9000 so far since 4 September 2010) but today I’m thinking about the E as in epic fantasy. I’ve done a few ” … on Anything, Really” posts on epic over the past year, most of which you find collected here, and a few more around the traps, mostly on SF Signal and Orbit. (If you want to check out collected guest posts, you’ll find them here.)

And sometimes my own posts on epic are sparked by what other folk are saying “out there” … So recently SF Signal featured a fun post from Daniel Abraham, titled A Private Letter from Genre to Literature. It’s very clever and definitely well worth reading, here, but I’ve been thinking about if off and on over the past week or so—mainly about the subtext, which I couldn’t help feeling was that somehow, genre fiction such as SFF somehow needs the approval of the more “literary” cabal, in the same way that a spurned lover (vis-avis Daniel’s “letter”) needs the beloved to again be kind.

So the thought that’s been revolving in my head is: is that true? Is it really true?

But I might not have posted about it, except that my buddy Mary Victoria has also been talking about her current transition from writing epic fantasy, in her Chronicles of the Tree series, to something more contemporary-historical with the current work-in-progress. In the progression from her post on How Fiction Wriggles to the to-and-fro of the comments, I felt there was a suggestion that epic must necessarily follow “a forward-motion storytelling” pattern as opposed to fiction (read the contemporary-historical) that “turns round a central issue instead of trying to ‘get somewhere.’” You will see there that I queried there whether this necessarily was the case, or indeed had to be the case—and indeed I do not feel that it is.

Looking purely at these questions from my own small corner, I cannot help feeling that it should be possible to address those world changing questions of epic that Mary refers to without necessarily having to deal with an “onward adventure and getting from A to Z”, even if the subject matter is world changing. Not do I believe that “change within” should be excluded from the provenance of epic …

I consider, in fact, that some of the grandest stories in the epic pantheon, beginning with Achilles in his tent, address the question of change within as much as the change of society without—the transition that occurs within Frodo, for example, that results in his inability to really return to the Shire. When I look at Daniel Abraham’s A Shadow in Summer I feel that the story is far more focused on the change within the characters, in many cases driven by the relationsip of poet and the andat, than it is by the external change and pressures within the society. Similarly, in Mary’s own books, particularly Samiha’s Song and Oracle’s Fire, it is the internal changes within two of the major characters, Samiha and Jedda, that drive the narrative, although the externally conceived quest journey is still present in the story.

I believe—as I have said in other fora—that this duality is entirely consistent with the epic tradition arising out of myth. And I feel that change within, turning around the conflicts that arise out of “… honor, ambition, and duty, but … also … responsibilities: to each other, to the world in which we live, to our families, whether of blood or friendship” while considering “questions of prejudice and fear, and what it means to be “other” – how we determine who is “other”, and what happens if the “other’ turns out to be us” (K. Nintzel on The Gathering of the Lost) is the heart of the story I am trying to tell in my Wall of Night series. They would be entirely different books if the story were only about making the grand tour through several fantastic locales while simultaneously playing out an externally conceived, black-and-white, fate-of-the-‘verse conflict (although it’s about that too, of course.)

The reason I am talking about this is because I don’t think any fiction, genre or otherwise, should be constrained to formula—and as I know for sure that I want to continuing writing fantasy, but I definitely don’t want to write the same story over and over again, then I know I shall be doing my durndest to not restrict myself to one writing style either.

Which brings me back to that private letter from genre to literature. I write poetry, plus short fiction in a range of genres, including contemporary realism (aka “literary”), as well as fantasy novels. And you know what—I approach the process of writing all these forms of literature in exactly the same way. Exactly. I also believe both epic and fantasy are a strong and consistent thread throughout literature, from works such as The Iliad and The Odyssey, through Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Shakespeare’s The Tempest or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. So if contemporary literature chooses to be unkind and keep her distance—well, that is mostly a failure of discernment on her part, in my opinion. And I don’t feel that genre needs to put energy into seeking a reconciliation, at all. We must each step to the beat of our drum, and do so as well as we possibly can—the rest readers and the Muses will decide between them.

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By the way, just in case my deliberations might lead you to think otherwise, I am a huge admirer of both Mary Victoria and Daniel Abraham and you can read my interviews with them here:

An Interview with Daniel Abraham, author of “The Dragon’s Path”

An Interview with Mary Victoria, author of “Samiha’s Song”

An Interview with Mary Victoria, author of “Oracle’s Fire”