Confession: My name is Carmine, and I am a fantasy Writer

(Originally posted on Wednesday May 9th 2007)

Here I am again, banging on about another aspect of the fantasy genre that has always seemed contentious to me as both a reader and writer.

Recently the UK sci-fi and fantasy magazine SFX published an article which listed ten well known and much loved authors who had at one time or another professed that they did not "write fantasy" but rather "speculative fiction".

In the case of the authors who were more associated with science fiction than fantasy, this was a credible if still pompous position to adopt. But in the case of the writers of those often very dense and numerous tomes that sit on the shelves of almost all bookshops, dominating the fantasy section; who are they trying to convince? The hundreds of thousands of people who read their books as fantasy fiction, or themselves?

On the simplest level it is true to say that all literature is both speculative and a fantasy dreamed up by the author, but there are certain factors that one has to accept about the genre of fantasy. Science fiction might be boiled down to give the air of a scientist, but applying the same process to fantasy simply produces a fantasist and perhaps some authors are afraid of this title. Maybe they fear being catagorised as a storyteller rather than as a literary prophet, as Hans Christian Anderson rather than H G Wells.But if an author is struggling to distance himself from the genre whilst still producing material that his readers are persuing due to their love of that genre, is someone not being sold short? If a thing has four legs, a tail and barks like a dog then more often than not it is a dog no matter what the man holding the lead might tell you. How jaded is an author who hates the genre in which he writes, and will he not also come to hate his audience in time as well?

I began writing in the fantasy genre years ago, for a while I wandred away from it, but now I'm back in there and trying to rediscover what made me want to write fantasy in the first place. I'm trying to see the conventions and stereotypes for what they are and use what might at first seem a problem instead as an opportunity to make a change or do something different.

I am standing up, raising my voice and saying: "My name is Carmine, and I am a fantasy writer!"

It's the first step on the road to recovery and I would urge anyone questioning their commitment to the art to join me.It's a powerful experience.