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MM: Do you feel that fantasy is closely married to martial history?  Can we have interesting fantasy stories that are about things other than great wars and the conflicts between man and monster?  Is armed conflict an essential element for such a broad swath of literature? JBC: Armed conflict certainly isn’t a necessary component of fantasy — but it is a human endeavor full of high drama which can reveal the best and worst elements of human nature. Therefore an author will find it a quite efficient way to reveal character, move action forward, and as Lois McMaster Bujold suggests, find the worst things you can do to your characters. Fantasy may also have a particular affinity for war and battle as a means of allegorizing great conflicts of concepts of good and evil, but there is plenty of fantasy that gets along quite well without it – think of the vast majority of the Discworld series, for example, or the early books of the Harry Potter series.

JBC: Armed conflict certainly isn’t a necessary component of fantasy — but it is a human endeavor full of high drama which can reveal the best and worst elements of human nature. Therefore an author will find it a quite efficient way to reveal character, move action forward, and as Lois McMaster Bujold suggests, find the worst things you can do to your characters. Fantasy may also have a particular affinity for war and battle as a means of allegorizing great conflicts of concepts of good and evil, but there is plenty of fantasy that gets along quite well without it – think of the vast majority of the Discworld series, for example, or the early books of the Harry Potter series.

MM: Do you feel that fantasy is closely married to martial history?  Can we have interesting fantasy stories that are about things other than great wars and the conflicts between man and monster?  Is armed conflict an essential element for such a broad swath of literature?