We all love the classic spec fic genres like space opera and cyberpunk, but have you noticed that they can get a bit… stale? Genres change over time, but some are more difficult than others, which results in a bunch of stories that all feel the same. Join us for a discussion of why that happens, how to break into new territory, and perhaps most surprising: why high fantasy isn’t on the list.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Ace of Hearts. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: We’re doing a podcast today and it’s nice, but those are pretty mundane these days, right? We all know what to expect. We get two to three hosts bouncing ideas off of each other with occasional obscure references that no one else will get. Wraith McBlade for life. Maybe we could spice it up by adding some music or some sound effects… [music plays]
Chris: …or die.
Oren: …or would that just destroy what makes a podcast cool to begin with?
Chris: [sarcastic] And this has nothing to do with our topic today, of course.
Oren: No, this is just random hypotheticals. So what I wanted to talk about today was how to add novelty to classic or possibly stale genres, depending on how nice you feel like being.
Chris: I do find over time most genres have to change, right? If they’ve been around for a significant length of time. Not solarpunk, because solarpunk only kind of exists, but many of the others have changed.
Oren: Yeah, solarpunk is also very new, right? Like it hasn’t had a lot of time to establish what a base solarpunk is, and I’ve definitely noticed this problem in some genres more than others. Like ironically, the one everyone is always complaining about, which is high fantasy, I actually find that one to be one of the least stale spec fic genres.
Chris: I think it’s really helpful for stories to be in other world settings. I think it makes it feel like there’s a lot more possibilities and people then tend to embrace more variation. Don’t get me wrong, I have still seen my fair share of stories where there’s just elves and orcs by different names but they feel exactly the same. But there’s still quite a bit of high fantasy that has branched out at this point.
Oren: And I think that’s because the things that people want in high fantasy are actually pretty loose. So you can call something high fantasy, still give people what they want, but also give them something new because we live in a constant war between a desire for the familiar and a desire for something new at the same time.
Chris: Yeah, I do think that there is an exception though, and that makes me wonder if the actual issue is just that there’s not a lot of Middle Earth-like high fantasy settings anymore, because that’s not where the popular zeitgeist is. That’s not what people are most enthused about anymore. But the thing that I am seeing a lot of is D&D-style high fantasy settings.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Because D&D has become really popular, right? And people have had some great games, or they’ve been watching their, you know, these roleplaying sessions shows.
Oren: I did not think that was gonna take off. Probably nine years ago, maybe longer at this point, I first started hearing about these and I very confidently said, that’ll be a flash in the pan. No one would just watch roleplaying games. Oh boy.
Chris: Turns out people do. I do think there’s something fun, especially when they get like celebrity actors in-
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: -is that they get that like personal connection, that parasocial relationship, if you will.
Oren: Yeah. The runaway success ones all have professional voice actors or comedians. Those are the two, but there are a bunch that don’t have either of those that do okay. They aren’t super famous. Most people wouldn’t have heard of them, but there are enough people who just listen to these or watch them to get by without having famous voice actors or comedians. And that is the part that I just did not see coming. I did not think that was gonna be a thing.
Chris: But in any case, now when I see something that’s more Tolkien inspired, it’s actually through a D&D lens. And I do think that causes some problems because again, all the Tolkien tropes that D&D uses are fairly stale. But also there’s another issue, that if you take all the conceits of D&D, we’ve got something that’s really low realism, but it’s also popular to have very like, gritty, high realism / grounded – since grounded is the hot new term for this – settings, and having a bunch of of adventurers running around. This is not very compatible with creating a gritty atmosphere.
Oren: Especially not adventurers who are at all like D&D characters, right? Because D&D is, it is so weird that D&D is now inspiring a lot of fantasy fiction. Obviously D&D has always had fantasy tie-in fiction, that’s not new. But just the amount of it is new. And it’s weird because D&D is already a weird blending together of a number of different fantasy tropes into kind of odd extremes. And so then you have, we’re taking that and running it back into the fictional medium from which it came and it’s weird. It is creating some odd issues.
Chris: Yeah. One of the issues with D&D-inspired settings is usually there’s just nothing to make them stand out. They really could use more novelty. D&D, but the typical settings people run – I mean, people can run D&D in all kinds of settings, of course – but if we just look for the standard Tolkien inspired setting, it is fairly generic. It’s a mishmash of tons of different things, right? Without often very strong theming other than being Tolkien-esque, which is pretty stale. So those settings by default just don’t have that much novelty to them. But I do think that it’s interesting to see, I think some of the best D&D inspired settings, like stories with novelty are actually focusing on the personal level, and not focusing on those adventure stories. So like Legends and Lattes and The Wandering Inn are two examples.
Oren: I feel like those are really interesting because you don’t need to have read a lot of D&D-inspired fiction. You just need to be familiar with the tropes of D&D. And so it’s then it’s like, yeah, we can have a story about an orc who retires from adventuring and opens a coffee shop and that clicks without having to read a bunch of, shall we say, less than inspired D&D novels.
Chris: So I think that is basically how the successful stories have been adding novelty to the D&D setting, is simply by looking at a different part of it, looking at those personal stories, looking at the urban areas, right? Instead of just doing the typical adventuring activities.
Oren: Yeah, like “what’s it like to run a potion shop in a D&D world?” that sort of thing. Yeah, the one that I have the most trouble with is actually space opera, which is admittedly a very broad subgenre, and people argue about what its definitions are more than they do with most genres, but in my experience, what it boils down to is settings with big space countries and ships that you fly around and shoot stuff in. That seems to be the important part. The last time that I found anything new in space opera, it was The Expanse. And by anything new, like on a broad scale. I’ve seen some exceptions since then, but the big change in space opera is The Expanse.
Chris: Which stood out because it has very high realism, but also did interesting things with it. Like that sweet spot where everything feels realistic, but it’s also very novel.
Oren: And like every other new space opera story I pick up is basically the Expanse again.
Chris: Because of course it is.
Oren: It’s like The Expanse-punk. It’s like it’s completely taken over. And Charlie Jane Anders has a piece in Esquire saying basically the same thing. And you know how weird it is when Charlie Jane Anders and I agree on something.
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: Something is going on at this point.
Chris: A lot of genres have these trends, right? This is the hot new thing. Everybody’s really inspired by The Expanse. Also, publishers are like, wow, The Expanse sold really well. So give us more of those. I think the danger though, at this point, it’s not that there aren’t necessarily people buying Expanse-like space opera. There probably is. It’s just that with all of these trends, there’s a peak at some point, and then as soon as the demand cools, as soon as people start getting tired of it, then suddenly what you have is a glut of storytellers writing these stories because they were excited about it. And then publishers don’t want any of them. And you could still publish yourself, still indie publish if you want to, but the demand is gonna cool. So I feel like if you’re going to try to do a trend wave, you gotta jump on it as soon as possible. And since it takes years, usually, to write a novel, at this point, I wouldn’t recommend an Expanse-type story.
Oren: I think the Expanse-punk subgenre is probably not the greatest thing to start in right now – would be my opinion based on the works that I’ve seen. Although one, even though I didn’t really like this book, as far as novelty goes, I thought it did a decent job, was The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.
Chris: Yeah, it was good at the alien races that were not just, it didn’t feel like Star Trek Forehead Aliens, but they were still close enough, like human enough that they could share a ship together.
Oren: That’s like the sweet spot that the author managed to hit very well was, okay, these aliens are not just Klingons, whatever, but they’re not so weird that we can’t work with them.
Chris: Yeah, and I think it did help that it was, again, a lighter story because that kind of allowed it to not be too rigorous about this idea of these other types of strange aliens that can all communicate with each other.
Oren: And then another one that had some interesting elements was Revenger, which is a part of a series. It’s pretty popular, I’ve forgotten the name of it off the top of my head. But it had an interesting dynamic where the ships were like sail powered in space. They were using basically sailing ship dynamics instead of either what was the previous dominant force in space opera, which was World War II naval ships, or the Expanse paradigm, which is more realistic ships that generate gravity by shooting their engines, basically. This one was different. It was, the ships fly around using solar sails and the physics of it was a little questionable, but whatever. That part was neat. Although that book also, to me, demonstrated the potential weaknesses of just trying to add new stuff, because a lot of it just didn’t feel like it made sense. It wasn’t cohesive. It was just like, okay, so here’s a setting. They have solar sales. All right, that’s neat. They have, they seem to exist in a world full of ruins from much older civilizations. All right, that’s cool, that provided us with a sense of adventure. And they communicate with these weird skulls. Do they use weird bones for anything else? No, just the skulls. Those are, that’s the only one.
Chris: So would you qualify that as a space fantasy? ‘Cause it does feel like space fantasy is having a bit of a moment.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, it is certainly on the edge. It’s hard to say if I would call that space fantasy or not. Like it seems like it should be when I describe that they communicate using skulls, but the skull communication is so mundane that I hesitate to call it space fantasy.
Chris: Yeah. As bad as Rebel Moon is-
Oren: Oh, Rebel Moon!
Chris: -yeah. I mean it does, I think, show a little bit of where people are going with this right now, where Rebel Moon is a space fantasy, right? Similar to Star Wars. Star Wars, the IP itself has been struggling obviously because it has been mishandled. But we did see in Ahsoka that they brought in more fantasy, even more overt fantasy elements, and we had witches, basically, were spell-slinging now pretty much. And do you feel like that’s compatible with what people wanna get out of a space opera?
Oren: I mean, probably? The issue that I think that would create is just that Star Wars is so omnipresent that if your story looks at all like Star Wars, that will be all people can think about. And that certainly happened with Rebel Moon, even though I would argue that Rebel Moon is aesthetically much closer to Warhammer 40K than it is to Star Wars, it is close enough to Star Wars, that is the connection everyone made. And of course we also know that it used to be a Star Wars script, so that didn’t help. But I think Space Fantasy is viable. I would almost, I would be hesitant to recommend doing space opera fantasy just because Star Wars is so dominant in that specific sub-genre that you would have to do something real different to not immediately be compared to Star Wars.
Chris: I guess the question is, is being compared to Star Wars bad?
Oren: I mean… [question noise] yes and no?
Chris: It just depends on how much demand there is for Star Wars material. Maybe Star Wars has embarrassed itself so badly that anything looks bad by comparison, right? It hasn’t generated excitement in space fantasy.
Oren: Yeah, and I don’t know, maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way because when I am looking at it, I’m thinking about it in terms of people saying it as a negative, “it’s just Star Wars again.” But I don’t know, maybe people will buy that anyway. So if you’re looking at it from a sales perspective, maybe that’s fine as long as you don’t mind a bunch of reviews saying how this is just Star Wars. But I wouldn’t want that, right? If I was publishing a book that was Sci-fi, I wouldn’t want people to look at it and be like, “it’s Star Wars.” I would have a hard time writing that if nothing else.
Chris: I mean, I think it might be possible to break away more from Star Wars by having it more overtly fantasy-ish. Like having a magitech space setting perhaps.
Oren: Yeah, that’s true. Magitech is a good option, ’cause Star Wars doesn’t really have much magitech. It has technology, which I mean admittedly is pretty magic, but not explicitly. And then it has the Force, which is always separate. So yeah, magitech is probably a good way to go.
Chris: Another genre that I find interesting, right, that has big trends is urban fantasy, which I felt like had a lot of settings that were disappointingly the same. Because the idea is that we’d have the relatability of an Earth protagonist with fantastic creatures, but everybody was using the same blend of like, folklore filtered through pulp culture creatures, right? We got the vampires, the werewolves, and what have you, and the settings tend to be very eclectic and not really have a strong identity and strong theme. And now it feels, and this is not entirely urban fantasy exactly, but it’s all fae all the way down. The kind of portal fantasy, somebody gets kidnapped by the fae or humans with fae. I mean Sarah Maas is just so dominant in some of these, her influence is so big.
Oren: I believe that is the “romantasy” genre as it is known by the kids these days.
Chris: But a lot of like, there was a lot of overlap between romantasy and urban fantasy, typically.
Oren: That’s true. Urban fantasy is definitely one of those ones where I know that the things that I read before are stale now. But I don’t know how to update them without losing the part about urban fantasy that I wanted, which is, I want a bunch of different monsters to live in factions and to fight each other. That’s a thing that I want.
Chris: I think that Crescent City was important in having basically urban fantasy, but other world urban fantasy, right? So we have relatable, very relatable earth things like cell phones, but it is technically not Earth anymore. But we can use all the same quips that were used, language that’s more like Earth language, all those things, so that we could basically have that urban fantasy feel in a different world, and that opens up a lot more options.
Oren: Yeah, no, that’s true. I did think that was like, the one cool thing about that story. Well, that’s not true. The other thing was the lost human civilization. There was a lot of interesting stuff there. Unfortunately, the humans were the villains in that story. That didn’t go anywhere.
Chris: Yeah, that was not great. But yeah, again, with the fae being so popular now, that’s another thing that I wouldn’t, novels take years to write. Even if they’re selling right now, I still wouldn’t recommend jumping on that bandwagon at this point.
Oren: Lemme put it this way. I have seen multiple YouTube videos where they’re like, “tropes we’re sick of.” And fae come up on those lists, which confused me because I don’t read a lot of romantasy. So I had no idea what was going on in that subgenre. And then I looked at it and found out, I was like, okay, I get it now. I understand why you guys are sick of fae.
Chris: I personally really like fae, but a lot of times it feels like the fae that is being depicted right now is just not that fae-like.
Oren: Which does, I think, create an interesting situation where you could probably get novelty by writing more actual fae. Fae that feel more fae-like and are not just jerk dudes with superpowers.
Chris: I do think that generally that’s something that storytellers find more challenging. So you could get novelty if you wrote fae, but like, better.
Oren: Although you would have marketing problems at that point, right? Because how are you gonna market that? It’s like, “it’s got fae.” Everyone’s like, yeah, we’ve seen that. We know what it’s like. “No, I promise. Mine are different!” Another genre that I have had this problem with is cyberpunk, and I could be mistaken, but I suspect that one of the reasons that a lot of recent cyberpunk fiction has been video games is for this exact same problem, because in video games it’s not as big a deal if you’re doing stuff people have already seen before. Because A, they can actually see it with their eyeballs, so that has a benefit of its own, but also they get to play it and they get to immerse themselves in their favorite oeuvre, if that is the right term, their favorite milieu. So that has a benefit that you don’t really get to the same extent in written stories. And the biggest one that I don’t know how to overcome is this inherent contradiction where it is increasingly desired that cyberpunks be actual punks, be on the fringes, on the margins of society – this is the roots of cyberpunk, it’s a thing people really like – but also have cool cybernetic implants that with any kind of logic would cost a lot of money.
Chris: You know, they’re commodities in the future. They’re all created in whatever country creates all of the cheap products.
Oren: I guess everyone has implants, but like your characters have the cheap knockoff versions.
Chris: Personally, cyberpunk feels so retro now, and maybe for some people that’s okay. I feel like we’re at the point where we should update all of our technology tropes in sci-fi.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, there is that too.
Chris: So I guess seeing, there’s definitely an opportunity for people to change cyberpunk to reflect what people are currently – machine learning, I’ll say – what people are calling AI, but it’s not actually AI as we’ve always defined it, at least in science fiction.
Oren: Yeah, that’s certainly hitting pretty close to home. Nothing says you can’t do that with your sci-fi stories there. One interesting cyberpunk story that I liked the concept of quite a lot is Always the Harvest. It’s a short story by Yoon Ha Lee, and in this story, the premise is that the story takes place on an alien colony, I should say, a human colony on an alien world. And the implants that they use are like weird bits of lost technology that they’ve found that are left over from the aliens. And so they don’t really understand how they work. They just know that they can use them in certain ways, and that creates some interesting plot ideas and it allowed for them to look weird and different, which I thought was neat. I also just, I’ve been thinking about it more and I honestly think putting it in space would be a cool way to spruce up cyberpunk. We’re used to cyberpunk happening on planets in dingy cities, but you can have cool implants in space and then that would also bring some new novelty to space opera, which is typically- the people are more or less unaltered in space opera.
Chris: There’s no reason you couldn’t do cyberpunk space opera.
Oren: I think you could feed two birds with one hand that way. I just think that would be neat. And while you’re at it, you could add some cosmic horror!
Chris: Add some cosmic horror!
Oren: A little bit, just a little cosmic horror.
Chris: I dunno. I feel like that might be, I don’t know. My instant reaction is maybe, I’m not saying it’s impossible to integrate those things, but I already have a lot going in there with cyberpunk and space opera, but I’m just imagining a Star Trek ship where instead of a holodeck, there’s virtual reality. That just makes perfect sense.
Oren: I did that for a Star Trek campaign once because I just didn’t wanna deal with the holodeck.
Chris: Didn’t want players to be like, and now I make this holodeck character sapient and aware, and now let’s make holo-emitters so they could leave the holodeck.
Oren: I was worried that was gonna be a problem, and I later ran Star Trek campaigns where I was just like, whatever, holodeck exists, it’s no problem. I never did a holodeck malfunction episode because I just couldn’t bring myself to do that.
Chris: There’s a lot of existential problems with the holodeck, right? Because all of the characters of the holodeck certainly feel very real. And once you start being like, oh yeah, Moriarty now is self-aware and wants to leave. Then you gotta start asking about all the other characters that you are creating and erasing on the holodeck.
Oren: Yep. I also start all of my Star Trek campaigns with a little primer about how in this setting the transporter works by opening a small wormhole and pushing you through it.
Chris: Yeah. So we don’t have murder clones.
Oren: Yeah, I don’t wanna have an argument about whether or not you die every time you use the transporter. I would rather skip that, please.
Chris: So, one that I find really interesting is sword and sorcery, because when I think about sword and sorcery, I always think about Conan, right? Which is like the classical sword and sorcery and Conan’s title stories have been out for a long time, much too stale. At the same time, The Witcher is basically today’s sword and sorcery. The idea is that we’re focusing on a very hack and slash story with a lot of action, but that typically focuses on smaller scale battles among various lords or kings and not really doing the huge epic fight of good versus evil so much, which has some of those elements too. But for the most part, we’re talking about “monster of the week” as it starts and things like that. And it makes it different ’cause we don’t have the desert barbarian anymore. We’ve swapped out the aesthetics so that we’re using Eastern European folklore and it just looks very different and has very different aesthetics. But I think it delivers the same thing, right? They’re still- the people who are interested in the Witcher today, I feel like were probably the same type of people who would’ve liked Conan back when Conan-style stories were really popular.
Oren: Yeah. As far as I’m concerned, sword and sorcery is a mood of high fantasy. Like, the meaningful differences between them are so subtle that I would almost consider them the same genre. But I agree that I think that The Witcher brought new novelty to that concept, and I think that much like with high fantasy, because what people want from sword and sorcery is a kind of dingy, perhaps morally gray adventure where the badass protagonist fights things. You have so many options with that, that it’s hard to imagine that you couldn’t come up with something even newer and weirder to add to it.
Chris: In general, folklore is in right now, and fairy tales generally too, although most people are doing dark spins on them, except for me. So, because that’s much broader than for instance fae, hopefully that will, that trend will stay true for a while. We’ll see, of course.
Oren: And the nice thing about sword and sorcery is that if the current blend of Witcher-likes, for lack of a better term, does get old, I think you could modify it pretty easily. I just, honestly, I have been really impressed by the variety of fantasy novels that I’ve picked up recently. They haven’t all been good. They’ve had other problems, but as far as settings go, yeah, this isn’t something I’ve seen before. This is neat, okay, cool. And some of them are using non-European cultures as their origin and some of them aren’t, and it’s just, there’s a lot out there. We have a lot to choose from as far as high fantasy goes. One more that I wanted to talk about before we finish up is the post-apocalyptic genre. Because similar to Star Wars, anything that looks like Mad Max is going to be compared to Mad Max. And it’s hard to be better than Mad Max, at least in people’s minds. A lot of the Mad Max movies – hot take, not actually that good – but people think they’re very good and Fury Road is very good. So that’s a hard road to climb, and it also can just feel derivative, even though the tropes being used are very broad.
Chris: Yeah. I think with post-apocalyptic, it’s almost like the sword and sorcery angle where we’re so used to post-apocalyptic with these increasingly very desolate environments where it’s very deserty, right? Or otherwise just, you know, all the environment has been destroyed, all the plants are dead, and again, a very barren environment.
Oren: And of course the alternative to that seems to be Fallout, which is also not new, but is a similar concept, but way zanier, right? It’s like, yeah, this is the post-apocalyptic wasteland, and we got all kinds of monsters around these parts. Because that’s what radiation does, it turns everything into monsters in this world.
Chris: I still remember watching The 100 again and just, oh wait, there are monsters in this show? I had completely blanked them out ’cause they don’t have anything to do with anything.
Oren: Yeah, just a random gorilla attack.
Chris: I just like, I had forgotten about the random, giant gorilla and just… wow, okay. There’s random monsters in this show just because we’re on a radiation-filled Earth.
Oren: But I will say that, I think the biggest thing you can do to make a post-apocalyptic story fresher is to change the nature of the apocalypse. There’s the green apocalypse, that one’s pretty popular these days, but there’s also the frozen apocalypse and the alien invasion apocalypse. You’ve got a lot of options and you can do a lot of the same stuff, a lot of the stuff people like in post apocalyptic stories, and still feel new and fresh.
Chris: But not zombies.
Oren: Yeah, I don’t know how to make zombies feel new and fresh. I’d have to do a whole podcast about that.
Chris: I think we could keep the zombie dynamic of having an overwhelming thing, force, out there, perhaps even overwhelming by the numbers. I think at this point, they have to just not be zombies anymore because other than people who are just zombie enthusiasts, I think we’ve just been oversaturated with them to the point that we just have to go back to hordes of vampires or something.
Oren: Okay, but what if I call them something other than zombies?
Chris: Infected?
Oren: Yeah, it’s gotta be a new word. Every new zombie thing has a new word, so mine’s gonna be groaners, I’ve decided. That’s what my zombies are gonna be called.
Chris: Very unique.
Oren: With that, I think we will call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you found this novel, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie MacLeod, then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess who saved herself by Jonathan Coulton.
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