Very thought provoking. You put forth numerous ideas in this essay worth considering, from the binary perception of high and low fantasy to the malleability of subgenres. I think the most important points come at the end, though:
1) Picking only one or two subgenres to label our stories as, so as to avoid confusing our readers. (A lesson I learned years ago but which I still occasionally slip up on.)
2) Drawing from your audience's interactions with and reactions to the story in order to pin down your primary subgenre(s).
I think many of us speculative/genre fiction writers have a tendency to get caught up in our own heads when it comes to describing our work in definitive terms. We're tempted to draw from as many angles as possible because that's often how we write, but that works directly against the goal of describing our work in simplest terms. And that's what those genre descriptions have to be - simple. If we overcomplicate them, we'll just confuse people and drive them away.
Decisiveness, then, becomes key in presenting our stories in genre terms. I write dark fantasies with a touch of mystery to them. There's technically more to my stories than those, yes, but they tend to be the primary subgenres, so that's how I classify them. (The Castle on the Hill being an exception as a romantic fantasy adventure.) Keeping genre descriptions simple is the best thing we can do for ourselves. We need to be mindful of this.
Exactly! And with too many descriptors, we not only confuse readers, we turn readers away! I've loved reading many an epic fantasy that involved romance and love stories. But I never go LOOKING for romance. If someone describes their work with a "romance" tag, I assume romantic emotions and sensuality are the main pillars of the story, and I don't pick it up. The reverse is true too; I don't AIM for dark fantasy, but also its good for me to know that's how people are reading it, because then maybe I won't sent something too gory to my grandma. All these labels are about cultivating an audience by noting similarities with other works. We go astray when we use them to show all the ways our work is unique (even if our work IS very unique and sits in between a bunch of fuzzy categories).
Thanks for this clarification. So many people get high and low fantasy mixed up with high and low magic. Even my best friend, who is also a fantasy writer, mistakenly refers to my book as a low fantasy because it has mid-to-low levels of magic. (It is an urban fantasy with a similar technology level to Earth, so it does blur the lines I'll admit, but it is also very importantly not Earth.)
The terms "hard magic system" and "soft magic system" also frequently get mixed up in there. Hard magic meaning there are strict rules to magic, soft meaning "because magic" is a valid explanation. Both high and low magic settings can be hard or soft. (This one is a spectrum, but many authors land on one extreme or the other.)
Totally. I’m probably going to have my next post be about hard vs soft magic since, like the above, I’m surprised at how often these things get blurred. But I also have a short story eating away at my imagination so we’ll see when everything gets published.
Clear and useful definitions, thanks. I don't tend to think about the genre I write beyond fantasy, scifi, and horror which is basically saying the same thing thrice. SciFi is futuristic, interstellar, or somehow technological fantasy, horror is typically supernatural events in a grounded world, usually on Earth, thus low fantasy. I accept that that is a little flippant on what the genres are and what they can do but I write what comes forth and it covers a lot of different sub-genres of speculative fiction. Typically, as you say, the story finds its own niche in the writing. Perhaps I should cluster my stories into sub-genres, or maybe I'll leave that for paperback/ebook collections.
This was such an interesting read. Sorry I don’t have much to add as I’m here to learn more than discuss but I just wanted to acknowledge that I read your full article (I rarely have time to do that these days so it hooked me in!). You came up on my Substack suggested reads, just in case you like to know where new readers are coming from.
Thanks for taking the time Lynsey! And for the attribution data haha. Out of curiousity what do you mean by suggested reads? Did I show up under “people to follow” or was it an email or something?
I love when you write stuff like this!! You’re so good at it and it’s nice to learn a little more about how you and others think about fiction. Thanks so much!
I will have to think about the genre of the story I am writing (the provisional title is "The Origins"), although I haven't thought about it before. Considering the subgenres you mention, it should be Epic High Fantasy. I sounds really good!
Interesting definition of high and low fantasy—I’ve never heard that before.
I’ve always heard high fantasy described as one with a magic system integral to the story, and usually very in-depth (think Brandon Sanderson), while low fantasy was more one where magic wasn’t as necessary or integral to the story.
That’s sounds more like the distinction between hard and soft magic systems (a phrase I think Brandon Sanderson might have coined). That’s something else I want to tackle soon, haha.
Great article! My first question after I read it was, is there a difference between fantasy and science fiction?
I personally see them as two different things and indeed there was a struggle a few years back to seperate science fiction into its own genre and to get away from fantasy.
I think the perceived line was magic versus technology. You've defined high and low fantasy but what *is* fantasy?
Honestly I’ve been pondering that question for a while and I think a lot of other authors are too. I have like three different articles I want to write about that 😅. I don’t have a solid answer right now. Magic vs. Tech is a decent place to start.
I hope I can help spur conversation around that question.
I do think they are separate, but they are not as separate as some people want them to be. Stay tuned, friend. I’d love your thoughts when we do get there
Very interesting and well presented. I was always confused by the difference between high and low fantasy. Sometimes in the past high fantasy was the literary stuff ( LotR) and the Deryni novels were considered low……
Thanks for reading, Kim. Yeah I think that’s a really common misconception because it’s an intuitive way to think of it based on the words “high” and “low”. It gets associated with “high class” or “high literature” or something. I wonder if in the past the high-low categories might have been as amorphous as the sub genres, but at some point the definition I state above became more common… I don’t know
There is always a twist to it, isn't there. For example I would say that most Forgotten Realms stories are high fantasy, but D&D literally is also Portal fiction because they have portals in it, and Earth with WoTC exists in that superuniverse of stories, and depending on who is writing the story might get the occasional visit from a character, much like 'Last Action Hero' visits earth. So does that make D&D low fantasy? I think not...
Sure, sure. But Forgotten Realms isn’t fiction literature, it’s not made by one author, and it’s perpetually evolving. Frankly that's just outside the scope of what I'm defining here. Especially getting into the weeds on where a character from ongoing franchises might show up outside their main stories, it can get levels of connection and classification on the levels of The Tommy Westphall Universe—which, while fun, begins to defeat the purposes of the classifications. Like we draw a clear line between the Norse Myths and the MCU, despite both featuring an Odin; we don't say that Mario and Luigi exist in Hyrule because Link appears in Mario Kart. That can be a fun thought experiment or fodder for fan-art, but the audience understands what's "in story" and what's just fun crossover between properties.
And again, I'd say it's all a bit moot since TTRPGs and video games are not prose fiction, which is what I'm after here. Insofar as any published stories of Forgotten Realms have a connection to earth as an important feature of their narrative, then those stories are low fantasy...
I'll have to read through it again more slowly when I have the time, but your distinctions on high/low are really clear and helpful. I definitely agree about the subgenres being more of an 'after' than 'before,' but you made me think more about the helpfulness of the labels. Great post!
I was interested in your classification of 'mythological' fantasy. I agree with your distinction between Once and Future King and Percy Jackson, but is there a reason you separate 'mythological' from 'Arthurian' fantasy? I just ask because Arthurian retellings and Arthurian-centric stories feel pretty distinct as a genre - do you have any non-Arthurian examples of what you'd consider 'mythological' this?
GREAT question! For the distinction of high/low and the definitions of the other subgenres, I’m relying on what I consider generally agreed-upon terms across the industry and fantasy community.
But for the mythological stuff? I’m kinda firing from the hip, making it up best I can.
I would say that Arthurian legends are a “subgenre” in that they could get overlapping labels as their own thing, or with other “myths and folklores” or fairy-tales…
But the reason they’re hard to pin down is when they were created way before these labels. I’ve seen modern retellings of Greek myths, for instance, like Circe, which I’d just call “mythological fantasy,” but the author might even want to shed the “fantasy” label. I don’t know.
But then how do we deal with things like Beowulf? One could argue it fits into sword & sorcery or historical fantasy or epic fantasy… but also all of those miss the point completely because Beowulf isn’t any of those things. It’s an ancient poem! None of these categories existed back then. Same with the original Arthurian tales (which are doubly complicated because there’s no one, original version or author).
And it gets really weird when we look at “fantasy” from 1700 to ca. 1920s… audiences didnt want to explore “parallel worlds” much, but instead we get a “Once Upon a Time” setting where it was kinda-like-earth but also expected to not be realistic at all. If there’s no narrative reason to connect to the real world, then I’d just call it “high fantasy.” But there’s an argument to made either way, I think.
… so I just slapped a new term on it “mytholoical” and called it a day. It’s all closer to “folklore” than “genre fiction” I think. But if someone published a novel about King Arthur in 2024 (as people still do), I would just label that High Fantasy. I don’t really have an answer.
Thanks for the extra thoughts! I loved reading through it.
I agree that the labelling of myths/fairy-tales are tricky. I think that legends, folktales, fairy-tales etc. are a bit different than fantasy outright, especially because their 'purpose'/use/way people viewed them was different...I was reading back through your post and when you get to talking about the real world giving tools and imposing limitations; I think that could also help explain what I'm trying to put to words. I would read a low fantasy differently than I would read a mythological retelling because the expectations for the low fantasy (system will be similar to Earth's) differs from my expectations for the retelling (system will be similar to the conventions of the original tale).
But you're right. The legends themselves, like Beowulf, are distinct and pre-genre. They have fantasy elements, but the way people used fantasy in those texts was different from how people started using it after the medieval period.
I find Arthurian fantasy weird because it seems to pop up more than so many other legends in the sense that every so often, someone will simply retell the story. No real bells or whistles, no change beyond maybe a new perspective of narrator. But it's not quite a retelling in the sense of fairy-tale retellings because fairy-tales usually have some kind of moral, and Arthurian literature, even if they have morals, convey them much more like a classic fantasy story. I would consider Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles historical fantasy more than Arthurian because (from what I've heard) they go off more of the history than the legends, and the two are usually considered pretty distinct. But there are consistently modern appearances of Arthur in fantasy...stories keep reusing the legend in a way that necessitates knowing or retelling the tale; I don't quite know how to categorize it.
I was trying to think of another story that uses locations/history the same way Once and Future King does, and I thought of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, because the series (at least the first; I didn't read the others) takes place in Oxford but a very clearly non-Earth version of Oxford. Stories that let you have the structure of a location and then work off of the idea of it for something else entirely. Alternate Universe-when-it-fits-the-need fantasy. [Edit: came back to add that Princess Bride might also fit this depiction. Narrator Goldman asserts Florin is a real place and that he is adapting the book from a famous historical Florin text, but if you take out the framing story, it could be entirely separate from Earth.]
All this to say that I also don't really have an answer, but if you have more thoughts, I'd also love to hear what you think.
Ooh ok but what if the Arthur was gritty, realistic with no magic? Wouldn’t that make it historical fiction vs fantasy? Because the focus is on the history not on the medieval myths/legends. I may have to update my elevator pitch to say historical romantasy. (Not that the romance overwhelms the action, it’s a key part of the series)
Again, I’m kinda guessing and I think it’s pretty loose. But I’d ask:
Is this meant to be Arthur the historical figure? As in, a Romano-British warlord of the 5th century who was fighting against Germanic invaders during the slow collapse of Roman rule in the former province of Britannia? Are you going to include some explanation about archeological records and primary sources, as often happens with historical fiction?
Or is this meant to be a retelling/adaptaion of Arthurian legends with the likes of Merlin, the Round Table, Gueneviere and Lancelot, and a sword in a stone?
If it’s more the first, then I’d call it historical fiction. If it’s more the second, I’d call it fantasy.
! But this is one man’s opinion !
I really do think Arthurian legends (like all legends, myths, and folktales) really float above and around these categorizations because they existed BEFORE the idea of fictional “genres” existed.
The first one, and yes pretty much before genres were invented. After all the Arthurian stories are called Romances (meaning something different then to now)
Very thought provoking. You put forth numerous ideas in this essay worth considering, from the binary perception of high and low fantasy to the malleability of subgenres. I think the most important points come at the end, though:
1) Picking only one or two subgenres to label our stories as, so as to avoid confusing our readers. (A lesson I learned years ago but which I still occasionally slip up on.)
2) Drawing from your audience's interactions with and reactions to the story in order to pin down your primary subgenre(s).
I think many of us speculative/genre fiction writers have a tendency to get caught up in our own heads when it comes to describing our work in definitive terms. We're tempted to draw from as many angles as possible because that's often how we write, but that works directly against the goal of describing our work in simplest terms. And that's what those genre descriptions have to be - simple. If we overcomplicate them, we'll just confuse people and drive them away.
Decisiveness, then, becomes key in presenting our stories in genre terms. I write dark fantasies with a touch of mystery to them. There's technically more to my stories than those, yes, but they tend to be the primary subgenres, so that's how I classify them. (The Castle on the Hill being an exception as a romantic fantasy adventure.) Keeping genre descriptions simple is the best thing we can do for ourselves. We need to be mindful of this.
Exactly! And with too many descriptors, we not only confuse readers, we turn readers away! I've loved reading many an epic fantasy that involved romance and love stories. But I never go LOOKING for romance. If someone describes their work with a "romance" tag, I assume romantic emotions and sensuality are the main pillars of the story, and I don't pick it up. The reverse is true too; I don't AIM for dark fantasy, but also its good for me to know that's how people are reading it, because then maybe I won't sent something too gory to my grandma. All these labels are about cultivating an audience by noting similarities with other works. We go astray when we use them to show all the ways our work is unique (even if our work IS very unique and sits in between a bunch of fuzzy categories).
Interesting article. I typically don't think about these things when writing fantasy. It's good to know
Thanks for this clarification. So many people get high and low fantasy mixed up with high and low magic. Even my best friend, who is also a fantasy writer, mistakenly refers to my book as a low fantasy because it has mid-to-low levels of magic. (It is an urban fantasy with a similar technology level to Earth, so it does blur the lines I'll admit, but it is also very importantly not Earth.)
The terms "hard magic system" and "soft magic system" also frequently get mixed up in there. Hard magic meaning there are strict rules to magic, soft meaning "because magic" is a valid explanation. Both high and low magic settings can be hard or soft. (This one is a spectrum, but many authors land on one extreme or the other.)
Totally. I’m probably going to have my next post be about hard vs soft magic since, like the above, I’m surprised at how often these things get blurred. But I also have a short story eating away at my imagination so we’ll see when everything gets published.
Clear and useful definitions, thanks. I don't tend to think about the genre I write beyond fantasy, scifi, and horror which is basically saying the same thing thrice. SciFi is futuristic, interstellar, or somehow technological fantasy, horror is typically supernatural events in a grounded world, usually on Earth, thus low fantasy. I accept that that is a little flippant on what the genres are and what they can do but I write what comes forth and it covers a lot of different sub-genres of speculative fiction. Typically, as you say, the story finds its own niche in the writing. Perhaps I should cluster my stories into sub-genres, or maybe I'll leave that for paperback/ebook collections.
I enjoyed your insightful article, thanks.
This was such an interesting read. Sorry I don’t have much to add as I’m here to learn more than discuss but I just wanted to acknowledge that I read your full article (I rarely have time to do that these days so it hooked me in!). You came up on my Substack suggested reads, just in case you like to know where new readers are coming from.
Thanks for taking the time Lynsey! And for the attribution data haha. Out of curiousity what do you mean by suggested reads? Did I show up under “people to follow” or was it an email or something?
It was in the Weekly stack email where they send you a few suggestions of things you might like to read.
I love when you write stuff like this!! You’re so good at it and it’s nice to learn a little more about how you and others think about fiction. Thanks so much!
Thanks so much, NJ 😊… my latest story needs more time to marinate so I might do another explainer next week
Thanks for writing this!
Happy to! Thanks for reading. More like this to come. Stay tuned
I will have to think about the genre of the story I am writing (the provisional title is "The Origins"), although I haven't thought about it before. Considering the subgenres you mention, it should be Epic High Fantasy. I sounds really good!
Interesting definition of high and low fantasy—I’ve never heard that before.
I’ve always heard high fantasy described as one with a magic system integral to the story, and usually very in-depth (think Brandon Sanderson), while low fantasy was more one where magic wasn’t as necessary or integral to the story.
That’s sounds more like the distinction between hard and soft magic systems (a phrase I think Brandon Sanderson might have coined). That’s something else I want to tackle soon, haha.
Great article! My first question after I read it was, is there a difference between fantasy and science fiction?
I personally see them as two different things and indeed there was a struggle a few years back to seperate science fiction into its own genre and to get away from fantasy.
I think the perceived line was magic versus technology. You've defined high and low fantasy but what *is* fantasy?
Honestly I’ve been pondering that question for a while and I think a lot of other authors are too. I have like three different articles I want to write about that 😅. I don’t have a solid answer right now. Magic vs. Tech is a decent place to start.
I hope I can help spur conversation around that question.
I do think they are separate, but they are not as separate as some people want them to be. Stay tuned, friend. I’d love your thoughts when we do get there
Very interesting and well presented. I was always confused by the difference between high and low fantasy. Sometimes in the past high fantasy was the literary stuff ( LotR) and the Deryni novels were considered low……
Thanks for reading, Kim. Yeah I think that’s a really common misconception because it’s an intuitive way to think of it based on the words “high” and “low”. It gets associated with “high class” or “high literature” or something. I wonder if in the past the high-low categories might have been as amorphous as the sub genres, but at some point the definition I state above became more common… I don’t know
Very nicely stated.
I'm so glad you do all this thinking for us.
Glad it was useful, Hanna!
Well done. And appreciated.
Happy to help!
There is always a twist to it, isn't there. For example I would say that most Forgotten Realms stories are high fantasy, but D&D literally is also Portal fiction because they have portals in it, and Earth with WoTC exists in that superuniverse of stories, and depending on who is writing the story might get the occasional visit from a character, much like 'Last Action Hero' visits earth. So does that make D&D low fantasy? I think not...
Sure, sure. But Forgotten Realms isn’t fiction literature, it’s not made by one author, and it’s perpetually evolving. Frankly that's just outside the scope of what I'm defining here. Especially getting into the weeds on where a character from ongoing franchises might show up outside their main stories, it can get levels of connection and classification on the levels of The Tommy Westphall Universe—which, while fun, begins to defeat the purposes of the classifications. Like we draw a clear line between the Norse Myths and the MCU, despite both featuring an Odin; we don't say that Mario and Luigi exist in Hyrule because Link appears in Mario Kart. That can be a fun thought experiment or fodder for fan-art, but the audience understands what's "in story" and what's just fun crossover between properties.
And again, I'd say it's all a bit moot since TTRPGs and video games are not prose fiction, which is what I'm after here. Insofar as any published stories of Forgotten Realms have a connection to earth as an important feature of their narrative, then those stories are low fantasy...
I'll have to read through it again more slowly when I have the time, but your distinctions on high/low are really clear and helpful. I definitely agree about the subgenres being more of an 'after' than 'before,' but you made me think more about the helpfulness of the labels. Great post!
I was interested in your classification of 'mythological' fantasy. I agree with your distinction between Once and Future King and Percy Jackson, but is there a reason you separate 'mythological' from 'Arthurian' fantasy? I just ask because Arthurian retellings and Arthurian-centric stories feel pretty distinct as a genre - do you have any non-Arthurian examples of what you'd consider 'mythological' this?
GREAT question! For the distinction of high/low and the definitions of the other subgenres, I’m relying on what I consider generally agreed-upon terms across the industry and fantasy community.
But for the mythological stuff? I’m kinda firing from the hip, making it up best I can.
I would say that Arthurian legends are a “subgenre” in that they could get overlapping labels as their own thing, or with other “myths and folklores” or fairy-tales…
But the reason they’re hard to pin down is when they were created way before these labels. I’ve seen modern retellings of Greek myths, for instance, like Circe, which I’d just call “mythological fantasy,” but the author might even want to shed the “fantasy” label. I don’t know.
But then how do we deal with things like Beowulf? One could argue it fits into sword & sorcery or historical fantasy or epic fantasy… but also all of those miss the point completely because Beowulf isn’t any of those things. It’s an ancient poem! None of these categories existed back then. Same with the original Arthurian tales (which are doubly complicated because there’s no one, original version or author).
And it gets really weird when we look at “fantasy” from 1700 to ca. 1920s… audiences didnt want to explore “parallel worlds” much, but instead we get a “Once Upon a Time” setting where it was kinda-like-earth but also expected to not be realistic at all. If there’s no narrative reason to connect to the real world, then I’d just call it “high fantasy.” But there’s an argument to made either way, I think.
… so I just slapped a new term on it “mytholoical” and called it a day. It’s all closer to “folklore” than “genre fiction” I think. But if someone published a novel about King Arthur in 2024 (as people still do), I would just label that High Fantasy. I don’t really have an answer.
I’d love to hear what you think.
Thanks for the extra thoughts! I loved reading through it.
I agree that the labelling of myths/fairy-tales are tricky. I think that legends, folktales, fairy-tales etc. are a bit different than fantasy outright, especially because their 'purpose'/use/way people viewed them was different...I was reading back through your post and when you get to talking about the real world giving tools and imposing limitations; I think that could also help explain what I'm trying to put to words. I would read a low fantasy differently than I would read a mythological retelling because the expectations for the low fantasy (system will be similar to Earth's) differs from my expectations for the retelling (system will be similar to the conventions of the original tale).
But you're right. The legends themselves, like Beowulf, are distinct and pre-genre. They have fantasy elements, but the way people used fantasy in those texts was different from how people started using it after the medieval period.
I find Arthurian fantasy weird because it seems to pop up more than so many other legends in the sense that every so often, someone will simply retell the story. No real bells or whistles, no change beyond maybe a new perspective of narrator. But it's not quite a retelling in the sense of fairy-tale retellings because fairy-tales usually have some kind of moral, and Arthurian literature, even if they have morals, convey them much more like a classic fantasy story. I would consider Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles historical fantasy more than Arthurian because (from what I've heard) they go off more of the history than the legends, and the two are usually considered pretty distinct. But there are consistently modern appearances of Arthur in fantasy...stories keep reusing the legend in a way that necessitates knowing or retelling the tale; I don't quite know how to categorize it.
I was trying to think of another story that uses locations/history the same way Once and Future King does, and I thought of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, because the series (at least the first; I didn't read the others) takes place in Oxford but a very clearly non-Earth version of Oxford. Stories that let you have the structure of a location and then work off of the idea of it for something else entirely. Alternate Universe-when-it-fits-the-need fantasy. [Edit: came back to add that Princess Bride might also fit this depiction. Narrator Goldman asserts Florin is a real place and that he is adapting the book from a famous historical Florin text, but if you take out the framing story, it could be entirely separate from Earth.]
All this to say that I also don't really have an answer, but if you have more thoughts, I'd also love to hear what you think.
Ooh ok but what if the Arthur was gritty, realistic with no magic? Wouldn’t that make it historical fiction vs fantasy? Because the focus is on the history not on the medieval myths/legends. I may have to update my elevator pitch to say historical romantasy. (Not that the romance overwhelms the action, it’s a key part of the series)
Again, I’m kinda guessing and I think it’s pretty loose. But I’d ask:
Is this meant to be Arthur the historical figure? As in, a Romano-British warlord of the 5th century who was fighting against Germanic invaders during the slow collapse of Roman rule in the former province of Britannia? Are you going to include some explanation about archeological records and primary sources, as often happens with historical fiction?
Or is this meant to be a retelling/adaptaion of Arthurian legends with the likes of Merlin, the Round Table, Gueneviere and Lancelot, and a sword in a stone?
If it’s more the first, then I’d call it historical fiction. If it’s more the second, I’d call it fantasy.
! But this is one man’s opinion !
I really do think Arthurian legends (like all legends, myths, and folktales) really float above and around these categorizations because they existed BEFORE the idea of fictional “genres” existed.
The first one, and yes pretty much before genres were invented. After all the Arthurian stories are called Romances (meaning something different then to now)