But what about bad “hard fantasy”? (updated)
3 o'clock, October 13, 2005
In comments tangential to this post on Meghan’s LiveJournal, various theories of “hard fantasy” are proposed:
Tim Pratt: I always thought “hard fantasy” just meant fantasy that was emotionally realistic and had a well-developed setting. So no vague rolling fields of elfland or great destined earth-altering one-true-love. Fantasy where things are messy and Fate doesn't take care of everything.
Meghan: Hard SF has a much more specific program about grounding SF in “real” science. So, just hearing the phrase “hard fantasy,” I think of that same “rigor,” i.e. grounding the fantastic in actual folklore traditions and not riffing off other writers and creating a genre echo chamber.
Also Meghan: [Or] perhaps “hard fantasy’s” rigor is more about writing the fantastic in settings that humanity would actually inhabit — with pain, with class, with ugly people — as opposed to a boring (and ideologically problematic) ye-old-golden-middle-ages.
Niall Harrison: I think of Ted Chiang — i.e. treating fantastic premises with the rigour charateristic of hard sf.
So what would bad hard fantasy be? What would be the equivalent of the quintissential hard-SF clunker that not even an Analog reader could love? I think I’ve seen it in Meghan’s first version, stories of the middle-class American family inherits Scottish lakeside castle — little girl dreams of horses — water-horse drowns little girl variety. But what’s the “rigorous premises” version? The “emotionally realistic” version?
Update: Jeez — sorry, Niall! Too much time in the economic history section of Waterstone’s.
Oh good christ, yes, that first version abounds in suckness. And I really do think that's the closest cousin to hard SF in terms of the potential for suckness - "My story is good b/c the science/folklore is right and not derived from space opera/Tolkein imitators, therefore, story awesome." I think the other modes would be more prone to the traps of realism, "But my wizard is a drunk who lives in a slum/a bored college professor/a listless quarter-life-crisis wizard, so what if he doesn't do anything throughout the story, damnit man, this is REAL LIFE." Or, all rigor (rigour? perhaps I will be british today?) in the concept, lack of actual story/character/etc, which sends us back towards hard SF...
Basically, everything has the potential to suck. There is no escape. I am grumpy. We are doomed.