Even though one of my hobbies is applying knee-jerk postmodern critiques to fantasy literature, I really do love the genre. But I have to ask: what’s the story with the authors’ obsession with initials. You got C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, J.G. Ballard, George R.R. Martin, Ursula K. LeGuin, J.K. Rowling. What do they think those initials are…runes? Mystical symbols to be pondered, like the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the thing on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Presence?
I guess if you’re writing about wizards and talking snakes, you might as well pretend that your name contains secret mystical codes or acronyms for shadowy puppetmaster guilds. It makes sense to try to cast a vague air of mystery over the proceedings.
Here’s another theory though. What if Lewis and Tolkien were only copying their hero H.G. Wells, and then it became the thing to do. After all, fantasy writers freely borrow and plagiarize from each other, though not in a bad way. It’s more like making a daisy chain into the past, because most fantasy books are fundamentally conservative. Which is fine! The Chronicles of Narnia are a Biblical allegory. Reactionary bourgeois hobbits are the heroes of Lord of the Rings. Ursula LeGuin fetishizes Platonic forms (the “true names” of things). And so on.
And of course all the classic fantasy epics are set in a bygone era—either medieval times or the 1950s. Which all tracks for people who believe modernity does kinda suck.
Here’s a fantasy book idea for the young people of today: endless masses of heavily medicated, hypnotized youth stare dazedly down at their personal tablet screens. Then one of them drops his tablet, which shatters, breaking the spell, and he or she or they gets transported back to a magical time where kids burned things in vacant lots and threw pennies and rocks at each other to pass the time. True story BTW