Every few years I teach a class called Science Fiction. Students, unprompted, try to define the term, and disagree: Is it the literature of scientific and technological change? the one that imagines a future unlike the past? The fiction of cognitive estrangement? Of hypothesis-testing, or of heterotopia? Or simply the sum of the ways that the phrase “science fiction” gets used? The same students think that they know what fantasy means: A fantasy story draws on traditions of magic, with religious, mythic, or legendary overtones, set in a place and time without modern machines. SF may aim to puncture superstitions or to renew our sense of wonder, to point at a possible future or a bad present, but fantasy takes on less ambivalent goals: The genre aims to re-enchant our disenchanted world.
In The History of Science Fiction (2006), Adam Roberts offered a sweeping new way to use the term: his “disorderly technology fiction” (p. 18), inseparable from the Protestant Reformation as well as from scientific revolutions, sets materialist, explicable, rational worldviews amid their mythic or humanist opposites. Characters in SF have to work alongside, or against, or with (though more often they work against), the machine. Two decades later, Fantasy: A Short History (mostly, and understandably, a history of prose storytelling in English) offers a shorter guide to the second, with fewer surprises. If SF becomes the Other both to received religion and to realist fiction, fantasy emerges as the Other to science fiction, and to an already technological age.
In other words: my students (and I) were right about what fantasy is, and Roberts can show how it got that way. Coalescing from allegory like John Bunyan’s, Victorian medievalism like Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s, and nineteenth-century folk and fairy tales, fantasy as we know it passes through children’s literature and classic horror before finding its center in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, along with C. S. Lewis’s Narnia. Despite its recent “move away from medieval Europe to global cultures” (p. 32), many of them non-Christian, what we call modern fantasy still draws on those quintessential sources, whose “idealized fantasy past” both describes, and critiques, “disenchanted industrial modernity” (p. 66). Stories of self-enclosed secondary worlds (like Middle Earth, or Michael Moorcock’s Melniboné, or Lois McMaster Bujold’s Chalion) do so by implicitly comparing their age with our own. Portal fantasy (people from here end up there), urban fantasy, and reverse portal fantasy (faeries from there end up here) make the contrast clear. So do the contemporary tales, like Philip Pullman’s or Seanan McGuire’s, whose protagonists run, fall, flee, or get trapped between worlds.
No wonder (Roberts asserts) that, though myth, epic, and legend appear far older than SF, fantasy properly so-called—both the genre and the word we apply—must be “the more recent phenomenon” (p. 3). You can only re-enchant the world if it’s been disenchanted first. And that enchantment has to come from somewhere: some place, some homeland, some past time. With its roots in Romantic nationalism (the völkisch Grimms, the sagas, or for that matter the orishas), the genre can accommodate many political outlooks, but, Roberts warns, not all of them: “its idioms of magic and myth, because they are not rational, can never really be liberal” (p. 33). We might see the Five Gods of Chalion, the multiversal Dust of Phillip Pullman, or the plural homeworlds of McGuire’s Wayward Children as attempts to square that circle.
Roberts does right by Pullman, showing how Pullman opposes not spiritual experience, but new presbyters and old priests. He has plenty to say about Edmund Spenser, though nearly nothing on Milton or Shakespeare. Nor does he cover Cuchulain, or Quetzalcoatl, or Mami Wata: His geneaology emphasizes allegory and England over the more chaotic or individualistic magic created elsewhere (and influential later). He does not mention in McGuire or Bujold, Darcie Little Badger or Garth Nix. He probably does not address your own favorite present-day fantasy either, because he’s not John Clute (nobody else is John Clute), and he’s not writing a sea-sized encyclopedia.
Instead, he describes a literary history that looks like a sturdy tree, sometimes a baobab and sometimes a banyan, attending reliably and thoroughly to its roots and its thick linked trunks. Those trunks’ components—their cells, their rings—are bounded (as bark encloses a real-life tree) by Roberts’s overall argument: “The whole premise of fantasy is a complicated desire to return to an enchanted past.” That past means some more-than-rational tradition, threatened “by science, by capitalism, by Protestantism.” Often that past exalts violence—though fantasy (at least when Roberts admires it) “can see how unviable this feudal, warrior, hierarchical shame culture is in actuality” (p. 127; italics his).
Another author’s fantasy past may exalt patience, interdependence, acceptance, or tolerance. The Five Gods, in Bujold’s Chalion, support a homeostatic, pluralistic order: Bujold’s bad guys, who follow the Quaternary Heresy, sound like polytheistic versions of homophobic Missouri Synod Lutherans. The ineluctable threat—neither good nor evil; it’s just the future—in Sofia Samatar’s magisterial A Stranger in Olondria (2013) comes not from good nor from evil, not from violence nor from nonviolence, but from literacy.
Roberts treats that ambitious novel beautifully, near the end of his study. He also weaves in appreciations for the Oz books, and for The Wizard of Oz (1939) on film; for Lord Dunsany and for James Branch Cabell; for Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea, and for Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn (1968); for Robert E. Howard’s original Conan stories, and then for Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Terry Pratchett. Even once Roberts gets to the twenty-first century, he tries for catholicity (with a small c): comic and tragic modes, historical detail and far-future whimsy, non-Europe-based (Samatar), and effortfully English (Susanna Clarke) work all get careful attention.
So do the successful video games, like Skyrim (2011), that Roberts feels obliged to cover, and the earlier open-world games, like Myst (1993), that he prefers. Though video games as a medium make up a “significant form of contemporary fantasy,” their gameplay ends up “necessarily instrumentalizing, goal-oriented, often violent,” even “antagonistic and flattening” (p. 228). Given his reach across multiple forms and media, I wish that Roberts had said something, anything, about comic books, graphic novels and bandes dessinées, especially since he’s worked with their creators. But the thing about an enormous tree is that you can’t go out on every limb, nor scrutinize every flower that blooms. Roberts’s late chapters track the prolific pollinators: the works—or at least some of them—that have most affected (in English) the rest.
That means Dungeons and Dragons (1974-present), though not the indie games that DnD spawned. It means the Lord of the Rings films (2001-2003), and Game of Thrones, both books (1996-?) and TV (2011-2019), though not Howl’s Moving Castle (2005) or She-Ra (1985 and 2018) or The Little Mermaid (1989 and 2023). It means Pullman, and Wolfe, and Moorcock’s multiverse, and Roger Zelazny’s Amber, with its “complex game of intertextuality” (Amber seems to include so many tropes from other stories because they are copies; in-universe, or rather in-multiverse, Amber is the original [p. 160]). Roberts goes on to highlight N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2016-17), which seems to me less fantasy than science fiction, though any chance to think about Essun and Castrima is, these days, a chance worth taking. Jemisin’s novels critique our own hierarchical, tech-ruled, whitewasd world more harshly than Tolkien did, or could.
This account of fantasy as a genre fits other accounts of genre and mode, especially Alastair Fowler’s, that originate far from science fiction and fantasy. The talking animals in Narnia, for example, derive from beast fables, and illustrate how genres with their own rules bequeath elements to later modes. Pratchett’s Discworld and Jemisin’s Stillness go together almost as comedy goes together with tragedy, the former imagining how we might live together (“nobody is beyond the pale in Discworld”; “nobody is demonized”), the latter implying that we cannot (p. 196). As for the future of fantasy, Roberts finds it in “instauration,” a term he borrows from Clute. The term means, in effect, fix-it fic at the worldbuilding level: retellings-with-a-difference, “remedying what now looks like deplorable limitations,” such as white supremacy (pp. 262-263). The authors of instauration fantasy mean not only to critique an earlier respected source, but to “rerun the ritual,” “rebuild the temple” (p. 265). Sounds good. Let’s go.
This quick tour’s last chapters single out skill in worldbuilding (such as Samatar’s) and in prose style (like Wolfe’s), but they do not find their through-line there. Instead, Roberts notes the “sheer number of notable fantasy titles” published after the hippies discovered Middle Earth, Ballantine Books and Lin Carter launched their Adult Fantasy list (1969-1974), and publishers started to seek out sequels, trilogies, tie-ins, Tolkien copyists and Conan clones, in potentially never-ending series. What does he absolutely have to cover? His own favorites, certainly, and sharp parodies, like Diana Wynne Jones’s Tough Guide to Fantasyland (1969), with its “hilarious … timeworn tropes” (p. 169). But as a literary historian, Roberts also has to look at what gathers fans, what self-described fantasy readers see as the genre’s pillars, and (to put it crudely) what sells.
And so he does. David Gemmell’s “thirty novels,” “all, more or less, variants on the same basic adventure story,” nonetheless retain “a large, devoted fanbase,” setting good guys with swords against bad guys with swords (p. 181). Terry Goodkind’s are worse, and more right-wing. Simplistic moral universes pose one problem; Grimdark, where everyone’s awful or else gets slaughtered (usually both), another. Joe Abercrombie, “Lord Grimdark” to his own fans, “is a consummate storyteller” as well as “a very witty writer” in his sanguinary way (pp. 237-238). George R. R. Martin’s Westeros, however, offers up continual blood-soaked hypocrisy. Enamoured of noble houses, dragons, and titles, thrilling at the poisonings, rapes, and betrayals that undermine any noble goals, Martin’s readers and viewers can safely “have their chivalric cake and eat it too” (p. 237).
Other pop hits get dinged in other ways. Brandon Sanderson’s “dissipating epic prolixity is slightly less enervatingly prolonged” than Robert Jordan’s, since Sanderson’s “series does, at least, come to an end” (p. 205). The Harry Potter books start promisingly, though after book three “no one dared tell [J. K. Rowling] to edit down her drafts” (p. 214). Yet Roberts has more to say about Hogwarts, and about school stories in the wake of Rowling’s. Her wizarding world becomes “a Panopticon-like space,” an “over-surveilled” universe with “one core secret,” a kind of twisted Akedah: “the old are called upon to sacrifice the life of the young” (p. 217). (If Rowling believes she’s cosmically ordained to kill trans kids, that would explain a lot.)
It’s easy to imagine Roberts, tasked to plough through so much modern series fantasy, exclaiming as one of Tolkien’s drinking companions was heard to exclaim when he read them his drafts: “oh God, not another fucking elf” (p. 105). Roberts says what he thinks, but he also asks why other people like, or love, many novels that he disdains. From Walter Scott, to Robert Jordan, to Hogwarts, readers crave “ordinary young people ‘leveling up’ into greater power and importance,” as well as an “imaginative theme park” where anybody can enter and nobody has to leave (pp. 203, 204). If what you want is escape, and imaginary power, and an inspiring past, maybe you don’t need a story that knows its own limits, nor a discerning take on modernity, nor even a thread that leads out.
But Roberts prefers clear limits, and elegant threads. He also displays, and honors, verbal nuance. I had not noticed (had you?) that rock, stone, earth, in the True Speech of Earthsea, is tolk, while the word for ocean is inien. “Le Guin is saying that Earthsea is tolk-inien,” “an elegant way of acknowledging her major influence” (p. 145). In Christina Rossetti’s verse narrative “Goblin Market” (1862), “Lizzie bravely seeks out the phantasmagoric goblin creatures” whose erotic fruit might save “her afrugivorous sister” (p. 48). Put “afrugivorous” in your hobbit pipe, along with some pipeweed, and smoke it.
Despite copyediting bobbles, Roberts’s prose delights. So, in the end, does his take on the genre whose boundaries he respects, without policing. That genre’s boundary, or ecotone, between commerce and imagination seems as vexed as those other boundaries—between past and present, Heimat and unheimlich, logic and dream, maturity and childhood, even sword and sorcery—that the genre, in Roberts’s telling, entails. Decidedly British, even English, limited by its mission and its page count, Roberts’s history, like any history, has gaps. But it’s a journey worth taking. Sympathetic critics and fans may even come to the end with the same words that Roberts calls the saddest in English: “He drew a deep breath. ‘Well, I’m back,’ he said” (p. 27).