"It's just fiction, bro!" On UKLG and style, voice

Voice is a tragically unexamined aspect of writing, so invisible yet so necessary. If it's doing its job well you don't think of it, like the plumbing, it's only when it acts up that a work becomes unreadable. Why do some authors depict their fictional universes so utterly, so memorably, so convincingly, while contemporaries seem forgettable and juvenile?

I had a disagreement from someone well-intentioned where I found myself arguing the reactionary side. It's always distressing when that happens, it makes you feel like a damn square. They argued characters in a fantasy make believe of cloud castles and fire giants should be at liberty to speak and think like teenagers from our world. I found myself uncomfortable with this license. But why?

It isn't stylistic conservatism I want in fiction, it's simply discipline. If the characters and the setting read like blogs or shitposting as a deliberate statement that could be perfectly acceptable fiction, even good and necessary fiction. But if it's out of laziness--

Ursula K LeGuin spelt it out better than I ever could in her "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie". She understood, decades ago, that an alien universe should be written using an alien style, that a joy of reading them are those stunning moments of connection and clarity in a foreign world. Style foregrounds both the universe and the characters' psychology, it "worldbuilds" so much more efficiently than any sloppy exposition, it extends themes deep into the characters' thoughts and emotions. Fantasy that fails to consider tone and voice in this way is simply shallow.

It's this shallowness that I find tragic, this refusal to consider the invisible plumbing of your work. Fantasy authors will map out oceans and genealogies and fake languages but are completely unable to give their worlds a consistent and distinctive voice. Without understanding their own style writers will resort to the tonal "vernacular"-- in LeGuin's day it was the airport thriller, in today's it is blogs and tweets.

It was a struggle trying to place why Jack Vance and Susanna Clarke created vivid settings while Gideon the Ninth failed to do so. Why is Middle Earth "real" while Azeroth pastiche? LeGuin explained it perfectly: It's all voice. The reader must exist under the same constraints the characters do. Writers unwilling to do this risk giving readers an easy out, a backdoor exit. Readers become tourists, fiction becomes a Netflix special played in the background.

I'm fine with applying the "it's just fantasy dude, chill out" argument to those neckbeards and pedants who get pissy over seeing a black guy in an ancient Roman setting or medieval nuns expressing their individuality. They are the lazy and shallow ones, they cling to their conventions out of comfort and fear, and besides they aren't even accurate by their own standards. Why get bogged down in their delusions, just make fun of them. I get that. But please don't apply that same argument to style and tone. You, fantasy reader-- yes you specifically-- you deserve better than this.