I was asked for my thoughts on high versus low fantasy. I may be able to come up with something more focused later, but this is where my brain went at first (so expect a bit of ramble — the short version will follow later):
High Fantasy vs. Low Fantasy
The terms seem to imply a difference in quality between these subgenres of fantasy fiction: “High fantasy is, like, better than low fantasy, because it has nothing at all to do with the boring world the reader inhabits.” (Speak for yourself, kid. I currently have two and one-fourth elves living in my brain, to say nothing of the dragons.)
I could probably dig up a quote from someone such as Ursula K. Le Guin to support that opinion — her essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” deals with the idea to keeping the “mundane” out of fantasy — but I don’t want to. Aside from the small amount of amusement I got from the title itself, I didn’t like that essay at all, the last time I read it, because the author argued in favor of keeping fantasy stories forever separate from the world we inhabit. Something about it cheapening the magic or whatever, if the magic is allowed to touch ordinary things.
Personally, I think the contrast makes both the magic and the mundane brighter, if both are dealt with properly.
Just to clear things up: High and low indicate the amount of magic-ness (as opposed to real-world-ness) in a fantasy story, not the quality of the story.
High fantasy is fantasy set in a secondary world, with nothing of the real world (note the lack of capitalization!) in it. The “epic-ness” of a story, by the way, has nothing to do with whether or not it’s classified as high fantasy. Yes, some people will tell you that high fantasy must be epic, “Because that’s how Tolkien did it, and of course all fantasy fiction is just a rip-off of Tolkien’s stuff anyway, right?” (Can you imagine me rolling my eyes at that?) They’re wrong. Even Tolkien himself would say they’re wrong. Yes, Tolkien’s most famous works are epic high fantasy, but what about “Leaf by Niggle”? The setting isn’t our world, but the story isn’t one about the great deeds of kings, etc., either.
On the other hand, a story set in a recognizable medieval Europe is low fantasy, and not because some people look down their noses at anything set in the Middle Ages (by which they mean any time period between the Fall of Rome and the Victorian era: “It’s all the same thing!” as one person told me). That’s because Europe is real, and the Middle Ages actually happened, and adding Magic and Stuff onto a mostly real setting is what makes the story low fantasy.
Now, unless you’re new here, you probably know how I feel about all-or-nothing categorizations: I don’t like them. Just as I don’t believe in any sharp separation between fantasy and science fiction, I don’t believe in any sharp separation between high and low fantasy. Yes, any specific story may be one or the other, but there are also stories that move back and forth, or even ignore any “division” entirely.
There’s even a subgenre known as portal fantasy, in which characters from “our” world are somehow transported to the “secondary world” in which most of the story takes place. (Every myth, legend, and folk tale about an ordinary mortal finding their way into Faerie through a secret gate, a barrow, or even a spell is portal fantasy, and such stories have been around for a long time.) If the setting can change from the “real world” to somewhere else, how can there be any absolute ‘A story can be high fantasy or low fantasy, but never, ever both’?
Unless you’re new here, you probably suspected I’d get around to this eventually: One of my favorite works of fiction begins in a “secondary world” and moves toward the Real World (and back again, more than once). The catch is, that “secondary world” is ours, or one enough like it as to be indistinguishable. You may not be surprised to learn that the author of that story didn’t believe in a clear division between fantasy and sci-fi (the main character in the second half of the series is a computer nerd, among other things), and although I have no proof (yet, but who knows what interesting essay or whatever one of my blogger friends may point me to next, and besides, there’s that stuff I found accidentally on Tor’s website on Sunday while I really was just looking up the correct spelling of a name), it wouldn’t surprise me if Roger Zelazny also said something once about not believing in a clear distinction between high and low fantasy.Ā
Now, some subgenres do seem to be almost entirely one or the other. Urban fantasy depends on the contrast between the “real world” and the magical add-ons. At least, much of the good stuff does. Then again, some of the good urban fantasy merges the magic into the “real world” as something that has been there all along (which it was), even if some of the characters weren’t aware of it. Although I’m certain it’s possible to write a sort of urban fantasy that’s also high fantasy, I’m not aware of any specific examples.
Low fantasy that’s also epic ought to be easier. Just write a sweeping tale of Important Events with Magic, set in an otherwise real time and place. This tends not to get written about recent eras, but that’s because it’s hard to write convincingly about Big Magic Events that supposedly happened in a time the reader lived through, in a world the reader inhabits. I think even that can be done, though.
North of Andover 