I finally managed to get to see the final part of the BBC’s Worlds of Fantasy series (thanks Nadine!). The program was a bit mixed. There were a lot of good bits, including appearances by a very shaggy-looking Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, and Guillermo del Toro. Much of the content focused on Terry Pratchett because he is, after all, guilty of literature. (He also has an amazing office – I wish I had a bank of screens like that.) And towards the end it actually mentions the term “New Weird”, thereby legitimizing the movement (anything that has been on the BBC being automatically “real”). Doubtless Jeff VanderMeer will be very happy.

On the other hand, the program tried much too hard to come to a profound and pretentious conclusion. This included a rather unwholesome juxtaposition of fantasy’s obsession over the battle between “good” and “evil” with the actual war taking place in Iraq. It also managed to confuse the nature of fantasy fiction by implying that role-playing only ever happens in fantasy worlds.

Interestingly this touched on the breakfast conversation I had at ICFA with Guy Gavriel Kay, John Clute and Liz Hand. We were talking about the different nature of the closed narratives that Guy and Liz write as compared to the more open narratives of series fantasy. The BBC program implied that open narratives were invented along with Dungeons & Dragons, but in fact we have had them for decades before that in comics and soap opera.

Whereas a traditional novel has a beginning, a middle and an end, open narratives are ongoing. These days both comics and soap operas have taken on board the concept of the story arc, so things do move forward slowly. But the operative word here is “slowly”. In role-playing this is an issue of what game designers call “play value”. If characters develop too quickly then they will outgrow the game world, becoming godlike in their powers. A game therefore has to strike a balance between offering tangible rewards and growth on the one hand, and keeping the players in check on the other. In comics and soap opera, too much character growth results in familiar, favorite characters changing, and perhaps even moving on or dying. You can get away with a small amount of that, but if too much changes then the audience gets upset.

Guy explained all of this using a comment from Quentin Tarantino. There is, apparently, a particular John Wayne film that Tarantino likes to watch again and again. The film has some particularly well realized and entertaining characters, and Tarantino says he watches it because he “likes hanging out with those guys”. Much the same is true of comics, soap opera and series fantasy. The readers or viewers enjoy being in the company of the characters, and want to have more and more stories featuring those characters. They are also likely to want to write fanfic in that universe.

All this is a far cry from the traditional novel. The BBC program features a clip of Philip Pullman explaining that he is a dictator in his stories – nothing happens without his say-so. Some of his fans doubtless wish he would write 2 Lyra books a year for the rest of his life, but that’s not what Pullman wants to do.

I don’t think that there is anything inherently superior or inferior about open narratives as compared to closed narratives. They just involve different sorts of skills. But I do think that the BBC was wrong in suggesting that open narratives are unique to fantasy. They have been around for a long time. Indeed, some of the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie have very similar features to series fantasy. But the narrative drive of a modern TV documentary is only rarely concerned with finding echoes of the past in the present. Directors tend to be much more interested in presenting an “if this goes on it will be the end of all we know” scenario, which is what the folks in charge of Worlds of Fantasy seemed to want to do.