Subgenre Saturday: Low Fantasy

So, most everyone knows what high fantasy is, I would assume. Tolkien and Dragonlance and Shannara and The Wheel of Time. Huge world that isn’t earth, lots of magic everywhere, and normally massively important consequences (though not always). I don’t even feel like I need to go into it too much. It’s pretty much what comes to most people’s minds when they hear about fantasy fiction.

It’s also not what I write. I’ve tried my hand at a traditional high fantasy once or twice (or more that I’m just not remembering), and it never turns out well. I love reading them, when they’re done well, but mine are never really done well (although I still have aspirations of one day writing my high-fantasy epic… just haven’t found the time for it between everything else). What I do write (when I’m not doing urban fantasy or sci-fi) is something I never had a name for. I described it as ‘high fantasy, but without the magic.’ Or with very little magic, or magic that just wasn’t overt. So, as I was scrolling through lists, trying to decide which subgenre to do this week, I ran across ‘low fantasy.’ I was intrigued because they had ‘urban fantasy’ as a separate entry on that list, and I’d always been told that urban and contemporary fantasy was low fantasy. So of course I clicked.

Turns out, I’ve been writing low fantasy for years, at least by that definition. It’s one of those that people can’t seem to decide on. Some people still say that urban fantasy is low fantasy. To me, that just seems redundant, so I’m sticking with this. Low fantasy is an alternate world, just like high fantasy, but you don’t have wizards running about throwing fireballs at dragons to save the Holy Chalice of House McGuffin from Larinth the Dreameater. Magic is rare in low fantasy, when it’s present at all. If there’s magic, it’s often gone missing or isn’t widely accessible. It may exist only in artifact form, or require the will of the gods, or belong to a single nearly-dead bloodline. Whatever the case, it’s not normally a viable problem-solving option in low fantasy.

Now, I’ve never read A Song of Ice and Fire (it’s on my to-read list, I promise), but I’ve talked to people who have. From what they describe, at the beginning, those books are low fantasy. Magic is uncommon and the major conflict to start with is this battle over the throne (all what I’ve heard, so I may be wrong. If so, I apologize). As magic comes more and more into play, it becomes sort of high fantasy, but it’s the most popular example I could think of.

(There’s also apparently a lot of crossover with sword and sorcery, when it comes to the great wintery world of Westeros. There’s also a lot of crossover between low fantasy and sword and sorcery. I’ll get into that particular subgenre next week.)

There are a handful of other things that set low fantasy apart from high fantasy and, at least for me, make it more enjoyable to read. It hits a lot of the things I like to see in my fiction. It’s a much smaller plot, which I prefer. Instead of saving the world, you’re trying to save your sister or your house or maybe your village.

It also hits one of the big character things I love: gray morality. In high fantasy, you often have a very cut and dry, black and white morality, including villains and heroes that get color-coded for your convenience (The evil forces all wear black armor, and the good forces are shiny and sparkly). In low fantasy, while it’s not ubiquitous (there’s very little in any genre or subgenre that would be considered ubiquitous), the characters often have gray morality. You don’t often get into anything as light as white and gray morality (a clearly good side, and a sort of ambiguous side, or evil that is sort of kind and really just needs a hug), but I’m sure it’s out there somewhere. You’re much more likely to see both sides with gray morality (neither side is necessarily all that evil, but they’re not going to bring you cookies and milk, either). Their conflict isn’t necessarily based around one side being bad and the other being good, but just around them being opposed. And then, at the dark end of our morality scale, you have black and gray morality. Basically, neither character is wonderful, but one of them is just downright evil, so a lesser evil has to be brought in to solve it (like summoning a demon to fight the Devil).

Now, as I said, none of these things have to happen to make it low fantasy. Take Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard books. There’s very clearly some real magic going on, but it doesn’t factor into the plot, and it’s not something the characters can turn to in order to solve their problems. At least not reliably. They have to go with cleverness and quick-thinking and more mundane skills.

On the movie and TV side of things, you norm

ally don’t come close to low fantasy. When they go for it in a medium like that, they normally really go for it. The closest would be something like Conan the Barbarian, but that’s sword and sorcery to the core (again, next week, I promise).

Unfortunately (at least for me), low fantasy has never really taken off on its own. It can be used to describe a lot of different genres and subgenres, but very few people produce it. So, if you know any really good low fantasy that I should be reading, let me know. I’m on the lookout for these kinds of books, and now I know what to look for.

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Voss

Subgenre Saturday: Wuxia

Well, today we’re going for something a little bit less familiar to a lot of my readers…and possibly something I’ve talked about before, but not necessarily in depth like this. Wuxia fiction. It’s at once a very specific description and also an incredibly broad one. Wuxia translates (roughly) to ‘martial hero,’ if I can believe the internet. I don’t speak any dialect of Chinese, so take what I have to say with a side-dish of doubt, when it comes to that.

Wuxia is a very old genre, and it deals with the adventures and wanderings of martial artists. Normally, they aren’t serving anyone but their own code of honor, which is often the best sort of law. It’s normal in wuxia to see a corrupt or unjust government (or at the very least, incompetent) which forces our martial artist hero to take matters into his or her own hands. All of this is set against the jianghu, assort of alternate reality version of imperial China (Note: wuxia doesn’t technically have to take place in that setting, but it almost always does. If anyone knows of any set in the modern world, please please let me know—I think that would be so awesome to read/watch/what have you.).

So all of that is what makes it such a specific subgenre of fantasy. If you miss those essential beats, it’s going to leave the audience a bit perplexed, at best, even if they don’t know why. At worst, it’s going to make for a very upset audience member or two… or more.

What makes it so general is… well, everything else. Wuxia is a very broad-ranging genre. It was initially literature, but has so pervaded culture in China (and is taking a stronger and stronger hold in other part of the world) that it’s moved into opera and, probably most famously overseas, cinema. All those movies (or a lot of those movies, anyway) that you see full of martial arts and questionable physics? They’re part of the rich landscape that is wuxia.

Probably the most famous wuxia movie for most people in the US is Crouching Tiger, HiddenDragon. And it hits all the beats. A government that has some seriously messed up stuff, a bunch of disparate martial artists, each with a very strict code of honor, the jianghu, and of course the fighting.

But then, on the other side of the movie coin, you have Kung Fu Panda. Yes, I’m absolutely serious about this. Take a look at it. Kung Fu Panda hits all the required wuxia beats: the closest we have to a real government (the prison) lets the incredibly dangerous evil kitty cat out. At the same time, our hero, who has no master, is destined to fight the evil kitty cat. And we’ve got the jianghu, which is very obvious. I’ll admit, it’s incredibly westernized, but it’s still widely considered to be a wuxia movie, and for very good reason. It even touches on a lot of tropes that pop up in other works of wuxia (the secret technique, the counter to the unstoppable style of combat, the old man/woman you don’t want to mess with).

When it comes to books, probably the most famous of all in wuxia are Romance of the ThreeKingdoms and Journey to the West, both written hundreds of years ago. In more modern literature, you have the Dutch-written Judge Dee books (initially inspired by an eighteenth century wuxia work) and the slightly-off-from-wuxia Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox.

Now, I wouldn’t be able to go into wuxia without at least touching on the influence it’s had in a newer story-telling medium: video games. You have the Dynasty Warriors franchise (based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms). You also have one of my favorites from my gaming era, Jade Empire. Even World of Warcraft got on board the wuxia boat with Mists of Pandaria.

And there are TV shows. There are comics and graphic novels. There are anime and manga that take from wuxia. It’s one of the most pervasive subgenres, yet it’s also hardly known to those outside of China. It’s also one that I think deserves its time in the spotlight.

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Voss