  Fantasy
This week: Way Out There Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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Fantasy mirrors desire. Imagination reshapes it.
-Mason Cooley
All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
-Carl Jung
All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.
-Max Beerbohm |
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Way out there
How far is too far?
It's an axiom that stories need at least one character to whom the reader can relate. Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was an ordinary human thrust into weirdness; Watson from the Sherlock Holmes stories was the one who could explain stuff to the audience; and it's even sometimes a nonhuman that still has humanlike qualities, like Bilbo Baggins from The Hobbit.
But enough about Martin Freeman. The point is, the Interlocutor in his or her various forms is a staple of fantasy and science fiction - that is, it's almost ubiquitous, but it's not cliché.
I wonder, though, about the challenges of writing something set on another world, another dimension, in space, in time, whatever, without someone like The Doctor's Companion from Doctor Who. Showing something truly alien, truly outside of our experience, without being able to relate it to things we know, like "That's taller than the Burj Dubai!" or "This planet has more severe weather than Earth" or whatever.
I'm sure it's been done, though examples escape my memory right now. I'm pretty sure Asimov tried his hand at it.
The trick, I would think, besides trying to convey something outside our experiences without relating it to our experience, would be to keep the reader engaged. It's a bit like describing color to someone blind from birth, I'd suppose, only you have to hold the audience's attention for far longer.
I've tried to write fantasy settings as if from the point of view of someone who was there, and not someone from Earth describing it to someone from Earth. It's not easy, but it's worth the effort, if only as an exercise in descriptive prose.
So give it a try next time you're writing something not of this Earth. You may learn things that will surprise you. |
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Fantasy: October 24, 2012 Issue [#5323]
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