Writing popular fiction

suspend disbelief. The moment you begin to explain how a werewolf could exist, how a disease can cause lycanthropy (as in Leslie Whitten's
Moon of the Wolf
), how a man might become mentally disturbed enough to actually
live
as a vampire (Whitten's
Progeny of the Adder
), you are writing science fiction or, possibly, psychological suspense. Fantasy generally lacks these levels of meaning and exists as pure escapist literature—a function it fills admirably well.
    The similarities between science fiction and fantasy are so obvious that many writers have a difficult time understanding they are not the same category of fiction. Both kinds of stories are usually set in times and places alien to ours. Both are filled with fantastic incident and bizarre problems for the hero to overcome. Both forms often employ non-human characters. Yet science fiction and fantasy
are
different, are bought and published and read under different labels.
    Except in especially unique stories, fantasy does not deal with extra-terrestrial creatures, time machines, strange new inventions, or space travel. It employs, instead, many sorts of superstitions: ghosts (Richard Matheson's
Hell House)
, vampires (Bram Stoker's
Dracula)
,
werewolves (Guy Endore's
Werewolf of Paris)
, demons (James Blish's
Black Easter
and
Day After Judgment
), banshees, witches (Keith Roberts'
Anita
, Fritz Leiber's
Conjure Wife)
, sorcerers (David Mason's
The Sorcerer's Skull)
, elves, leprechauns, dwarves, fairies, inexplicably sentient beasts and other mythological beings, charms, incantations, chants, spells, curses, and devils, all of which exist without rational explanation. Usually fantasy is set in its own richly detailed world with no overt comparisons to our place and time (which would destroy the reader's suspension of disbelief in such delicately wrought tales; except in some Dark Fantasy—which we will soon discuss—the reader should be made to forget his own world and settle thoroughly into the fantastic one). The author usually makes no attempt to explain how this other world came into existence or where it is in space/time. The fantasy may also be set at the dawn of time on Earth, in that period of pre-history when, some say, great cities—influenced by the laws of magic rather than by the laws of science—flourished. If set in the
far
future, a fantasy must not provide scientific explanations for its miracles; for example, if the hero's magical abilities are hinted to be extra-sensory perceptions which have evolved in human kind since our own day, the story becomes science fiction and not fantasy.
    In short, fantasy is mystic. It is shrouded in mystery and a psychic sense of "other lives, other places" which require in the reader a special faith in magic and the supernatural for him to be fully snared—while science fiction is predicated on our present-day knowledge of the universe and upon what we rationally expect to discover in the future.
    This does not mean, however, that fantasy may be illogical. Once the oddities of the imagined world are given, all events must flow from the background conditions within the world. A hero may not escape from a dungeon simply by "magically" snapping his fingers, unless you have prepared the reader for this development from the outset by establishing that the hero has such a power. (And if you do make a hero's lot this easy, you destroy any suspense you might otherwise be able to build; if he is all-powerful, the hero generates no sympathy or concern from the reader.) Nor may you postulate a land in which the citizens have all sorts of magic powers—and then fail to postulate a set of controls and balances that would insure social order among these men who could circumvent most laws. For example, if everyone could perform feats of magic, would the police use magic too, instead of guns and handcuffs; a stronger magic than criminals might possess? Because of this need to order the basically unorderable, to reason with the unreasonable, many writers find fantasy far more demanding than science fiction.
    Like science fiction, fantasy can be broken into sub-types. Unlike science fiction, characterization differs from form to form, as do, in some cases, the motivations. Let's look at the four sub-types of the fantasy story and their individual characteristics.

DARK FANTASY
    The foremost writer of dark fantasy in this century is H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), whose stories remain in print (even though some were