I’m back from the chilling void with my usual ramblings in tow.
I have been thinking about fantasy lately, that broad and elusive genre. As some might have guessed by my previous newsletters or general demeanour, I am what some may call a nerd.
I enjoy things.
But an enjoyment I lost many moons ago, was my love of fantasy. I loved swords and spells and tales of heroes and…
It goes on.
That affair withered over time, possibly due to bouts of depression years long or perhaps simply a kind of fatigue. But I don’t like that. That’s an unsatisfying end, its a shame. I reject it.
That’s all fine and dandy, a rejection of how things stand currently, however it leaves me trying to relearn a genre with phantom familiarity. I have changed and my tastes have altered, but fantasy remains a daunting and multi-faceted beast from my youth and further back.
So I did what I did years ago, I started to read and learn and see what fantasy had to offer to me. And you know what?
It was great. Is great. My journey through these fields has not yet concluded. But I have reintroduced myself to magic, to monsters, not just in the abstract world of writing but in reading too. Prose has been something of an embarrassing Achilles’ Heel, due to how (comparatively) slow I read. But giving myself space to parse out these worlds of lore has been very rewarding.
As of writing I have read in this journey:
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle.
Neverwhere and American Gods by Neil Gaiman.
Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney.
A rather pathetic dent in the mountain of fantasy and near-fantasy books I have accrued, which includes (but is not limited to) all of His Dark Materials, Once and Future King, Earthsea and a smattering of Discworld books.
To supplement my admittedly glacial reading pace, I have been a frequent viewer of the channel: Strictly Fantasy. A channel which has these really well hewn essays and character studies on various fantasy settings, one topic close to my heart are the Legacy of Kain videos. A game from my youth which I could not complete due to incompetence but was enraptured by.
Specifically this scene
It is here where I must add a realisation that…
Well it didn’t dawn on me, but rather grew and became obvious on the vine one day.
That famous Arthur C. Clarke quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, its a skeleton key. Once science fiction reaches a certain threshold, is “sufficiently advanced”… it might as well be fantasy.
A TARDIS is as much a piece of magic as it is technology.
Or the Incal.
Or a Hyperdrive.
Especially a Warp Drive from a certain grim dark reality.
This broader sense of the fantastical didn’t, as I’d initially feared, lessen the genre of fantasy but it made everything else sweeter.
Because magic could lurk in anything.
With that…
I’d like to say,
Thank You For Reading.