Reeves, Nancee
MWF 4 :10 PM
Park Hall 0144
I love Tolkien. I really do. But he was so influential, so iconic, that fantasy as a genera stagnated for years. Science Fiction began to gain respect, but fantasy was seen (and maybe still is?) as childish. While SF moved forward, embraced diverse voices, typical fantasy stayed very white, male, straight, and European. Except not really. That is just how fantasy was perceived and marketed. Authors worked around this, or were forced to, with most non-medieval fantasy labeled as weird or slipstream or horror or speculative. Some respected writers denied they write fantasy (I'm looking at you, Margret Atwood) as if it were frivolous or shameful.
But, just as we are in a renaissance of SF, we are in a new age of fantasy. Much of this is just discovering writers that were there all along, but the awards committee and the publishing industry are also taking changes on unusual fantasy, on people of color, on women, on non-binary people, and we are finally seeing movement, seeing the genre expand and move foreword.
This does not mean ditching castles and swords and princess, it means using those conventions to say something new. It might also mean the princess is made of snakes and yet is still a good guy. The hero might be a mushroom or maybe the hero and the viliain are both female necromancers in space who fall in love. You get the idea.