“Increasingly fantasy has moved more from the fringes towards the centre”, with a rise in writers operating in the genre, says Irenosen Okojie, who founded the afrofuturist festival Black to the Future and whose books include Curandera.
Why is the genre thriving? Readers “need escapism right now in ways that truly speak to our imagination”, says Okojie, and they “like these richly imaginative worlds that explore our lived experiences in dynamic, transformative ways”. Fantasy is also “invested in projecting how worlds different from our own might flourish”, says Matthew Sangster, a professor of romantic studies, fantasy and cultural history at the University of Glasgow.
However, even though the “success of the likes of George RR Martin and Nnedi Okorafor” show fantasy is a “thriving space”, says Okojie, it “always has been”: look at the likes of Ursula K Le Guin and Samuel R Delany.
George Sandison, managing editor at Titan Books – which publishes VE Schwab and Veronica Roth – agrees. Though he often hears that a particular genre is “having a moment”, when it comes to fantasy, he feels as though “that moment has lasted my entire career in fiction, my entire life before that, and for the countless generations required to produce all the work that lit up my brain as a child!”
Fantasy “is arguably at the root of all literature”, he says – even Virginia Woolf. Every work of fiction “imagines a whole new reality”, fantasy “just has a lot more fun with those mental images, turning them into dragons and talking cats, giving them magic powers, and breaking them free of our planet’s geography”. He sees the publishing industry’s categorisations of fantasy as simply telling readers what metaphors and tropes to expect, “to try to sell more books”.
Certain fantasy subgenres have a lot of buzz around them, aided by TikTok (or, specifically, BookTok). There’s an “ongoing” move away from fantasy worlds modelled on medieval Europe, explains Sangster, and towards romance. Older fantasy “didn’t tend to focus on romance”, but “a lot of fan fiction addressing this lack has been written and avidly consumed”, which made clear that there was huge appetite for mixing the genres.
It may be that romance has evolved to incorporate fantasy elements, rather than the other way round, suggests Lisa Tuttle, the author of books including Riding the Nightmare who writes a monthly column on science fiction and fantasy books for the Guardian.
“In the traditional romantic novel the suspense and conflict revolves around some reason why two lovers can’t get together, but these days most of the old reasons that would do that – class differences, arranged marriages – aren’t as powerful,” she explains. “Perhaps the move to fantasy worlds was inevitable for both writers and readers yearning for more romance and magic in their lives.”
Another popular subgenre, cosy fantasy, has also borrowed elements from fan fiction, such as coffee shop alternative universes “in which characters have lower-stakes interactions than are common in traditional epic fantasies of war or high politics”, says Sangster. And queernormative fantasies “draw on ideas nurtured in fannish spaces” as well as earlier novels such as Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint and Laurie J Marks’ Elemental Logic books.
Games are increasingly an entry point for fantasy. Authors of LitRPG – short for literary role-playing game, a subgenre of stories in which the protagonist interacts with a game-like world – “use readers’ familiarity with game conventions as a jumping-off point”.
Who are the standouts of the genre for our experts right now? Okojie suggests NK Jemisin and Marlon James, who once referred to his 2019 book Black Leopard, Red Wolf as “African Game of Thrones”. And Sangster nominates CSE Cooney’s Saint Death’s Daughter, Kelly Link’s The Book of Love, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s House of Open Wounds and Sofia Samatar’s “wonderful” The Winged Histories.
Emilia Clarke in the TV adaptation of George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones. Photograph: Hbo/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock
