By Gig Hope
In 2001 I saw the three-hour fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring three times in the theatre. I was in love. Especially with the sequence where the ethereal elf Arwen saves the story’s hero Frodo. Imagination captured.
Imagine my disappointment when I immediately started reading my mother’s copy only to struggle through reading about some guy named Tom who wasn’t even in the movie and no action involving the elvish princess.
At the recent Sydney Writers’ Festival talk Fantastical Worlds author Samantha Shannon shared a similar experience when she first read the book. She recounted harnessing her disappointment into writing her first novel at age 19, the female-led The Bone Season.
Shannon’s experience with butting up against writing that reflected “the times” further informed her Roots of Chaos series. She relayed that the first book in that series, The Priory of the Orange Tree, a retelling of the St George myth, was inspired by a version of the story that had a clear derision for anyone who wasn’t an Anglo-Christian Briton.
Finding the discrimination inherent in the foundational myth of England so distasteful she simply rewrote it. Featuring a cast of multicultural, multiracial, sexually fluid characters of all genders, Shannon has added a multicultural, queer version of the story to live in perpetuity in the historical cannon.
All three panelists (Samantha Shannon, Shelley Parker-Chan, and Garth Nix) spoke at length of the appeal of writing historical fantasy, Nix describing it as a “sideways entry into contemporary issues”.
This thought process is perhaps clearest in the work of Parker-Chan who cites the T.H. White novel The Once and Future King as a major inspiration. The novel is a historical reimagining of the legend of King Arthur, set in the 14th century. White uses its period setting to comment upon post-WWII society.
Parker-Chan viewed the novel’s preoccupation with the character Lancelot’s failure at chivalric knighthood as a metaphor that helped them discover their own queerness, a tradition Parker-Chan hopes to continue in their own work.
As a half-white/half-Chinese, gender and sexually queer person Parker-Chan and others like them have been locked out of the historical record. Through fantasy writing they can insert themselves into the fabled history of their cultures and not only be included but become the hero.
Through their fantasy novel She Who Became the Sun, Parker-Chan is able to not only give a non-binary character historical agency they are also able to “wield their gender like a superpower”.
As Shannon, Parker-Chan, Nix discussed, writing fantasy is important as it allows us to look at history and as Shelley Parker-Chan says: “I don’t like how that went. I’ll change it.”
Featured image: A female knight faces off against a dragon. Image: Gig Hope/AI