The Cozy/Grimdark/Heroic Fantasy Sine Wave and a bunch of stuff about villains
I woke up this morning thinking about something, and it struck me that it might make a good column/newsletter, so here we are. This is me thinking out loud, and I don’t pretend to have made up my mind here, but I have noticed a series of patterns, I guess you would call them, and in noticing those patterns formulated a bit of a theory.
We all know that there are literary movements and trends that emerge and submerge from the sea of story, as it were, sometimes demonstrating remarkable durability as the cutting edge of the Zeitgeist and sometimes falling away surprisingly fast to become niche interests.
Western adventures dominated the American publishing landscape for almost a hundred years before the Myth of the West wore thin, and Westerns became a quirky niche category where people like me and Karen Joy Fowler go slumming because we want to comment on the existing body of work. Grimdark made it almost thirty years as a flagship category of Fantasy before being dethroned by cozy fantasy and Romantasy. It might still be going strong if a certain TV show hadn’t been flown into a mountainside under control quite so dramatically.
People do get tired, and I’m old enough to notice that this reaction architecture between hopeful fantasy and hard-edged fantasy is a sine wave. Each reacts to and deconstructs the other in turn.
And neither of them ever actually goes away. (And there’s a lot of stuff in the middle that takes elements of everything and combines them.)
Tolkien isn’t exactly as uplifting and one-note as he’s often remembered (there’s another essay on how we turn great books into parodies of themselves that I should write someday) and The Lord of the Rings is about trauma and damage and loss and weariness and how the world is never the same after you’ve been ruined by something as much as it’s about the triumph of spirit and courage in the face of nihilism. But it bursts on the scene and inspires a horde of imitators and commentators, many of whom write books that are ethically much simpler than Tolkien’s masterpiece. Some of those books are indeed merely uncomplicatedly uplifting and one-note.
Anyway, as that strain of epic Tokienic fantasy became established, it began to dominate over the Sword-and-Sorcery that had been a prevalent modality beforehand. And as it became more established as a dominant market category, people began to react against it with other styles. Fables, such as The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. Allegories, like Watership Down by Richard Adams. Dark and violent fantasies with everyman antiheros such as Lord Foul’s Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson. Queer literary New Wave fever dreams like Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. Deconstrive sword-and-sorcery romps like Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny. Science Fantasy, such as Dragonflight by Anne McCaffery.
(I chose these books in particular because as far as I can determine, each of them has sold over a million copies, and in the case of Watership Down it’s something like 25 million copies. The Zelazny might be an edge case on that, but it’s a banger, so.)
But even while Tolkien is working, other artists are working as well. Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword draws from the same myths and legends that Tolkien recasts. It was published in November of 1954; The Fellowship of the Ring had just come out that same July. Something was in the water in those days, and these two medievalists and scholars of different generations and different war experiences were both soaking in it. And they wrote very different texts, drawing from the same Nordic background of dwarves and elves and broken legendary weapons.
Which is actually where I am going with this.
There seems to be ideas that just settle out of the ether into multiple heads simultaneously, and if they find fertile ground and a readership, proliferate. I’ve expressed this previously as “You railroad when it’s railroading time.” Which is to say, at a certain point the evolution of society and technology and narrative have created a certain set of circumstances, and those circumstances lead to the writing of a certain type of book. And moreover, the popularity of that certain type of book.
So—and now I am really theorizing—the success of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (+) leads to, in no particular order, a blockbuster Broadway musical, Despicable Me, Maleficent, Cruella, etc and then to Madeline Miller’s Circe and then, in the past few years, to an absolute bonanza of fantasy novels about the usual villains of fantasy novels: Vicious (V.E. Schwab), The Apprentice to the Villain (Hannah Nicole Maehre), Long Live Evil (Sarah Rees Brennan), Dreadful (Caitlin Rozakis), How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying (Django Wexler), Starter Villain (John Scalzi), Someone You Can Build a Nest In (John Wiswell), The Mere Wife (Maria Dahvana Headley), and approximately fifty percent of the Holly Black oeuvre, as a nonexhaustive list. (*)
Because people are inspired by and influenced by what they read when they write… and often if they enjoy a thing they have read they want another thing that reminds them of the thing they liked. And if the thing they liked sold well, because a lot of people liked it, suddenly it doesn’t seem farfetched from the publisher’s perspective to spend the money to develop a book that might have seemed a little outré just a few years before.
And thus you wind up with what seems like a sudden and glorious proliferation, nay even a flowering, of books on suspiciously similar themes. Which persists until it starts to seem a little samey to the readership and the sales fall off, by which time something else is probably waiting in the wings.
A great deal of energy among writers, editors, and publishers is exhausted in trying to time the peak of that wave and predict what the next Thing is going to be. There were industry efforts as far back as the early 2000s to crystal ball the successors to grimdark and paranormal romance, and at that point grimdark had barely even gotten rolling. And if you get lucky or read the tea leaves and hit at the right time with the right story, you can bring about a category renaissance and ride the wave as one of the foundational authors of a new subgenre.
Hit that rising wave just right, surf it, find the readership, and you get to have the career that William Gibson, Diana Gabaldon, or George R. R. Martin has.
Of course, this is all much easier said than done. But I do think it’s a useful and fascinating pattern.
+I am in no way suggesting the Maguire invented the Villain Narrative. Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber; John Gardner’s Grendel; C.S. Friedman’s Black Sun Rising various others long predate it.
*Amusingly, I wrote a short story (“Abjure the Realm”) decades ago about a Standard Arthurianish Fantasy Evil Forest Tower Sorceress named Maledysaunte, who also turns up as a secondary character in my novella Book of Iron. I feel like I was ahead of the curve.