Fantasy/SciFi

A short teaser for the newest Boston Dynamics humanoid robot.

PG has blogged about earlier models of Boston Dynamics robots, but, even from the short video below, it’s obvious that the company has been hard at work. Thanks to several regulars on TPV or the tip.

Here is a video of earlier models of Boston Dynamics robots, including some robot fails.

From Business Insider:

Apple is in the early stages of looking into making home robots, a move that appears to be an effort to create its “next big thing” after it killed its self-driving car project earlier this year, sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.

Engineers are looking into developing a robot that could follow users around their houses, Bloomberg reported. They’re also exploring a tabletop at-home device that uses robotics to rotate the display, a project that’s more advanced than the mobile robot.

The idea behind the smart display robot is to mimic a person’s head movement, such as reacting during a FaceTime session. It initially caught the attention of senior Apple executives years ago, though they’ve disagreed over whether to continue with the project, Bloomberg said.

Link to the rest at Business Insider

From Slate:

Fairies are having a moment, thanks to the overwhelming popularity of books like Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses. But longtime YA fantasy readers will remember that Holly Black is one of the OGs of gritty novels about the mercurial inhabitants of faerie lands. The author of Tithe, the Curse Workers trilogy, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and other books—which have collectively sold more than 26 million copies—is no stranger to the otherworldly appeal of magic, romance, and dangerous court intrigue. Now, 20-plus years into her career, Black is still ruling the genre, with her Folk of the Air trilogy’s The Cruel Prince a staple of the book-obsessed subset of TikTok known as “BookTok.” Black’s latest work, The Prisoner’s Throne—a conclusion to her The Stolen Heir duology, about the young rulers of two rival faerie courts navigating political treachery, self-acceptance, and the cost of power—was released in early March, and she is at work on a card game based on The Folk of the Air. I chatted with the author about her long career, her thoughts on the booming genre and BookTok, and why hooves are sexy.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Slate: It’s been nearly 22 years since the publication of your first book, Tithe, which was a young adult fantasy book. The genre is experiencing a renaissance of sorts. If you look at the bestseller list, a lot of them are fantasy romance books. How do you feel about this popular resurgence of faerie fantasy?

Holly Black: I tell this story a lot: Between when Tithe came out and when the first Spiderwick book came out—2002 to 2003—I went to the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators conference, which I had never been to before, and I didn’t know a lot of people who were working writers. I guess people had been told to network wherever, so there’s a long bathroom line, and the woman in front of me asked me, “What do you write?” I said, “Oh, young adult.” And she turned around to talk to somebody else. Young adult—nobody wanted to write it, it was an extremely tiny part of the children’s market, it really didn’t have the cachet. It was a time when picture books and middle grade were where you wanted to be.

There was a huge shift; I think it started with Barnes and Noble moving the YA section outside of the kids’ section so that you no longer had to go through that gateway, and for the first time it became discoverable by people who no longer considered themselves children. So you had teenagers much more willing to approach it, but also adults. Probably the first series that really blew up was Gossip Girl—that brought adults to the YA section but had teens really reading it, and just changed the genre. I just watched it blow up in this way where it became much bigger and attracted many more writers, having these huge hits.

. . . .

The majority of your work is YA. What draws you, as a writer, to that age range?

I sort of stumbled into it. I had written Tithe, and it has a 16-year-old as its protagonist because it is a story of someone who’s discovering that they’re a faerie changeling. A 30-year-old figuring out they’re a faerie changeling seemed late, or maybe like they’re not the sharpest knife in the drawer; it just seemed like the wrong time for self-discovery like that.

So you never set out to write YA specifically?

I just set out to write a fantasy novel. There were lots of fantasy novels with 16-year-old protagonists. I had a friend who was a children’s librarian, and she said, “I think you should consider YA,” and I thought, I don’t know, there’s lots of swearing in this book! There’s a lot of stuff in this book. She gave me Tamora Pierce and Garth Nix—some of the most beautifully built magic systems of any books that I’ve read, just super elegant. I went into this space at such a great time because it was growing and because, when people are coming into YA, they’re not used to reading extremely specific genres, so you can mash up things. You can try things. You can be more experimental because readers don’t realize you’re being experimental—they’re reading this stuff for the first time. So it was a really fun place to write in.

What does it feel like now to be surrounded by all these other faerie fantasy books and, consequently, readers who potentially read only fantasy, who are not coming into the genre for the first time?

As a person who writes and reads a lot of fantasy, it’s been extremely gratifying to see fantasy move into a mainstream place. There are a lot of people who’ve grown up watching Lord of the Rings at a young enough age that it’s become part of their vocabulary of how the fantasy world works. Game of Thrones too. I think, for a lot of people, that barrier to entry is much lower than it was when there wasn’t so much exposure to fantasy.

I think the rise of romantasy is certainly in part because people do have the vocabulary of fantasy. Romance is one of the biggest genres in the world, so of course people want to see, or are able to read, fantasy romances in a way that might not have been true before. Romantasy is really two different genres kind of mushed together, probably in the same way that urban fantasy was. You have two streams: the romance-forward fantasy, where it’s really a romance novel with fantasy, and then you have fantasy that has romance. They’re paced really differently, and they have different focuses, but they live in the same genre. Then you had urban fantasy that came out of fantasy, and often those were the faerie books; for a long time urban fantasy was faerie, in the late ’80s.

Link to the rest at Slate

From Book Riot:

In a world of devastation, it’s necessary to seek the magic in the mundane. Speculative fiction, and everything beneath its wide umbrella, allows us as readers to find magic in various ways. Whether escaping into another world entirely (epic fantasy, sword & sorcery, space opera, etc.) or to something more familiar (urban fantasy), I am a fervent believer that there is a genre of speculative fiction for everyone. I’ve explored many genres and subgenres in the past, navigating blurred lines and intricacies, from slipstream to subgenres of science fiction. Of all of these beautiful genres, one of my favorites is the fabulism subgenre.

What Is Fabulism?

An excellent question, my dears, and one that may have a different answer depending on who you ask and what you like to read. If you look up the definition of fabulist in a dictionary — we’ll use Merriam-Webster for this — its most boiled-down description is “a creator or writer of fables.” Fables are stories with fantastical elements that convey a moral or teach a lesson. Believe it or not, the first use of the word “fabulism” or “fabulist” can be traced back to 1593.

So it’s by no means a new term, but the fabulist literature we read today is quite different from the fables of the past centuries. It’s even been argued that fabulism, as we know it today, is one of the “newer” speculative genres, though I’d take this with a grain of salt.

The most common definition I’ve found for fabulism in contemporary literature is this: writing in which fantastical elements are entwined with the everyday. Kathryn Harlan expands on this definition more eloquently in her 2022 Publishers Weekly article “10 Essential Works of Fabulist Fiction:”

“What defines fabulism in my mind, though, is the use of fantastical elements to explore personal, human themes. Fabulist fiction tends to privilege internal and interpersonal conflict over large-scale, action-heavy plots; its elements of unreality follow a kind of magical thinking. When something strange occurs, the story is less interested in why it’s happening — its origin or mechanism — than in what it means, in a symbolic or emotional logic.”

Kathryn Harlan in Publishers Weekly

Fabulism: Resisting the Why

An interesting factor of fabulism — similar to slipstream — is that it’s a genre that resists a concrete, longstanding definition. Indeed, the genre itself fights against being placed in a neatly wrapped box. When fabulism is at play in a work, it often resists the why. Fabulism does not explain the magic system or fantastical elements. It doesn’t go into why a character suddenly sprouts branches as limbs, or why a character is back from the dead. It — the fantastical, the magical, the weird — just is.

Therefore, many writers labeled as “fabulists” often create work that is indefinable, even paradoxical. Many fabulists create work that is either deemed too literary to be genre, or too genre to be literary. These writers sit on the fence, the in-between, constantly reinventing themselves, and by proxy, reinventing the genre. Honestly, that’s why I love fabulists so damn much.

Several authors come to mind when thinking of the above definitions and explorations, though it’s possible these authors may not describe their own work as such. Kelly Link has been called the high priestess of fabulism. Another titan of the genre, for me at least, is Helen Oyeyemi, and her March 2024 novel, Parasol Against the Axe, sounds like it hits fabulism on the nail. 

It’s also important to note that fabulism is found in more than just fiction. Poets can fabulists. Many visual artists are considered fabulist or even neo fabulist. It’s a genre that can be expressed across all art mediums.

. . . .

Fabulism vs. Magical Realism: Similar Yet Separate

One of the genres that is often rolled together with fabulism is magical realism. They both use fantastical elements, especially in everyday life. They both also utilize these fantastical elements without explaining why; weird, fantastical, and magical things happen in the world, and you, as a reader, are meant to accept it and roll with it. The lines are certainly blurred between the two, but one way to distinguish between them is to look at the origins.

As I noted in my fantasy subgenre primer, magical realism originated and belongs to Latine authors, and we owe them that distinction and respect. Authors in Latin America used magical realism in literature and art to reflect and portray the political turmoil that occurred around and between the 1940s to 1970s, especially regarding colonialism and oppression. It is still used today by Latine authors to extrapolate similar issues. As such, magical realism is a genre of resistance, political commentary, and activism. So keep that in mind as you read and differentiate between the two.

. . . .

The Book of Love by Kelly Link

One cannot discuss fabulism without discussing the incomparable Kelly Link. Link is one of my favorite writers of all time. Her collection Get in Trouble, continues to be foundational for me as a reader and writer. The Book of Love, Link’s debut novel, is another testament to her talent and breadth of imagination. It follows three friends who find themselves back in a high school classroom after being missing, and possibly quite dead, for a year.

White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

There are so many brilliant Oyeyemi works to choose from, but this one is probably my favorite. Oyeyemi is another queen of fabulism, threading together the fantastical with the every day in a way that also mirrors societal issues. White is For Witching is about a house in Dover, England, and the four generations of Silver women that have lived within it. When Miranda’s mother, Lily, passes away while abroad, Miranda’s grief and connection to the house begin to manifest in mysterious ailments. This is such a powerful book about about family legacies, race, and nationality.

Link to the rest at Book Riot

From The Wall Street Journal:

It is a cinematic scene familiar to millions: A man named Morpheus sits across from another man named Neo and informs him that his entire notion of reality is a lie. If Neo wishes to know the truth of human existence, Morpheus says, all he has to do is choose one of two pills. “You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill…and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

This scene is the turning point in “The Matrix,” the sci-fi classic that was released 25 years ago this month. Of course, Neo chooses the red pill and learns the terrible truth that the advent of artificial intelligence allowed machines to take over the Earth. He believes it is 1999, but in fact it is 2199, and all human beings are perpetually asleep in vats, exploited by their AI masters as a source of energy. The world they think they experience is actually a virtual reality known as “The Matrix.”

Morpheus, played by Laurence Fishburne, has devoted himself to freeing individuals from the Matrix and leading them to a refuge called Zion. He believes that Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, is “the One” destined to liberate humanity.

Directed by the sibling team the Wachowskis, “The Matrix” was a box office hit in 1999 and spawned two sequels in 2003 and another in 2021. It also became an important cultural influence. The term “red-pilled” is now widely used online to describe someone who has grown skeptical of the way political reality is usually depicted.

The power of the film lies in the way it adapts one of the oldest allegories in the history of philosophy. In Plato’s “Republic,” the Athenian philosopher Socrates describes prisoners who have spent their entire lives manacled in a cave. A fire behind them casts the shadows of objects on a wall in front of them, and because shadows are all they have ever seen, they assume that what appears before their eyes is reality.

One prisoner breaks free, however, and makes his way to the surface of the Earth, where he beholds the sun and the real world. Ultimately he returns to the cave, seeking to convince his fellows that reality is out there to be discovered. Plato argues that the philosopher is like this escaped prisoner. It is his job to free humanity from illusion and teach us what is truly real.

The allegory of the cave is one of the indelible images in the history of Western thought, a metaphor for the capacity of human beings to break free from falsehood. Morpheus and Neo have been widely recognized as Plato’s heirs, philosopher-kings for the digital age.

But Plato also warns that the prisoners in the cave will resist being freed and that they will hate the philosopher who tries to teach them unfamiliar truths: “If any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The Economist:

Frank Herbert, the author of the science-fiction novel “Dune” on which a new blockbuster film is based, would have been amused to learn that ecologists along the Oregon shore are ripping invasive European beachgrass out of the ground. As a young journalist in the late 1950s, Herbert derived his inspiration for a tale about a desert planet from watching ecologists plant the grass to control encroaching sand dunes. The scheme worked, maybe too well: residents of the coastal towns that the grass helped prosper now long for the beauty of the dunes and regret the unintended consequences for native flora and fauna.

“They stopped the moving sands” was the title of the article Herbert never wound up publishing about the Oregon dunes. He admired the ecologists and their project. But as much as he prized human intelligence he feared human hubris, credulousness and other frailties. One character in “Dune” is a planetary ecologist, who, for complicated reasons—the novel has no other kind—finds himself overcome by natural processes he has been trying to manipulate, to help the native population by changing the climate. “As his planet killed him,” Herbert writes, the ecologist reflects that scientists have it all wrong, and “that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.”

The persistence of “Dune” itself is a marvel. Some 20 publishers turned the manuscript down before a company known for auto-repair manuals, Chilton, released it in 1965. The editor who took the risk was fired because sales were slow at first. But popular and critical acclaim began to build, eventually making “Dune” among the best-selling and most influential of science-fiction novels, some of its imaginings, with their edges filed down, surfacing in “Star Wars”.

No doubt the novel’s endurance owes in part to Herbert’s success, like Tolkien’s, in wrapping an epic yarn within a spectacular vision given substance by countless interlocking details. He published appendices to his novel: a glossary, a guide to the feudal houses that jostle over his imperium, a study of the galactic religions and, of course, a paper on the ecology of his desert planet, Arrakis, known as Dune. That ecology yields a substance called spice that prolongs life and also supplies psychic powers, enabling navigators to guide ships among the stars: think potable petrol with the properties of Adderall and Ozempic. It is the most precious stuff in the universe.

The young hero, Paul Atreides, arrives on Arrakis when his father, a duke, is awarded control there. It is a trap set by the emperor and a rival house. His father dead and his surviving allies scattered, Paul flees with his mother into the desert and finds haven among its fierce people, the Fremen. As the spice unlocks latent mental powers in Paul, the natives recognise him as their messiah and—spoilers!—he leads them not just to avenge his father but, via control of the spice, to seize the imperial throne. Then comes a bit of a bummer, galactic jihad. More on that in a moment.

Herbert was thinking partly of T.E. Lawrence, oil, colonial predation and Islam, and the success of the novel may owe also to those echoes (along with the giant sandworms). But the novel’s enduring popularity suggests more timeless resonances. There are nifty gizmos in Herbert’s galaxy, but clever conceits keep them from stealing the show and making his future either too alien or, like other decades-old visions of the future, amusingly outdated. Personal force-fields have rendered projectile weapons harmless. Soldiers and nobles alike fight with swords, knives and fists.

A more provocative gambit by Herbert was to set his tale thousands of years after the “Butlerian Jihad” or “Great Revolt”, in which humans destroyed all forms of artificial intelligence. (Herbert once worried to an interviewer that “our society has a tiger by the tail in technology.”) “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind,” has become a core injunction, resulting in a race to develop the mind’s potential. Paul’s mother is a member of a female sect, the Bene Gesserit, whose own hubristic enterprise is to manipulate the imperium’s politics, and who for scores of generations have conducted a breeding programme to engender a superhuman intelligence—which, to their consternation, arrives in the form of Paul, whom they cannot control.

The new Dune movie is the second of two in which the director, Denis Villeneuve, has told the story with breathtaking imagery and, for the most part, with fidelity to the novel. The films deal elliptically with Herbert’s themes of technological, economic and ecological change to zero in on his main matter, the dangers of political and religious power and of faith itself, secular or spiritual.

Link to the rest at The Economist

PG is having problems getting into The Passive Voice to add new posts. He’s working on the problem.

What’s a Conlanger?

From Conlanger.org:

A “conlanger” is someone who creates or constructs languages or “conlangs.” Conlangs come in a wide variety although these can be divided primarily into three general areas: auxlangs or international auxiliary languages like Esperanto, engelangs or engineered languages like Ithkuil and Lojban, and artlangs or artistic languages like Sindarin or Klingon. This is just the tip of the iceberg, and these are simply some of the more widely-known examples of these respective types of conlangs. What is fascinating is the number of people engaged in language creation.

Link to the rest at Conlanger.org

From The Conlang Manifesto:

To me, it seems odd to have to defend language creation, and yet it’s been repeatedly attacked, mainly by linguists (which is the most baffling part about the whole business), and decried as a form of frivolity which should not and cannot be taken seriously by anyone, or even wicked (I’ve heard it). To such claims, I say the following things.

I would hope that many would agree that doing something that neither harms the doer nor anyone else is not wrong. That said, creating languages, to my knowledge, has never resulted in the harming of another human being, or of the language creator (at least, I’ve heard of no reports of a language creator driven insane. Though I should note that Esperantists were persecuted in Germany during the Holocaust, along with just about everyone else). Like any other hobby or activity, the only requirement is a requirement of time, and time management has nothing to do with the activity itself, but only with the one performing it. Thus, it can’t be argued that language creation is “a waste of time”, it can only be argued that certain people are wasters of time—how they do it is irrelevant.

The other argument—whether language creation can be taken seriously—is a bit stickier. The main problem I see that people have with language creation is that it’s “weird”—that is, not usual. As such, anything that is not usual will be regarded with apprehension initially; it’s as old as Copernicus—even older than that. If you point this out to the arguer, they will usually counter with the argument that language creation is useless, and therefore, frivolous. And, looking only at the utilitarian end of it, if the creator isn’t going to use their language for communication, and since language can be viewed only as a means of communication, language creation is pretty useless.

But is this all language is: A method of communication? If so, what is poetry? what is literature? What possible use could James Joyce’s Ulysses have? I suppose if you were on a desert island and needed to smash crabs, it would do the trick—it’s pretty thick, after all. But beyond that? According to them, it would have no use. And why stop there? What good do paintings do anyone? They just sit there, after all, doing nothing for nobody. And along with this goes any other form of visual art: Pottery, jewelry, tapestry, mosaic, sculpture, animation… And what about architecture? You just need a roof over your head; no reason it needs to look fancy. So out the window it goes, too. And music?! My word! There’s not even any functional value in music! So let’s burn all our musical instruments and albums: Goodbye Tchaikovsky, bye-bye Beatles, see ya’ Enya, aloha Israel Kamakawiwo’ole (that’s the “aloha” that means “goodbye”, not “hello”). Pretty soon what you’re left with is a world without art.

At this point, the argument should come to an end. The rigor and usefulness of art is an argument that has been argued many times by many people much more articulate than I, and by now (I certainly hope), the whole world should have figured out that art really does pull its weight on Earth. So, let’s continue from here. Any university worth its salt is going to have an art department. Millions of people every year study useless, frivolous art. So why not language creation? Nearly every serious subject has an art associated with it that’s also studied: Literature has poetry and prose; computer science has computer graphics and video games (another underappreciated form of art); functional architecture has artistic architecture; art history has art; music theory has music. If you take this to its natural conclusion, is not language creation the art most closely associated with linguistics?

This is particularly why I find the condemnation of language creation by linguists so befuddling. Aside from art, though, language creation has other uses. First, creating a language allows one to better understand language itself. One who creates an ergative language is far more likely to understand ergativity in natural languages than one who does not, I say. What’s more, this same understanding can ease foreign language learning considerably—not to mention linguistics itself. More importantly, it gets one thinking about the multifariousness and beauty of language, and one who can appreciate this is less likely to misunderstand, deprecate and stereotype those speaking other languages, which is one of the main causes of racism and ethnocentrism. In short, language creation is one of the keys to social harmony and world peace. If one is going to take anything seriously, certainly world peace is it, and if so, shouldn’t language creation be given some credit too?

Link to the rest at Conlang Manifesto

PG thanks regular commenter K. for sending him into Conlang World.

He loves finding small groups of people who are highly enthusiastic about something 99% of the world has never heard about, let alone recognized as an occupation/pastime.

From The New Yorker:

The trailer for Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two” features the boy prophet Paul Atreides, played by Timothée Chalamet, yelling something foreign and uninterpretable to a horde of desert people. We see Chalamet as the embodiment of charismatic fury: every facial muscle clenched in tension, his voice strained and throaty and commanding. A line at the bottom of the screen translates: “Long live the fighters!”

The scene fills barely a few seconds in a three-minute trailer, yet it establishes the emotional tone of the film and captures the messianic fervor that drives its plot. It also signals the depth of Villeneuve’s world-building. Part of what made his first excursion into the “Dune” universe such an experiential feast was its vivid, immersive quality, combining monumental architectural design with atmospheric soundscapes and ethereal costuming. We could see a few remnants of our world (remember the bit with the bagpipes?), but the over-all effect was transportive, as if the camera were not a piece of equipment but a cyborgian eye live-streaming from a far-flung alien civilization. Chalamet’s strange tongue is part of the franchise’s meticulous set dressing. It’s not gibberish, but part of an intricate linguistic system that was devised for Villeneuve’s adaptations.

Engineered languages such as the one Chalamet speaks represent a new benchmark in imaginative fiction. Twenty years ago, viewers would have struggled to name franchises other than “Star Trek” or “The Lord of the Rings” that bothered to invent new languages. Today, with the budgets of the biggest films and series rivalling the G.D.P.s of small island nations, constructed languages, or conlangs, are becoming a norm, if not an implicit requirement. Breeze through entertainment from the past decade or so, and you’ll find lingos designed for Paleolithic peoples (“Alpha”), spell-casting witches (“Penny Dreadful”), post-apocalyptic survivors (“Into the Badlands”), Superman’s home planet of Krypton (“Man of Steel”), a cross-species alien alliance (“Halo”), time-travelling preteens (“Paper Girls”), the Munja’kin tribe of Oz (“Emerald City”), and Santa Claus and his elves (“The Christmas Chronicles” and its sequel).

A well-executed conlang can bolster a film’s appearance of authenticity. It can deepen the scenic absorption that has long been an obsession for creators and fans of speculative genres such as science fiction and fantasy. But the entertainment industry’s fixation with crafting super-realistic realms can also be distracting. Speculative fiction works by melding the familiar with the unrecognizable. It makes trenchant provocations not by creating the most believably alien worlds possible but by interweaving them with strands from our own.

Hollywood’s current obsession with constructed languages arguably started with “The Lord of the Rings” film adaptations of the early two-thousands. J. R. R. Tolkien was a professor of Old English at Oxford and a lifelong conlanger, and he famously created the tongues of Middle-earth long before writing the books. “The invention of languages is the foundation,” he once wrote. “The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse.” The trilogy’s success showed the power of conlangs to create engrossing alternate realities, inspiring filmmakers to seek out skilled language creators.

The most influential conlanger working today is David J. Peterson. Born in Long Beach, California, Peterson started to create languages in 2000, while he was a sophomore at U.C. Berkeley. His early projects were amusing experiments: X, a language that could only be written; Sheli, which included only sounds that he liked and was initially unpronounceable; and Zhyler, which he created because he enjoyed Turkish and which, in honor of the Heinz Company, had fifty-seven noun cases. In 2005, he graduated with a master’s degree in linguistics from U.C. San Diego. Two years later, he co-founded the Language Creation Society with nine other conlangers.

Peterson’s big break came in 2009, when HBO reached out to the Language Creation Society with a strange request. They were creating a television show (which would turn out to be “Game of Thrones”) and wanted someone to develop a language (which would emerge as Dothraki). Nothing like this had ever happened before, so the society organized a competition that would be judged by the show’s producers. After signing a nondisclosure agreement, applicants were invited to send in a phonetic breakdown of Dothraki, a romanized transcription system, six to eight lines of translated text, and any additional notes or translations.

Peterson had an edge over his competitors: unemployment. For two and a half weeks, he worked eighteen-hour days, assembling a hundred and eighty pages of material. He made it to the second round and eventually produced more than three hundred pages in Dothraki. He landed the job and was later invited to develop five more languages for the series, including High Valyrian, which proved especially popular among fans. In 2017, a High Valyrian course launched on the language-learning app Duolingo; at one point in 2023, more than nine hundred thousand people had signed up as active users.

Along with James Cameron’s “Avatar” (2009), which appeared in theatres soon after Peterson was hired by HBO, the first season of “Game of Thrones” demonstrated that audiences not only tolerated fictional languages—they loved them. What had previously been a nerdy pastime transformed into a standard of fantasy filmmaking. Peterson became the go-to language wizard. He has since been hired to create some fifty other conlangs, including languages for the Dark Elves in “Thor: The Dark World” (2013), for the Grounders in the television show “The 100” (2014-20), and for the desert-dwelling Fremen in the two “Dune” movies. When Chalamet, as Paul Atreides, calls to his combatants, he does so in words devised by Peterson and his wife and fellow-conlanger, Jessie. (Peterson worked alone for the first “Dune” film, and collaborated with her on the second.)

Peterson’s success stems from a commitment to naturalism. He knows languages well; he has studied more than twenty, including Swahili, Middle Egyptian, and Esperanto, and seems to have an endless mental Rolodex of the lexical, grammatical, and phonological patterns found around the world. Yet, when an interviewer asked him how, when assembling a new conlang, he decides “which aspects of a language to borrow from and mimic” (Greek suffixes? Mongolian tenses? Japanese particles?), he rejected the premise. “If you just ripped out a structure from one language and put it in your own, the result would be inauthentic,” he replied.

Link to the rest at The New Yorker

From The Write Life:

In the ever-evolving genres of fiction, slipstream emerges as a genre that defies the traditional boundaries of storytelling, offering a unique blend of the real and the surreal.

This genre, sitting at the crossroads of speculative fiction and literary fiction, challenges our perceptions of reality, inviting readers and writers alike into a world where the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

. . . .

What is slipstream fiction?

Slipstream fiction is a genre that thrives on ambiguity, challenging both writers and readers to explore the spaces between the known and the unknown. 

Let’s dive into the core aspects that define this intriguing genre.

Our slipstream fiction definition 

Slipstream fiction is notoriously difficult to pin down with a single definition, but at its core, it represents a narrative that straddles the line between the speculative and the literary, often blurring the boundaries of reality and the fantastic. 

This genre is not just about fantastical elements or futuristic settings; it’s about invoking a sense of wonder, unease, or the uncanny through stories that feel both familiar and deeply strange. 

Slipstream challenges our everyday understanding of reality, pushing readers to question what they know about the world around them. 

It is this unique blend of the real and the surreal that sets slipstream apart from more conventional genres, making it a fascinating field for writers who want to explore the depths of human experience in novel ways.

What are the key characteristics of Slipstream fiction?

Before we delve into the characteristics that define slipstream fiction, it’s important to understand that these traits work together to create a distinctive reading experience that defies easy categorization. 

Here are the seven most important characteristics of slipstream fiction:

1. Ambiguity: Stories often leave more questions than answers, challenging readers to find their interpretations.
2. Cognitive dissonance: The narrative may combine elements that traditionally don’t coexist, creating a sense of unease or perplexity.
3. Surreal atmosphere: The setting or events have an otherworldly quality, even if rooted in the familiar.
4. Emotional resonance: Despite the fantastical elements, the core of slipstream fiction lies in its ability to evoke deep emotional responses.
5. Intellectual stimulation: These narratives encourage readers to think deeply about themes, ideas, and the nature of reality itself.
6. Genre blending: Slipstream fiction often incorporates elements from various genres, refusing to be boxed into a single category.
7. Metafictional elements: There’s often a self-awareness within the narrative, playing with literary conventions and reader expectations.

Keep in mind that slipstream fiction is by its nature a genre that blends elements and influences from a wide range of sources.

As a result, feel free to use or ignore whichever characteristics of slipstream depending on what your story requires.

How has Slipstream fiction evolved?

The roots of slipstream fiction can be traced back to the works of authors who dared to push the boundaries of narrative storytelling, such as Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges. 

These pioneers laid the groundwork for a genre that would evolve to encapsulate a wide range of themes, from the existential to the metaphysical. 

Over the decades, slipstream has grown from a niche interest into a significant movement that challenges the conventions of mainstream literature. 

Its evolution reflects a growing desire among writers and readers for stories that offer more than just escape or entertainment; they seek narratives that offer a mirror to the complexity and ambiguity of the human condition. 

In the contemporary literary landscape, slipstream fiction continues to evolve, influenced by both the rapidly changing world around us and the endless possibilities of the human imagination.

Slipstream fiction examples

To truly grasp the essence and diversity of slipstream fiction, examining both its foundational works and contemporary examples is invaluable. 

These stories illuminate the genre’s defining characteristics and showcase the myriad ways authors can navigate its complex terrain.

What are some classic examples of slipstream fiction?

The foundations of slipstream fiction are often traced back to the literary giants who blended the surreal with the mundane, crafting narratives that defy straightforward interpretation.

Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”

Kafka’s story a seminal work that exemplifies slipstream’s essence, with its story of a man who inexplicably transforms into an insect, challenging readers to find meaning amidst absurdity. 

Jorge Luis Borges’ collection “Ficciones”

Ficciones is another slipstream cornerstone, weaving intricate tales of labyrinths, mirrors, and infinite libraries that question the nature of reality and fiction. 

These classic examples not only highlight the genre’s roots in the surreal and the speculative but also demonstrate how slipstream can offer profound insights into the human condition through its unique narrative approach.

What are examples of contemporary slipstream fiction?

Contemporary slipstream fiction continues to explore the boundaries between the real and the unreal, providing readers with immersive and thought-provoking experiences.

“The Night Circus” by Erin Morgenstern

Morgenstern’s tale is a dazzling foray into a magical competition between two young illusionists, set within a wandering, fantastical circus that opens only at night. Morgenstern’s novel captivates with its rich, atmospheric storytelling and intricate plot, showcasing slipstream’s potential to blend magical realism with deep emotional resonance.

“Station Eleven” by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven presents a post-apocalyptic vision that intertwines the lives of a traveling Shakespearean theater troupe with the interconnected stories of individuals surviving a global pandemic. Mandel’s work exemplifies slipstream through its exploration of art, memory, and survival in a world where reality has shifted beyond recognition.

“Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell 

Mitchell’s classic stretches across time and space, linking disparate narratives from the 19th century South Pacific to a distant, post-apocalyptic future.

Cloud Atlas is a masterclass in genre blending, each story echoing themes of connection, power, and the nature of humanity, embodying the slipstream genre’s capacity for intellectual depth and speculative scope.

The diversity of contemporary slipstream fiction is proof that you have the creative freedom to add your own unique take on the genre,

Link to the rest at The Write Life

From The Economist:

The National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome houses choice examples of 19th- and 20th-century Italian art. But the books currently on sale in its vestibule have nothing to do with futurism or Arte Povera. They are by – or about – J.R.R. Tolkien, a British writer of fantasy. “One of the greatest authors of the last century,” murmured Carlo Pesce, a Venetian business executive, as he fingered an edition of “The Silmarillion”, a dense narrative even die-hard fans tend to skip.

The books were put on sale as part of a show called “Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author”.

Italy’s right-wing government had sponsored the exhibition as a component of its cultural strategy, which aims to dismantle the long-standing ascendancy of Italy’s mainly left-leaning intellectuals and artists. At a packed news conference held to announce the exhibition, the culture minister extolled Tolkien as “a staunch Catholic who exalted the value of tradition and of the community to which one belongs…a true conservative.” Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, took time out from her official duties to open the show, and the inauguration was attended by a bevy of ministers from her party, the Brothers of Italy (fdi). It was given extensive, admiring coverage on the prime-time news bulletin of the largest state-owned tv channel.

Italy’s culture minister extols Tolkien as “a staunch Catholic who exalted the value of tradition and of the community to which one belongs…a true conservative”
Attendance was sparse when I visited on a chilly weekday afternoon in January, yet the woman at the ticket office said the turnout had been “pretty good”. Still, the exhibition hardly lived up to the razzmatazz with which it was unveiled. It consisted of film clips and photos of Tolkien, illustrations for his books in which heroes slay dragons and grapple with orcs and editions of his works in a bewildering assortment of languages. There were also costumes and posters from Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of “The Lord of the Rings”, and a clip in which the wizard Gandalf battles the ghastly Balrog. There was even a gaudily decorated Tolkien-themed pinball machine. Meloni pronounced it all “very beautiful”.

. . . .

Tolkien, however, is only one of a strange collection of cultural touchstones held in esteem by Meloni and her party, which dominates Italy’s governing coalition. The fdi champions an array of writers, artists and film-makers who would be unfamiliar to most mainstream European and American conservatives. Surprisingly, few of them are Italian but they provide the country’s nationalists with a store of reference points. And not all of them are conservatives. What they have in common is a shared genre: fantasy.

Link to the rest at The Economist

From Gizmodo:

You’d think the biggest headlines surrounding an annual celebration of sci-fi and fantasy writing would be applauding the winners—but that’s not always the case with the Hugos. Its latest controversy involves works being deemed “not eligible” for consideration at the 2023 event, which was presented by Chengdu Worldcon in Chengdu, China. Now, we have a touch more clarity about what happened—and an apology from the organization as it looks to the future.

The 2023 Hugos were handed out in October, but rumblings about the eligibility controversy began last month, when nomination data revealed certain authors and books had been deemed “not eligible,” despite having the necessary votes to make the list of finalists. The most glaring slight was against R.F. Kuang’s Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, a best-selling, highly acclaimed work that won the Nebula Award in 2022 for Best Novel as well as the 2023 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel.

At the time of the data release, the lack of explanation caused frustration among fans and authors. In a response posted on Instagram, Kuang noted “no reason for Babel’s ineligibility was given to me or my my team… until one is provided that explains why the book was eligible for the Nebula and Locus awards, which it won, and not the Hugos, I assume this was a matter of indesirability rather than ineligibility. Excluding ‘undesirable’ work is not only embarrassing for all involved parties, but renders the entire process and organization illegitimate.”

A stunning investigation posted on Patreon by Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford (via Locus) digs what happened at the 2023 Hugos, offering background and context while asking questions like who was responsible for the “not eligible” rulings, and why the works in question were singled out—as well as how much the geographical location of the 2023 awards affected the situation. It’s definitely worth reading the in-depth report yourself for all the details and receipts, but it did find that “political considerations” were behind the exclusion of Babel, as well as potential nominees Paul Weimer (Fan Writer) and Xiran Jay Zhao (Astounding Award for Best New Writer).

“Emails and files released by one of the administrators of the 2023 Hugo Awards indicate that authors and works deemed ‘not eligible’ for the awards were removed due to political considerations,” Barkley and Sanford wrote. “In particular, administrators of the awards from the United States and Canada researched political concerns related to Hugo-eligible authors and works and discussed removing certain ones from the ballot for those reasons, revealing they were active participants in the censorship that took place.” The report further notes that these concerns “were in relation to Chinese laws related to content and censorship.”

In his endnotes, Sanford underlines his main takeaway. “The 2023 Hugo Awards were censored because certain authors and works were deemed to have too many political liabilities, at least from the viewpoint of the Chinese government. While it’s unclear if this was official censorship from the Chinese government or self-censorship by those afraid of offending governmental or business interests, we can now be certain that censorship indeed took place. However, what also disturbs me is that the administrators of the Hugo Awards from the United States and Canada, countries that supposedly support and value free speech, appear to have been active participants in this censorship.”

In a statement released today, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, the chair of Glasgow 2024 – A Worldcon for Our Futures, which will present the next iteration of the Hugos, offered an apology for “for the damage caused to nominees, finalists, the community, and the Hugo, Lodestar, and Astounding Awards” and outlined “steps to ensure transparency and to attempt to redress the grievous loss of trust in the administration of the Awards.”

Link to the rest at Gizmodo

The first thought that raced through PG’s mind as he read the OP was “Innocents Abroad.”

Like a great many successful attorneys, a great many successful authors are intelligent people.

However, both attorneys and authors together with other groups of experts are liable to make classic logical error: because they are experts in one field, they assume they know something useful in an unrelated field.

The intelligent science fiction authors leading the 2023 Hugo Awards thought they had enough intelligence and knowledge to know how the Chinese government would respond to the recognition of an outstanding book of fiction written by a brilliant and accomplished woman, R.F. Kuang, whose parents emigrated from China when she was four years old.

Errors that PG could identify from reading the OP:

1. Scheduling the Hugos’ big annual awards event in a location requiring lots of travel expenses that would present a financial strain for most of the members of the organization to attend: Dumb or Stupid?
2. What was the attendance like for this convention vs. previous conventions in more accessible locations?
3. Did the big shots in the Hugos organization have all their travel, food and lodging expenses paid?
4. Why choose China? Did anyone consider the political issues/threats/possible reputational damages to the organization?

From Deadline:

At its Max streaming event in April 2023, Warner Bros. Discovery confirmed a new era is coming for Harry Potter fans. The company announced a TV series based on all seven books about the boy wizard written by J.K. Rowling. See below for the most current answers to the most important questions about the project.

What is the Harry Potter TV series about?

“This new Max Original series will dive deep into each of the iconic books that fans have continued to enjoy for all of these years,” said Casey Bloys, Chairman and CEO, HBO & Max Content about the project, which he also assured fans would be “a faithful adaptation.”

. . . .

Early reports had each season of the series focusing on one book in the Harry Potter book series, which consists of seven novels, but Bloys said the project would run for “10 consecutive years,” which would seem to defy the 1 season, 1 book assertion. For those who say Fantastic Beasts could be leveraged to provide 10 seasons over 10 years, WBD brass said specifically during the announcement that FB will not be a part of the series.

Whatever the case, Bloys promised that, as the company embarks on its new Harry Potter adventure, “We do so with the full care and craft of this franchise.”

Who Is creating the Harry Potter series?

It has taken a bit, given the initial announcement was in April 2023, but in recent months Warner Bros. invited a select group of creatives in to pitch ideas for what the series could be.

Martha Hillier, Kathleen Jordan, Tom Moran and Michael Lesslie were among the original group who presented their visions to the streaming service and Warner Bros. Television, sources said. It’s an interesting mix of Brits and Americans, most of whom have some experience working with streamers and many of whom have shepherded projects in the sci-fi/fantasy space.

. . . .

Early reports had each season of the series focusing on one book in the Harry Potter book series, which consists of seven novels, but Bloys said the project would run for “10 consecutive years,” which would seem to defy the 1 season, 1 book assertion. For those who say Fantastic Beasts could be leveraged to provide 10 seasons over 10 years, WBD brass said specifically during the announcement that FB will not be a part of the series.

Whatever the case, Bloys promised that, as the company embarks on its new Harry Potter adventure, “We do so with the full care and craft of this franchise.”

Who Is creating the Harry Potter series?

It has taken a bit, given the initial announcement was in April 2023, but in recent months Warner Bros. invited a select group of creatives in to pitch ideas for what the series could be.

Martha Hillier, Kathleen Jordan, Tom Moran and Michael Lesslie were among the original group who presented their visions to the streaming service and Warner Bros. Television, sources said. It’s an interesting mix of Brits and Americans, most of whom have some experience working with streamers and many of whom have shepherded projects in the sci-fi/fantasy space.

Link to the rest at Deadline

From Publishers Weekly:

Two leaders of Worldcon Intellectual Property (WIP), the nonprofit that holds the service marks of the World Science Fiction Society, have reportedly stepped down from their posts following accusations of censorship in the voting process for the 2023 Hugo Awards.

In a January 30 statement, WIP officials announced that director Dave McCarty and board chair Kevin Standlee have both resigned from their positions. McCarty was also censured for “public comments that have led to harm of the goodwill and value of our marks and for actions of the Hugo Administration Committee of the Chengdu Worldcon that he presided over.” Standlee was “reprimanded” for “public comments that mistakenly led people to believe that we are not servicing our marks.”

In addition, WIP announced that two others, Chen Shi and Ben Yalow, were also censured for “actions of the Hugo Administration Committee of the Chengdu Worldcon [they] presided over.” The statement adds that there “may be other actions taken or to be taken that are not in this announcement.” Yalow, who co-chaired the Chengdu Worldcon with Shi, is no longer listed on the 2024 Glasgow Worldcon committee and staff page.

“WIP takes very seriously the recent complaints about the 2023 Hugo Award process,” the statement reads, “and complaints about comments made by persons holding official positions in WIP.”

The Hugo Awards are the most prestigious honors in the sci-fi/fantasy community. The awards, administered by the World Science Fiction Society, are awarded annually at the group’s global convention, Worldcon. Last year’s Worldcon was held for the first time in China, in Chengdu.

The resignations and disciplinary actions come after the nomination data for the 2023 awards was made public on January 20 and it was revealed that certain authors and books—including R.F. Kuang’s hit novel Babel—had been inexplicably deemed “not eligible” for the Hugo. Kuang is Chinese American, and her work draws heavily from Chinese culture and history. Many fans and authors have speculated that state censorship—or self-censorship under the state’s watch—was the reason for the opaque ineligibility rulings by the Chengdu–based committee.

Also deemed ineligible were Chinese Canadian author Xiran Jay Zhao, whose book Iron Widow is about China’s only female emperor, and writer Paul Weimer, who expressed concerns in 2021 over holding Worldcon 2023 in Chengdu.

In response to the outcry, McCarty took to Facebook on January 20 and attempted (sometimes curtly) to address hundreds of comments from angered authors, including Neil Gaiman and Silvia Moreno-Garcia. An episode of Netflix’s TV series The Sandman, based on Gaiman’s comic series, was also declared ineligible.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From The Washington Post:

People sometimes say science fiction basks in optimism for a better future, while fantasy is about nostalgia for an imaginary past. But this year’s most notable fantasy books worked to uncover historical crimes, while science fiction warned of coming evils.

The good news? The best sci-fi and fantasy books of 2023 will give you hope and strength in the toughest times.

‘The Deep Sky,’ by Yume Kitasei

This was a year of strong debuts, but Kitasei’s murder mystery in space is a mind-blowing performance even by those standards. “The Deep Sky” makes even familiar space adventure tropes brand new, including desperate maneuvers, an unreliable A.I., a malfunctioning virtual-reality system and a multinational crew whose members have secret agendas of their own. But what sticks with me is Kitasei’s thoughtful exploration of friendship, identity and a fractured mother-daughter relationship. (Book World review.)

‘Silver Nitrate,’ by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Movies enchant in more ways than one in this chilling tale of film nerds colliding with occultists who seek a special film with arcane powers. Moreno-Garcia reinvents herself from book to book, which makes each a unique treat, but this time around her protagonists are among her most compelling. “Silver Nitrate” hits especially hard when it explores colorism in both mysticism and Mexican society, and the need to survive by creating your own private language. (Book World review.)

‘Rouge,’ by Mona Awad

Belle’s snow-white mother dies, leaving her half-Egyptian daughter with a house full of weird beauty products and a connection to an even weirder beauty cult. “Rouge” could have been a polemic against the beauty-industrial complex, but instead it delves fearlessly into trauma, internalized self-loathing and the dangers of falling for a movie star — in this case, one who visits through a magic mirror. At the core of it all, Awad finds an astonishing tenderness. (Book World review.)

‘White Cat, Black Dog,’ by Kelly Link

When present-day writers retell old fairy tales, it can come across as mere annotation, but Link’s revamped classics feel brand new. Her characters navigate bizarre situations with arbitrary rules, but also find love and kindness in the oddest places. There’s a literal trip to hell and — much worse — a never-ending layover caused by a series of canceled flights. Plus a post-apocalyptic traveling band. By turns unsettling and delightful, “White Cat, Black Dog” captures the essential poetry at the heart of fables. (Book World review.)

‘The Water Outlaws,’ by S.L. Huang

Speaking of retellings of classics, Huang’s epic saga of martial arts and insurrection is inspired by the seminal Chinese novel “Water Margin.” Huang writes action that feels both kinetic and spiritual. And her community of rebel bandits strikes up a fascinating debate about how to save a country from itself. Tearing myself away from this addictive book was one of the hardest things I’ve done lately. (Book World review.

‘The Great Transition,’ by Nick Fuller Googins

In a year full of climate stories, Googins’s quasi-thriller was among the most emotionally compelling and humane. In the near future, teenage Emi attends the commemoration of the anniversary of our victory over climate change, but there’s a terrorist attack and her mother goes missing. Emi soon discovers that the fight to save the planet hasn’t really ended. Through Emi’s parents, Googins shows the different ways people process trauma and just how much the fragile salvation of our world cost them. (Book World review.)

‘Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon,’ by Wole Talabi

I’ve been describing “Obalufon” as a thrilling heist novel with a deep, crunchy backstory. Shigidi is a minor god of nightmares who used to work for the hyper-capitalist Orisha Spirit Company but now freelances with his succubus lover, Nneoma. Shigidi and Nneoma have history, in both senses of the word, and their romance is intertwined with the political intrigues of gods and mystics. An action-packed romp coupled with a thorny love story: Who could ask for more? (Book World review.)

‘Godkiller,’ by Hannah Kaner

In “Godkiller,” gods have been outlawed, and Kissen exterminates them for a living — until she finds one she can’t kill. It’s a setup for a classic fantasy road trip, with a motley group and plenty of wild action. But it’s also a vehicle for exploring the different meanings of divinity and why people need something to believe in. (Book World review.)

Link to the rest at The Washington Post

From Jim Wilbourne:

Have you ever wondered: what’s the real DNA of contemporary Fantasy and Science Fiction? What do they share, and where do they diverge? And what about their future?

Hey guys, it’s Jim Wilbourne, author of The Continua Chronicles, and today we’re discussing the beginnings and current state of The Contemporary Era of Fantasy.

Like the Modern Era before it, the Contemporary Era’s literature received an exponential boost through the development of new technologies. The Information age gave us magazines, radio, television, computers, stronger distribution channels, and the internet. These mediums amplified the work that began with the development of the printing press in the 16th century.

CONTEMPORARY FANTASY’S ORIGINS

J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were two of the most influential writers of the 20th century, and their works have had a lasting impact on the world of storytelling.

Tolkien is best known for his epic fantasy series The Lord of the Rings. The story follows a group of hobbits as they embark on a quest to destroy a powerful magical artifact known as the One Ring. The series is notable for its complex world-building and vivid depiction of mythical creatures and landscapes.

Tolkien’s prose takes an elevated tone. This, combined with the many poems and songs throughout his stories about Middle Earth take a page from the epic poetry passed down from ancient times. His stories also utilize elements of fairy tales—such as enchanted objects and relatively simple themes—and we can see the use of the fish-out-water trope from Gulliver’s Travels.

Taking all of these elements and expanding them to create a world that feels large and deep with history has created the modern epic fantasy genre that we know today, which is why we often credit Tolkien as being the grandfather of contemporary fantasy. To this day, his worldbuilding and staying power is nearly unrivaled.

C. S. Lewis, on the other hand, is best known for his series of fantasy novels known as The Chronicles of Narnia. The books follow a group of children who are transported to the magical world of Narnia, where they encounter talking animals and other fantastical creatures.

Like the ancient myths and biblical stories, Lewis uses talking animals and an afterlife. Just like Tolkien, The Chronicles of Narnia draws on our rich tradition of fairy tales, and, though Lewis himself didn’t like to see it this way, the books lean heavily on allegorical elements like The Little Prince.

Tolkien and Lewis were members of an informal writing club called the Inklings, and were close friends, sharing their literary ideas. Both authors were pioneers of contemporary fantasy, and their works helped establish many of the conventions and tropes of the genre. Both authors were passionate about the power of the human imagination, and both inspired many other writers to push the boundaries of storytelling.

Their influence can be seen in other contemporary landmark tales such as The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling, The Dark Tower series by Stephen King, and the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman.

CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE FICTION’S ORIGINS

After the Modern Period, Science Fiction rose to become one of the most important forms of fantasy stories. As the world continued to modernize, and what was once a fantastical pipedream slowly became reality, Science Fiction has risen to serve many of the same purposes that traditional fantasy served before it.

Isaac Asimov is best known for the Foundation series and the Robot collection. His stories often explore the social and philosophical implications of scientific and technological advances. He’s credited with coining the term “robotics” and his works have helped to popularize the idea of artificial intelligence and robots.

Arthur C. Clarke is another towering figure in the world of science fiction. He is best known for his novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey, exploring the possibilities of space exploration, and helping launch the modern space opera sub-genre.

Robert A. Heinlein is best known for Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers. His stories often explore the social and political implications of scientific and technological advances. He is considered one of the pioneers of the “hard” science fiction sub-genre.

Together, these authors helped give rise to many of the stories we love today. It might be hard to imagine Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson or Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan without Asimov, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card or Dune by Frank Herbert without Clarke, The Martian by Andy Weir or Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie without Heinlein.

THE STATE OF FANTASY STORIES

Today, fantasy and science fiction are both well-developed genres and are as popular as they were in ancient times. Because of the development of technology, filmmaking, and the internet, fantasy stories have taken a strong leap into popular culture in ways that haven’t been seen since its dominance prior to the modern era.

New subgenres have emerged like urban, dark, and grimdark fantasy. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer and The Magicians by Lev Grossman helped popularize Urban Fantasy. Coraline by Neil Gaiman and The Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin helped launch dark and grimdark fantasies as common forms of the fantasy tradition.

There’s also a growing trend of diverse voices appearing in fantasy, splitting away from the more traditional and well-worn paths walked over the past several centuries. These fantasy tales explore marginalized communities and feature cultures and myths from societies that haven’t been explored to a great extent, especially in the western canon.

And, after splitting off into a subgenre so popular that it’s often considered its own genre, Science Fiction often finds itself reunited with Fantasy in blended forms such as The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin, and, of course, George Lucas’s Star Wars.

DC, Marvel, and other comic publishers emerged at the end of the Modern period and grew throughout the Contemporary era. And though the popularity of comics declined during late 20th century, Marvel and DC managed to survive, and their science fiction and fantasy characters are some of the most popular fantasy icons in the early 21st century, further popularizing the blending of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

In the 1980s, Video Games began their rise to popularity and is now one of the biggest forms of entertainment in the world. The Legend of Zelda, Pokemon, Final Fantasy, Halo, Mass Effect, The Elder Scrolls and even adaptations such as Star Wars, The Witcher, and The Matrix have been turned into beloved fantasy and science fiction interactive experiences.

Additionally, there has been a meteoric rise in independently published fantasy novels and comics in the 21st century, further widening the potential for both popular and underserved niches in fantasy. Where there was once a much smaller bottleneck to publication, gatekept by large corporations who controlled the distribution of stories to the market, the internet—the Contemporary era’s innovation on the printing press—has afforded many more storytellers a chance to make their mark on the fantasy genre.

The future of fantasy storytelling is wide open.

I expect to see new ideas we haven’t yet explored.

I look forward to diving into worlds that have yet to penetrate popular culture.

And I also expect to see the talents of writers, programmers, visual artists, narrators, musicians, and audio engineers to mix and merge, forging new experiences that have yet to be realized.

Built on the foundations of ancient myths, epic poems, and fairy tales, fantasy stories have a long history in human culture, and as long as we continue to enjoy exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new lives and new civilizations, boldly reading, watching, and playing in realms where no man has gone before, the fantasy genre will persist.

Link to the rest at Jim Wilbourne

From The Economist:

In “The Avengers” (2012) Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), a spy, described heroes as “an old-fashioned notion”. Certainly the film’s characters, including Captain America and Iron Man, were not novel, first appearing in comic books published in the mid-20th century. But if the idea was old, the excitement around superheroes had been renewed. “The Avengers” became the first Marvel movie to make more than $1bn at the global box office.

When Fury’s words were used in the trailer for “The Marvels” (2023, pictured), however, they took on a different tone. Heroes may seem antiquated, he argued, but “the world can still use them”. If it was an attempt to convince the viewer, it did not work. Released in November, “The Marvels”, the 33rd instalment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), made around $200m at the box office. It became the poorest-performing MCU film to date, and will probably lose money.

Nor was “The Marvels” a one-off disappointment. “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” also underperformed. According to CinemaScore, an audience-rating benchmark, of the past eight MCU films, five have scored B+ or worse (see chart). Fans complain of dull characters, sloppy writing and amateurish special effects.

Marvel productions on the small screen have not fared much better. Recent MCU television series on Disney+, including “Secret Invasion”, about Fury’s character, have been poorly reviewed and, estimates suggest, little watched. It does not bode well for the shows due to be released in the coming months.

The decline is surprising: for a long time, the Marvel brand seemed invincible. Disney bought the comic-book company in 2009 and it became a prized asset. The 23 movies released between 2008 and 2019 grossed almost $23bn in total, making Marvel the largest film franchise in history.

Marvel kept standards high even as it increased production. The company released 2.75 films, on average, in 2016-19, up from 1.2 in 2008-13. Of those 23 movies, only one ranked lower than A- on CinemaScore. Three films received an A+, awarded to fewer than 100 of over 4,000 films measured since 1979. “Black Panther” (2018) even became the first comic-book adaptation to be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.

Marvel pioneered an innovative “cinematic universe” model, in which plotlines and characters were shared across films. As Marvel’s universe grew, its competitors tried, and failed, to emulate its success. dc Comics—which owns Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman—set up, and recently scrapped, its “Extended Universe”. Warner Bros has turned the Harry Potter franchise into a “Wizarding World”. Universal twice tried to launch a “Dark Universe” of monsters such as Dracula and the Mummy, but both attempts failed after a single release. Efforts to build out Robin Hood and his merry men (Lionsgate), Power Rangers (also Lionsgate) and King Arthur and his round table (Warner Bros) all faltered.

By the early 2020s the MCU seemed set for further dominance. In 2019 Disney acquired 20th Century Fox, which held the rights to characters including the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. The launch of Disney+ that year made it easier for fans to keep up with the ever-expanding MCU and enabled the franchise to tell new stories in a serialised format. But instead of developing its position in pop culture, Marvel has struggled creatively and financially.

Disney insiders suggest several causes for the slump. One is to do with personnel. Several trusted writers and directors have moved on. Many of the actors playing the most popular superheroes left the MCU after “Avengers: Endgame” in 2019, and Chadwick Boseman, the star of “Black Panther”, died in 2020. Last month Disney fired Jonathan Majors after he was found guilty of assaulting and harassing his then-girlfriend. The actor played the villain at the heart of the “Multiverse Saga”, the story which would connect the films released between 2021 and 2027.

Another reason is to do with geopolitics. The first 23 films were all released in China, the world’s largest theatrical market, but between 2020 and 2022, none was. (China did not give a clear reason why, but it was probably building up its domestic film industry.) Though this de facto ban is now over, cinematic universes are hard to understand when audiences have missed several entries. Making matters worse, Disney+ is not available in China, so fans cannot watch the tv entries.

Link to the rest at The Economist

From The Wall Street Journal:

Six decades ago, Madeleine L’Engle’s novel “A Wrinkle in Time” won the American Library Association’s prestigious Newbery Medal for the year’s “most distinguished contribution to literature for children.” Today “Wrinkle” endures as one of our best-loved and bestselling books for young people. But as the chair of the Newbery committee noted, it is “an unusual story, defying classification,” owing to L’Engle’s refusal to conform to genre expectations for young adult literature.

L’Engle’s adolescent protagonist, Meg (whose mother is a molecular biologist and cooks stew on her Bunsen burner), embarks on an interplanetary mission through a fourth dimension to rescue her father, a scientist gone missing during a secret government assignment. Meg, like L’Engle herself, is brainy, stubborn, headstrong, prone to anger at injustice and determined to do things her own way. The novel confronts dichotomies—between motherhood and career, faults and virtues, science and faith—liberating its author and readers from either/or constructs in favor of both/and.

L’Engle wrote “Wrinkle” in late 1959, at the end of the darkest decade of her life. She was 40 years old and had published five previous novels, but after moving with her husband and two children from Greenwich Village to rural Connecticut, she was seized by what she called a “violent conflict” between writing and motherhood. If she could not write her name “on the scroll of fame,” L’Engle said in her journal, then her life had no meaning.

Compounding her existential crisis were Cold War fears that “madmen may blow our world to a radioactive wasteland” through nuclear war. A wide slab of granite at the peak of nearby Mohawk Mountain became a kind of altar; she made pilgrimages there after dark to “look up at the stars, at the wild beauty of the night sky, and feel surrounded by the presence of the Maker—the Great Storyteller.”

In the summer of 1959, L’Engle set off on a 10-week cross-country camping trip with her husband and children. Next to her on the front seat of the family station wagon was a box of books on theoretical physics by Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg, among others—works she considered “theology,” expanding her awe of a divine hand in the wonders of the universe. It was in Arizona’s Painted Desert, amid “strange fairytale rock formations,” that she conceived her magnum opus. The landscape reminded her of “Chesley Bonestell’s pictures of alien worlds,” referring to the American illustrator whose cover art influenced midcentury science fiction—a genre of dime-store pulp marketed to men and boys. Science fiction, like science itself, was decidedly not for women and girls.

Three characters began taking shape in L’Engle’s imagination: guardian angels called Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Which and Mrs Who. (She left off the periods following the honorifics to enhance their otherworldliness.) Returning to Connecticut, she began writing a story that was a radical departure from the coming-of-age realism of her earlier novels. “A Wrinkle in Time” sees the guardian angels aiding Meg in her fight against the Dark Thing, “the shadow which darkened the beauty of the earth” and threatens to destroy entire planets.

“All through the universe it’s being fought,” Mrs Whatsit says, prompting the children to name some of the world’s best fighters, including religious figures and scientists: Jesus, Madame Curie, Louis Pasteur, Buddha. As this list suggests, L’Engle, a broadminded Christian, rejected worldviews that pitted faith against science. This made the novel controversial: Some secularists considered it too religious, while a faction of evangelicals deemed it not adherent enough to Christian orthodoxy. People on both sides called its grotesque representations of evil inappropriate for children. Consequently, “Wrinkle” became one of the most challenged library books of the late 20th century.

Meg finds her father on the planet Camazotz, a place controlled by “It,” a disembodied brain physically manifesting the Dark Thing. It exerts control through chilling conformity: On Camazotz, every child on every identical lawn in front of every identical gray house bounces a ball in unison. Deviants are shunned. Meg, a self-loathing “oddball,” must reconcile her disdain for being “different” with an epiphany that she doesn’t want to be “like everybody else.”

Protecting her mind from It’s hypnotic attempt to make her think and behave in lockstep, she shouts the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It tries to confuse her, agreeing that equality means “everybody exactly alike.” But Meg knows better: “‘No!’ she cried triumphantly. ‘Like and equal are not the same thing at all!’”

“Wrinkle” is L’Engle’s declaration of independence, her way of shouting down the Dark Things and reminding us, as the Medium exclaims, that “It can be overcome! It is being overcome all the time!” After she finished the manuscript, L’Engle wrote in her journal: “If I’ve ever written a book that says what I feel about God and the universe, this is it. This is my psalm of praise to life, my stand for life against death.”

Nevertheless, when her agent began sending the manuscript to publishers in 1960, it was rejected two dozen times before landing with Farrar, Straus & Co., an up-and-coming literary house with a taste for the avant-garde. An editor at Random House, without a whiff of irony, criticized “Wrinkle” for being “strange,” nonconformist, “something between an adult and juvenile novel” but not right for either.

In fact, that cross-generational appeal was among the book’s strengths at a time when change was in the air. “Wrinkle” was published in 1962 and won the Newbery in 1963, the same year that Martin Luther King, Jr. led the March on Washington (and) the Soviet Union sent the first woman into space.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

PG realized that he hadn’t read this lovely book for a long time and needed to go back to it.

From The Wall Street Journal:

The first sentence of “Fahrenheit 451” is one of literature’s great opening lines: “It was a pleasure to burn.” In the 1953 novel, now a modern classic, author Ray Bradbury went on to describe a future in which books are banned and firemen burn them. So it comes as a mild surprise to read Bradbury’s letter from a dozen years earlier: “I just rifled my files and took one million words out and burned them up.”

Bradbury wrote this sentence when he was still unknown—shortly before he sold his first story and long before the publication of books such as “The Martian Chronicles,” “The Illustrated Man” and “Dandelion Wine.” Burning his pages, Bradbury believed, was a necessary annihilation: “Most of it was inane description, no plot, no idea. It hampered me, so I destroyed it.”

Bradbury’s admission appears in an illuminating volume of correspondence that provides fresh ways to understand and appreciate the author, who died in 2012. The contents of “Remembrance”—the title is the name of a nostalgic free-verse poem by Bradbury—have been “largely unseen until now,” writes editor Jonathan R. Eller, who is Bradbury’s biographer and a co-founder of the Ray Bradbury Center in Indianapolis.

The book’s first letter, from 1937, reveals a 17-year-old with the gumption to invite the world-famous creator of Tarzan to attend a gathering of his science-fiction club: “We have often wished to have a chance to meet you and talk things over with you.” Although Edgar Rice Burroughs politely declined, the exchange shows that the young Bradbury had big ambitions.

They didn’t include a diploma after high school, however. “College ruins more writers than it makes,” Bradbury wrote in 1965, when a 17-year-old sent him a fan letter in the way he once sent one to Burroughs. “You must educate yourself at your typewriter, every day.” This autodidactic approach paid off but involved a lot of failure. “My average is one sale out of every three stories,” he wrote in 1943. He later estimated having received more than 2,000 rejections.

Early on, Bradbury swapped advice and ideas with other pulp-fiction writers, such as Charles Beaumont and Robert A. Heinlein, as well as Henry Kuttner, an influential genre writer who died in 1958 and is little known today. He was a mentor to Bradbury—“my best and most consistent teacher.”

As Bradbury rose and left behind “all those years of obscurity and editorial neglect,” he traded letters with the likes of Federico Fellini, Graham Greene and Carl Sandburg. In 1992 President George H.W. Bush, as he campaigned for re-election, sent Bradbury a thank-you note for the gift of “Yestermorrow,” a collection of essays: “I shall read it; but that must wait till my deadly debate book begins to gather dust.” In 2004 Bush’s son awarded Bradbury the National Medal of Arts at a White House ceremony.

Much of “Remembrance” reveals the grind of authorship. Bradbury aimed “to turn out at least a thousand words a day,” he wrote in 1941. His most frequent correspondent in this volume is Don Congdon, his longtime agent—a reminder that, for all of Bradbury’s artistry, he was a commercial writer in search of his next sale or a blurb for his next book. The work never ceased: “It is the time away from the typewriter that counts most; idle thoughts at idle hours.”

The letters brim with writing advice. Bradbury recommends reducing stories “down to a sharp cutting, wonderful edge.” This honing, he argues, “is one of the great arts of writing.” Several letters, spanning decades, express faith in the mysterious fruits of subconscious thought: “It hasn’t failed me yet. It’s like feeding information into one of these new-fangled calculators, then going to bed; in the morning, there, on a crisp new white sheet of paper, is the answer.”

Bradbury was a happy man who loved his wife, took joy in his four daughters and felt grateful for his success: “I am one of God’s lucky children.” He reflected on his good fortune to Russell Kirk in 1967: “The thing that drives me most often is an immense gratitude that I was given this one chance to live, to be alive the one time round in a miraculous experience that never ceases to be glorious and dismaying.”

Yet he also needed to escape from what must have been a rambunctious family life: “I have taken refuge in the garage, where I do my writing now, oblivious to wails, screams and childish ululations.” In 1954 he boasted of writing six short stories in 40 hours. Mr. Eller says in his helpful endnotes that this frenzy included “The Day It Rained Forever,” regarded as one of Bradbury’s best.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From Electric Lit:

In many ways, the world Naomi Alderman portrays in her newest novel, The Future, is not so different from our own: a few tech CEOs have possession of much of the world’s wealth; headlines in the news chronicle a litany of natural disasters incited by the climate crisis; the polarizing forces of social media are very much in play; and people try to find meaning or forms of escape in different places, some of them turning to the remaining beauty of the natural world, others to survivalist message boards where they swap strategies for how to survive any apocalypse and ruminate on religious parables that carry meaning into present day.

The difference between our reality and the fictional one Alderman creates? In The Future, the world ends. And the tech billionaires, through their use of an AI survival program and their unimaginable amount of wealth, leave everyone to suffer while they take refuge in a series of secret bunkers. 

Alderman brings the same propulsive prose and razor-sharp critique of our contemporary landscape that she did in her best-selling novel The Power to The Future, in which she skewers ills propagated by extreme wealth inequality. I had the opportunity to speak with Alderman over Zoom about the importance of community, the value of re-interpreting religious texts in present day, and what it looks like to maintain hope in times of deep crisis.

. . . .

Jacqueline Alnes: The future, not to borrow your title, is such a rich premise for a novel. On one hand, some characters find hope and identity in the future: they spend their time imagining what’s ahead for them and work or scheme to reach those goals. For others, the future is foreboding, rife with natural disasters, pandemics, and other dangers. What was it like exploring these different perceptions?

Naomi Alderman: I have worked in technology for many years and I make games, so I often have to think about the future. In order to make an app, for example, you have to not be targeting whatever the phones are today, you have to think about what’s going to be happening four or five years from now and then try to hit that moving target. Also, I’m a fairly anxious person. Some of that conversation in the book about the future comes out of my own thinking and saying to myself, okay, maybe things are not going to be terrible. Maybe there’s a chance that things are going to be alright. It’s kind of working some hope out on the page.

I have a tendency to think it’s all going to be bad, but at the same time, working in technology, I think it’s probably going to be both good and bad, just like every other historical period. I see people talking about the book now online which is extremely exciting and fun, and I see people saying, Oh, it’s a terrifyingly real possibility and it’s a reality that just feels normal to me now.

JA: I felt like reading the book made some of what tech companies do—in terms of data or privacy—feel more real. Maybe working in tech means you have more of an ongoing awareness?

NA: On Friday, the genetic data company 23andMe announced that they had been hacked and that the hackers have released the information of all Ashkenazi Jews. I registered with that company about ten years ago. I’m an Ashkenazi Jew. God knows how that’s going to play out for me over the rest of my life. I can change everything about myself, but I can’t change my DNA. 

. . . .

JA: Your book made me think about the capabilities of technology. Like the example of the CEOs controlling the weather so that we have no more floods or famine—what a great idea. But then, there’s this underbelly: if the wrong people have access to that power or if the wrong people co-opt it, it becomes a weapon. 

NA: It’s all a tool. Every single thing that we’ve made is a tool. We could decide to use it for the benefit of all other humans and instead what we’re mostly doing is making a few dudes rich and powerful in a way that is going to send them crazy.

In my previous work I’ve thought a lot about power, and it continues to be interesting to me. My conclusion is not a novel conclusion, but I think it needs to be heard every single time: It’s not about the individual person. If you make people that powerful, they will go crazy. You look at Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg challenging each other to a cage fight, you must say to yourself that they have experienced power toxicity. It is affecting their brain functioning and the kindest thing to do would be to take quite a bit of power away from them so they can return to sanity. I guess either we do that in some sort of humane way, or at some point there’s a revolution, which I don’t think will be fun for any of us to live through. 

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

PG was a big fan of Frank Herbert’s original Dune way back when he was in college.

He did a bit of research and found that Herbert was born in 1920 and grew up in rural poverty in the Pacific Northwest. He lied about his age to get a job on a local newspaper after he graduated from high school in 1938.

World War II took him to the South Pacific with the Navy until he sustained a head injury and received a medical discharge. On his return to Oregon, he got a job with another local newspaper.

He attended the University of Washington, but never graduated, and got married and divorced while working for various Washington, Oregon and San Francisco newspapers.

Herbert read science fiction for about ten years before he started writing science fiction stories. He sold stories to Startling Stories, Astounding Science Fiction and Amazing Stories.

Dune grew out of an assignment to write a travel magazine article about the Oregon Dunes, where a coastal mountain range is home to forty miles of temperate rain forests that receive from 80 to 200 inches of rain per year. The forests blend with sand dunes as high as 500 feet along the coast of the Pacific Ocean.

Photo Credit: Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. (2023, February 20). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Dunes_National_Recreation_Area – Original image created: 22 January 2013 by Themom51 – Own work CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED, Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported,

It took Herbert six years of researching and writing to finish Dune. Analog magazine published it in two parts comprising eight installments, “Dune World” from December 1963 and “Prophet of Dune” in 1965. Thereafter, the book was then rejected by nearly twenty book publishers.

An editor of Chilton Book Company (known mainly for its auto-repair manuals) had read the Dune serials and offered a $7,500 advance plus future royalties for the rights to publish them as a hardcover book. Herbert rewrote much of the text prior to publication.

Upon publication, Dune was a critical but not a commercial success. The royalties were not large enough to allow him to stop writing articles for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspapers. Finally, in 1965, he was finally able to spend all his time writing books.

Herbert hoped it would be seen as an “environmental awareness handbook” and said the title was meant to “echo the sound of ‘doom'”.

From The Literary Hub:

In 2009 I was working with the prison book program in Asheville, North Carolina when I got a request for shapeshifting. I was shocked and thought it was funny, until I came to realize esoteric interests like this are common with incarcerated people.

Incarceration removes people from friends and family. Most are unsure of when they will be released, and inside prisons people aren’t supposed to touch each other, talk in private or share belongings. Perhaps this is why literature on magic, fantasy and esoteric ideas like alchemy and shapeshifting are so popular with incarcerated people.

When deprived of human intimacy and other avenues for creating meaning out of life, escapist thought provides perhaps a necessary release, without which a potentially crushing realism would extinguish all hope and make continued living near impossible. Many incarcerated people, potentially with decades of time to do ahead of them, escape through ideas.

Which is why it’s especially cruel that U.S. prisons ban magical literature. As PEN America’s new report Reading Between the Bars shows, books banned in prisons by some states dwarf all other book censorship in school and public libraries. Prison censorship robs those behind bars of everything from exercise and health to art and even yoga, often for reasons that strain credulity.

The strangest category of bans however, are the ones on magical and fantastical literature.

Looking through the lists of titles prison authorities have gone to the trouble of prohibiting people from reading you find Invisibility: Mastering the Art of Vanishing and Magic: An Occult Primer in Louisiana, Practical Mental Magic in Connecticut, all intriguingly for “safety and security reasons.” The Clavis or Key to the Magic of Solomon in Arizona, Maskim Hul Babylonian Magick in California. Nearly every state that has a list of banned titles contains books on magic.

Do carceral authorities believe that magic is real?

Courts affirm that magical thinking is dangerous. For example, the seventh circuit court upheld a ban on the Dungeons and Dragons role playing game for incarcerated people because prison authorities argued that such “fantasy role playing” creates “competitive hostility, violence, addictive escape behaviors, and possible gambling.”

A particularly strange example of banning magic can be seen on Louisiana’s censored list.

Fantasy Artist’s Pocket Reference contains explanations of traditional nonhuman beings like elves, fairies and the like. It also features drawings of these beings and some guidance on how to draw them using traditional or computer based art. The explanation for this book’s censorship on Louisiana’s banned list reads, “Sectarian content (promotion of Wicca) based on the connection of this type of literature and the murder of Capt. Knapps.” Captain Knapps was a corrections officer in the once plantation now prison, Angola in Louisiana. Knapps was killed in 1999 during an uprising that the New York Times attributed to the successful negotiation of other incarcerated people for their deportation to Cuba at a different facility in Louisiana prior that year. It is unclear how this incident is linked in the minds of the mailroom staff with Wicca or this book—which is a broad fantasy text and not Wiccan per se. (Prison mailrooms are where censorship decisions are—at least initially—made).

As confused as this example is, what is clear is that these seemingly disparate links are understood by others within the Louisiana Department of Corrections since Captain Knapps’ death continues to be cited as rationale for why fantasy books are not allowed.

Is the banning of fantastical literature in prisons just carceral paranoia—or it is indicative of a larger cultural attitude that simultaneously denigrates and fears imagination? After all, prisons are part of U.S. culture which, despite a thriving culture industry that trafficks in magic and fantasy, nonetheless degrades it as lesser than realism. We see this most clearly in the literary designation of high literature as realist fiction and genre fiction like science fiction, Afrofuturism, magical realism as not as serious.

Magic’s status as deception and unreality is a relatively recent invention. Like the prison itself, it is a reform of older conceptions. In Chaucer’s time and place, ‘magic’ was a field of study. For example, in The Canterbury Tales, written in 1392, he writes, “He kepte his pacient a ful greet deel/ In houres, by his magyk natureel” when speaking about a doctor whose knowledge of plants was medicinal. Magic was connected to knowledge in Chaucer’s mind because of its connection with the Neoplatonic tradition, which acknowledged the limits of human knowledge. The known and the unknown were in a kind of relationship.

However, the Oxford English Dictionary notes, “Subsequently, with the spread of rationalistic and scientific explanations of the natural world in the West, the status of magic has declined.” Beginning with OED entries from the 1600s, “magic” becomes a term to designate manipulation of an evil kind.

At this time in Europe and its settler colonies, ‘magic’ became applied to a huge variety of practices increasingly seen as pernicious, from healing with herbs to rituals associated with nature spirit figures, like the Green Man and fairies, to astrology and divination. The diverse practices popularly labeled ‘magical’ were lumped together only through their association with intentional deception, superstition and error.

Writers like Ursula Le Guin have gone to great lengths to contest the supposedly firm divide between magic and reality. She argues that imagination is eminently practical and necessary:

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.

For Le Guin, rejecting imagination is the ultimate collapse of the human social project.

Joan Didion’s conception of magical thinking as escapism is not far from this. The imagination that allows us mental respite from trauma is a bedfellow to the imagination that envisions our world unmoored to current conditions. There are so many issues that demand wild dreams to be addressed in more than shallow and inadequate ways.

It’s much simpler and less disruptive, of course, to deny dreams as unrealistic and to assert their danger. Imagination’s potential for disrupting systems already in place is clear. Those that cite this danger as a reason to foreclose imagination may even admit current systems imperfections yet, necessity. This may be the perspective of prison censorship of magical literature—commonly banned under the justification that these ideas are a “threat to security.”

Incarcerated readers say the censorship they experience oppresses their thoughts and intellectual freedoms. Leo Cardez says, “They [books] are how we escape, we cope, we learn, we grow…for many (too many) it is our sole companion.” Jason Centrone, incarcerated in Oregon, expresses exasperation with the mentality that sees magical thinking as threatening: “Or, lo! The material is riddled with survival skills, martial art maneuvers, knot-tying, tips on how to disappear—like this.”

Link to the rest at The Literary Hub