There’s Gold in Them Hills

It you missed any of this series you can find them here:
Part 1: http://fantasy-faction.com/2011/keeping-fantasy-fresh
Part 2: http://fantasy-faction.com/2011/sands-of-time
Part 3: http://fantasy-faction.com/2011/absense-makes-the-heart
Part 4: http://fantasy-faction.com/2011/keeping-fantasy-fresh-a-time-for-heroes

There’s Gold in Them Hills

We’ve looked at timelines, landscapes, and heroes so far; but if I had only one element with which to define fantasy, it would magic.

After all, what is fantasy without magic? Steampunk. Historical fiction. Alternate history. “Secondary world fiction,” if we are pressed, and such a thing has a magic quality to it even if the world therein is devoid of it. The writer, after all, has done a magical – you might even say divine – thing.

Indeed, fantasy has always bordered on the religious, or the speculatively-theological. It’s easy to find the parallels between world faiths and fantasy (The Chronicles of Narnia being only the most obvious), but what is even more interesting are the kinds of faiths fantasy has the ability to create and to question. Magic – whether it be a power, an artifact, a place or a person – is the positing of not so much a “what if,” but a “why?” And whenever we read a fantasy, magic makes us wonder why our world is this way and not another; why creation, or the universe – depending on your perspective – isn’t the other way round.

Magic has taken on many incarnations throughout the history of fantasy, from the vaguely all-powerful of wizardry to the highly specific worksmanship of spellcraft. It has appeared in the guise of sentient swords, otherworldly realms, the power of supernatural beings and the technologies of monstrous creatures. It is these elements that tell us we are in the world of fantasy and indicate that something deeper lies beneath the text – whether it’s a fetish for the undead or the desire to be a great and powerful warlord. We know fantasy by its magical qualities, by its unrealness that we wish to actuate.

Magic seems to make for the greatest divide between science fiction and fantasy, at least conceptually; but in reality, I think the opposite is true. The least controversial – or least magical – science fiction could just as easily be considered “literary;” Margaret Atwood frequently makes genre-heads steam when she calls her SF “speculative.” But even hard science fiction usually demands some level of suspension of disbelief: Jon Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series makes use of “skip drives” that effectively posit multiverses. In my opinion, this is just as fantastical as Steven Erikson’s “Warrens” of magic in The Malazan Book of the Fallen: both demand a belief in other existent realms that are not normally accessible without some sort of knowledge. The only difference is science fiction wields a techno-fetish: those closed realms are accessed by know-how and artifacts, rather than knowledge purely.

This is, perhaps, why I’ve always found the “hard” and “soft” SF debate risible. The hardest science fiction, like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, doesn’t possess the “sensawunda” that takes the genre to their furthest – and in my opinion, most exciting – limit.

It is this quality of sheer imagination that makes fantasy what it is. Even in a magicless world, there is always the quality of “faerie;” “Tel’aran’rhiod” has always, to me, sounded suspiciously like “Tír na nÓg,” the Celtic land of myth beyond the furthest reaches of the North Sea. It is, in other words, the three other characteristics of fantasy that make fantasy magical, and not the presence of magic itself. Fantasy is magical because it takes place beyond time, in lands of wonder that are populated by heroes. And that’s magic.

Print Friendly