Suvudu Universe

This is a post I originally wrote for a shared Fantasy blog in 2012.  Since the blog no longer active, I thought I’d repost it.  I went through and edited, changing it a bit from the original.  Hope you enjoy!   – WCB

I love High fantasy. I love Epic fantasy.  In fact, I love both, though they are the same.  I write many stories set in High and Epic fantasy settings. I have books planned that fit the very definition of High and Epic fantasy. In fact I often spend months just reading High and Epic fantasy series by authors I like. Yet, it is hard to pinpoint what elements make High and Epic fantasy unique.  The words High and Epic are often interchangeable.  So I ask this, what is High and what is Epic fantasy?

That is a good question and tends to vary with each person asked. Some may give examples like “Stories set in a Middle Earth type society.”  Others may say, “If there isn’t a world ending event that needs to be stopped, it isn’t Epic Fantasy.” How do I view High and Epic Fantasy? At the most basic level: I define High and Epic Fantasy as stories involving parallel worlds that have some type of fantastical element (Like magic and/or fantasy races and animals) as well as a world-spanning plot.

That is it.  The setting doesn’t necessarily have to be faux medieval and European.  It doesn’t have to contain Elves, Dwarves and “Halflings.”  It doesn’t even have to have a specific magic system.  I like my definition because it is so malleable.  It envelopes many different plot types and lets me, as an author, have freedom to spin a variety of tales within a set framework.

This is good because I love fantasy.  I especially love epic fantasy.  You might be surprised to know that wasn’t always the case.

As a young lad, I believed I didn’t like fantasy.  If I were to go back in time and ask my thirteen year old self what genre he reads, He (I?) would’ve responded “Science Fiction, of course!”  By the time I turned that age, I believed all the science fiction books in the local library had my name on the inner card.  I ignored much of the fantasy on the shelf and instead focusing on books by Asimov, Clark, and Niven.  I admit it; I was a science fiction snob.  I once asked the librarian why Fantasy and Science Fiction books were on the same shelf.  The books were obviously different and anybody with brain cells should see that.

I believe this librarian just kind of rolled her eyes and told me to go home.

That Sci-Fi snobbery didn’t last.  As I grew older, I came to realize that the books that really touched me tended not to be science fiction and were fantasy.  The authors that really inspired me were people like C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Lloyd Alexander.  I can admit that Asimov, Clark, and Niven laid the foundation for my love of genre fiction, but their stories never touched me in the same way.  I stood on Mount Doom as Frodo came close to losing his mind to the temptation of the ring.  I grew up with the Pevensie children as they first experienced Narnia and felt their sadness whenAslan told them they could never return. I traveled with Taran as he tried to find out who he was and changed from a child in to a man. These are the stories that still stick with me, the tales that I will one day pass on to my own children.  Because of these authors and stories, fantasy is now as much a part of my life as science fiction.

When I realized I love fantasy as much as I do science fiction, it changed my literary life forever.

As I grew as a man and a writer, I learned that the type of fantasy I grew up reading was a certain subtype of the whole genre.  As a child, I didn’t realize that publishers cut the genre pie up in to anything more than just “fantasy” and “science fiction.”  If it involved space, it was sci-fi. If it involved magic and elves, it was fantasy.   My mind saw most things in broad strokes as a child.     I soon learned that what I liked reading tended to be considered High Fantasy, a subgenre different in tone and feel from something like Sword and Sorcery or Heroic fantasy.  High fantasy stories tended to be set in another world, another age apart from our own.  The books were focused on world-shaking events, often dealing with situations that had the potential to destroy or save all of humanity and other races.

High Fantasy is epic, you see.

Once I figured out that I loved fantasy and that I loved, specifically, High and Epic fantasy, I started to search out authors that wrote in that subgenre.  The first one I remember finding, after my soul bending revelation, was Robert Jordan.  I found his first Wheel of Time book for 50 cents in a local library book sale around 1992.  Little did I know I’d still be reading his epic fantasy series 20 years later…  Because I found Jordan, I started to seek out other writers of epic fantasy: George R.R. Martin, Tad Williams, Terry Brooks, Margret Weis and Tracy Hickman as well as many others.  I realized that multiple worlds existed underneath my nose.  Worlds I never knew about and worlds for which I wanted to be a part.

Eventually this lead me to writing my own bit of epic fantasy, a small story that started a violently orphaned boy on a quest to find an object his dead sister valued so much.  The object, named the Will O’ Wisp, would lead my character in to the middle of the blasted lands and onward to find why his world was dead and why it deserved salvation.

Pretty epic, right?

Although I had written many stories before that, this is my first fantasy story.  Someday I might even try to write again and see where that boy ended up.  As far as I know he’s still wandering the wasteland and mourning his recently deceased family. I’m sure his story is epic and must eventually be told. Until that time, I will continue to read and write Epic Fantasy while trying to push the genre forward.