{"id":22959,"date":"2013-10-28T06:30:28","date_gmt":"2013-10-27T17:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=22959"},"modified":"2016-05-10T22:42:16","modified_gmt":"2016-05-10T10:42:16","slug":"adding-to-the-epic-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2013\/10\/28\/adding-to-the-epic-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"Adding To The Epic Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the last few weeks I’ve been having a conversation about epic fantasy here on the blog — sparked in large part by The Gathering Of The Lost<\/em><\/a> have been voted onto the final shortlist<\/a> for the David Gemmell Legend Award for Best Fantasy Novel<\/a>. Which last is, by the way, absolutely awesome folks—and I know I’ve said it before but let me reiterate again just how much I appreciate all your support to get the book there.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The David Gemmell awards are all about epic-heroic fantasy, of course, with David Gemmell being one of the pre-eminent authors in the genre over the thirty year period from 1984 (when Legend<\/em> was first published) until his death in 2006. The awards commemorate his legacy, but they’re also all about promoting the genre — and I am decidedly into that, both by supporting the initiatives of the Award organisers, such as the interviews<\/a> with all the finalists, plus adding my mite to the cause through the posts such as the conversations on epic fantasy, here on my own blog.<\/p>\n

So far, the topics we\u2019ve discussed have been:<\/p>\n

What Makes Fantasy Epic<\/a>?\u00a0 and<\/p>\n

What Makes for \u201cThe New\u201d in Epic Fantasy?<\/a><\/p>\n

Is Epic Fantasy Currently Enjoying A Resurgence?<\/a><\/p>\n

Each week’s topic has been sparked by the previous week’s conversation, which is kinda cool, and the conversation has also spilled over onto Twitter. Here’s one of my favourite tweets to date:<\/p>\n

“…Epic Fantasy is more about characters confronting central truths about their entire existence.”<\/em><\/p>\n

I believe the tweeter meant the entire existence of their culture \/ world, as opposed to just the existence of the characters, although obviously the latter would be hard to separate from the former… But yes, I think it’s another good thread teasing out what makes a story sit in the ‘epic’ quadrant of the fantasy spectrum.<\/p>\n

To continue the tradition of last week’s conversation sparking this week’s topic — and please do feel free to suggest what you would like to talk about as wel l— last week one commenter mentioned the possibility for trends to be region specific, e.g. with readers in the US and UK, which are traditionally viewed as reasonably similar, occasionally reflecting divergent trends. I found this interesting, because it reflects a question I often refer to in my Fun With Friends<\/a> interviews on SF Signal<\/a> — whether there is anything that distinguishes Australian and New Zealand epic fantasy, or fantasy for that matter,\u00a0 from that coming out of the US and UK, for example? And is there any distinction between the UK and US in terms of genre preferences?<\/p>\n

This is even without bringing in Fantasy in translation from other cultures—so on either score, within English language fantasy and epic in particular, or looking at works coming out of other cultures, I am very interested to canvass your thoughts.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the last few weeks I’ve been having a conversation about epic fantasy here on the blog — sparked in large part by The Gathering Of The Lost have been voted onto the final shortlist for the David Gemmell Legend Award for Best Fantasy Novel. Which last is, by the way, absolutely awesome folks—and I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epicfantasy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22959"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22959\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32239,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22959\/revisions\/32239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}