I recently returned home from this year’s Fantasy Convention in Glasgow. As always, I had a great time: catching up with old friends, making new ones, learning more about both the craft of writing speculative fiction and the current state of the publishing industry. A particular highlight was the tenth anniversary live edition of Breaking the Glass Slipper (one of my favourite podcasts) where the presenters looked back at how things had changed over the past decade.
I was also on a couple of panels, including one where we created our own magic system on the fly (with help from the audience) and I was in charge of moderating the mayhem. A couple of my fellow panelists were new to conventions and a little bit nervous, so I gave them some guidance and had the realisation that I’m now a seasoned panel professional. Looking back over the years, I worked out this was my tenth fantasy convention, which, as these things tend to do, got me thinking.
My first convention was the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton in 2013, a huge international event with star guests including Robin Hobb, Patrick Rothfuss, Trudi Canavan, and Terry Pratchett. I jumped in at the deep end of the convention world and had a weekend that was both exciting and exhausting, going to as many panels as I possibly could and soaking up knowledge like a thirsty sponge.
What did the world of fantasy look like at the time? Well, the bloodstained flag of grimdark was flying high. If you’re not familiar with it, this is a sub-genre of fantasy that emphasises gritty realism over magic and wonder, with fewer elven maidens and more gruesome violence. The most popular grimdark book series was George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, the basis of the hugely popular TV show Game of Thrones. The series’ fifth instalment, A Dance with Dragons, had come out in 2011, and the sixth and seventh instalments were expected to follow in due course.
Another highly popular fantasy book series was The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss. The second book of the trilogy, The Wise Man’s Fear, had also been published in 2011, and everyone expected the third book to come along shortly. At the time, fantasy books were usually published in trilogies or longer series, and standalones were relatively rare.
Thirteen years on, and things look very different. Neither Martin nor Rothfuss shows any sign of producing his long-awaited volume. Standalones have become more common, especially for newer authors who haven’t yet established an audience. While the grimdark flag is flying lower than before and starting to look a bit tattered.
The flag flying highest these days, of course, is the beautifully embroidered banner of romantasy, with authors like Sarah J Maas and Rebecca Yarros selling in their millions. Cosy fantasy is also huge, with the breakout success of Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes followed by a host of titles exploring low-stakes stories in fantastical settings.
Marketing has also changed, something the presenters of Breaking the Glass Slipper commented on. There’s a lot of emphasis on books as physical objects, with dedicated fantasy bookshops, foiled covers, sprayed edges, and special editions from monthly subscription boxes like FairyLoot and Illumicrate. A lot of marketing material foregrounds the tropes used in a book (eg ‘enemies to lovers’) rather than the actual plot or themes.
What are the reasons for these trends? Well, I don’t think you need to be a genius to suggest why grimdark might be less popular these days and more escapist fare all the rage. The emphasis on beautiful books, I think, reflects broader post-pandemic cultural trends about the importance of physical objects and real-life experiences. And, while I don’t want to rehash the bitter online arguments about whether Rothfuss and Martin are terrible people or not, I don’t think there’s much mystery about why readers and publishers might have become wary of committing to trilogies or longer book series.
But there’s also another influence at work, one that is hugely popular and yet flies under many people’s radar. I’m talking about fan fiction, aka fanfic or just fic. Back in the early 2000s, fanfic was still a pretty niche online activity that had little influence on mainstream culture. Things started to change towards the end of that decade. 2007 saw the publication of both City of Bones by Cassandra Clare, and His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik, two writers who were prolific authors of fan fiction before turning professional. An Archive of Our Own, (AO3) an open-source online depository for fanfic of all kinds, was founded in 2008 (by a group of fan writers including Novik), and has provided a home for fan works ever since, allowing more people than ever before to discover, share, and create fic. At the time of writing, the website is down for maintenance for 2-4 weeks due to a security incident, and fandom is having a collective meltdown, sharing stories of how to survive.
The big breakthrough of fanfic from online archives into offline bookshops came in 2011 with Fifty Shades of Grey, a steamy BDSM romance novel that started life as a Twilight fanfic. Since then, we’ve had a steady stream of romance, fantasy, and romantasy novels that either started out as fanfics, or are written by authors who mastered their craft in the fanfic mines before coming up to the surface and earning traditional publishing contracts.
If you’re at all familiar with fanfic, you’ll see its fingerprints all over modern publishing. There’s the way tropes are used in marketing books in exactly the same way as people use tags on AO3 to let readers know what to expect. There’s the frequent inclusion of explicit sex scenes in books that aren’t plain erotica. There’s the focus on relationships — romantic yes but also the found families so common in ‘cosy’ sub-genres — with the fantasy world-building in relatively soft focus in the background.
I’m a reader and writer of fanfic myself, and an enthusiastic believer that fanfic is a form of literature that is fully capable of excellence and deserves to be taken seriously. I’ve been literally moved to tears by a Transformers fic before now. But, over the past few years, I’ve found myself feeling a little bit uncomfortable with all this fannish influence on the mainstream of speculative fiction. This article by Jenny Hamilton at Reactor does a good job of articulating some of the reasons why this influence isn’t all positive, with re-purposed fanfics based on Harry Potter and Star Wars taking up the shelf space that could have gone to books set in brand new worlds — a phenomenon the author dubs the ‘shadow franchise’.
By its very nature, fanfic is usually built on what’s gone before. It tends to assume the reader is already familiar with the world, cares about the characters, and is pre-invested in the story. The joy of it often lies in making tweaks to the original and seeing what happens — like, ‘what if Harry was sorted into Slytherin and became best friends with Draco Malfoy and then they kissed?’ — or in fixing something that was unsatisfactory in the original. By, for instance, giving it a happy ending, or in the case of an unfinished work, any ending at all.
Now, I should issue a quick disclaimer at this point to say that fanfic is extremely variable and difficult to summarise. Some of it is poor quality and hopelessly derivative, like a document that’s been photo-copied too many times. Some of it is wildly imaginative and breathtaking in its quality and ambition. Some of it is batshit crazy. That’s kind of the point. Absolutely anyone can have an idea (what if Alexander Hamilton was a cannibal mermaid?), write a fic, post it on AO3, put on some appropriate tags, and see if it attracts readers. There’s no gatekeepers, no censorship, no barriers of any kind except for an Internet connection and a basic degree of literacy.
But the fanfic that’s getting picked up by publishers and turned into ‘proper books’ does not reflect the full diversity of fan fiction, to any given definition of diversity. There are several books out recently (eg Alchemised by SenLinYu and Rose In Chains by Julie Soto) that started out as Draco/Hermione fics, and the previous wave was Rey/Kylo Ren (how romance writer Ali Hazelwood got her start). These books are… well, I’ve enjoyed some of them myself so I wouldn’t say they’re bad, but they’re kind of same-y. It’s always the brooding white anti-hero and the plucky heroine. The astonishing variety and imagination of fanfic rendered down into Yet Another Bad Boy Who Needs A Good Woman. Yawn.
So the state of modern fantasy publishing feels a bit… stuck. Recycling the same old stuff, this time with sprayed edges, and afraid to take risks. The books that are super-popular don’t really line up with either what I like to read, or how I write. And I haven’t even mentioned the impact of generative AI, but I ain’t opening that particular can of worms. Not today, Satan.
But. Before I descend into despair, let’s revisit my first paragraph. What do I say in my second sentence? Oh yes, that’s right: ‘I had a great time: catching up with old friends, making new ones, learning more about the craft of writing’. And it’s true. The convention was packed full of clever, funny, highly creative people who were all there to share our love of fantasy literature. There might be troubles in the world outside, but like the rag-tag protagonists of a cosy fantasy book, we enjoyed hanging out, drinking coffee or Prosecco, swapping stories, and sparking inspiration. The fire of creativity and imagination will never go out, while there is someone left to tend it. Thank you Glasgow, the British Fantasy Society, and everyone at the Convention.
