I know I’m banging on a bit about China Miéville, with two entries on him in one day, but I missed this article in The Independent when it came out last year:
The real distinction between the tourists and what has become the “generic” fantasy tradition shows up in the weaknesses of the mainstream. When writers don’t respect the field from which they borrow, let alone when (cough, Theroux, cough) they despise it, their work doesn’t believe itself. On every page, nervously scrawled in invisible ink, are the words “It’s ok! It’s not fantasy! It’s really about oppression/marginalisation/exploitation/etc!” The curiously philistine and simplistic belief is that fantasy is only “meaningful” so far as it’s narrowly allegorical.
By contrast, writers within genres know perfectly well that they are writing about refugees, or economics, or gender oppression, or whatever else, but they also enjoy the strangeness they create for its own sake. And they always have done. Gulliver’s Travels is a vicious satire on various social ills, but it also revels in the uncanny spectacles it creates: squadrons of tiny people tethering a man to the ground; talking horses; islands floating with a giant lodestone. It trusts the reader to get on with the tasks of understanding, and of enjoying the strange. It is a book that delights in fantasy.
One of the great signs of fantasy’s health is that often these days, those who borrow its tropes from
outside genre, like David Mitchell, the hot favourite to win Man Booker prize, do so with facility and
respect. Mitchell writes brilliantly about human society and emotion, and about ghosts, sentient computers and transmigrating souls, without sneer, anxiety or generic despite.