From Gilgamesh to Gawain and the Green Knight, the Brothers Grimm to Grimdark, the natural world has provided the backdrop for Fantasy since its earliest iterations. The playgrounds of childhood are often a writers first Fantasy landscape and can develop into fully-fledged storyworlds. Do readers of Fantasy seek out the genre for a taste of this unsullied environment? Is it nostalgia for the lost Edens of childhood; a way to escape; or to find resilience and inspiration? And in a time of Climate Emergency is the nature of Fantasy changing to reflect the challenges it presents? Can the blue-sky thinking of the Fantastic provide us with a useful tool for addressing what the United Nations has called the defining crisis of our time? This is a timely survey of the environmental aspects of Fantasy, with a unique focus on Fantasy sites and the real-world impact of Fantasy texts across media.
Introduction Fantastical Meditations
1. Early Fantasy Green Knights and Faerie Queens
2. Childrens Fantasy The Mythopoeic Land-scapes of Childhood
3. Epic Fantasy Portals, Paradises, and Waste-lands
4. Urban Fantasy Edgelands, Polders, and Wain-scots
5. 21st Century Fantasy Fantastic Ecologies in the Capitalocene
6. Mapping the Fantastic: the ethics of placiality, ar-chitectonics, and
speculative cartography
7. Fantasy Sites Fantasy texts and their real-world impact
Conclusion The Le Guin Index and Other Interventions
Bibliography
Kevan Manwaring, Editor of the British Fantasy Society Journal, is the MA Creative Writing programme leader at Arts University Bournemouth. He is the author of Writing Ecofiction, Desiring Dragons, The Windsmith Elegy, Ballad Tales, and editor of Heavy Weather. A contributor to Free Thinking on BBC Radio 3 (panels on Vikings, Ursula K. Le Guin, and John Cowper Powys), he was the Academic Consultant for BBC 4s The Secret Life of Books. He is a member of the Climate Fiction Writers League.
