vi Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Horror Fiction
protagonist who depends as much or more on his
brawn than on his brains. The popularity of that
form has fluctuated in recent years, but it remains a
significant subset of the genre, particularly in those
books associated with computer or other game sys-
tems such as Warhammer.
The light fantasy adventure story was closely
associated with the magazine Unknown, which
helped bring writers such as L. Sprague de Camp to
prominence. The central characters in these novels
were more likely to be intelligent and civilized and
often fell into their adventures by mischance, per-
haps by being inadvertently kidnapped by fairies.
They were generally humorous in tone and
employed simple, direct plots. A third type of fanta-
sy story often overlapped with science fiction—the
lost race novel. Writers such as H. Rider Haggard, A.
Merritt, and Talbot Mundy introduced their charac-
ters into isolated civilizations, remnants of ancient
cultures, sometimes describing them as possessing
superior science and sometimes capable of perform-
ing genuine magic. The lost world fantasy novel has
largely been abandoned by modern writers, but the
other two forms are still actively in use.
During the late 1960s publication in mass mar-
ket paperback of the Lord of the Rings,a trilogy by
the British writer J. R. R. Tolkien, began what
would be the transformation of fantasy and its grad-
ual rise to a popularity as great as that of science fic-
tion. Tolkien’s epic story of a world filled with
diverse races, with a fully worked out history and
intricate political and social structures, has been
imitated by numerous writers, perhaps most notably
Terry Brooks. The Forgotten Realms and
Dragonlance game systems are set in a
Tolkienesque world and have been the basis for lit-
erally hundreds of fantasy novels and stories. Scores
of fantasy trilogies followed, some of them similar to
Tolkien’s, most of them not. Another form of fanta-
sy, the disguised historical, infrequently used before
the 1970s, began to grow in popularity and is now
the dominant theme in the field.
This trend started when Katherine Kurtz,
Robert Jordan, Merecedes Lackey, L. E. Modesitt
Jr., and other writers began producing a kind of
Graustarkian romance with magic. Their stories are
all set in completely imaginary worlds, although in
almost every case there are strong parallels to his-torical Europe. These worlds or political entities
within them are generally ruled by kings and
queens or emperors, contain wizards who side
either with good or evil, and are prone to warfare
and other violence, although frequently most of the
conflict arises from palace intrigues, rebellions, or
conspiracies, and often the plot hinges upon the
efforts to protect the throne from insurgents or
recover it from usurpers. Many borrow from
Tolkienesque fiction and include quests for knowl-
edge or magical artifacts, enchanted swords, and
occasionally dragons. This form has become so pop-
ular that even the better novels often seem stale
and repetitive, and truly innovative writers such as
George R. R. Martin, Stephen R. Donaldson,
China Miéville, and Mary Gentle may sometimes
be lost in the crowd of lesser authors.
Other forms of fantasy remain generally on the
periphery. Humor made a brief comeback in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, with a steady output
from Esther Friesner, Craig Shaw Gardner, Robert
Lynn Asprin, John DeChancie, and others, but only
Piers Anthony, Terry Pratchett, and occasionally
Diana Wynne Jones have continued to be success-
ful in the United States. Laurell Hamilton blurred
the distinction between fantasy and horror with the
very popular Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, series,
which depicts various supernatural creatures as
varying from good to evil just as humans do and
which is set in a world very similar to but not quite
our own, but only a handful of writers such as
Charlaine Harris and Kim Harrison have explored
similar territory. There have also been a few writers
who set their fantasy novels in genuine historical
settings, such as Judith Tarr, Sara Douglass, and
Gael Baudino, but they are in a decided minority, as
are more consciously literary fantasists such as
Gene Wolfe, Jeffrey Ford, and the more recent
Michael Moorcock.
Although the result of this has been counter-
productive in terms of the field’s creative develop-
ment, it appears that readers are perfectly content
with the situation the way it is, and not a month
goes by without announcements of new trilogies or
open-ended series involving warriors, princes, wiz-
ards, and occasional demons. There have been
indications of some movement since the early
1990s, however, and the fact that World Fantasy