SO WHY FANTASY?

OCTOBER 2024

© Chad Corrie

Since I’m in the midst of a book tour for Rainier’s Legacy I got to thinking about one of the more popular questions that arise from meeting folks and doing events. They may not ask it directly but there are several ways it comes up—and that is the matter of why I write primarily in the fantasy genre.

While I tried my hand at various genres when I first started writing I tended to gravitate to fantasy in general. I guess it could be part of my upbringing in which I was coming of age when fantasy was more or less having its heyday. Movies, television, and animation were flooded with several shows and characters and settings to help that along. And then there was the toy market that was bursting at the seams with Transformers, He-man, and many other fantasy, science-fctansy, sci-fi, and other flavors of adventure just waiting to be explored. Even Lego kicked off their castle series around that same time. Like I said, a very fantasy rich season to be alive.

While that may have been part of it I seemed to have had an early fascination to the genre in general, as I think most do when young. It just stuck with me, I guess, longer than other folks. The other part of the equation is that when I started writing in other genres I learned that there was a lot of research and reference work you needed to be undertake for a tale. You need to know car makes and models, proper notation for guns and weapons and tactical gear, and so forth to tell any sort of story well—or rather, believably. This didn’t really appeal to me. I wanted to write not research things endlessly to get things “right” for a certain story.

The irony, of course. is that I’d be doing a lot more researching and development work for crafting fantasy tales than I first knew, but that’s another tale for another time. While the research matter was a sticking point the real issue I saw was that having things set in any modern time period was going to instantly make it more topical and thus dated to a certain extent. And things don’t tend to always age as well as we think, relevance with the reader also being a factor. And so I opted to take a closer look at fantasy, which didn’t have such limitations.

Fantasy, in a way, is evergreen. You don’t really have things that can get too dated if you base your story universe on something outside the known. You don’t have to keep up with all the latest technology to keep things current or know all the latest specs from some type of car, aircraft, or the like. You can simply set up your setting and tell your tale. And that story will still be relatable the next year, decade, and even generation, as we see with many of the more established fantasy stories out there.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I’ve focused on the fantasy flavor of fiction for so long: a combination of not wanting something to become topical/dated and having more freedom to create and explore without having to be more grounded on real world tech and realities. And with that, I think we’ll wrap up this month’s post.

And now back to that book tour…