---
title: Axes of Fantasy
date: 2023-12-26
draft: true
---

import Sidenote from '@components/Sidenote.astro';

For a while now, I've had a private taxonomy of fantasy books, based on the distinction (or lack thereof) between the fantasy world and our own. It goes something like this:

* *High Fantasy* is set in a world completely separate from our own, with no passage from one to the other. At the most, there might be faint hints that the fantasy world represents ours in the distant past.
* *Low Fantasy* is set in a fantasy world that is separate from ours, but that can be reached (at least some of the time) by some means, such as a portal, magic object, ritual, etc.
* *Urban Fantasy* is fantasy in which the fantasy world is contained _within_ our world, but typically hidden from the prying eyes of mere mortals in some fashion.

I refer to this as a "personal" taxonomy because as far as I can tell, nobody else shares it. The terms are well-known, of course, and there's some overlap--what most people call "High Fantasy" certainly does tend to be set in fantasy worlds with no connection to our own - but "Urban Fantasy" in particular means a whole lot more to most people than just "fantasy set in our world." Most people seem to agree that urban fantasy should be, well, urban - not that it has to take place in _cities_ stricly speaking, but it should at least portray the fantastical elements in and around the real world, and pay some attention to the question of how it stays out of sight of Muggles.

Obviously, my personal classification system is much simpler and stricter than this. To be honest, it's not terribly useful on its own - while the relationship between a fantasy world and our own is certainly _an_ attribute worth considering for classification purposes, it's far from the only one.

So then I got to thinking: If world-overlap is one "axis" along which fantasy can be ranked, what others are there? If we come up with a sufficiently comprehensive set of axes, can we start identifying existing labels (High Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, etc.) as "clusters" of stories which share the same position on _multiple_ axes?

This means that the ideal basis for an axis should be:

* One-dimensional: Ideally, we'd like to be able to give each fantasy work a number, say from 1-100, so that any one is easily relatable to any other. This can't be a true ratiometric scale, obviously, but having something numeric makes it much easier to do fun stuff like searching for "neighbor" stories that sit near a given story on multiple axes.
* Orthogonal: Axes should be _conceptually_ unrelated to one another. Obviously a lot of axes will _tend_ to cluster, just like certain ingredients are commonly paired across a variety of dishes, but it should be possible _in principle_ for a story to occupy any positions on any given pair of axes.
* Objective: As much as possible, at least. Our existing axis of world overlap does well on this metric: it's usually pretty clear where a given story should fall. Sure, there are a few cases where different people might disagree about which of two stories has more or less overlap, but only when they have a very similar amount of overlap to start with. It doesn't seem likely that different people could end up placing the same story on opposite ends of the axis.
* Impactful: A story's position on the axis should go at least some way toward determining what kind of story it is. For example, the climate of the fantasy world would _not_ do well on this metric, since it doesn't matter a lot whether the world is hot or cold when you're asking how it should be classified.<Sidenote>The most impact I can imagine a fantasy world's climate having is something like the situation in A Song of Ice and Fire, where the extremely-long cycle of seasons (each cycle takes decades, if I recall correctly) lead to political differences because e.g. people younger than a certain age have never experienced a winter. But even then, it isn't the climate itself that most people would base their classification on, it's the political situation. It still seems largely incidental, _for classification purposes_, that the political complexity comes partly from environmental factors.</Sidenote>

Okay, so what different axes can we come up with? Obviously we can start with the original one that I wanted to base my taxonomy on:

## World overlap

This is an easy aspect to use for classification, because it's usually quite clear where a given setting should fall. At the left-most extreme you have what I'll call "Otherworld" fantasy, where the fantasy world has absolutely no connection at all to our own world. At the opposite end you'll find most "Urban" fantasy, where the world depicted _is_ the real world, just with added fantastical bits.

Notable subregions include:

### Otherworld Fantasy

No overlap at all. I think most fantasy that's written tends to fall here. At least, it's what most people think of when you say "fantasy book," and the Wikipedia definition of "Fantasy" specifies that it's "typically set in a fictional universe," so I think it's fair to say that this is the "standard" position for a fantasy story to occupy on this axis.

Examples: _The Lord of the Rings_, _Earthsea_, _The Prydain Chronicles_, _Wheel of Time_, _Belgariad_, _A Song of Ice and Fire_, etc. Pick up a book from the fantasy section of a bookstore and there's at least a 50% chance it will fall into this category.

### Mythopoeic Fantasy

Much rarer than the previous category, stories of this type are set in the real world, but in a long-forgotten vanished age of which only the faintest echoes are now known. Think of the "A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away" intro to _Star Wars_<Sidenote>_Star Wars_, of course, isn't typically categorized as fantasy, but rather sci-fi - which is funny because _Star Wars_ has a lot more in common with most fantasy than most sci-fi. Starting with straight-up magic, i.e. the Force.</Sidenote> - the fantasy world has _some_ relation to our own, but for all practical purposes it might as well not exist.

The _Conan_ stories are the only ones I know of that fall clearly into this category, although I'm sure there must be others.

Interestingly enough Tolkien's original goal in writing developing his legendarium was to construct this type of setting. In his own words:<Sidenote>This comes from a letter that Tolkien wrote to Milton Waldman, who I believe was his publisher, in 1951.</Sidenote>

> I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands ... Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story - the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths - which I could dedicate simply to: to England, to my country.

Unfortunately, perhaps, for Tolkien, but quite fortunately for fans of modern fantasy as we see it today, he wound up creating what is pretty undeniably an Otherworld fantasy. There are occasional references to "nowadays" or "in later times" but even then, the conceit seems to be that the narrator is writing from the later days _of Middle Earth_.

### Portal Fantasy

We now make a rather significant jump into what I'm pretty sure is the second-largest category on this scale, which I'm calling "portal fantasy."<Sidenote>This is actually a term that I've seen used elsewhere, in contrast to the previous two which I just made up.</Sidenote> The "codifying" work for this category<Sidenote>In the same way the LOTR was codifying for much of otherworld fantasy, i.e. it's extremely common now for fantasy worlds to feature Elves, Dwarves, and Men, who all share roughly the same set of characteristics as Tolkien's versions. Even the spelling is Tolkien's - previously, "dwarves" would have been considered incorrect; the standard spelling was "dwarfs."</Sidenote> is, of course, the _Chronicles of Narnia_, but there are plenty of other examples. Apparently there's even a Japanese word for it, _isekai_.<Sidenote>I'm not at all familiar with this subgenre, so I don't know if it's exactly the same thing as what I'm calling "portal fantasy" or just shares some key traits with it.</Sidenote>

Note that the mere existence of portals between worlds, or some sort of established "multiverse," doesn't by itself qualify a story for this category. It's required that one of the worlds in question be _the real world_. Otherwise it's just a different flavor of otherworld fantasy. So no _Riftwar_, _Skyhold_, _Traitor Son Cycle_, etc.

One of the fun things about this classification is that it's a mini-axis in its own right, differentiated primarily by how easy or difficult it is to cross from the real world into the fantasy world or back again:

* On the left or "less overlapping" side you have stories like _Narnia_ or _The Last Rune_, where passage between worlds is spotty and _mostly_ doesn't happen at the behest of the characters, but by happenstance or by the action of some Greater Power that overstrides both worlds.
* Moving rightward, you find stories where points of passage are rare but knowable, usually requiring both a certain time and a certain place. _The Paradise War_ is a good example of this.
* Next you have stories where passage can seemingly be accomplished at any time, but requires a great deal of effort and/or arcane knowledge - think large assemblies of wizards gathered together, chanting in unison around a rune-inscribed circle that glows with eerie light, that sort of thing. _The Wizardry Compiled_ is pretty close to this, from what I remember.
* Finally there are some portal fantasies where the portal exists in a fixed location and can be crossed at any time, e.g. _Stardust_. This seems to be the rarest version, at least based on my own reading.

Other examples of portal fantasy include _The Chronicles of Amber_,<Sidenote>Originally I actually had this split into a separate category that I was going to call "nested-world fantasy", but on further reflection I realized that didn't make sense because a) if the fantasy world is nested inside the real world then it's just some verion of [urban fantasy](#urban-fantasy), and b) if it's the other way around, well, every portal fantasy already postulates the existence of some sort of "magical multiverse" that also contains the real world, and it's fundamentally no different whether the main story is set in the multiverse as a whole or just in some particular part of it.</Sidenote> _The Fionavar Tapestry_, the _Oz_ books, _Droon_,<Sidenote>I'm only putting this here for completeness, not because I've  read a bunch of them or anything. _furtive glances from side to side_</Sidenote> the _Fairyland_ books, _The Phantom Tollbooth_,<Sidenote>I think, at least? I never actually finished this one.</Sidenote>, _Shades of Magic_, and _The Keys to the Kingdom_. There are buckets more, but that's all I can think of right now. Plus, this isn't meant to be an exhaustive catalog or anything.

### Alternate History

Fantasy that's set in our world, but with magic.<Sidenote>Or other fantastical elements, of course. Doesn't have to be literally magic-with-an-M.</Sidenote> I hemmed and hawed a lot about whether to even give this category a spot on this scale. You could easily make the argument that a fantasy version of the real world is just a different world, and all of these stories belong in the Otherworld category.

In the end, though, I decided that the point of this axis is to classify fantasy according to how much the fantasy world overlaps with our own, and alternate history involves _quite a lot of overlap_, even though the end result is a world that's not _quite_ identical with the real world.

Broadly speaking there are two variants of alternate history: 1) Either the fantastic has always been a part of life, or 2) it was suddenly introduced into the world by some (usually fairly cataclysmic) event.

Examples of the first variant include _Cecelia and Kate_, the _Temeraire_ books, _Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell_, etc. An interesting quirk of this variant is that it's almost always set significantly in the past, but for some reason not _quite_ as far back as the quasi-Medieval era that is the bread and butter of most "standard" fantasy. The Napoleonic/Regency era is popular, as is the Victorian era. Modern-day alternate-history stories of this type seem fairly uncommon--_Bartimaeus_ is the only example I can think of off the top of my head.

Examples of the secont variant include _Unsong_, _Reckoners_, and _The Tapestry_. Stories of this type are much more commonly set in the modern day--understandably so, since "what would happen to society if magic were suddenly introduced" is a pretty interesting question to explore.

### Urban Fantasy

This is another term that you'll run across a lot if you do any research at all into fantasy subgenres. Here I'm using it in a very restricted sense, that is, _only_ to refer to the integration of the fantastical elements with the real world, without any of the other themes that are often indicated by the term.

To me, the defining characteristic of urban fantasy is that it's set in the real world, where the fantastical is _present_, but _hidden_. It _has_ to be hidden, because if it weren't then it would unavoidably have a major impact on the world, at which point we'd be back to alternate history.<Sidenote>The ever-relevant TVTropes has [some things to say](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Masquerade) on this subject as well.</Sidenote>

So urban fantasy depicts a world where there's magic<Sidenote>Or dragons, or fairies, or whatever fantastical elements the author wants. I'll just use "magic" generally to refer to "the fantastical" for the rest of this section.</Sidenote> but for whatever reason this is completely unknown to most people. Occasional exceptions may be made for top-secret government programs - it isn't that much of a stretch to imagine that if there were magic in the world, then at least some of the powers that be would be aware of it and using it to their advantage. The _Milkweed Triptych_ and the _Checquey Files_ are both examples of this variant.

For the most part, though, the people who know about magic are the people who have magic, plus the occasional Ascended Muggle Sidekick who's there for flavor (and to act as an audience surrogate, probably.) In fact, quite frequently the main conflict of the story is about _preventing_ the magical part of the world from being exposed, either because the magicians are afraid that a world full of angry normies would actually pose a threat to them<Sidenote>In this case the Salem witch trials and similar events are frequently invoked, in-universe as cautionary tales of what might happen "if _they_ find out about us."</Sidenote>, or because the wise and benevolent Wizards' Council has declared that even though they _could_ rule the world, it wouldn't be fair to the poor normies.

Other notable examples of the genre include _The Dresden Files_, _Percy Jackson and the Olympians_, _The Laundry Files_, _Neverwhere_, _American Gods_, the _Artemis Fowl_ books, the _Mither Mages_ series, the _Iron Druid_ series, _Monster Hunter International_, and of course _Harry Potter_.


## Quasi-Historical Era

Another good dimension for differentiating fantasy stories is their "era," so to speak: What real-world historical period provides the basis for the level of technology, social structures, etc?<Sidenote>This is necessarily bound up with the question of _where_ the fantasical cultures get their inspiration, but unfortunately that side of it isn't nearly as easy to map onto a single numerical scale, so I'm going to mostly ignore it for now.</Sidenote>

I don't think it's worth trying to be too precise with the exact historical placement of most fantasy works because most are filled with anachronisms and/or cobbled together from patchworks of different specific times and places,<Sidenote>E.g. the _Belgariad_, which has one country filled with more-or-less French knights of the late Medieval era, and another country populated by not-quite Vikings, in the same world.</Sidenote> so they don't really belong to _one_ precise era.<Sidenote>Exceptions, of course, being things like the _Traitor Son Cycle_, which is _very_ clearly set in an analogue of the late 14th century.</Sidenote> But you can usually get a rough sense of the aesthetic that the author is going for, in broad strokes.

### Antiquity

This is pretty rare, but there are a few examples. The _Codex Alera_ is set in something approximating Imperial Rome, and though I haven't read them I've heard that David Gemmell has written some in an Ancient-Greece-ish setting. I've heard rumors of some ancient Egyptian ones as well.

### Dark Ages

If anything, even rarer than the above. The only ones of which I am aware are the _Belisarius_ series,<Sidenote>Wikipedia terms this "Alternate history science fiction" but it isn't very science-y at all, from what I remember, and it _is_ more than a little magic-y, so I'll call it fantasy.</Sidenote> and (although I haven't read this one) the _Sarantine Mosaic_, both set around 500-600 AD.<Sidenote>So post-fall-of-Rome, which I think counts as Dark Ages.</Sidenote>

### Middle Ages

The _vast_ majority of fantasy is set in something with approximately the aesthetics of Medieval Europe. Tolkien, obviously, was the trend-setter here,<Sidenote>Although interestingly, Tolkien's work seems to clock in rather earlier than your Standard Formulaic Fantasy Setting 1A. Tolkien's world is closest to the _early_ middle ages (circa 1050 or so), from what I understand - e.g. his characters consistently use chain mail rather than plate armor; presumably plate armor doesn't exist in Middle Earth. The obvious reason for this, of course, is that this was the era Tolkien himself had studied most intensively - mostly its literature, from what I understand, but you can't become an expert in the literature of a period without developing at least _some_ sense of what life was like then. So naturally, this was what he drew on when crafting his fantasy settings. Later fantasy, on the other hand, seems to draw most heavily on the _late_ middle ages, circa 1300-1500, with plate armor, chivalry, the occasional joust, etc.</Sidenote>
