Nanohedron wrote: My motivation was escape from the world, and for that, it met my needs perfectly. Now? I no longer do, because this crazy world keeps demanding my attention.
I myself have turned to the flute and video games for escaping the world. It works pretty good.
AaronFW wrote:
Second, s1m0n, what are your reasons for reading fantasy? Is it just for leisure?
s1m0n wrote: Apart from the needs of academia, I can't think of any other reason to read fantasy. Is there one?
I suppose if you were in the biz, you might be looking for stories to license for movie rights, or manuscripts to publish, but I can't think of other motives
...
Well, according to my experience (and Sturgeon's Law) a portion of fantasy fiction is also Literature, and thus yields the same reward that all Literature yields. My private definition of capital L Literature is that unlike fiction, the primary concern of a literary novel is the interior landscape. Both have external actions and events that the characters go through, but the principal action of a literary novel occurs in a character's head, and this is where the plot's crisis and payoff of the novel will occur. At the end of a literary novel, the hero is different, not because he fought off the villain, but because he realized something.
So that's what I'm seeking when I read fantasy. Most of the time I don't find it, but most of the time, its not there to be found. When I write, I try to write something that works both as f/sf and as lit. It's difficult, but anything else is unsatisfying..
Thanks for both explanations. I originally asked the question because I was wondering what type of literature you were reading, your goals for reading, and wondering how it related to the suspension of disbelief. Before stumbling on this hay bale thread, I had seen an article on Rock-Paper-Shotgun about
portraying slavery in videogames. They began the article with this remark:
Video games always come with an expectation that the player will suspend disbelief to some extent. Genetically engineered super-soldier clones don’t exist, radiation has never and will never work like that, and overweight Italian plumbers could never make that jump. In most cases, if we are unwilling or unable to suspend our disbelief, we may well struggle to enjoy the game and our questioning of the basics of its ‘reality’ would probably make us insufferable to be around.
So I had already been thinking about the suspension of disbelief a little.
My field isn't literature. My undergrad was in Linguistic Anthropology and I did some graduate work in Ethno-arts and Cultural Anthropology, as a result, I tend to stay out of reading fantasy but have different anachronisms that bother me.