I’m reading Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924). I’m also preparing to lecture on fantasy and fairy tales in my Science Fiction and Philosophy module (fun!) So I am pleased to find the following passage about the forging of the hero Alveric’s blade. The sword is made from thunderbolts, you see, dug up from a witch’s cabbage patch. (She lives in an especially thunder-prone mountain region. Nothing special about cabbage, apparently.) Thunderbolts are unearthly space metal knocked from the sky in thunderstorms. Science fact.
Nobody can tell you about that sword all that there is to be told of it; for those that know of those paths of Space on which its metals once floated, till earth caught them one by one as she sailed past on her orbit, have little time to waste on such things as magic, and so cannot tell you how the sword was made, and those who know whence poetry is, and the need that man has for song, or know any one of the fifty branches of magic, have little time to waste on such things as science, and so cannot tell you whence its ingredients came. Enough that it was once beyond our Earth and was now here amongst our mundane stones; that it was once but as those stones, and now had something in it such as soft music has; let those that can define it.
So there’s my epigraph for the chapter about the relationship between science fiction and fantasy, when finally I get around to writinbg it. Science fiction is like that sword.
{ 20 comments }
Eamonn 10.07.17 at 10:37 am
was hoping when I read the title that SF would refer to Sinn Féin
steven t johnson 10.07.17 at 1:11 pm
Fantasy is a mirror. One can imagine that it tells you the truth about what you see in the mirror. But that hardly seems to be the done thing. The brave rejection of mundane reality testing opens so many more possibilities.
Science fiction is a mirror. At the best what you can see is limited by the size and placement of your window, the acuity of your vision and the darkness of the scene revealed. Happily, you can generally turn a window into a mirror by looking at the pane rather than looking out.
The real question is, I think, why one would want to distinguish fantasy and science fiction in the first place? The only reason I can think of is that the pseudorealism of science fiction is ideal for deconstructing wishful thinking, leaving the prospect of change. It appears that modern literature is premised on the eternity and immutability of the Human Condition (aka Human Nature,) which removes science fiction from literature tout court. But that kind of thinking sometimes leads me to think fiction is a sub-genre of fantasy.
Jim Vandewalker 10.07.17 at 2:05 pm
She lives in an especially thunder-prone mountain region. Nothing special about cabbage, apparently.
If it’s Granny Weatherwax’s cabbage patch…
Mike Huben 10.07.17 at 7:33 pm
I really enjoy Dunsany’s twee prose, but really it’s just an excuse for not saying. Apparently, the dichotomy between science and poetry/magic is so distinct that nobody can master both. I’m skeptical.
Is it just me, or are too many fantasy authors unwilling to ground their magic in something even vaguely comprehensible? I much prefer the ones who do provide an interesting basis for their magic.
None 10.07.17 at 11:52 pm
“Is it just me, or are too many fantasy authors unwilling to ground their magic in something even vaguely comprehensible?”
If it’s comprehensible then it ain’t magic. Hence all the gobbledygook.
Collin Street 10.08.17 at 12:16 am
If it’s Granny Weatherwax’s cabbage patch…
“We could make him one, out of thunderbolt iron. I’ve got a spell for that. You take some thunderbolt iron . . . and then you make a sword out of it.”
[Magrat Garlick played by Ayumu “Osaka” Kasuga]
Austin G Loomis 10.08.17 at 2:42 am
There needs to be a shorter phrase, preferably just a word, for “things you didn’t realize you need them until you see them, and which perfectly push fandom buttons you didn’t realize could go together”.
(A short word, mind you. Not one of those German compound nouns that inspired Mark Twain, in the persona of Hank Morgan, to the observation, “Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”)
Martin 10.08.17 at 3:42 am
See Bran Sanderson for fully-worked-out magic systems (eg the Mistborn series). .
faustusnotes 10.08.17 at 7:38 am
I recently went to an art exhibition here in Tokyo, about visions of the universe that included a sword made from meteoric iron. It was awesome. Swords made from space metal are cool.
Did Dunsany write The Worm Ourouboros? That was hilarious.
Donald Johnson 10.08.17 at 4:16 pm
“Did Dunsany write The Worm Ourouboros? “
No. That was Eddison.
EWI 10.08.17 at 5:04 pm
was hoping when I read the title that SF would refer to Sinn Féin
So there was Dunsany, being chauffered along the Dublin quays in style on Easter Monday, 1916, when he runs smack right into the Easter Rising, becoming a guest of the Four Courts Garrison (i.e. Ned Daly’s 1st Battalion). By all accounts he was very pleasantly surprised to be recognised by his captors and find himself the prisoner of well-read, literary men.
EWI 10.08.17 at 5:08 pm
Martin @8
See Bran Sanderson for fully-worked-out magic systems (eg the Mistborn series). .
I’m sorry, but the mess he made of the final three books of Robert Jordan’s work left too bad a taste in the mouth to read something else he’s done.
Neel Krishnaswami 10.08.17 at 6:51 pm
E.R. Eddison, actually.
MisterMr 10.08.17 at 7:22 pm
IMHO, fantasy deals with magic and gods, and magic and gods are inherently moral things:
fantasy reflects the pre-modern worldview of a morally structured world.
Science fiction on the other hand doesn’t necessariously imply this kind of entities (sometimes it does, but in these occasions it is fantasy surreptitiously sneaked in as SF).
To put it in kantian terms, there is a pure reason (knowledge), a practical reason (ethics), and estetic judgement. Fantasy works by assuming the material existence of things that pertain to the second and third group of things, like an evil sword, or Helen of Troy.
So Dunsany is somehow coherent in his explanation. This concept IMHO is the basis of 20st century romanticism, both in literature and in philosophy, so it is a big thing.
Barry Freed 10.09.17 at 3:00 am
I think that might have been my favorite Dunsany back when I went on that kick some 30 years ago. I would reread it but I’m worried it would not cast the same spell all these years later.
Joseph Brenner 10.09.17 at 5:02 am
The way I’ve always put it is fantasy is “what if you had three wishes?” and science fiction is “what if everyone had three wishes?”.
Glen Tomkins 10.09.17 at 1:00 pm
Except the SF isn’t forged by elves. It’s forged by people cosplaying as elves.
alfredlordbleep 10.10.17 at 1:01 pm
Freed@15
I guess a familiar point is that plot heavy appeal in youth doesn’t hold up (well). But certain stylists do. Even John Collier, to take somebody I quoted on CT before (His Monkey Wife closing paragraph, I’ve found in re-reading suffers the same effect. The one exception is his short-short, Were You Too Late or Was I Too Early, poetic and O Henry-esque tricky at the same time.
David Duffy 10.12.17 at 7:09 am
“that SF would refer to Sinn Féin”: that would have been The Curse of the Wise Woman”:
drd 10.12.17 at 8:28 pm
http://www.news.com.au/technology/terry-pratchett-creates-a-sword-with-meteorites/news-story/6e2beab31cfa115128dda892af56a500
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