[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] So I'm Adam Roberts, I'm a professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, and I've written History of Fantasy.
Published by Bloomsbury. I.
The way to answer that is to say we need to distinguish, I think, between fantasy as a commercial genre, which we recognise.
You go into the bookshops and there are sections that have fantasy novels and what we could call fantastica.
More broadly, Fantastica is any story that is includes things that aren't in our world,
that are impossible in our worlds of magic or monsters or gods of fantastical creatures.
And, um, there are a lot of stories that we could call fantastical fantasy.
I think as a more specific thing that has grown, uh, largely out of, uh, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis,
the little thorn drawings in the Narnia books, and have become really the major genres of, of writing today.
For fantasy as such. Yes. I think you can trace a line that, um, some perhaps even earlier than the 19th century.
I generally I would say that the roots of modern fantasy, uh, in the 19th century,
writers like Lewis Carroll writing the Alice books, uh, William Morris writing his, uh, prose romances.
But I think we can go back further, actually, I think, uh, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, which is a famously religious allegory.
This is also a track, a quest through a fantasy land that's very vividly rendered.
And it's hard to overstate how important and influential Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Carroll's Alice have been.
And then through into the 20th century. There's a wealth of really brilliant fantasy books, but also films.
I mean, The Wizard of Oz, for instance, which is Frank Brown's novel series that was made into the very famous,
perhaps one of the most famous films ever made, The Wizard of Oz, which is again about a portal fantasy of escape into a wonderful, marvellous realm.
Um, but I think, uh, to go back to what I was saying, I think it's with Tolkien,
the hobbits in the Lord of the rings, and with C.S. Lewis in the Narnia books.
Uh, the Lord of the rings is 1954 or 5.
The Narnia books are published in the 1950s and then in the 1960s that become huge bestsellers and very influential.
There's a lot of really good fantasy at the moment. And, um, I think, um.
I'll be completely honest. I spent a lot of time reading very widely in fantasy, uh, to write my history of fantasy.
And after I've, I'm having a bit of a break from fantasy now for that.
But I'm. There is so such good writing happening today from all sorts of kinds of fantasy writers, all sorts of different backgrounds.
I do think Joe Abercrombie is a really good writer, and I think his fantasy novels, he's pegged as a kind of grim, dark fantasy writer.
But there's a lot more to him than that label.
And I think Rebecca Kwang, who's a rising star, has written some amazing novels and is continuing to do that.
I mean, it's interesting that we're here in Oxford and she's she has a history with Oxford that she studied here and so on.
And she's doing she's turning Oxford into a kind of fantasy and really compelling and fascinating ways.
It doesn't seem to be dying away, does it? Usually with the valves for things.
And then there's a kind of fascination with, like, gothic fiction.
Say the first Gothic novel is the 1760s, and then through the 1770s and 80s and 90s, there were hundreds and hundreds of Gothic novels.
And then it sort of faded away and people lost interest in it, and we turned to other things.
Fantasy just seems to go from strength to strength. It gets more and more popular, and I can't see that stopping anytime soon.
It seems that it's a global phenomenon now.
And it's not just novels, it's it's TV series and films and videogames and comic books and the fan culture.
And it's it's really exciting to see such variety in immensity.
Well, I. I write about science fiction and fantasy, but I also write science fiction.
So I've published in science fiction novels. Um, and what I, what I hear is, um, fantasy just sells better than science fiction does.
So, uh, for whatever reason, it's more popular than science fiction.
Science fiction is a more a niche interest in terms of books, not in terms of the screen texts,
because everybody comes to see in avatar, everyone's seen Star Wars.
But when it comes to books and short stories, it's it's got a smaller, dedicated fan base because fantasy is just widely popular.
Uh, I know that doesn't really address the question that you ask me in terms of the kind of structural differences.
I think they're quite alike in many ways, because they're both examples of fantastical.
They're both examples of text that, uh, in the words of Samuel Delaney,
they are metaphorical literatures because they aim to represent the world without reproducing them.
So they have elements that are not in our world, which become the metaphors for talking about things, whatever is interesting or fascinating.
Generally, science fiction draws on ideas of plausible extrapolation from known science, but then not always.
There's quite a lot of stuff in science fiction that is strictly impossible.
Faster than light travel. Uh, time travel is simply accepted as part of the tropes and a lot of science fiction I mentioned Star Wars.
Star Wars is really fantastical in the genre sense of the word fantasy.
It's about wizards and sword fights and magical powers, but it's also about robots and spaceships and lasers.
And it's a kind of combination of the two.
Um, and I think they, they, they share, um, what in science fiction is sometimes called the sense of wonder,
the splendour, the sublime and the scale of the universe.
And that sense of wonder is something prized by fans of science fiction.
And I think transcendence or enchantment is it's an equivalent in in fantasy,
in that sense of it's also a sense of wonder that you enter in a wondrous and perhaps perilous realm when you read a fantasy novel.
Yes, I think it is true to say that they cross-pollinate and that if I'm writing an academic essay or an academic book,
the ideas that I'm working with can spark ideas for stories and for novels.
I think it's also true that writing academic work is still writing.
It's just it's all the same kind of process.
So I teach literature for the University of London, and I also teach creative writing.
And the the way we teach creative writing is, um, we get students to, to do their writing might be a story or a novel of, um, some poems or a play,
but we also get them to write critical commentaries upon their own work so that they can contextualise and situate their own creative praxis.
And I think the two do go together.