Heard on an advert today:

'Nintendo DS and Brain Training starter pack, for Father's Day.'

Not really the kind of message I would want to send...

Just wanted to draw your attention to an interesting article about fantasy that comes from a rather unusual quarter. I tend to find that games and prose fiction are two things that work differently, and when one tries to behave like the other, the result is often a poor game or a poor story. So I wouldn't generally turn to an article on games for ideas about what works in fiction (or vice versa).

Yet today, I read an article on a site about trading card game that I found to be quite a thoughtful analysis of the issue of speech in a fantasy world. It's actually about the appropriateness (or otherwise) of swearing in fantasy, but I think its ideas have more general relevance. And, though it naturally has technical game-related parts, I think it deserves a wider readership. So, here is Doug Beyer's article "Frakkin' Zounds". If you're interested in fantasy, have a read and see what you think.

This BBC documentary closed by looking at the rising popularity and influence of fantasy over the last fifty years. Once again, interesting subject matter, and better than the others in some ways (e.g. no random celebrity talking heads); but also let down by some strange editorial decisions. The coverage was uneven, beginning with Michael Moorcock, then jumping to Terry Pratchett, who was the subject of about half the programme. Of course, this was fair enough, as Pratchett is probably the most significant fantasy author of the last twenty years. But then...

Then, we turned to fantasy films, which had not previously been mentioned in the series, and really deserved an episode of their own. All this programme could do was skip from The Thief of Bagdad straight to the recent Beowulf movie and the films of Guillermo del Toro. Next up were fantasy games -- again, a subject all of their own -- and  a bit about how games players can now tell their own fantasy stories, but not much about how the kinds of stories we tell in games are of an entirely different sort from the ones we tell in prose.

Then it's back to books, and the recent developments in modern urban fantasy, with Neil Gaiman given as an example; cue, as predicted in this blog previously, clips of Neverwhere. Now, much as I like Neil Gaiman's work, I would have thought he's too wide-ranging to be so easily classified -- though I suppose the majority of his work can be described generally as 'modern urban fantasy'. Anyway, the programme finished by touching briefly on the New Weird, focusing in particular on China Miéville, who, if I remember rightly, was the only contributor to feature in all three episodes -- but, for whatever reason, they didn't interview him about his own work.

I was pleased to see the programme acknowledge some of the complexities of fantasy, that it can both act as a comfort blanket and confront important issues head on -- but still the story was left incomplete. You would be forgiven for thinking that modern urban stuff is the norm in contemporary fantasy publishing, when in fact there's still a lot of mediocre (or worse) sub-Tolkien fantasy being published; the programme suggested that the latter was just a blip at the end of the 1970s. And no mention of the most popular fantasy author of recent times, J.K. Rowling.

And so, the final episode of The Worlds of Fantasy was like the series as a whole: interesting in parts, but far from comprehensive, even allowing for its short length. What a shame.