Abandoning the Quest? High/Epic Fantasy and the Challenges of the Anthropocene

The aim of this article is to determine why the prototypical form of high/epic fantasy cannot effectively address the present environmental, social and political problems gathered under the umbrella term of the Anthropocene. Drawing on Marek Oziewicz's concept of planetarianist fantasy and scholarship on the Anthropocene, as well as on examples of selected fantasy series (J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Stephen R. Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Guy Gavriel Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry, and Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time), this article investigates the sub-genre's most persistent components and juxtaposes them against issues related to ethnicity, species interconnectedness, non-human agency, sustained urban development and urban ethics which are raised by Anthropocene debates. This analysis will illustrate why the form of high/epic fantasy requires reconfiguration so that it can continue to evolve together with the needs of contemporary readers.