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[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.

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Published by Bloomsbury. I.

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The way to answer that is to say we need to distinguish, I think, between fantasy as a commercial genre, which we recognise.

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You go into the bookshops and there are sections that have fantasy novels and what we could call fantastica.

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More broadly, Fantastica is any story that is includes things that aren't in our world,

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that are impossible in our worlds of magic or monsters or gods of fantastical creatures.

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And, um, there are a lot of stories that we could call fantastical fantasy.

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I think as a more specific thing that has grown, uh, largely out of, uh, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis,

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the little thorn drawings in the Narnia books, and have become really the major genres of, of writing today.

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For fantasy as such. Yes. I think you can trace a line that, um, some perhaps even earlier than the 19th century.

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I generally I would say that the roots of modern fantasy, uh, in the 19th century,

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writers like Lewis Carroll writing the Alice books, uh, William Morris writing his, uh, prose romances.

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But I think we can go back further, actually, I think, uh, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, which is a famously religious allegory.

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This is also a track, a quest through a fantasy land that's very vividly rendered.

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And it's hard to overstate how important and influential Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Carroll's Alice have been.

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And then through into the 20th century. There's a wealth of really brilliant fantasy books, but also films.

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I mean, The Wizard of Oz, for instance, which is Frank Brown's novel series that was made into the very famous,

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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.

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Um, but I think, uh, to go back to what I was saying, I think it's with Tolkien,

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the hobbits in the Lord of the rings, and with C.S. Lewis in the Narnia books.

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Uh, the Lord of the rings is 1954 or 5.

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The Narnia books are published in the 1950s and then in the 1960s that become huge bestsellers and very influential.

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There's a lot of really good fantasy at the moment. And, um, I think, um.

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I'll be completely honest. I spent a lot of time reading very widely in fantasy, uh, to write my history of fantasy.

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And after I've, I'm having a bit of a break from fantasy now for that.

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But I'm. There is so such good writing happening today from all sorts of kinds of fantasy writers, all sorts of different backgrounds.

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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.

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But there's a lot more to him than that label.

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And I think Rebecca Kwang, who's a rising star, has written some amazing novels and is continuing to do that.

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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.

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And she's doing she's turning Oxford into a kind of fantasy and really compelling and fascinating ways.

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It doesn't seem to be dying away, does it? Usually with the valves for things.

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And then there's a kind of fascination with, like, gothic fiction.

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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.

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And then it sort of faded away and people lost interest in it, and we turned to other things.

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Fantasy just seems to go from strength to strength. It gets more and more popular, and I can't see that stopping anytime soon.

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It seems that it's a global phenomenon now.

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And it's not just novels, it's it's TV series and films and videogames and comic books and the fan culture.

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And it's it's really exciting to see such variety in immensity.

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Well, I. I write about science fiction and fantasy, but I also write science fiction.

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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.

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So, uh, for whatever reason, it's more popular than science fiction.

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Science fiction is a more a niche interest in terms of books, not in terms of the screen texts,

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because everybody comes to see in avatar, everyone's seen Star Wars.

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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.

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Uh, I know that doesn't really address the question that you ask me in terms of the kind of structural differences.

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I think they're quite alike in many ways, because they're both examples of fantastical.

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They're both examples of text that, uh, in the words of Samuel Delaney,

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they are metaphorical literatures because they aim to represent the world without reproducing them.

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So they have elements that are not in our world, which become the metaphors for talking about things, whatever is interesting or fascinating.

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Generally, science fiction draws on ideas of plausible extrapolation from known science, but then not always.

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There's quite a lot of stuff in science fiction that is strictly impossible.

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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.

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Star Wars is really fantastical in the genre sense of the word fantasy.

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It's about wizards and sword fights and magical powers, but it's also about robots and spaceships and lasers.

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And it's a kind of combination of the two.

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Um, and I think they, they, they share, um, what in science fiction is sometimes called the sense of wonder,

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the splendour, the sublime and the scale of the universe.

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And that sense of wonder is something prized by fans of science fiction.

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And I think transcendence or enchantment is it's an equivalent in in fantasy,

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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.

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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,

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the ideas that I'm working with can spark ideas for stories and for novels.

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I think it's also true that writing academic work is still writing.

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It's just it's all the same kind of process.

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So I teach literature for the University of London, and I also teach creative writing.

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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,

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but we also get them to write critical commentaries upon their own work so that they can contextualise and situate their own creative praxis.

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And I think the two do go together.