Ok. I tried. I really did. I went and looked at other threads and repressed all my urges in responding to this old (already jumpstarted once) thread. I finally couldn't control myself any longer. I'm a newbie. You can slap me down, curse me, whatever appeases your irritation, but I have to put in my two cents worth, because it's killing me.
Nothing to do with Jade, but with something EUOL said....
Fantasy is old, man. More than a quarter of a century old. You can trace it back all the way to Lord Dunsany, a century ago, with THE KING OF ELFLAND'S DAUGHTER and his other novels. (Try Hope Mirrlees' LUD-IN-THE-MIST, same time period.) If you like, you could go back further and argue that ALICE IN WONDERLAND and THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS are early fantasy works. Heck, I've even seen scholars claim that WU-THERING HEIGHTS (
) is a fantasy novel. And if that doesn't count, certainly the intense fantasy worlds created by the Bronte siblings do.
Fairy tales are in the fantasy genre: tales told first by mouth centuries ago, before they were even written down or bastardized by Walt Disney. The Arthurian saga (completely muddled by the French) represent a perfect example of medieval fantasy, very popular and mainstream at the time. Although I don't honestly believe Homer, or the Celts and the Norse, the Chinese, the American Indians, etc. thought of their great mythological stories as fantasy, we as fantasy writers draw upon their work in creation of our own.
The reason Tolkien gets so much attention, and so many imitators is because he thrust open the floodgates in this country. Prior to the publication of THE HOBBIT and even afterwards, the only works accepted by publishers (who published anything other than mysteries, romances, or literary works) was science fiction. These were the glory days of Heinlein, Asimov, and others. Fantasy was the dark, second cousin that crouched uninvited in the doorway. People like Fritz Leiber had trouble getting their fantasy work published. Robert E. Howard's Conan thrived in the pulps, and he would be a good example of one person who was able to feed the need for fantasy.
Then came Tolkien. My father remembers when the bootleg additions were first released in this country; back when people were starved for Tolkien and had to have copies shipped from overseas. Suddenly, people wanted fantasy. Publishers wanted fantasy, too - not just any fantasy. They wanted more Tolkien. So other writers wrote in the same vein, and they were published, to feed the market. If you want to trace the "Tolkien-esque fantasies" back to their source, there it is.
But I don't personally believe the market is drowned in it today. I see the copies, and the wannabes, and I usually glide right on past their books. I love Tolkien, but not enough to read quest novels by other people writing Tolkien. And thankfully, I don't have to. That's why I'm curious. EUOL, you mentioned all the divisions in SF, and those are true - but you don't seem to mention all the little branches of fantasy you can find today.
There's the dark fantasy of Tanith Lee and Joyce Carol Oates; the return to the fairy tales (started by Terry Windling and Ellen Datlow - read FITCHER'S BRIDES as an excellent example of this dark, rich fantasy series). I love Tim Powers, of course, with his LAST CALL and DECLARE; there's Jonathan Carroll (LAND OF LAUGHS); William Browning Spencer (ZOD WALLOP); the works of China Mieville, which read like the opium-addicted offspring of Marvyn Peake and Edgar Allen Poe. How about the novels of Octavia Butler?
Dark fantasy, urban fantasy, contemporary fantasy, magic realism, historical fantasy, weird fantasy....the list goes on and on. I see the Tolkien-esque fantasy as only a minor drop in the bucket of a far richer world. There's room enough for all of us to write what we like - to read what we want - and never, ever lack.
This is a very old genre, and its roots go back in time towards the beginning. The stories we tell now have been told a thousand times before. But like any romance reader will tell you, it's not what's the same, it's how different it seems.
