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Poller5
Dec Member 2023

Poller5

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I think, Ark, that you unwittingly touched on the crux of the question of magic in your first sentence: good magic is very hard to write. There was a point, some four years ago now, when I was doing a fair bit of world-building, and thinking about magic in fantasy, and realized how "scientific" it had become in a lot of ways. You're a fifth level wizard, now you can cast third level spells, and every day you can memorize and cast the exact same fireball spell. While that is magic, in a sense, it's not magical.

Fantasy is a unique genre in that it's capable of separating itself entirely from reality in a way that nothing else (save the fantastic, Lovecraftian side of science fiction) quite can. I could probably be here all night if I started to delve into defining fantasy, but I think that if we were to come to the simplest possible definiton of fantasy, it would be something along the lines of "literature set in a world as fundamentally exciting as the modern world is fundamentally dull."

I realize that probably plays somewhat more into my own worldview (and therefore also my view on the role of fanasty) than would be ideal for a scientific defintion, but if you'll humour me for a moment: we live in a world that has been entirely conquered by science. There are no unmapped regions of the globe, no "dark heart" of Africa where dinosaurs or ancient, primitive civilizations could be discovered; no ancient city in Antarctica, nor in the Australian outback. Nowhere can we write "hic sun* dracones" and hope that that may be true. Storms are no longer Odin's wild hunt but rather wind and precipitation and static electricity. We've scaled Olympus and found no gods, entered Avernus' caverns but found no entrance to Hades. Even the aurora borealis is nothing more than radiation smacking into a magnetic field.

12-Sep-2013 11:13:18

Poller5
Dec Member 2023

Poller5

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Everything we can physically observe can be described by science, and while some find that to be a wonder in and of itself, there is no inherent wonder in the answers that science gives. There is no magic left in the world.

Now we come to fantasy. Where the real world is sterile it is a fantastic world's job to be fertile; where we have lost our sense of wonder, wonder must be restored. Where magic has been lost it must be found. If we are to write fantasy -- truly fantastic literature -- then we must create magic with our words, establish unscalable heights upon which the gods hold council, delve unmappable caverns beneath the earth; our forests must be ancient, primeval, empty of roads, walking paths, or any paths at all: only in such a forest can elves and their magic truly be found. Fantasy is magic: not a wizard waving his fingers to conjure a lightning bolt, but the re-introduction of wonder to the world. The difference between the Alps and the Misty Mountains is not their location, but rather that to pass under the Alps you drive your car through a tunnel; to pass beneath the Misty Mountains, you must travel through Moria.

You can, of course, write a good story without using magic. You can even write a brilliant one. But you can't write a fantastic one.

12-Sep-2013 11:13:28

Arkkataka

Arkkataka

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Well, here we come to an impasse. I have never thought this world to be any less full of wonder because we could explain things. Understanding the world through a thousand different perspectives is what gives it life and beauty, at least for me. Perhaps one should consider this: there is a difference between knowing and perceiving. You know there are no unmapped corners of the world, have you seen all of them? Really experienced them?

I think that our own world can be just as engaging, terrifying, and invigorating as a fantasy world. As I see it, we disagree indefinitely though. As far as direct clash goes, consider that for every part of Africa that becomes better mapped, more worlds of ideas, experiences, and perspectives become open to us through their people.

However, if I must write magic, it would run alongside this world instead of against it in all its beautiful and horrifying forms. Anything less is to lose a bit of life in it. I see our world functioning as a wonder, and I think magic is just as interesting as the ideas already discovered in our world.

To do a good job at writing, I think one should focus on presenting a clear perspective of a situation or idea. But what the heck I'm not tolkein, I see and feel wonder all around me with no ability to show other people what I think and feel about our world.

12-Sep-2013 23:11:46

Poller5
Dec Member 2023

Poller5

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Cyun said :
Poller, I think you've just beautifully articulated something I've never even thought about before.

Cheers, Cyun :) .

Your views are obviously valid, Ark, but it still seems to me that fantasy has to be something more than our world; while aspects of our world can be wonderful, a fantastic world should be wonderful in the sense of the Old English wunderfull : entirely full of wonder. If that latter view is indeed how you see our world, however, then by all means are views are entirely irreconcilable.

At any rate, as I've said, none of that precludes a magnificent story being written based on the guidelines you set out; it simply precludes that story from being fantasy.

13-Sep-2013 04:53:03

Arkkataka

Arkkataka

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I'm mostly frustrated at trying to say something I feel I cannot express in words. I hate when that happens. By the way, do I detect a sense of exasperation on your part given my inability to reason or agree with you?

If it helps, the reason for our disagreement may simply be in age, assuming you are older than me as I am in high school. It wouldn't surprise me that at this time in my life I think the world is so awesome because I have seen less of it and I am continually amazed by it. However, if you have been around Europe numerous enough times to that it no longer feels incredible, then what looks amazing to me, isn't all that unusual to you. If by some chance this argument offends you then I apologize ahead of time.

13-Sep-2013 06:45:40

Poller5
Dec Member 2023

Poller5

Posts: 11,421 Opal Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
No, Ark, there's no exasperation, and I apologize if it came across as if there was. I fully acknowledge that your views are valid, and perhaps even admirable; they are simply so very different from my own that I can do little more than acknowledge their validity. Because of that extreme difference -- indeed, basically direct opposition -- any attempt to discuss them at a deeper level just leads to my attempting to refute them.

While I am older than you (second year of uni, and a month shy of the big 2-0), and your reasoning for our disagreement is logical enough, it doesn't really hit the mark. It's not that I once found the world full of wonder, but through exposure became jaded to it. I've just always had a problem with the modern age. If you'll pardon an excursion into autobiography:

Most of my earliest memories are of the time I spent living in Germany from the time I was three until the the time I was six. Of these, the most vivid are of running around castle ruins, fighting friends with wooden swords, shooting crossbows at mediaeval fairs, and generally lamenting the fact that I wasn't born seven hundred years earlier. My first hero wasn't an athlete, or a Hollywood star, but St. George, because he killed a dragon . To my young mind, that couldn't be topped. Hell, I'd still say it can't be topped.

Somewhere in all of that, I developed something of a disdain for everything about the post-industrial world. No stick I ever held became a pretend gun; that was too crass an option, compared to a sword, a far more elegant weapon. Though I left Germany and all its mediaeval heritage when I was six, the castle ruins never left me.

In 2008, my family went on vacation to Rome. In that week, I probably experienced two of the top ten days of my life. On the first, we started at the Coliseum, and then walked the Via Sacra through the Forum, past, among other things, the temple of Julius Caesar.

13-Sep-2013 12:06:24

Poller5
Dec Member 2023

Poller5

Posts: 11,421 Opal Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
On the second, I walked the dead streets of necropoliptic Pompeii, a city out of time. When I say there's no wonder left in the world, it is a comment aimed squarely at the modern age; the ruins of bygone times maintain yet something of their former magnificence.

The splendour and wonder of world, to me, is preserved entirely in such places: the misty lengths of Hadrian's Wall, the stark beauty of the Parthenon, the mystifyng antiquity of Stonehenge. But these are not of our time; they are not produced by the world we know but rather incursions into it of a foregone epoch. There is no longer in this world anything like a universal sense of wonder, a wanting born perhaps of the growing conception that there is nothing relevantly superior to man. The world has become a puzzle to be solved rather than a work of art, and as a result is left with all the romance of Rubik's cube.

Fantasy, then, for me, is the recovery of that which imbues those relics of the past with their wonder. To stand before the Coliseum is to feel that there was wonder in the world once, but also to know that it is now only a shadow to be glimpsed but not touched; fantasy fills out that shadow, gives it form and shape, and re-introduces to our lives that which the modern world has forgotten. To me, that is a remembrance devoutly to be wished.

13-Sep-2013 12:06:48

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