The different types of fantasy

I’ve written a couple of different kinds of fantasy, so today I thought I would talk about the different kinds of fantasy and what differentiates them from each other.

I should mention this isn’t intended to be a comprehensive list, nor a rigorously academic one. Genre is one of those topics that invariably seems to bring out the WELL ACKSHULLY commentors from the woodwork to argue over the finer points of what, exactly, constitutes hard science fiction or sword & sorcery.

I don’t think it is useful to consider genre as a strict taxonomy of stories, like phyla and species for animals. My view is that the writer needs to first and foremost think about what will make a good story. The overall kind of story you are writing is reflected by the genre, where there are certain underlying assumptions that the reader will expect for that genre. “Genre” is merely a useful shorthand of specifying what kind of story the reader expects to get when he or she picks up your book. Like, if your cover and title make the reader assume that your book is Contemporary Romance, the reader will be very surprised (and probably annoyed) if the book turns out to be a noir detective story.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the popular genres of fantasy that are predominant nowadays.

1.) Epic fantasy

Everyone knows what this one is -its the genre inspired by THE LORD OF THE RINGS. Big, sweeping story with multiple point of view characters and numerous different settings to visit. There will often be large battle scenes or sequences. Usually a lot of traveling is involved. There will often be a large overarching quest that is the main plot of the story.

Almost invariably the epic fantasy doesn’t take place on Earth, but a constructed world designed by the author. A map is often required.

Epic fantasy also tends to be really, really long, with both long individual books and long series overall. This has kind of had a deleterious effect on the genre in recent years, since sometimes authors run out of gas and can’t finish the series, and sometimes publishers pull the plug because the sales aren’t high enough.

Epic fantasy also tends (but not always) to have clearly delineated lines between good and evil. If there’s a morally ambiguous antihero, he or she will tend to reform, die heroically, or become one of the bad guys.

Epic fantasy that I’ve written includes FROSTBORN, SEVENFOLD SWORD, DRAGONTIARNA and the DEMONSOULED series.

2.) High fantasy

This term tends to get used interchangeably with epic fantasy. But in the strictest sense, “high fantasy” is fantasy that takes place in a constructed world like Middle-earth or Narnia or the Forgotten Realms. The proper term for that is “secondary world.”

I’ve done numerous secondary worlds – the setting of FROSTBORN, the setting of DEMONSOULED, and the setting of THE GHOSTS are all secondary worlds. Even though CLOAK GAMES/MAGE has other worlds, it takes place primarily on Earth, so it doesn’t quite count.

Which leads neatly to our next type of fantasy.

3.) Low fantasy

As with high fantasy, this is one of those terms that tends to have a mutating definition. Like, in the original sense, “low” fantasy simply meant a fantasy that took place on our world rather than a constructed world. This obviously can cover a wide range of stories, from literary magical realism and a gothic ghost story to urban fantasy like the Dresden Files.

Low fantasy has also acquired a couple of different definitions – a fantasy story without an epic plotline, or one with a morally ambiguous antihero as the lead. But in the original sense of the word, it was a fantasy that took place in our world rather than a constructed one like Middle-earth or Westeros.

CLOAK GAMES/MAGE would be the biggest low fantasy I’ve written. Some of the short stories in the OTHERWORLDS anthology would count as well.

4.) Sword & sorcery

Everyone knows what this one is. Conan the Barbarian! You have a protagonist or a group of protagonists making their way through a fantasy world, fighting evil sorcerers, sinister cultic priests, and tyrannical local nobles. Usually the protagonists are looking out for themselves or hoping to get rich instead of undertaking a grand high fantasy quest. If the series goes on long enough with the same main character, then eventually the scope might expand in scale. Conan himself started out as a wandering vagabond and ended up as King of Aquilonia, and in the one and only full length novel that Robert E. Howard ever wrote, Conan has to reclaim his throne and keep the evil sorcerer Xaltotun from bringing back an ancient dark empire.

Sword & sorcery typically has a darker edge to it than epic fantasy. The protagonists might be greedy thieves or raiders, though they will still have a core of honor to them. Of course, a lot of modern sword & sorcery tends to veer into grimdark, which we will talk more about below.

In my books, sword & sorcery elements turn up frequently in all my epic fantasy novels – FROSTBORN, DEMONSOULED, and THE GHOSTS. Ridmark & Mazael both spend time as wandering knights having adventures, and Caina in THE GHOSTS frequently breaks into the strongholds of corrupt lords and evil sorcerers to steal stuff from them.

5.) Urban Fantasy

Fantasy set in the modern world of the 20th and 21st century, where you might have wizards and elves and vampires walking around next to modern lawyers, policemen, and politicians.

Generally, urban fantasy tends to break down along two different lines. The first is the “Masquerade”, a term popularized by the old VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE role-playing setting. The idea is that there’s an expansive supernatural world, but for whatever reason it is kept secret from most people, who don’t know about it. The reasons might be that the normal world might rise up in wrath and destroy the supernatural one if its existence came out, or that the supernatural world preys on the normal one (like vampires) and prefers to remain secret, or you have to be able to use magic to be able to perceive the supernatural world at all. I think the most famous current example of a Masquerade world is actually HARRY POTTER. The HARRY POTTER books aren’t urban fantasy, but the books’ division into the world of the Muggles (normals) who don’t know about magic and the Wizards is a good example of a Masquerade.

The other version is a world where magic exists, everyone is aware of it, and society has adapted to it. This can be played for laughs, like you have an elf as head of the neighborhood HSA and a dwarven blacksmith is running for Congress under the slogan of “hammering government back into shape like iron upon my ancestral forge!” Or it can be played dead serious, with rival magical factions holding sway on various parts of Earth, or the US government forcing all mages into a secret program, and so forth.

The CLOAK GAMES and CLOAK MAGES series are my urban fantasy books. Also CLOAK & GHOST, which was a crossover with a version of Caina who lived on Nadia’s world, but that just confused a lot of people, so I stopped writing them.

6.) LitRPG

This is a new genre that has arisen in the last few years. Basically LitRPG are SF/F stories told using the conventions of science fiction and fantasy role playing games, especially MMORPG style games.

Of course, “characters entering a game world” isn’t exactly new. JUMANJI was basically LitRPG with a board game, and in the new movies from the 2010s, the characters explicitly enter a video game world and have stats and special abilities. In the 1970s, Andre Norton wrote a novel called QUAG KEEP where some characters get pulled into the Dungeons & Dragons world via magical gaming figurines (I think it’s on Kindle Unlimited now if you want to read it). ENDER’S GAME is a science fiction version of the trope, where Ender discovers that the game he is playing has deadly consequences.

I think there are generally two strains of LitRPG. In one, the protagonist is pulled entirely into the game world, leaving Earth behind, and lives there entirely. In the other, the protagonist is playing the game and trying to balance it with his or her real life – maybe financial pressures, maybe the game has a dark secret, something like that. Both versions lean heavily onto the tropes of MMORPG games – the protagonist selects a character class, levels up, faces bosses, might join a guild or start a stronghold, and so forth.

LitRPG is mostly an indie author phenomenon – not many legacy publishers have published LitRPG.

Currently the only LitRPG I’ve written is SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION, but as of this writing I’m 13,000 words into SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: LEVELING.

7.) Cultivation

Also known as xianxia fantasy, from the the Chinese word “xian”, which means immortal being.

This is relatively new genre in the west, but has come over from China thanks to the Internet. It’s hugely popular in China, but less so in the US, though it does have a devoted fan base. The idea is that by essentially unlocking (or cultivating) one’s inner energy, usually called qi, you can gain fantastic abilities of mind and body and become a xian. Some xian becaome so powerful that they can conquer galaxies. Sometimes there are rival clans of xian engaged in conflict with one another, or who follow different paths of training.

If you’ve ever seen a wuxia film with supernatural martial arts heroes following secret training traditions, it’s a lot like that, except with more abilities and a greater scope in the setting.

American readers are sometimes surprised at how harsh Chinese-written xianxia fantasy can be, but I suspect that’s because Chinese culture in general is a lot less individualistic than American culture. Like, large aspects of American culture celebrate victimhood – a lot of Chinese culture most certainly does not.

I’ve never written any cultivation fantasy, though elements of it do pretty frequently appear into LitRPG, since the “leveling up” in a LitRPG is at least superficially similar to the paths of cultivation in xianxia fantasy. Nadia’s journey throughout CLOAK GAMES and CLOAK MAGE is superficially similar to a cultivator’s journey, but I don’t think that’s a valid comparison because I never even heard of xianxia fantasy until 2021 and therefore it wasn’t an influence.

8.) Historical Fantasy

Historical fiction with a fantastical twist. Like, Henry V was secretly allied with the King of the Elves when he invaded France, or the Library of Congress is actually a secret magical society that has pulled the strings of American history from its founding. The degrees of fantasy and historical accuracy can vary wildly between authors and how much research they happen to do.

This, of course, can easily blend in with urban fantasy. To return to our Library of Congress example from earlier, if the plot is set in the 1880s, it’s historical fantasy. If it’s set in the modern era, then it’s urban fantasy, though the 1880s plotline can still influence events.

I’ve never written any historical fantasy, though FROSTBORN assumes a somewhat magical past on Earth, and CLOAK GAMES has the Elves arrives and conquer earth in 2013, which was ten years ago now, so it sort of has an element of historical fantasy.

9.) Grimdark

This is less of a genre and more than a tone. It was inspired by George RR Martin’s A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE and, to a lesser extent, Joe Abercrombie’s books. Grimdark books are brutal, bloody, and violent, often explicitly so. Expect most of the characters to die in various horrible ways, often described in exacting detail. All the characters will be morally bankrupt, with those who are not becoming easy prey for those who are. In grimdark, The Bad Guy Wins, but all the characters are the Bad Guy.

I came to dislike grimdark because it embodies a sort of adolescent nihilism that some people never quite grow out of. This isn’t to say A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE didn’t do it well, but all its many imitators did it less well.

I consciously avoid writing grimdark because I don’t like it. That said, it can be done well – the movie SICARIO about the US intelligence apparatus playing an underhanded game against the drug cartels is a masterpiece of a film, but very, very dark.

10.) Science/Space Fantasy

This is a science fiction story with strong fantasy elements.

DOCTOR WHO and STAR WARS both come to mind as immediate examples, since both have strong fantasy elements that they dress up in scientific-sounding explanations. DOCTOR WHO, essentially, is about a Space Wizard with a Magic Space Box who flies around having adventures, preferably in the company of one or more attractive female companions. (The show traditionally seems to suffer when it strays from that formula.) The proportion of science fiction and fantasy within DOCTOR WHO varies depending on the author. Likewise, STAR WARS is basically about Magic Space Samurai who fight each other with laser swords and Space Magic. Another example might be WARHAMMER 40k, which does has Space Orks and Space Elves fighting each other, though the bigger influences are probably grimdark science fiction and horror.

All three franchises have been around long enough that they’ve sort of created their own genre of space fantasy. Like LitRPG, it hasn’t really hit the legacy publishing business, but you see lots of indie books that fuse science fiction and fantasy to the point where you have mages flying around on starships.

I’ve never really written anything in Space Fantasy. Even the more “supernatural” elements of SILENT ORDER like the Great Elder Ones and the macrobes come more from horror than fantasy. Though interestingly Brandon Sanderson’s books sometimes come at science fantasy from the opposite end, where the book’s magic system is so intricate and detailed that the setting can build a technological society off of it.

CONCLUSION

So those are ten different types of fantasy that I think are popular nowadays. No doubt I missed some, and there are probably genres of fantasy popular right now that I haven’t heard of yet.

That said, for a writer, especially for an indie writer, the main value of genres is an aid to think about marketing. Like, my CLOAK GAMES/MAGE series is mainly urban fantasy, but there’s also elements of Historical Fantasy in it and more and more science fiction elements. But it’s mainly urban fantasy, so I designed the covers to look like urban fantasy and market it as an urban fantasy book.

It’s also good to be conscious of what you are writing. Like, FROSTBORN and the other Andomhaim books are primarily epic fantasy, so I try to stick to the accepted tropes, but I do let other stuff bleed in as I find it interesting and think it would enhance the story.

And as always, thanks for reading!

-JM