So here goes, this is my first draft of my fantasy Road Map... I intend eventually, to have it laid out something akin to the London Underground map, in order to make relationships more complex, I'm also looking for more examples to go in my "Unheroic" fantasy category, apart from Steerpike and Tanith lee's birthgrave.. which may actually count as Science Fantasy.. I'm not sure what else to put there.
4 comments:
I like it, and it's a project that needs doing. Offhand I can't think of a fantasy flowchart that captures all the various subgenres.
I can't comment on Gormenghast as the originator of unheroic fantasy because, embarassingly, I haven't read it yet.
A Song of Ice and Fire is a tough one... it's definitely epic in scope, but its also decidedly unheroic.
I've put gormenghast there specifically because of what I feel is a mis-understanding involving the book.
As I remarked in my post, "steerpike parkway" I think that due to the complexity of the book, a lot of people fail to grasp the idea that, though Steerpike is indeed the "Protagonist" of the book.. he's not the "Hero' of the book.. and thus isn't setting out to set a good example, and has taken his place as the villian of the work just about the time he begins murdering people. But yet some how you still feel compelled to root for him cuase hes the underdog trying to drag himself up in society.
He is effectively, Tony Montana, but with less drugs. I came to the conclusion of the misunderstanding after having seen how much weight authors such as Moorcock and John Grant place on him..
I was not entirely sure where to put A Song of Ice and Fire to be honest.. I wound up putting it there because by GRRM's own admission, Memory Sorrow and Thorn was his inspiration.. But that is it.. You wouldn't immediately connect the two novels upon a surface reading.
Where as I feel say, both Kate Elliot and KJ Parker are decidedly in the vein of Katherine Kurtz.. just on wildly different spectrums of morality.
I wound up deciding that both Elric and Kane should probably, if not be directly in the "Unheroic" category.. than should be within spitting distance of it.. and as such have decided I will need to add a scale of some sort to the second edition in order to more properly lay it out.. That of course also means working out a list of qualifications to determain where on the scale it will fit..
I'm still debating a cartesian graph, with the axies being "Social Behaviour" and "Scope" meaning that a character can be social or anti-social or some where between the two.. and the scope of the setting can be anywhere from personal mano e mano to vast world altering events.
Interesting.
I think you'd do better with the a cartesian sort of graph. The way your representing it now suggests a pedigree--a philogenetic relation that may not exist in some cases and certainly hasn't been established. For instances, I don't think Howard's inspirations were what the graph seems to suggest, but rather pure adventure stories like those of Mundy, Sabatini, and Lamb.
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