Once upon a time, fantasy stories had a relatively simple format. Typically, a hero fought a monster, and there was often some magic involved. This format goes as far back as Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, and Beowulf. But like all great things, fantasy grew and evolved. Not only are there now numerous fantasy subgenres, but there are also great works of fantasy that are hybrids, mixing fantasy and other genres.

For example, Myke Cole’s Shadow Ops: Control Point is part fantasy, part military thriller. Stephen King’s Dark Tower series is a mixture of fantasy, western, science fiction, and horror. Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books combine comedy, satire, and fantasy. Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell are historical fantasies, mixing magic and the Napoleonic wars. Heck, virtually every novel in the urban fantasy subgenre blends fantasy and mystery.

So what is it about the fantasy genre that allows for such easy crossover? Why has fantasy spread its influence far and wide? I suspect that some critics would claim that fantasy writers were trying to “transcend” their chosen genre by using a better sort of fiction to hide their colors. After all, in a recent article in The New Yorker, Arthur Krystal dismissed genre fiction as mindless fluff, calling it “a narrative cocktail that helps us temporarily forget the narratives of our own humdrum lives.” Surely genre-blending can only improve such lightweight escapism.

But if you’re a fan of this site, comments like these probably get your back up, so I propose an alternate theory: more than any other genre, fantasy is metaphorical, able to approach topics from an oblique angle to reveal powerful truths. Fantasy is not mindless; instead, at its best, fantasy is creative and sometimes even subversive. And fantasy’s use of metaphor allows it to easily incorporate elements from, and blend with, just about any genre.

Fantasy is the court jester of literature, revealing truth through indirect, more palatable means. Distract people with a spectacle, and you can secretly get them to confront sensitive issues. On mythicscribes.com, Myke Cole said:

Writing SF/F allows me to get close to real subjects that I want to address, while keeping a measured distance. My Shadow Ops series is making some hard calls about war, xenophobia, colonialism, and, most importantly, the role of bureaucracy and how it places process over people. But those are REAL issues, and talking about them can polarize. When you deal with it through an SF/F lens, you get some distance from the topic. This lets folks interact with it on their own terms, without investments and agendas tangling up the point.

Satires such as Voltaire’s Candide or Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels have used this technique for centuries. Similarly, Pratchett uses satire to explore religion, politics, business, and technology today.

Of course, this technique is not new, but I contend that fantasy uses metaphors more effectively than any other genre because fantasy has something no other genre has. Rod Serling, creator of TV’s The Twilight Zone, said, “Science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable.” Fantasy is better able to use indirect methods because, at its heart, is a love for the impossible, usually expressed through some use of magic. Magic makes anything possible. Consequently, magic provides fantasy the creativity and flexibility other genres lack. Magic allows fantasy to take on all subjects, break them down, and re-examine them in unique ways.

Moreover, not only can fantasy use this magic and metaphor to explore society, but it can also explore the rules of other genres themselves. Again, magic is a skeleton key, unlocking every genre’s back door. Just as many forms of entertainment have entered a post-modern phase, so too has fantasy embraced deconstruction, self-reference, and irony. By tweaking the rules, hybrid fantasy exposes the truths and tropes of other genres, allowing them to be explored from an alternative point of view. For example, fun things happen when an urban fantasy author replaces a P.I.’s pistol with a magic wand, or when she replaces a femme fatale with a (literally) devilishly diabolical dame.

Therefore, it should be no surprise that literary authors such as Cormac McCarthy, Michael Chabon, Philip Roth, and Colson Whitehead are turning to fantasy. I suspect that they are not trying to uplift fantasy to the higher ranks of literary fiction. Instead, I think they are using fantasy to transcend the rules of literary fiction, to take it to the level of the impossible, to do what literary fiction cannot, to do what fantasy does best.