The Fantasy genre can be divided into two sub-catergories: Low Fantasy and High Fantasy. Low Fantasy takes place in the normal world and doesn't involve magic or the supernatural. Most Fantasy books are High Fantasy, which I'll talk about here.High fantasy usually takes place in a secondary world that involves magic and strange beings. It uses noble characters, archetypes and elevated style. Writers either ignore our world, set the secondary world in some relationship with ours or use a world within a world technique. Stories use a commoner hero that rises to the occasion or a morally ambivalent hero who can't decide between good and evil. High Fantasy works mostly with two themes. One theme is the struggle for supremecy between good and evil, light and darkness, order and chaos.
The other major theme is the quest. A quest is a search for a magical object or person which can save the world. Quests are always toward something; they are a spiritual or religious undertaking. Characteristics of a quest are:
- A precious object and/or person to be found and possessed or married.
- A long journey to find it, for its whereabouts are not originally known.
- A hero because the precious object can't be found by anybody, but only by the one person who possesses the right qualities of breeding or character.
- A test or series of tests by which the unworthy are screened out, and the hero revealed.
- The Guardians of the object who must be overcome before it can be won. They may be simply a further test of the hero's qualities, or they may be malignant in themselves.
- The Helpers (may appear in human or animal form) who with their knowledge and magical powers assist the hero and but for whom he would never succeed.
There are many books of High Fantasy. This leads to a proliferation of the same themes rehashed many times. Every once in a while, a writer comes up with something new. So keep reading High Fantasy or give it a try if you haven't.