Whenever something strange is introduced in a story, it grabs the attention of the audience. Quite simply, fantasy is what we as storytellers use to hold the attention of our audience as we prepare to tell them something important. Yet fantasy permeates society and my love for it blossomed as a child-from bedtime stories to cartoon, from cartoons to comics and fables and myth, from myth to more contemporary fantasies in the form of novels. I grew to love fantasy as a child, sitting on my mother’s knee, as she told me bedtime stories like “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Hansel and Gretel.” I don’t think that I recognized that animated stories-cartoons like Bugs Bunny or movies like Peter Pan-were roughly the equivalent of those bedtime stories. Yet many folks don’t recognize how important fantasy is in our lives.
I’m pretty safe in making that bet: it’s been true every year for the past 20 years. In fact, I’m going to make a prediction: eight of the ten top-grossing films this year will be fantasy or science fiction. Most of the bestselling books of all time are fantasies-things like Harry Potter, Twilight, or the The Alchemist. Some of the big players in the fantasy genre include people like Homer, Shakespeare, and Dickens. Wonder literature makes sense, though there are those who recognize that horror is often closely aligned to fantasy.Īfter all, the strange is often terrifying as well as wondrous. These are often humor, romance, horror, thrillers, and so on. You see, we tend to categorize books nowadays by the primary emotions that they elicit. Science fiction and fantasy would thus be sold together under his model. Wollheim once suggested that bookstores create a section called “Wonder literature” that would include stories meant to arouse a powerful sense of wonder.
To some degree it might even be predictive of the future in a way that fantasy is not. Science fiction is most often a literature that deals with speculation about the future. Some people consider science fiction to be a subset of fantasy, though it can be quite different. It also does in the characters that inhabit our own world-vampires and supermen. Fantasy offers some strangeness as a primary draw, such as a strangeness in the setting for the story such as imaginary places or magic systems. Today, when discussing fantasy as a literary genre, we often are discussing a branch of literature.
In one sense, every story that is made up, or imaginary, is a fantasy.Ī hundred years ago, if a writer were discussing and writing fantasy, he would have used the term fantasy that way.
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