| Re: Some thoughts on the direction Fantasy seems to be heading -- present and future.
Not to take away from Zelazny -- whom I respect greatly -- but this is something he brought his own slant to, rather than bringing it to the genre. Other writers had been doing that at least as far back as Stapledon, Sloane, etc. Even some of the pulp writers brought some of that in. It was, however, in the 1960s that it became one of the more predominant aspects of the genre.
As for fantasy (rather than science fiction), it has a long history of including such things in its parameters; in part because fantasy (until -- again -- the Tolkien boom) has traditionally been an enormously broad genre that encompassed such things as the Gormenghast books, Charles Williams' or George MacDonald's allegorical novels, the almost unclassifiable novels such as E. H. Visiak's Medusa, the delicate fabulism of Lord Dunsany (or, before him, Poe and Wilde), the unabashedly archaic novels of E. R. Eddison, and tales of modern urban life as seen through the lens of the fantastic (Charles Beaumont, Harlan Ellison, Kuttner and Moore, etc.)....
Oh, and it's very nice to see a reference to Ariosto's Orlando Furioso... an absolutely marvelous (no pun intended) tale, indeed.... (Incidentally, you may be interested in Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp's original stories of Harold Shea, a fantasy series whose modern-day character ends up in such settings as that of the Norse myths -- just before Ragnarok, of course!; Spenser's Faerie Queene, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, the Irish myths and legends, and the Kalevala....) |