Reddit reviews Blood Sport: A Journey Up the Hassayampa

I guess I've just always sort of grouped nonsense with magical realism and experimental fantasy as being the "out there" side of fantasy. It's interesting that people are studying what makes them the same and different.

I'm all fed up with magic systems. I prefer fantasy with little or no magic. If I'm reading a story and the writer starts going on & on about their great magic system, I pretty much know I'm done. I've been there before and they're just going to keep indulging themselves, harping on it. I'm also fed up with magic schools and the wizard/apprentice relationship because they all just use it to infodump their dialogue with more data copy/pasted from their worldbuilding files.

I'm fed up with elves. Elves, dwarves, dragons, vampires, werewolves, fairies. And all the permutations thereof, urban elves, dark elves, steampunk elves riding in dirigibles. I've read lots of stories about all of those things, and I enjoyed them. But what I really love to see now is when someone builds their world from scratch with fewer preconceptions. I really like fantasy where writers have made their own world, their own beasts and races of sapients, their own cultures.

I've been reading some counterculture stuff from the 60s and 70s. Psychedelics and a lot of new ideas such as free love and stream of consciousness stoned writing just sort of crashed into the existing media, and there's some weird speculative fiction.

I don't know if you've encountered them, but how would you categorize Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar, and Robert F. Jones' Blood Sport? They are contemporary fantasy of some types, I suppose, and definitely in the out there.