You argue that fantasy readers and writers prefer magic because it’s more exotic, but contend that, were they ever to find themselves living in a world of sword and sorcery, it would automatically become mundane. However, you also contend that our actual reality is fascinating despite its familiarity: that living with digital technology and science has failed to put a dent in our curiosity about it. In order for these two statements not to be contradictory, your argument seems to be predicated on a notion that fantasy readers are all intrinsically uninterested in the world around them, and are therefore incapable of being fascinated by any reality in which they find themselves, regardless of whether it’s scientific or fantastic in nature. Certainly, there are incurious people in the world, and some of them are fantasy readers, but when it comes to judging the whole of fantasy and the reasoning behind it as a whole, I’m fairly sure we can do better than that.
The common element across all stories, fantastic or otherwise, is character: being a reader therefore means being curious about other people. This is just as valid and worthwhile a curiosity as being interested in (say) science or mathematics, but the two states are far from mutually exclusive. Building a new world, as per a fantasy story, requries believability: we must know why a city or culture functions in accordance with this bias, that assumption, why it values these traditions and abhors those. Yes, there is an enormous amount of creative leeway in determining the above, but it will fail if the reader cannot be made to believe that people would really act that way. The idea is to build a society that supports magic, not to use magic as a substitute for society: in other words, the world still needs to function even without magic, because magic isn’t the most important element.
In hard SF, the aim is often to detail the parameters of a particular technology and then describe how society works around it. Magic can fulfill a similar narrative function, but without the in-depth analysis that accompanies hypothetical technology: it’s a shortcut, a way of using ‘what if?’ sans close scrutiny of whatever mechanism is making it possible. That’s not analogous with a lack of curiosity: it’s simply enabling the reader to be curious about something else—the result of the experiment, not underlying logic which created it. This is a primary difference between fantasy and SF, but both stories are still an exercise in imaginary worlds.
Let’s be honest: all fiction is a form of escapism. Magic has no monopoly on people wanting to live different lives, do exotic things and visit exotic places. If I am not a doctor in everyday life, but still like to read medical dramas, that is not the same as saying that I am uninterested in my own job, or that I lack curiosity about what it is I do. It doesn’t even mean I want to be a doctor, or that I somehow think I’d be happier if I were. Yes, that’s always going to be the case for some people, but prejudging all of fiction on those grounds seems like a pretty poor analysis. The very heart of escapism is that it is temporary—a break from the norm, a curiosity to learn new things, not an out-and-out desire to become the subject of whatever book I happen to pick up. Being a reader in any genre is not synonymous with being dissatisfied with reality, so why should fantasy be singled out as the exception to the rule?
It’s one thing not to want to read about imaginary creatures and false worlds. Different stories contain different degrees of fiction, and I completely understand and appreciate that my preferences are not the same as the preferences of someone else; nor should they be. But I am heartily sick and tired of people going the extra step further, to argue that the books they read aren’t really about escapism, because there are no dragons. Escapism is an attitude the reader takes to the book, not a genre in and of itself. Take your preference of reality and have welcome to it—but don’t pretend it’s a morally superior choice.
However, you also contend that our actual reality is fascinating despite its familiarity: that living with digital technology and science has failed to put a dent in our curiosity about it.
To certain people, I think that’s the point you missed. For most people, that statement isn’t true—namely, people who aren’t fascinated by reality. People who are fascinated by the merely real wouldn’t find magic mundane either, even if they grew up in a magical world, because they don’t find the familiar mundane. These people are not the normal SF&F reader, though there are certainly a few SF&F fans who fit the description.
The point is that just because it’s familiar doesn’t mean it must be mundane. However, most people do find the familiar to be mundane, and these same people would find magic mundane as well just as soon as it became familiar.
This is the second time an Eliezer post has reminded me of a certain series of books, where the protagonist is a computer programmer who gets sucked into a world where technology flatly does not work, and in its place is “magic”.
In one of the books, the protagonist’s sorcerer girlfriend gets transported back to this world, and she is absolutely amazed by such things as microwaves and cell phones and cars and television. This is someone who is used magical teleportation and parchment maps that magically update terrain and scrying pools and such. Yet things we find mundane were incredible to her. Cars in particular scared the bejeezus out of her, and she was used to riding dragons and whatnot.
It’s all perspective. If you aren’t amazed by science and technology here, then it won’t take long before you aren’t amazed by magic in a magical world either.
The tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities, esp. by seeking entertainment or engaging in fantasy
Exactly.
Unless they can find the capacity to take joy in things that are merely real. To be just as excited by hang-gliding, as riding a dragon; to be as excited by making a light with electricity, as by making a light with magic… even if it takes a little study...
I can absolutely take joy in things that are merely real. I would be just as excited by hang-gliding as I would by riding a dragon, at least in part because they often feel equally out of my reach.
Here’s why fantasy escapism is compelling: for many people, the problem isn’t physics; it’s psychosocial reality. We’ve been conditioned with such horrific levels of defeatism, akrasia and learned helplessness that we literally cannot conceive of succeeding in any world that looks remotely like this one; the conceptual distance between this world and one with dragons and sorcery is it is probably somewhere near the minimal conceptual distance necessary for our subconscious to say “this is a different enough world that the mysterious forces which keep you depressed and miserable and resourceless and powerless and statusless in your world might not do so in ours.” So your brain gives you permission to fantasize about actually succeeding without berating yourself and feeling stupid for doing so, which is what you’re looking for from these novels.
For example, the vast majority of the time I imagine myself accomplishing anything, it involves timetravel, or something similar. It feels like anything I didn’t do in prepubescent form doesn’t really count. Kinda like “Yes, you opened the safe, but only after the bomb inside went off and damaged the lock, and destroyed most of the valuables within.”
A recent such imagining involved me talking to a psychologist about foreknowledge, and it turned out that most of the predictions I made were about negative things (shootings, 9/11, etc). I answered this observation with “I had a very idealistic upbringing; any world that does not turn out like an action movie with me as a hero is a disappointment.”
Well, that, and there are things that I want that technology can’t give me at the moment, and would be… difficult to get funded. (And the ones that are actually feasible are trappd in Akrasiaban.)
However, most of the things I want that would require technology to advance considerably are rather mundane. Slightly weird, attainable if I’d known in advance and been a rationality ninja at the time, but not magic.
… No, I never did manage to get any of my psychologists to talk about this subject. :P. It was mostly all about akrasia and depression. (Though one of them did let me play with Mindflex, which is a far cry from an FMRI, but provided me with experimental evidence as to where I have Ugh Fields strong enough to turn off a motor… ah, and the thoughts I used that got the machine to full power were made of imaginary friends and kamehamehas.)
Occasionally, the simply real works, though. I recently decided that if none of these tactile display projects are actually going to hit the market (Senseg sounded close a year ago, then went silent, and this is the same pattern set by several others in the field), I’ll just build my own. Unfortunately, this will require people with more comp sci / electrical engineering skill / parts than me, and better-functioning eyeballs would doubtless be useful. So I’m write back to an akrasia-vulnerable task: convincing the nearest comp sci department that I know has the parts/people to help. (Though if anyone wants to beat me to it, the tesla touch strikes me as a good starting point.)
Nick, please explain why magic, which is a complex thing, must paradoxically also be fundamental, in order to be wonderful.
You argue that fantasy readers and writers prefer magic because it’s more exotic, but contend that, were they ever to find themselves living in a world of sword and sorcery, it would automatically become mundane. However, you also contend that our actual reality is fascinating despite its familiarity: that living with digital technology and science has failed to put a dent in our curiosity about it. In order for these two statements not to be contradictory, your argument seems to be predicated on a notion that fantasy readers are all intrinsically uninterested in the world around them, and are therefore incapable of being fascinated by any reality in which they find themselves, regardless of whether it’s scientific or fantastic in nature. Certainly, there are incurious people in the world, and some of them are fantasy readers, but when it comes to judging the whole of fantasy and the reasoning behind it as a whole, I’m fairly sure we can do better than that.
The common element across all stories, fantastic or otherwise, is character: being a reader therefore means being curious about other people. This is just as valid and worthwhile a curiosity as being interested in (say) science or mathematics, but the two states are far from mutually exclusive. Building a new world, as per a fantasy story, requries believability: we must know why a city or culture functions in accordance with this bias, that assumption, why it values these traditions and abhors those. Yes, there is an enormous amount of creative leeway in determining the above, but it will fail if the reader cannot be made to believe that people would really act that way. The idea is to build a society that supports magic, not to use magic as a substitute for society: in other words, the world still needs to function even without magic, because magic isn’t the most important element.
In hard SF, the aim is often to detail the parameters of a particular technology and then describe how society works around it. Magic can fulfill a similar narrative function, but without the in-depth analysis that accompanies hypothetical technology: it’s a shortcut, a way of using ‘what if?’ sans close scrutiny of whatever mechanism is making it possible. That’s not analogous with a lack of curiosity: it’s simply enabling the reader to be curious about something else—the result of the experiment, not underlying logic which created it. This is a primary difference between fantasy and SF, but both stories are still an exercise in imaginary worlds.
Let’s be honest: all fiction is a form of escapism. Magic has no monopoly on people wanting to live different lives, do exotic things and visit exotic places. If I am not a doctor in everyday life, but still like to read medical dramas, that is not the same as saying that I am uninterested in my own job, or that I lack curiosity about what it is I do. It doesn’t even mean I want to be a doctor, or that I somehow think I’d be happier if I were. Yes, that’s always going to be the case for some people, but prejudging all of fiction on those grounds seems like a pretty poor analysis. The very heart of escapism is that it is temporary—a break from the norm, a curiosity to learn new things, not an out-and-out desire to become the subject of whatever book I happen to pick up. Being a reader in any genre is not synonymous with being dissatisfied with reality, so why should fantasy be singled out as the exception to the rule?
It’s one thing not to want to read about imaginary creatures and false worlds. Different stories contain different degrees of fiction, and I completely understand and appreciate that my preferences are not the same as the preferences of someone else; nor should they be. But I am heartily sick and tired of people going the extra step further, to argue that the books they read aren’t really about escapism, because there are no dragons. Escapism is an attitude the reader takes to the book, not a genre in and of itself. Take your preference of reality and have welcome to it—but don’t pretend it’s a morally superior choice.
To certain people, I think that’s the point you missed. For most people, that statement isn’t true—namely, people who aren’t fascinated by reality. People who are fascinated by the merely real wouldn’t find magic mundane either, even if they grew up in a magical world, because they don’t find the familiar mundane. These people are not the normal SF&F reader, though there are certainly a few SF&F fans who fit the description.
The point is that just because it’s familiar doesn’t mean it must be mundane. However, most people do find the familiar to be mundane, and these same people would find magic mundane as well just as soon as it became familiar.
This is the second time an Eliezer post has reminded me of a certain series of books, where the protagonist is a computer programmer who gets sucked into a world where technology flatly does not work, and in its place is “magic”.
In one of the books, the protagonist’s sorcerer girlfriend gets transported back to this world, and she is absolutely amazed by such things as microwaves and cell phones and cars and television. This is someone who is used magical teleportation and parchment maps that magically update terrain and scrying pools and such. Yet things we find mundane were incredible to her. Cars in particular scared the bejeezus out of her, and she was used to riding dragons and whatnot.
It’s all perspective. If you aren’t amazed by science and technology here, then it won’t take long before you aren’t amazed by magic in a magical world either.
That’s the point.
What is that series? I’d like to read it.
It’s by Rick Cook, first novel Wizard’s Bane.
That was awesome. What else can I read in that subgenre? I mean, aside from everything by Lawrence Watt-Evans, sort of.
Yes, what Eliezer said.
I enjoyed the snot out of them—he actually wrote a magic compiler!
You can find the first two books at the Baen Free Library. There are four total.
I’m going to have to read the books others have mentioned as well, because I really like the genre.
It’s heavy on the wish-fulfillment angle. I could have done with a lot less of that.
It looks like it was named in Universal Fire: The Incomplete Enchanter by L. Sprague de Camp.
“Let’s be honest: all fiction is a form of escapism.”
Hell no. Try reading “Voices From the Street”. Why would I ever want to escape from my wonderful life to go THERE?
Escapism | Noun
″ The tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities, esp. by seeking entertainment or engaging in fantasy ”
Exactly.
I can absolutely take joy in things that are merely real. I would be just as excited by hang-gliding as I would by riding a dragon, at least in part because they often feel equally out of my reach.
Here’s why fantasy escapism is compelling: for many people, the problem isn’t physics; it’s psychosocial reality. We’ve been conditioned with such horrific levels of defeatism, akrasia and learned helplessness that we literally cannot conceive of succeeding in any world that looks remotely like this one; the conceptual distance between this world and one with dragons and sorcery is it is probably somewhere near the minimal conceptual distance necessary for our subconscious to say “this is a different enough world that the mysterious forces which keep you depressed and miserable and resourceless and powerless and statusless in your world might not do so in ours.” So your brain gives you permission to fantasize about actually succeeding without berating yourself and feeling stupid for doing so, which is what you’re looking for from these novels.
For example, the vast majority of the time I imagine myself accomplishing anything, it involves timetravel, or something similar. It feels like anything I didn’t do in prepubescent form doesn’t really count. Kinda like “Yes, you opened the safe, but only after the bomb inside went off and damaged the lock, and destroyed most of the valuables within.”
A recent such imagining involved me talking to a psychologist about foreknowledge, and it turned out that most of the predictions I made were about negative things (shootings, 9/11, etc). I answered this observation with “I had a very idealistic upbringing; any world that does not turn out like an action movie with me as a hero is a disappointment.”
Well, that, and there are things that I want that technology can’t give me at the moment, and would be… difficult to get funded. (And the ones that are actually feasible are trappd in Akrasiaban.)
However, most of the things I want that would require technology to advance considerably are rather mundane. Slightly weird, attainable if I’d known in advance and been a rationality ninja at the time, but not magic.
… No, I never did manage to get any of my psychologists to talk about this subject. :P. It was mostly all about akrasia and depression. (Though one of them did let me play with Mindflex, which is a far cry from an FMRI, but provided me with experimental evidence as to where I have Ugh Fields strong enough to turn off a motor… ah, and the thoughts I used that got the machine to full power were made of imaginary friends and kamehamehas.)
Occasionally, the simply real works, though. I recently decided that if none of these tactile display projects are actually going to hit the market (Senseg sounded close a year ago, then went silent, and this is the same pattern set by several others in the field), I’ll just build my own. Unfortunately, this will require people with more comp sci / electrical engineering skill / parts than me, and better-functioning eyeballs would doubtless be useful. So I’m write back to an akrasia-vulnerable task: convincing the nearest comp sci department that I know has the parts/people to help. (Though if anyone wants to beat me to it, the tesla touch strikes me as a good starting point.)
I don’t quite see the relevance of this to what I said.
You might want to check out Noel Carroll’s Philosophy of Horror.
(Aside: I never noticed before—the cover looks like a Vampire: The Masquerade splatbook)