What makes for a great fantasy novel...

In my mind, a great fantasy novel is like any other novel--if the characters don't engage me, the novel isn't successful. But if you're thinking about things specific to fantasies, I'd say I like inventiveness the best. I don't want to read about the same old "noble elves, evil orcs" or other cliches unless the author has a good twist on them. And I like fabulous creatures in fantasies, but only if they act like real creatures and not like people with funny suits on. That is, if the author has an intelligent lizard-man as a character, say, that lizard-man should look at the world and react to events differently than the human characters. And, of course, human characters should react to the lizard-man differently than they do fellow humans.

I agree with Saanen.

I think the most important things for me as far as a good fantasy/sf book are originality, believability and thoroughness.

Originality: I want to read about new worlds, not rehashed old ones. I can't be bothered with stories that just recycle the old tropes and standbys. Elves, orcs, evil overlords, even dragons. If there's a new twist or facet that is explored - fine. But too many new writers just want to use the same old stuff that's been done so many times before.

Believability: The writer has created a world AND shows it in such a way that I half believe it. Not BELIEVE it, of course, but the suspense of disbelief comes easily. I enter the world the author has created and am borne through it on their words alone. It's a fun ride and while I'm on it, that particular world is real to me.

Thoroughness: I love it when an author has covered all the bases. I don't stop in the middle of a scene and think: "Why?"

The author has constructed a world, society and characters that act naturally within their framework and also interact naturally. The author makes me feel like there's an actual world still out there.

Bad stories have gaping holes in logic, in the world's infrastructure, society etc.

Some pet peeves: When an author creates a society of drones or clones. Everyone in X society is a stable, hardworking upright citizen and everyone in Y society is no-good, evil etc.

When the characters are unbelievable - as in goody goody's with no bad qualities, no errors in judgement, who show none of the baser human qualities that every human being on this planet was born with.

Yes, I want heroes but I want them to be believeable and find it more interesting when they perform heroic feats despite the fact that they sometimes feel lust or jealousy or greed or whatever.

I have to say that I think the face of fantasy today is changing. 5, 10 years ago I felt like fantasy was in a la-la land with all the cookie-cutter hero archetypes, the connect-the-dots storylines, the same old, same old cast of characters, villains and monsters.

First of all, I want all the stuff I expect from any novel. Reasonably well-written, characters I care about, tension, pacing, yadda yadda. Everything you'd want in any good story.

Next, I want mystery. I love it when the characters to face something they don't fully understand.

I don't need to have originality in characters or settings. That's nice, but not as crucial as other the things.

Ok, you all have some good ideas and opinions! Helps to see what the readers want and like, since I am writing fantasy as well as reading it some after a twenty year hiatus.

Now as a reader, I agree on the originality thing, except for elves. Darn it, I just love the elf-idea, especially the Tolkien type of elves who are as big as we are and don't sit around on toadstools in gossamer wings. They are sexy, intriguing, and still have a lot of untapped potential for stories. I personally love the idea of the immortal-mortal relationship thing, regardless of how the immortal race is portrayed; elves or whatever.

I HATE ponderous, hard-to-read language, no matter how intriguing the author's ideas are! (no offense to Janny Wurts, but YOW - hers is one example)

Last, I'd say that it's the characters. Make me care, make them engaging and flawed and unusual. Make me cry, laugh, get angry.

Good stuff!

Thanks for posting this question, MI. I've been thinking about the same thing as of late.

I've been wondering, if all the elves and gnomes and dwarves are erased from fantasy, then what is fantasy? I tend to like all those wonderful creatures that I can't find walking the streets of my home town (although I will admit to knowing one or two trolls in my life). Characterization's great. Setting's great, too. But without some fantasy creatures, even the occasional talking dragon, fantasy seems to loose it's flavor. It's like spaghetti sauce with just tomatoes and nothing else...you need the spice to make it spaghetti sauce.

As a fantasy writer, I am very very relieved to hear that other people are just as tired of the old elf-good, orc-bad, and there is no way that any dwarf is ever going to get in a boat cliches.
Me and my older brother made a fantasy role playing game for our younger brother;s birthday once, and an older friend who does a lot of wargaming came to play it with us. He told us afterwards, that you couldn't have good orcs (we had made it possible for a gameplayer to have an orc as their character) and dwarves couldn't be sailors.
Of course, I'm a little rebel at heart, so I instantly changed my 'good guy lost races' in my novel from Trolls and Goblins to Trolls and Orcs. But my dwarves were sailors before he even mentioned this, so there wasn't much I could do there.
Oh - and one of my bad guys is a dark-skinned, deaf, female, elf. How's that for unusual?
But, to continue with the topic, I see a good fantasy as being something with gripping characters, adventure, a story-line I can be brought to care about, and writing skills that don't make me wince.

I think originality is all fine and good, but if the characters and storyline are not believable, the work suffers as do I when I'm reading it.

On the subject of Elf-good, Orc-bad, I like to throw concepts like that out the window myself. In my previous work, the main protagonist was a dragon, and the main antagonist was a unicorn. I've always thought that using stereotypes for evil vs. good characters ought not to be done, because to me that smacks of the old 'same old, same old' that someone mentioned earlier in this thread. I enjoy very much being different from the norm.

Then again, you don't want to deliberately go against the grain for the sake of reversing a cliche. That would be a cheating way of acheiving originality, and I don't think you'd be fooling anyone. The hero's home is an iron citadel inside a volcano, and the antagonist's is a bucolic little hamlet? Nah.

Great story, great characters, great conflict, and a dash (or more) of something lost from this world... and oh yeah, great writing...

we must have played different RPG's, MI. the ones i played as a kid had an entire race of 'dark elves.'

naturally, it has to be a good, well-written novel with all the care given to characters and setting as any other book. my personal preference doesn't lean towards dragons.

a little mystery, a little romance (though that's hard for some fantasy writers, it seems). i like a little familiarity, yet not cliches. i prefer anti-heroes and books who aren't afraid to 'go there,' wherever that there is. there's got to be something in the book that i can relate to. i also greatly appreciate a fantasy that begins and ends within one book: trilogies turn me off and so do hugely open-ended finales.

as far as whatever magick system there is, i'm really not interested in stories that go to great lengths to describe how it all works. show me a few examples of what extents magick in that world can go to and that's all i need. i don't care from which god magick is given, less about that god's history.

i like to learn a few things while reading. doesn't have to be anything grand, just perhaps something silly like the parts of a saddle or the type of a castle or how a peasant's life really is. there has to be at least a pseudo-science behind how the world operates that's discernable.

i like authors with life-experience. this is especially true of fantasy authors. since the genre seems to me to attract beginning writers, that really stands out more often than not.

basically i like the kind of stories i write, lol. which, incidentally, is a driving force behind why i write because i think most stories are crap. keep your tolkein tales with a twist. give me a story written by an adult who's not so desperate to be different (as mentioned, going against the grain of cliches for the sake of 'uniqueness' is cheating, rather akin to being a 'rebel' by getting a tattoo-- geez, what a statement of conformity it is to be under 25 with a tribal around your bicep. way to go, dumbasss) that he avoids *all* cliches.

also as mentioned are mary-sues. hate 'em. they're not even real characters.

i'm also not too hep on main characters who aren't human. call me crazy. or characters who are the chosen ones. prophecies in general suck. too, characters with super-powers i'll never have don't appeal to me. remember in the original star wars how the force was something a kid could feel as if he could have?

i've never cared for speaking creatures that shouldn't speak.

I think everyone's made really good points so far. There isn't just one quality that makes a good fantasy story. Stories can have have fascinating, original plots, but if I don't care about the characters then it's only a mediocre book in my opinion. I like fantasy that's original, but originality alone will not make a story, and there is a point where an author can go overboard. I also appreciate a little comedy thrown into a serious struggle of good vs. evil, but again, that alone will not save a story. I agree with the above comments that Mary Sues and perfect characters can kill off a novel completely. I also don't like damsels in distress, just because I'm a feminist like that and the concept is way overdone.

Make sure you have great troll names if you have any troll characters. I suggest using Willem, Larry, Miranda, Erica, and Marleen. Okay, forget Larry. That's more suited to a lounge lizard. But the others could be really good troll names.

loquax said:

Then again, you don't want to deliberately go against the grain for the sake of reversing a cliche. That would be a cheating way of acheiving originality, and I don't think you'd be fooling anyone. The hero's home is an iron citadel inside a volcano, and the antagonist's is a bucolic little hamlet? Nah.

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I know where you're coming from, loquax, but at the same time I hold to the old belief that 'looks can be deceiving.' What better way to make the bad guy more evil than to have him live in a quaint little hamlet? To add open deception to his evil ways.

I think of the movie 'Beauty and the Beast' made a number of years ago by Disney. The Beast lived in a dark, forboding castle, but in the end turned out to be quite the good guy, and a perfect gentleman. I personally like fantasy stories that turn looks on its head. They intrigue me quite a bit.

Well, there you're slipping into the realms of anti-hero and anti-villain, which I think are great. But I'm saying it's bad when people do it for the sake of originality and nothing else - where the story actually suffers because they've deliberately tried to be different.

I think of good fantasy as fresh and original angles on time old concepts and cliches.

loquax said:

Well, there you're slipping into the realms of anti-hero and anti-villain, which I think are great. But I'm saying it's bad when people do it for the sake of originality and nothing else - where the story actually suffers because they've deliberately tried to be different.

I think of good fantasy as fresh and original angles on time old concepts and cliches.

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I think I get what you're saying now.

I had heard the terms 'anti-hero' and 'anti-villain' before, but I never really understood them correctly. My mistake.

And I agree wholeheartedly with the idea that changing a traditionally evil character to good, and vice-versa, for originality's sake and nothing else, is a bad thing. I believe each character should be his or her own person, not just a photocopy of what others of his or her race or species are deemed to be like in a story. That just bothers me, to think that no one within a particular race or species cannot be different from others within their same race of species.

My-Immortal said:

Oh no, one of the RPGs I played had dark elves too (drow) - but my point was that it shouldn't JUST be a 'dark elf' that is evil. It seems unrealistic that ALL the elves of the typical "good" race should be "good". Wouldn't it seem more realistic to believe that an elf has the potential for evil just as much as a human? And wouldn't it also seem possible that at least some of those elves with the potential for evil actually were evil?

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Intersting you hould say that. One of the characters in my book is an Elf gone bad.

Making non-human races more human isn't necessarily a good thing...

...I don't know if giving non-human races human qualities is bad or good - it just gives them more depth, I think.

An example: In one of my stories, part of the plot-intrigue is putting an immortal, pure Elf in a situation where he has to lie for some reason to save someone, although it is not his nature to do so normally. But he goes for the 'higher good' and does it, though it's hard for him (and he even gets the girl, in the end!) Think of the people who hid Jews from the Nazis - they had to lie, steal at times, etc, in order to save innocents & fight evil.

I mean, what other role model do we have for humanoid-type races, other than ourselves - or the animal kingdom? Since we are fascinated with ourselves, we model them after our best, our worst, and in-between.

And since elves are fantasy creatures, anyway, who's to say what, exactly, they are or aren't? The writer, the creator who puts their own "spin" on their characters. It's our job to make them credible and suspend disbelief.

Creating new worlds and making people believe, and care...

My personal opinion is that human traits would be wasted on other races if you already have humans to express them. If all of a sudden elves can die, lie, cry, and make pie, they lose that extra dimension that separates them from Men, which in turn robs your humans of their uniqueness.

By all means, if you can twist what our definition of elves and dwarves are successfully, then there is nothing wrong it. But when you get to the point where you stand back, view your work objectively, and discover that the only thing that keeps your elves from being fully fledged humans is "pointed ears", you should stop and think about your reasons for having elves in the first place.

And MI, I don't think anyone can top that end-note. How very cheerful!

loquax said:

My personal opinion is that human traits would be wasted on other races if you already have humans to express them. If all of a sudden elves can die, lie, cry, and make pie, they lose that extra dimension that separates them from Men, which in turn robs your humans of their uniqueness.

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But by that argument, there's no reason to have elves (or any other fantasy race) in the first place, because humans can be good and noble and beautiful as well as everything else. I don't think it's possible to rob humans of their (perceived) uniqueness--after all, we're naturally rather absorbed with ourselves.

I think fantasy races are often used to point out different aspects of human culture, but it's basically an exercise in stereotypes these days. When I say "elves," "dwarves," "orcs," or "Klingons," I'm sure you get a pretty static image in your mind. But when I say "vampires," that image may be less static, because of all the vampire fiction that examines vampires as complex characters who aren't necessarily all evil (or all good). A good writer can make a character of any race well-rounded without making the character seem like just another guy you'd meet in the street.

What!? Humans aren't immortal! Humans don't suck blood! Humans aren't uncapable of evil!

That's what makes fantasy races so cool... their separation from people. I'm saying that when you take these special traits away from them - make them more human and less fantastical, there's no reason for having them in the first place.

If I've ticked anyone off because their MC is a vampire who doesn't suck blood , has no super strength, can live in daylight, and who isn't immortal, then remember - that's okay as long as it's done well.