Fantasy fiction conservative?

[Alfred001]

I was reading the wikipedia entry to a book called Iron Council and there's this passage in there:

"Still, fantasy fiction is usually fabulously conservative, and Iron Council – with its implicit trade unionism, as well as the fact that many characters are casually bisexual – stands as a rebuke to the genre's medieval politics."

And I'm wondering, is that really true, that fantasy fiction is conservative? Conservative in what sense, what kind of views are typically expressed?

Do writers (and maybe readers) of conservative fiction tend to be conservative?

[OrphanPip]

I was reading the wikipedia entry to a book called Iron Council and there's this passage in there:

"Still, fantasy fiction is usually fabulously conservative, and Iron Council – with its implicit trade unionism, as well as the fact that many characters are casually bisexual – stands as a rebuke to the genre's medieval politics."

And I'm wondering, is that really true, that fantasy fiction is conservative? Conservative in what sense, what kind of views are typically expressed?

Do writers (and maybe readers) of conservative fiction tend to be conservative?

I think there was a time where the major figures in fantasy and science fiction were deeply conservative. Lewis and Tolkien were both fairly conservative individuals. Early science fiction in America was associated with militarism. At the same time you can point to leftist genre writers from the 60s and 70s as well, like LeGuin or Moorcock.

Others, particularly Moorcock himself, have made the point that genre fiction is itself a kind of conservative genre because it rewards imitation of predecessors and resists experimentation.

"The commercial genre which has developed from Tolkien is probably the most
dismaying effect of all. I grew up in a world where Joyce was considered to be the
best Anglophone writer of the 20th century. I happen to believe that Faulkner is
better, while others would pick Conrad, say. Thomas Mann is an exemplary giant of
moral, mythic fiction. But to introduce Tolkien's fantasy into such a debate is a sad
comment on our standards and our ambitions. Is it a sign of our dumber times
that Lord of the Rings can replace Ulysses as the exemplary book of its century?
Some of the writers who most slavishly imitate him seem to be using English as a
rather inexpertly-learned second language. So many of them are unbelievably bad
that they defy description and are scarcely worth listing individually. Terry Pratchett
once remarked that all his readers were called Kevin. He is lucky in that he appears
to be the only Terry in fantasy land who is able to write a decent complex sentence.
That such writers also depend upon recycling the plots of their literary superiors and
are rewarded for this bland repetition isn't surprising in a world of sensation movies
and manufactured pop bands. That they are rewarded with the lavish lifestyles of
the most successful whores is also unsurprising. To pretend that this addictive
cabbage is anything more than the worst sort of pulp historical romance or western
is, however, a depressing sign of our intellectual decline and our free-falling
academic standards."
- Michael Moorcock

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/en361fantastika/bibliography/2.7moorcock_m.1978epic_pooh.pdf

[Ecurb]

Sword and Sorcery fantasy is fundamentally conservative, like religion. The religious world view is that we have fallen from a glorious past. The Greeks had the age of heroes, when Gods walked among men. Christians have the fall from Eden. This world-view is fundamentally conservative.


In Middle Earth, the Elves are waning in power; man has fallen from the glories of Numenor; Sauron lacks the power of Morgoth. IN "The Worm Ouroboros", this notion is explicit -- the worm is swallowing its own tail, and the heroes wish for past heroism.

No fairy tales begin: "Once upon a time their was a President..." It must be a king, or a queen, or a princess. That's because in fantasy and fairy tale, character is fixed by rank and position, a conservative notion.

One more thing: Joyce's Ulysses borrows its name, plot, and chapters from -- you guessed it -- a "fantasy" (or a historical story containing many fantastic elements). The modern, scientific world view suggests the notion of "progress". Modernist art (and its fans) applaud this notion. But is "Ulysses" really greater literature than "The Odyssey"?

[Ecurb]

Job 34:

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation....
while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?"

Isn't this fundamentally conservative?

[Alfred001]

Lets bring this down to earth and not draw tenuous connections between features of fantasy fiction and conservatism:

Are fantasy writers mainly conservative IN THEIR POLITICAL VIEWS? (or are there more conservatives in fantasy than other genres)

[Ecurb]

Lets bring this down to earth and not draw tenuous connections between features of fantasy fiction and conservatism:

Are fantasy writers mainly conservative IN THEIR POLITICAL VIEWS? (or are there more conservatives in fantasy than other genres)


Who cares? I'm more interested in the literature than the political affiliations of the writers.

[Jackson Richardson]

Job 34:

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation....
while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?"

Isn't this fundamentally conservative?

Not necessarily, The priest who had the greatest influence on me as a convinced socialist. Surely socialism fits very well with the loss of Eden? Humanity no longer knows social equality and justice and there is a hope that they can be regained in the Kingdom.

Incidentally the word "conservative" means something very different outside the USA, like the words "liberal" and "football". I certainly intellectually sympathise with socialism but I am definitely conservative in my cultural tastes.

And I'm not sure modernism applauds progress. I'd have thought that it was very suspicious of it. And T S Eliot often thought of as the arch modernist was conservative in many ways. Ezra Pound was nearly a fascist, I believe.

[Ecurb]

I'm using a general definition of "conservative". I suppose modern political conservatives favor Capitalism over Socialism, but wasn't Capitalism a liberal (even radical) idea not very long ago? I'm thinking of conservatism as reverence for the past and reluctance to change -- not as capitalism vs. socialism.

Religion is "conservative" because it promotes the notion of eternal values, which do not change from one generation to the other, as well as because we might all think that hearing the morning stars sing together in wonder and praise represents some sort of ideal that we (like Job) are unlikely to witness personally. Of course I agree with you that there is nothing in Christianity that favors capitalism over socialism, although Max Weber did think that Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic fed into each other.

[Alfred001]

Who cares? I'm more interested in the literature than the political affiliations of the writers.

Then go start your own thread

[Pompey Bum]

I certainly intellectually sympathise with socialism but I am definitely conservative in my cultural tastes.

Ah, conservative in one's own tastes but generous with other people's money. How convenient. ;-)


Lets bring this down to earth and not draw tenuous connections between features of fantasy fiction and conservatism:

Are fantasy writers mainly conservative IN THEIR POLITICAL the(or are there more conservatives in fantasy than other genres)

I would imagine it depends on the individual writer. H.G. Wells called himself a socialist and belonged to the Fabian Society for a time. J.R.R. Tolkien has horrified by the industrialization of the English countryside. I don't think there is anything inherently conservative about fantasy writers. But Wells and Tolkien are about as far as I've read in the genre.

[Danik 2016]

I suppose it also depends on the time and the place when the text is written. For example, one can´t expect any one writing about Presidents at a time where they didn´t exist.
And often the revolutionary or experimental fiction from yesterday becomes today's norm.

[Ecurb]

Then go start your own thread

Is a belief that one "owns" a thread one starts capitalistic and conservative?

[OrphanPip]

I agree with ecurb that there is an inherently conservative nature to "High Fantasy" as a genre.

As to the politics of writers. The only explicitly conservative authors currently active I can think of are Orson Scott Card (a deeply conservative Mormon) and Terry Goodkind (an objectivist who sees himself as a successor to Ayn Rand). On the left I can think of China Mieville, and perhaps J.K. Rowling if you want to include her.

Card, Goodkind and Mieville all write explicitly political fiction though, Card has his moments but I think the only really talented one out of the three is Mieville.

[JCamilo]

Yeah, I think the conservative in fantasy mentioned in the wikipedia sentence is more about this kind of fantasy (it is too old genre, too complex to be one thing) is often about the same unchangeable times of medieval logic. Feudal kings owning the land, heroes who serve an old ideal, villains who defy the order of the land in the same way, religion (even if with an entire new pantheon) etc. They are rooted in the past (unlike the fantasy of Science Fiction, for example) and have a feeling of what is lost (In this way, that is the entire theme of Tolkien after all, hence why LoTR is so representative). Think of the gothic genre, all the ghosts in old ruins of castles are written in counterpoint to the modernization of european society in XVIII century. Those were works of aa certain level of "saudade". It is not exactly about the authors.

[Pompey Bum]

Think of the gothic genre, all the ghosts in old ruins of castles are written in counterpoint to the modernization of european society in XVIII century.

It's interesting that by the 19th century many of the haunts turned out to have rational explanations after all. Apparently modernization was winning.

[JCamilo]

I know what you mean, but I think the stories always have an appeal to rational explanations. Except, at some point, a ghost was a damn good rational explanation. :D

[Pompey Bum]

I love it when ghosts just turn up briefly in contemporary novels that aren't otherwise aboutmagical realism. The American writer Richard Russo is especially good at making that work. For Alf007's sake, Russo is a Catholic labor type--once common in the Northeast but now grown scarce. That makes him socially somewhat conservative but politically left. Interesting guy and a good writer, but certainly not in the fantasy genre.