Andrew Johnson [FXS]
Prince
- Joined
- May 15, 2020
- Messages
- 394
In fact, Robinson's first published story, in Analog (a magazine devoted entirely to 'hard' science fiction), received a lot of irate reader comments because it had "no science fiction" in it: he had simply taken the classic trope of Time Travel and turned it around: instead of a person traveling in time, what if time traveled and the person didn't? His point in the comment I mentioned was that the published fantasy had become all too often, also standardized and therefore not much fantasy at all.
Any game that pretends to be 'fantasy' while using common tropes or already-published works runs the risk of also being regurgitated fantasy and therefore not fantastic, just familiar - and all too often comfortable and Dull.
Literary theorist Todorov writes that the "fantastic" exists in that space when the laws of the world are upended and anything seems possible. It quickly devolves into other genres (the uncanny, when the appearance of the fantastic turns out to be a misapprehension of real events - e.g. in Poe, or the marvelous, when new laws are discovered - e.g. in Harry Potter). Cultivating that sense of wonder is the real draw towards fantastic literature, for Todorov, and for me.