Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 89

Magic Regencies:
How Fantasy Forms a Hybrid
Many science fiction and fantasy readers and writers have had an
ongoing interest in other popular frameworks, even to the extent of
combining them into hybrids of two or more genres. This interest
includes Regencies, those f)eriod novels of love and manners set
between the French Revolution and the reign of Victoria, roughly
corresponding to the scandalous era of George IV. As evidence of this
interest. Regency dancing, which figures in many novels of the period,
has become a staple activity (in costume) at science fiction and
fantasy cons. The attraction of this colorful heyday of convention and
hierarchy, whose best known author. Georgette Heyer, who is
sometimes considered a popular Jane Austen, is its tension between
Romantic individuality and rigid convention. Recently fantasy
novelists in particular have begun to adapt and blend such Regency
ingredients for their own purposes.
This essay examines recent fantasy works by Patricia Wrede and
Teresa Edgerton and space opera by Walter Jon Williams as examples
not only of the combining of Regency and fantasy frameworks, but also
how successful hybrids are made. A contrasting example, a Regency
mystery by Kate Ross, illustrates the pitfalls of creating hybrids. In
general, I offer the theory that popular hybrids can form between any
two compatible frameworks—fantasy and Regency are one such pairor hybrids may form when one strong framework is allowed to
dominate another, as fantasy does in several works by the three
authors cited above. In a dominant hybrid, the chief elements of each
framework are retained, while the more flexible one adapts, from
plot to detail, the less elastic or less clearly defined one.
To examine how these particular frameworks. Regency and
fantasy, combine, it is useful to first sununarize them. A fan of
fantasy writing can reasonably expect the following elements: magic;
practitioners of magic, both good and evil; rules and rituals for the
practice of magic; magical beings such as elves, dwarves, and trolls; a
hierarchical society, usually feudal, with court and peasant class,
including artisans and those classless artists, the bards; and finally,
opposition from those who are afraid of, skeptical about, or hostile