Posts from Fantasy vs. Science Fiction

All kinds of fiction are interesting to me; I don't have a clear favorite genre. I voted for fantasy because it had fewer votes. Many people already know that my favorite writer is Howard Phillips Lovecraft. He created his own world based on ours, with its own cities among the existing ones, its own books full of forbidden knowledge, and their authors – powerful and insane sorcerers. And, most importantly, it has its own structure, intelligent races, and gods. In his world, there are forces so powerful that they are beyond human comprehension, while humanity is just a small dot, a brief moment, an unsuccessful result of one of the races' experiments in breeding intelligent slaves. Also, his stories and novellas are written in good language (although, some people find his descriptions too detailed and drawn out). They completely absorb your attention while reading, build up to a peak of tension on the last pages, and leave a strong aftertaste, a sense of the fullness of cosmic horror and the insignificance of people. I don't know how to call his genre. His most ardent fans have even come up with a separate one – Lovecraftian horror, or supernatural horror, after his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature." He mainly wrote short stories, and there are a couple of novellas. I would recommend starting with: "Polaris," "The Cats of Ulthar," "The Call of Cthulhu," "Herbert West – Reanimator," "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," "The Colour Out of Space." I'm not claiming to be completely objective.

R.E. Howard also has stories in a similar style. They were likely written under the influence of his correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft. And R. Zelazny has a novel called "Night in October" in a similar style, but with a more humorous tone.
As an alternative to the overused elves and goblins, you can read S. Donaldson's "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant" - I haven't encountered anything like it before, or G.L. Oldie.

...As an alternative to the rather tiresome elves and goblins...

I see that for most people, the concept of fantasy is associated only with various fairytale and mythical creatures – they can't imagine anything more (not directed at the author of the post). Here's an explanation from Wikipedia:
"Fantasy works most often resemble historical adventure novels, set in a fictional world close to reality. Unlike science fiction, fantasy does not try to explain the world in which the action takes place from a scientific point of view." So, a huge number of works by various writers, who wrote about real life, possibly with a touch of mysticism, in a fictional world, fall under this definition. This includes Burroughs' Martian stories, and the works of Green, Robert Howard, and many other writers (including writers of other genres). There are no mythical creatures there, as in Tolkien's works, but the action takes place in a fictional world, either in the not-so-distant past or many thousands of years ago. The only thing missing is scientific explanations, which, by the way, makes it easier to read.

For most people, the concept of fantasy is associated only with various fairy-tale and mythical creatures.

Probably because this plot is the most well-known. But, in science fiction, authors don't always overload their books with scientific explanations – for example, E. Hamilton or D. Simmons (although the latter has a significant bias towards philosophy). Against this background, the stories of D. Bilenkin and some works by O. Berdnik stand out favorably. IMHO. Although many science fiction fans actually enjoy scientific details – the more, the better.