Heroic fantasy
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Heroic fantasy is a sub-genre of fantasy literature which chronicles the tales of heros and their conquests in imaginary lands. Typically it emphasizes the conflict between good and evil. Frequently, the protagonist is reluctant to be a champion.
Selected authors
- Robert E. Howard
- Jessica Amanda Salmonson
- Sir H(enry) Rider Haggard
- Edgar Rice Burroughs
- Karl Edward Wagner
- Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany
- Michael Moorcock
Quotations
"Heroic fantasy" is the name I have given to a subgenre of fiction, otherwise called the "sword-and-sorcery" story. It is a story of action and adventure laid in a more or less imaginary world, where magic works and where modern science and technology have not yet been discovered. The setting may (as in the Conan stories) be this Earth as it is conceived to have been long ago, or as it will be in the remote future, or it may be another planet or another dimension.
Such a story conbines the color and dash of the historical costume romance with the atavistic supernatural thrills of the weird, occult, or ghost story. When well done, it provides the purest fun of fiction of any kind. It is escape fiction wherein one escapes clear out of the real world into one where all men are strong, all women beautiful, all life adventurous, and all problems simple, and nobody even mentions the income tax or the dropout problem or socialized medicine.— L. Sprague de Camp, introduction to the 1967 Ace edition of Conan.
External links
- Enjoying heroic fantasy (http://www.violetbooks.com/heroic.html)
- Heroic fantasy (http://www.towson.edu/~flynn/herofan.html)