Freedom of fantasy

J.R.R. Tolkien is arguably the biggest name in the world of fantasy literature, and the college where he taught, Pembroke College in Oxford, has continued to honor his legacy in a variety of ways, including a public lecture series called the J.R.R. Tolkien Lecture, which annually invites notable fantasy authors to discuss the genre and promote "the study of fantasy literature, and advances our understanding of it."

The series began in 2013 and has included such figures as Lev Grossman, Maria Dahvana Headley, Marlon James, Kij Johnson, Guy Gavriel Kay, R. F. Kuang, and a whole bunch of others. (Last year's speaker was Neil Gaiman, in what I think was his last public appearance before allegations of his sexual misconduct came to light. Whoops.)

I'm familiar with Zen Cho as the author of the 2015 novel Sorcerer to the Crown, which I remember enjoying as a interesting read about the nature of magic in England. (She's since written a sequel, The True Queen, as well as Black Water Sister, and some others.) The book was about an archaic magical system contending with some existential challenges, now being led by the first African sorcerer and contending with the prospect of allowing women into their order's ranks.

Cho kicked off her talk with a good observation:

"The advantage of fantasy is that you're not constrained by the laws of physics. Fantasyland is ruled by the laws of metaphor...for that space, you're freed from the restrictions from our world, and one of these restrictions is the duty of accurate reporting. This is another reason why fantasy is a good place to work things out; it provides a place of psychological safety for the creator."

She goes on to point out that as we're discussing ideas – and particularly on social media – people have a tendency to go to extremes or to simplify those topics and talking points, eliminating nuance. "There's not much space to get things wrong," she says, "there's not a lot of space for healthy debate or the discussion of nuance," which can cause problems for artists and creators who feel that they have to please everyone and remain as inoffensive or unobtrusive as possible in order to succeed. "That fear is incredibly damaging to creativity, and exploration and play, which are all necessary to the creation of good art."

Fantasy is a way to circumvent that: if fantasy doesn't have to adhere to reality, it can serve to provide cover and distance for those discussions to take place. It's a way grant freedom to those creators to take risks and stretch their wings.

She goes on to talk about how vast and varied the world of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is: Middle-earth's mix of cultural analogs, the otherworldliness of Legolas's as compared to that of the Hobbits or humans, all placed against this giant backdrop of a battle of good and evil that threatens the place. That framework allowed Tolkien to really showcase the stakes of the story the larger story against the smaller, mundane moments.

That flexibility, Cho notes, is a huge advantage for practitioners like herself and others who don't necessarily see themselves in traditional fantasy. Those writers often have to go out and forge their own path, and when they do, they can be perceived as diversity hires or published because a publisher wants to check off a box somewhere, or saddled with the burden of having to tell a story with outsized dramatic, emotional, or political heft.

Working with fantasy, without its duty to adhere to the real world, can be liberating. "I would argue that the freedom and flexibility of fantasy is a huge boon because it opens up a multiplicity of voices and styles and time periods to draw upon," she says. When asked about why she decided to use the "unconventional" choice of using an African sorcerer as her lead character in Sorcerer to the Crown in an interview, she noted "because I think he's hot."

I've been writing creatively quite a bit lately and as I've done so, I've been thinking a lot about making choices and decisions in a story. I can make the characters do X, Y, and Z over the course of their journey, and their actions and decisions pin them down as they move forward through the narrative. But as I've been jotting down notes and dialogue and info dumps, the structure of fantasy literature means that you can just do things. If I want to toss in something really cool, I can absolutely do that. "There's a shared understanding of practitioners of this genre, whether that's readers, writers, reviewers, publishers, that it's fun!... You don't have to ask 'why put a dragon in a book?' Why wouldn't you? Dragons are cool? 'Why include magic?' Because it's magical!"

Ultimately, Art is a way to express one's humanity – allowing us to take the necessary risks that allows us to be creative and to life our lives to the fullest. Fantasy, without those constraints and justifications to shoehorn itself into the real world, is an excellent expression of artistic and creative freedom, one that allows us to better live and flourish in the real world that surrounds us.

I really appreciated this lecture, because Cho articulates some of the disparate thoughts that I'd had about art, genre, writing, and creativity in a world where we're constantly getting machine learning programs and predictable, formulaic patterns shoved down our throats. Living and art and fantasy are all about the imperfections and serendipity that we encounter in our lives and in our stories, and the ability to work free of those expectations and proscriptions will lead to better stories and art.

You can watch the whole lecture here: