Fantasy Fiction Takes Itself as Some Sort of Realist Narrative

This rant has not been well researched or even proofread, I only felt the need to get my thoughts on the whole subject out of the way in one big ramble, sorry in advance.

Fantasy fiction takes itself as some sort of realist narrative, developing counterpart cultures and existing economics into some amalgamation of reality and fiction. Why, I wonder? Why in a genre (although the word genre itself has its own issues) where the fantastical is normalised, where the bounds of collective human reality are let down, would a writer, or any artist, limit themselves by the real? By mapping a truly constructed reality in terms that limit it to the confines of 12^th century Northern Europe or 17^th century Arabia is the writer not limited by reality artificially, unnecessarily?

Arguably Tolkien was the first to truly try to map the unmappable in his monumental works set in Middle Earth, namely in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Silmarillion. Tolkien was never happy with what he had made, always adding, changing and shifting material throughout his life. He carried out this work from its inhiation in the hellscape trenches of the First World War to his death in Bournemouth, leaving his son Christopher with the task of finalising a manuscript for the Silmarillion, the mythic history of Tolkien’s world.

Now many writers try to achieve what Tolkien ultimately could not over the course of his entire lifetime, they attempt to create a history, an entire world, constructed in fiction, pushing to ‘ground’ fantasy in a reality of its own. Author’s construct worlds set to mirror the struggles of Charlamagne, the infighting between criminal gangs, the Taiping Rebellion.

 Now, basing a fantastical story in a real place has been done for millennia, as is showcased by the multitude of mythologies found in every corner of the map, and modern stories have often tapped into this vein to tell their own tales. These stories do often inform on humanity, provide lessons, history, explanations. These, however, live with the people who tell them, they attempt explanations of reality based on the world we inhabit.

Science killed that, in many ways. We now have explanations based around the movement of atoms, the effects of forces and the interplay of light and dark. Stories based in these theories have great potential, sci-fi has thrived basing tales around them to great effect. However, the cult of science has creeped its way into fantasy. We feel embarrassed when fantasy takes a leap to far from the safety of the real, when it is not gritty depictions of medieval life or were magic is like science, rules carefully explained, power levels ordered into spreadsheets.

Now, it is most likely impossible to write something that fully escapes the confines of human experience, a work is still created by humans after all. Additionally, if anything was created that could exist outside those boundaries it would probably be impossible to connect with, having nothing for an individual to latch onto. But fantasy stories still have the ability to mesmerise us, tell us tales of inner selves that science cannot touch to near the same degree. The metaphorical worlds of Moorcock, the symbolic made real of Viriconium’s shifting streets, the power magic represents in Le Guin’s Earthsea all give us a power held outside of the bounds of reality, deep in our minds where the laws of thermodynamics and Einstein’s Relativity fear to tread.