Reuters Opinion: No ‘American Fantasy’?
“If Fantasy books make up much of our mythology, and I think strongly that that is true, then I also think that we, in America, have a problem.” This is from Reuters opinion writer Devin Miller. “The problem is that most of our Fantasy isn’t written by Americans about American culture and values.”
Do you agree?
Miller continues in his April 12 column ”Game of Thones,” ”Harry Potter,” ”Chronicles of Narnia”: Where Are All The American Fantasy Characters?:
English values are similar to ours, but they’re still not American. And if mythology is supposed to teach a culture how to act and behave, what type of person you should strive to be, then we have a serious problem, because all our mythology is teaching us how to be good Brits, not good Americans.
If we’re going to teach American culture and beliefs to generation after generation, then we need powerful stories and characters that will remain with us for decades. We need more American Fantasy that speaks to our culture and our values.
America’s best answer to Tolkien? I think not.
A few kick-starter observations:
- If (as I’ve read) the pessimism, sex-and-power-gluttony obsession, and lack of regard for honor and nobility in Game of Thrones are “American values,” Americans might as well emigrate.
- If the mythology-subcreation and heroism in British classic fantasy are “English values,” then we should all become English.
- If that’s true, then Scripture, the only True Myth that inspired those classic writers, is also “English.”
- Yes, some American fantasies try to copy British ones. Yet who loves our Star Trek franchise and superhero comics and films — to the point of outsourcing multiple top actors (Christian Bale, Andrew Garfield, and now Henry Caville) to play our superheroes 1 ? That would be Britain.2
- Which leads to this crucial fact: only if we preconceive a definition of “fantasy” to mean “medieval/magic” do we pretend Americans haven’t already been doing their fair storytelling share. Arguably America’s fantastic storytellers have long been inspired by our motherland’s example. Our pop-culture fantasy/sci-fi/superhero exports are what’s teaching “American culture and beliefs to generation after generation.”
Actually, there’s quite a history of American fantasy. L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea, Madeleine L’Engle, Jim Butcher, Robert Jordan, and Brandon Sanderson, just to name a few well-known authors and series. There’s even a (slightly outdated) book devoted to the history of American fantasy: http://www.amazon.com/Fantasy-Tradition-American-Literature-Irving/dp/0253356652.
We have American fantasy. It just has to fight with some of the more internationally acclaimed books.
Also, Twilight: what’s more American than bad teenage romance? 😉
These are some fascinating thoughts! I’ve never thought of superheroes and space-opera type sci-fi as “America’s fantasy genres” before, but that’s completely true. We have our own brand of speculative fiction that’s not as commonly found in Britain, but is widely enjoyed there as well as here.
It seems to me that fantasy focuses a lot on honor and nobility (except, apparently, GoT), while superhero fiction focuses more on justice (“truth, justice, and the American way”!). These are core values in our respective cultures and they are certainly “taught” through our mythologies.
P.S. And as shastaswtin said above me, America certainly has fantasy too! It’s just not as “classic” and widely read as the giants of the genre, Tolkien and Lewis.
Another thought – perhaps America doesn’t have as much of this “medieval type” fantasy because our nation didn’t exist that far in the past. There was never a “medieval” time in the United States.
Yeah, I was going to go the direction of some of the comments. My American Lit professor said that the American cowboy is the European knight. And I think a lot of the lore surrounding historical figures and events qualify, too.
And has absolutely no one heard of Sweet Betsy from Pike? 😛
Actually, I love English values and story-telling style, thank you. I’ve never seen an American author (myself included) who was able to tap into that deep richness that marks English writers.
Honestly, I think some people as a group are gifted in different ways, and the English have been the best story tellers. Always. *did you see what I did there? 😉 *
So I study English fantasy and hope some of it rubs off on me. — Harry Potter, Redwall, LOTR, Narnia, even GK Chesterton.
I agree with Devin Miller.
First, though, you’re right about that. Ultimately, moral values are universal. Honor is not distinctly British, and the self-sacrificing love that Jesus exemplified is not distinctly Jewish. But there are cultural values as well as moral values. In a nation that had its political origins in a revolt against the established governmental authority, the agonizing conflict between the moral duty to follow what you really believe to be right and the moral duty to be loyal to authority and tradition has always been relevant and close to us.
I think there is a Western/British tradition in which the king or the government is in some sense the spirit or essence of the land, so that rebelling against the king amounts to scorning your homeland. That tradition goes against American cultural values. My sister was hooked on the British TV show Merlin, and that show definitely promotes the cultural value that the king is the heart and spirit of the people. I think that cultural value has some true moral virtue. It can be a Biblical value, if applied the right way. But it is not an American value. American values can be Biblical too, and epic and beautiful, but we often get Americanized versions of British/Euro values in the entertainment industry.
Devin Miller wrote:
A very good point. Almost all high fantasy takes place in a made-up quasi-Europe, with medieval British social conventions. Part of the problem is that American and Canadian history doesn’t reach back into ancient legend. We can’t really write a pre-history of North America the way Tolkien wrote a pre-history of Europe. However, I don’t think the implied relationship of pre-history is really necessary anymore. Someone should create a high fantasy world that looks much like colonial America, but selectively include elements of modern American culture that developed since colonial times. There should be some similarities to the historical situation, but not enough to turn the fantasy into an alternate history.
That said, there are some writers who are doing this, most notably Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. Perhaps more importantly, American space opera television often includes mythic elements that express American cultural values. Babylon 5 includes elections, fears of a corrupt administration, and mostly generic diversity themes that were pretty bland, but in context of the political elements of the setting does seem somewhat American. The Star Trek franchise contains mostly postmodern secular humanist values, but Deep Space Nine actually explores the American cultural value of freedom of belief, and the inability of a distant government to know what is culturally and morally best for a people, intentionally subverting some of the themes from The Next Generation. Battlestar Galactica embodies the theme of a people wandering through the wilderness, looking for a homeland, ingrained in American culture through the initial immigration of the Colonists, the Abolitionist movement, and then the idea of Manifest Destiny. Battlestar Galactica also shows characters wrestling with the conflict between loyalty and moral duty. It also explores vigilantism as both a good thing and a bad thing.
Interesting question! In America we run to the “Techo-myths” as Brian Jacques put it rather than real magic. We explain many of our popular heroes (Superman, Green Lantern) as given alien origins, instead of, say King Arthur’s sword that was given to him by a fairy. But as for the case of nobility and honor, our cowboys, superheroes, Jedi and Starfleet Officers do teach these virtues just the same as the knights of the Old World.
Bainespal, above, made the point on this that I’ve repeatedly heard before:
And I’ve only seen about two fantasy settings that really draw more on the American mythic landscape than on European legends: Bujold’s Sharing Knife books, and Patricia Wrede’s Thirteenth Child and sequels. (Poul Anderson’s Operation Chaos is sort of borderline, since it’s set in an alternate America that’s recognizably America in some ways, but all the fantastic elements draw almost entirely from medieval European mythological ideas about the celestial and infernal realms.) And given the themes that those two authors tend to weave into their books (which are well worth reading and grappling with, but in the final and long-term (to the point of eschatology) analysis not consistent with reality as I understand Scripture and Christian experience to describe it), I do wish for fantasy fiction drawing from the good qualities of the “American mythos” but also knowingly and willingly drawing on the timeless Truth …
Yeah, let’s all be British. They have the best speculative stuff anyway. Who’d want to lay claim to Twilight? I think I’ll write a more drawn-out response on my blog, but generally, I think the author’s demand isn’t as urgent as he thinks it is. Yah, I’d like more good American fantasy authors–Hey, can we claim a time-share in Gaiman, as he lives in the Twin Cities now and wrote American Gods?
That seems like a concession that American culture is inferior to British culture. If our culture isn’t rich enough to inspire mythic storytelling, then it really is inferior. And the nationality of writers has little to do with it. American fantasy novelists are some of the best in the business. The point of the Reuters article is that American fantasy novelists primarily draw from European cultural sources and aspire to British cultural values in their mythic storytelling. Why can’t American fantasy writers draw from indigenously American lore and legends, and use American cultural values to drive the story’s themes?
But the Reuters article was limited to fantasy, and European settings do have an advantage in high fantasy, partly because the Western component of American history is too recent too be very shrouded in myth and legend, and partly because the medieval-European environment has become the stereotype. Several of us have noted that space opera television, perhaps American science fiction in general, often does contain American themes and cultural elements. Some space opera does walk the same path as fantasy by creating myth. The problem is that science fiction doesn’t usually give us an origin story that we can cling to, being typically set in the future. Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars are partial exceptions, by disconnecting the setting of the space opera with known human history. Battlestar Galactica comes close to providing something like an origin myth, showing a culture that looks very much like our own, that began in a Colonial era centuries before.
To be honest, I think American literature is generally…not exactly inferior, and I knew part of it is my tastes, but a lot of American literature seems to be concerned with small things, with reinventing the wheel to distinguish itself instead of drawing from all the great traditions available to it.
Well if your idea of fantasy is whatever popular series is getting made into a movie or TV serial, of course you’ll think this. There’s a curious ignorance about the genre from many modern fantasy fans that leads to statements like this. We’re the nation that gave the world H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard, and there’s no shortage of american SF/F writers who have written good fantasy.