If the genre of fantasy were a house, it’d have an infinite number of doors. Some would be an inch high, others towering; none would have obvious keyholes. There are just so many doors in fantasy. Or magic-door-like things, at the very least—portals hidden away, tunnels to fall through, wormholes that wibble-wobble time. To the characters traversing them, these openings are quite literal, with stuff on either side. To us, though, they’re more complicated. We recognize them as sort of supermetaphors for the genre: Fantasies are, themselves, doorways to other worlds.
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Or they can be. In 2020, a notably unfantastic year, it got weirdly less complicated. The boundaries between the real and the not-real have always glitched a bit, gone fuzzy around the edges; now, they seem to be dematerializing altogether. For fantasy, what this literally means is: more and more stories set in our world. Metaphorically: doors opening and/or collapsing onto themselves.
Naomi Novik’s last two books, Uprooted and Spinning Silver, were enchanting little Polish-ish fairytales. Her new one, A Deadly Education, is none of those things. It takes place in modern England, at a school of magic that resembles Hogwarts in all ways but three. One, there are no teachers. Two, students die a lot, partly as a result of this macabre Montessori milieu. Three, there are significant nonwhite characters. The narrator is half Indian. She has a Chinese friend. There promises to be a Black character in the sequel, a girl with “hair in a million braids.”
Never mind that these racial differences are irrelevant to both plot and character development and strike sour notes on occasion—they’re meant to make A Deadly Education more “realistic.” So is the fact that the richer and more connected your family, the less likely you are to get eaten alive. Instead of graduation, students must fight their way through the school’s megamonster-infested basement and out the doors of opportunity to freedom. What’s the metaphor, Naomi?
A more visceral, but no less literal, reading experience is Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby, a novella that’s been publicized as “what if Black people got superpowers?” Don’t think Marvel. It’s a loud-soft race fantasy of vengeance, with its sights set on revolution. The action moves from the real worlds of South Central and Harlem to a near-future Watts, and Onyebuchi is never subtle with his themes. As he put it in a recent interview (emphasis added): “I wanted to literalize the obliteration of the police state.” No room for misinterpretation there. Perhaps if you’ve been misunderstood, or unheard, for long enough, elaborate metaphors lose their appeal.
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They seem to have for N. K. Jemisin, our writer of the decade and now a certified genius. One of the biggest, if not quite best, books of 2020 was her The City We Became, expanded from a short story in which present-day New York City comes, literally, alive. After years of sending readers to intricate, far-off realms, such as Gujaareh or the Stillness, so that they might be forced to look back, with new eyes, at the realities of Earth, here Jemisin has built a door to her own backyard, a dead-ahead urban fantasy, and said, without inflection, “Walk through it.”
Police are the henchmen of the enemy. Locals have sensitivities that out-of-towners don’t. As a figuration for gentrification, it’s all rather two-dimensional, and further flattened by the uncharacteristically silly writing. In her acknowledgments, Jemisin says City We Became “required more research than all the other fantasy novels I’ve written, combined,” but only the wrong sort of reader cares about verisimilitude. When your fantasy is set in a real place, it’s the fantasy elements, not the factual ones, that stand out, and must bear greater scrutiny.
2020 was perhaps most notable, however, for a fantasy book that did not come out, perhaps because it couldn’t: the third and final chapter of Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles, at one time the most promising trilogy in a generation. Technically, it hasn’t come out every year for the last nine—book two, Wise Man’s Fear, was published in 2011, four years after the legendary debut, Name of the Wind—but this year, whatever hopes remained that Rothfuss was making at least some progress, however slight or in secret, were shot to pieces. “I’ve never seen a word of book three,” his editor complained on Facebook, in July. “I don’t think he’s written anything for six years.”
Fans were, predictably, outraged. They cursed and screamed at Rothfuss on Twitter, fantasy forums, Goodreads, as if by force of invective they could will some sense of closure into being. Good luck with that. Also, there’s nothing shocking about Rothfuss’ incapacitation. Just look at the working title of his as-yet-unpublished book three: The Doors of Stone.
Doors! Again! And these doors operate, sure enough, on levels literal, metaphorical, and supermetaphorical. Literal, because they exist for the hero, a young wizard in a distant land. Metaphorical, because to get past them, he’ll probably need to discover something about himself. And supermetaphorical, because Rothfuss has an evident case of writer’s block. For nearly a decade, he’s been standing before his own doors of stone, as stumped as Gandalf at the Doors of Durin.
Gandalf didn’t stay stumped, of course. He tried every language he knew, which was a goodly many and took all day, until he finally realized he was saying the wrong word. This may comfort Rothfuss, and if it does not, there’s always the example of Dumbledore, who, at the rocky mouth of Voldemort’s cave, simply sliced his hand open to reveal the path to the underground lake. Basic tenet of wizardry, that: The greater the wizard, the more passages he can find a way through.
So is Rothfuss a great wizard? Almost everybody says so—fans, fellow writers, Lin-Manuel Miranda—on the basis of his books, his bearing, his magnificent beard. In 2020 and beyond, though, that may not be enough. Wizards draw their strength from the world, and the world is changing. It’s moving away from the ancient sources of power, the traditional ways of doing magic, the European metaphors and medievalisms of Rothfuss’ brand of otherworldly, boy-genius, save-the-girl fantasies.
All of which Rothfuss knows. He once said of Jemisin, by way of a compliment, that she’s “stomping all over the genre.” Meanwhile, he seems to be retreating to its edges, or up against the stone doors of his mind. If he looks very closely, he might even glimpse a little writing on the rock. It’s hard to make out, some lost Elven script, but it seems to say this: The age of the wizards will end. Dumbledore is dead. Gandalf has sailed far away. On them—these old white men in hats—the doors of power are slamming shut.
The Best Fantasy Books of 2020:
A Luminous Republic, by Andrés Barba
Tender Is the Flesh, by Agustina Bazterrica
Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke
Surrender, by Ray Loriga
Network Effect, by Martha Wells
Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi
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