Travelling Fantasy Roundtable : Part 20 : Being Human

Part  20 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, our roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature, is in two parts at Valjeanne Jeffer's tumblr. This month we're discussing fantasy and being human.

Travelling Fantasy Roundtable : Part 19 : Evil and the Fantastic

Part 19 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, our roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature, is up at Warren Rochelle's blog. This month we're discussing evil and the fantastic.

Travelling Fantasy Roundtable : Part 18 : Mythical Creatures

Welcome to Part 18 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, a roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature! Today, Sylvia Kelso and Warren Rochelle join me in discussing mythical creatures.

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Andrea K Höst

What makes a mythical creature?

Let me tell you about the darati.

Twice the height of a tall man, but very narrow, they dwell in birch forests: their pale mottled skin providing a natural camouflage, while the trunks offer them support and shield them from winds which might knock them from their feet. Darati are patient hunters. They stand, and they wait, usually near water sources, or bushes heavy with edible berries. When prey comes within reach, they exhale a thin mist which disorients and makes drowsy. There is no future for any who fall asleep at the feet of a darati.

Now, let me tell you about dragons.

Your reaction to that second sentence is the difference between fantasy and myth. Darati are not mythical creatures, but rather fantastical ones. They have no weight, and the word 'darati' is as thin a conjuring as the creature I spent the last few minutes creating. No creature I will ever invent could hope to bring with it the tidal wave of association, the almost contemptuous familiarity, the endless flood of possibility in the statement: Here be dragons.

Beautiful, dangerous, villainous, munificent, terrible, transformative. Are dragons rivers, or greed or dinosaurs? Yes, they are. Dragons are thousand stories, old and new. A mental image imprinted into the common id. A different image, perhaps, particularly as you move from one culture to the next, but a word with an almost unrivalled strength. It was not so long ago that dragons were as real as elephants.

Here be dragons. A phrase used on maps. A deliberate conjury not of the unknown, but of myth. Here, the mapmaker suggests, might exist those things that we have all heard of, but are not here, within the bounds of this map. Beyond the borders of the known world live not unspecified ideas of monsters, but all the ones the stories have told us are out there. This outside area is where the mermaids, the rocs, the pegasi enjoyed something resembling existence. The darati never lived there.

The choice to use a mythical creature in a fantasy is a double-edged sword. There is an immense, immediate emotional and intellectual reaction to the word – the idea – of dragon. But this reaction can range from "I love dragon stories!" to "Not another dragon story". Readers will bring their pre-established idea of what a dragon is to the story, and compare your story to all the other stories about dragons, and ask if you're doing anything new – or be disappointed when Your dragon is not Their dragon.  And your dragon will never quite be 'yours' either, because it started from a base template of myth built up by your own experience of dragon stories.

There are, of course, more obscure mythical creatures. I came across a new one to me when researching the Food in Fantasy topic, and discovered the Cinnamon Bird. More obscure mythical creatures will perform their conjury only for the select few who have heard of them, but even so they have a certain something extra. So why use the darati? Why invent from scratch creatures whose name performs no conjury, whose existence lacks the resonance and power of myth?

Perhaps simply because all myths had a beginning, a first time that tale was told. There's always room for another story.

Andrea K Höst was born in Sweden but raised in Australia. She writes fantasy and science fantasy, and enjoys creating stories which give her female characters something more to do than wait for rescue.

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Sylvia Kelso

“Mythical” in this title cd mean, firstly, non-existent, including invented beasts, or secondly, beasts out of myth and legend, non-existent or not.

A fantasy writer inventing a beast naturally asks, Can I make this seem original? A fantasy writer looking to a legendary beast – a dragon, a unicorn - *knows* that s/he faces the answer given by one of Barbara Hambly’s vampires, when asked if they had ever tried to use other ways of getting blood: “Everything has been tried.”

And with the famous mythical beasts everything HAS been tried. Yet, perversely, if you do use/recycle one, yours will never be *quite* the same as every other version. If only because your writing style, hopefully in a good sense, is not like anyone else’s.

Way back in the last century, before I ever wrote anything that cd. be labeled fantasy, I did decide to write what I called a fairytale. It had only two parameters: It started with “once upon a time” and it had a monster/weird thing per chapter. At the time my brain was stuffed with enthusiastic research into antiquity and the second parameter was a cake-walk. Said “monsters” included an Assyrian hawk-headed god, a chimera, of sorts, a serpent oracle, a couple of Gilgamesh Scorpion Men, and, among others – a unicorn.

I did not actually think,

how can I make this unicorn original? Nor did I rehearse all the versions I knew, right down from James V of Scotland’s famous “Fenced Unicorn” tapestry that I finally saw in Stirling Castle, a building replete with Scotland’s own heraldic beast. I didn’t even recall the airiest and most delicate of the modern sugar and good-magic incarnations, in Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. Mine just came through the avenues of the story – written in longhand, omg – and – um – there it was.

At this point, Our Hero and his Faithful Sidekick (I was also very traditional about questers in those days) had passed the set-up stage, weathered their early tests and were facing Serious Danger Number One – Lost in Desert During Murderous Pursuit. Which had modulated to Lost in Desert in a Sand-storm. Anddd:

Perhaps it was the thirst that made them heedless when the wind’s regular onslaught broke into veering gusts; and perhaps it was the thirst that hid from them the way the sand now crunched thin and hard under their feet; certainly it was the thirst, locking them into a stupor of endurance, which concealed Sweetwater’s true avenger until it was too late.

Two sand flurries had clashed, an eddy recoiling upon itself, and it came upon them through the curtain, so all they saw was a flash of solider, linearly moving white; all they heard was the crr-unch crr-unch of approaching hooves matched to the grunts of a galloping beast. Then something hit the mare’s right side with the impact of a new-fired cannonball.

The shock bowled her right off her legs and over the prince at her left shoulder, down in the sand beyond him with a great horse scream of pain and shock and fright. The overset prince caught one flash of milk-grey belly and thrashing legs as they arced over him; a sector of open sand; then at right angles to the rest a pair of white, driving hocks that plunged like a fired bow and were gone.

He was rolling in the sand, a snapped spear haft vertical at his elbow, Ervan and the bay a mist shadow beyond his feet. Beside him, all her side a flaring scarlet shield of blood, the mare was trying to get up. And beyond her the attacker had wheeled to complete the kill.

Ripples of silver hide glistened through the sand murk, slender steel muscles played above cloven yellow hooves. It had a horse’s head but a goat’s beard, a pure gold eye, cold and impassive as a surgeon’s, and from the silver forehead a length of gleaming, whorled tortoise-shell was levelled like a spear. The gleam was a lacquer of fresh blood. The goat’s chin tucked under as it trained its weapon on the fallen mare, the delicate hocks were flexing like tempered steel.

The prince struggled onto an elbow. As he did so he saw the pain and terror in his mare’s eyes, and suddenly the sand mist went a bloody, mottled red. His hand shot to the snapped spear. He wrenched it out and floundered up, yelling, “Come on!”

Though it came out as a mere cough the movement sufficed. The unicorn’s eye flicked. Quick as a great cat it changed aim in mid-career, leapt the mare with one feather-light spring and charged the prince.

He had dropped on one knee. Now he planted the other on the broken spear butt and leant it up and outward, gripping it in both hands. The blade was just above his head. He knew the haft was too short, he knew that even if he aimed true the unicorn would transfix him, and he did not care. He had forgotten all about the Quest. He knew only that his innocent mare was dying, and he meant to have her revenge.

The golden eye leapt at him, the nostril flaring like a great red rose. He heard its quick breath and somehow admired the splendid force with which its hind feet punched the sand. I shall die with honour, he thought, and dropping the spear point below the round ringed boss of the levelled horn, he trained it between the cushions of that sleek silver breast.

But suddenly a shadow sprang over him. Something flashed; there was a brazen scream, an axe-like clunk! A silver projectile hurtled past, a spray of blood drenched his face, and the swing’s impetus dropped Ervan on his knees beside the prince, yelling, “Got him! Got it! Look!”

Out in the fog the unicorn pivoted, a splendid, deadly javelin haft, rearing, beating the air with its forefeet, braying with rage and pain; and the prince saw what Ervan had got.

The horn had been lopped. Its point was gone, and the trunk played like a fountain, three or four simultaneous sprays of blood.

No, my unicorn wasn’t pretty, or in the least simpatico. I did hope it was powerfully vivid, menacing, and very definitely Elsewhere. But the creative unit, aka the Black Gang, were operating in their usual mode, right down to the lopped horn, which, like the heads of cattle I had seen dehorned back home in Australia, would spout not one but two or three jets of blood.

The BG’s nature emerged even more clearly at the Last Major Battle, a confrontation with the Scorpion Men which was going to be awesome, a heraldic swash-and-buckle, larger than life – in fact, mythical. Unfortunately, the Black Gang extrapolated the consequences of swinging a sword two-handed at a six-foot high monster while standing on an ice lake, and ye heraldry degenerated into an ice-hockey pile-up over a collapsed Rugby scrum.

The consequences were definitely catastrophic, but the actual event? Traumatic, ferocious, bloody. Yep. Mythical? Well, er – no. It seems if I do mythical, with beasts or anything else, it very definitely turns out nearly all my own.

Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia, and writes fantasy and SF set mostly in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some stories in Australian and US anthologies. Her latest short story, “The Honor of the Ferrocarril” appeared in Gears and Levers 3 from Skywarrior Books, and “Spring in Geneva,” a novella riff on Frankenstein, is projected to appear from Aqueduct Press in October 2013.

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Warren Rochelle

Necessary Monsters

According to Jorge Luis Borges, “…there is something in the image of the dragon that is congenial to man’s imagination, and thus the dragon arises in many latitudes and ages. It is, one might say, a necessary monster …” (The Book of Imaginary Beings xii). It is what these monsters, the mythical beasts that populate the wild countries of the fantastic, might be necessary for that I want to consider briefly here. What some of the parts do they play in the tales we read (and write) of these countries—as necessary monsters are they symbol, metaphor? Archetypes of the monstrous, evil—or rather something more amoral, wildness, the uncontrolled?

For Le Guin, the answer as to what her dragons are necessary for might be, to all of these questions, yes, more or less. In a previous essay, “The Emersonian Choice: Connections between Dragons and Humans in Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle (Extrapolation 47.3, 417-426), I have discussed this at some length. Here, briefly, dragons and humans were once “all one people, one race, winging and speaking the True Language.” Some became more in “love with flight and wildness” and “Others of the dragon-people came to care little for flight, but gathered up treasure, wealth, things made, things learned …” (Le Guin, Tehanu 12). They become two people. Dragons choose to be; we chose to make. Dragons choose to be Nature; we choose to be active in Nature—and learning this, for both dragons and humans in Earthsea, becomes an essential act—for humans of being fully human.

Tolkien writes of the necessity of monsters in a different way in his famous essay, “Beowulf: The Monsters and The Critics.” Originally a lecture, he took on the critics who wanted to downplay the “fantastical elements” in the poem. He argued, instead, they were the key to the narrative, and the poem should studied as a work of art. In other words, Beowulf needs his monsters, his mythical beasts, Grendel and his mother, and the dragon. To be the hero he wants to be, he must have monsters to fight. He is the Good; they are the Evil. He, to be a hero, must fight evil.

To return to Le Guin, she argues, in her essay, “The Child and the Shadow,” that not only must the hero, the Good Guy, have monsters, or Evil to fight, but that good must not just fight evil, it must embrace it—“this monster is an integral part of the man and cannot be denied …” (in Language of the Night 56). The dark, the monster, “The shadow is on the other side of our psyche, the dark brother of the conscious mind” (59) and if we are to live “in the real world, [we] must admit that the hateful, the evil, exist within [ourselves]” (60). We are the monsters, the mythical beasts.

But, are all mythical beasts monsters, are they all dark emblems of evil? What of unicorns? Surely these mythical beasts are not malevolent. Well, it depends on the story. According to A Natural History of the Unnatural World, unicorns are “fierce, wild and untameable by nature,” but “[they become] meek and gentle with [their] young and in the presence of human virgins” (78). In the Thurber classic, “The Unicorn in the Garden,” the title beast is indeed untamed, but it is not tearing up the garden, rather it is “cropping the roses.” It eats the lily from the man’s hand. Gentle and wild, a “mythical beast”—and perhaps there, perhaps not. Perhaps here it is more about believing that such beasts do have a reality. But the man does use the unicorn to get rid of his wife; he does lie to the psychiatrist; he is not wholly innocent, no matter how justified his actions may seem to most readers (including this one).

Which brings me back to the beginning: necessary monsters, essential metaphors, living symbols. We are both dark and light, and the dark is integral to being human as much as the light. Yes, monsters are necessary and sometimes we find them in our myths. Sometimes we find them by looking into our mirrors.

Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, "The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. His short story, “The Boy on McGee Street,” was just published in Queer Fish 2 (Pink Narcissus Press, 2012). His short fiction can be found in such journals as Icarus, Collective Fallout, North Carolina Literary Review, Romance and Beyond, Forbidden Lines, and Aboriginal Science Fiction. He is at work on a novel about a gay werewolf and his godling boyfriend and a collection of gay-themed speculative fiction, in which all the stories have happy endings, sort of.   Please see http://warrenrochelle.com

Travelling Fantasy Roundtable : Part 15 : Shades of Fantasy

Part 15 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, our roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature, is up at Deborah J Ross' blog. This month we're discussing the whole range of fantasy - from grim, to gritty. ;)

Travelling Fantasy Roundtable : Part 14 : The Difference Between Fantasy and Science Fiction

Part 14 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, our roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature, is up at Valjeanne Jeffer's blog. This month we're talking about the difference between fantasy and science fiction.

Travelling Fantasy Roundtable : Part 12 : Technology in Fantasy

Welcome to Part 12 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, a roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature!

Today, Carole McDonnell, Valjeanne Jeffers, Theresa Crater, Sylvia Kelso and Warren Rochelle join me in discussing technology in fantasy.

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Andrea K Höst

Have you ever played Civilization?

You start with a group of settlers, and you end up in space. Along the way you build an Empire, clawing your way up a hierarchical technology tree where Pottery leads to Masonry, and Bronze Working leads to Iron Working, and you don't get to skip a step. You also never go backwards, never have your Great Library burn down, never have barbarians banding together to crush your Empire, and you never lose half your clever construction techniques.

Nor do you ever discover anti-gravity stones which allow you to construct floating cities and give every person fast, inexpensive and wide-ranging travel abilities.

I've discussed previously in my Impacts of Magic series, that it's rare to see magic used to significantly alter this hierarchical development of technology, and through technology to significantly change social and cultural development. Often magic is depicted as inimical to technology, causing more advanced examples to fail when in its presence. It is rare to the point of almost never to have a healing mage show up and start teaching non-mages that there's different blood types, the basics of immunology, and the importance of sterilisation.

One series which does seem to marry technology to magic is Terry Pratchett's Discworld - from the Hex computer to cameras - but this appears to be a parallel technology tree rather than advancements in practical science.  Other worlds have magic assisting technology (see all of Final Fantasy), but the injection of magic into a world of technology, or technology into a world of magic, rarely seems to massively alter the technology tree.  We simply get "the Industrial Age + Magic" or "Feudalism + Magic" or "Faerie + Computers" without the complete revolution which that injection of other should surely bring.

Instead magic is often depicted as stultifying and backward instead of an instrument of revelation and advancement.

Magic in our world belongs to the charlatan. Rational science disproves magic, reveals its smoke and mirrors. Instead of partners in advancement, they are foes. Thus, to the fantasy author, it is only natural to make magic an enemy of scientific advancement. Science, with its need for comprehension and proof, with its systematic testing and extrapolation, should hate "explanationless" magic. Would science want a magic which can shortcut scientific testing, point out the correct result, and leave science to merely test and prove it?

Even in the genre of 'modern magic', urban fantasy, we rarely see any significant shift of this world's technology tree. We might get a werewolf working for, say, customs, sniffing out drugs, but we rarely get technology which has undergone a paradigm shift because magic is real. The closest we seem to come is a 'steampunk sensibility' (which appears to use clockwork technology with more than an element of magic about it) or the kind of World Behind story found in Gaiman's Neverwhere or Rowling's Potter books – magic is present but separate.

But perhaps the reason for the rarity of magic altering the technology tree is simply the sheer difficulty in mapping the result. How big a change would that anti-gravity stone bring about? Think of the impact on the Age of Expansion. Trade. Wars. At what point would mapping all those changes start to distract from the story and become an exercise in overwhelming worldbuilding, leaving the reader struggling to understand the rules?

Andrea K Höst was born in Sweden but raised in Australia. She writes fantasy and science fantasy, and enjoys creating stories which give her female characters something more to do than wait for rescue.

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Carole McDonnell

There are two fallacies often found in fantasies where technology is concerned.

The first is that magic is purely fantastical. Of course, some magic is. Demons, faes, and gods abound in much fantasy. But for the most part, magic is a kind of technology in its own right, an art and lore that can be learned from wizened teachers or from ancient books. For instance, in Shakespeare's Tempest, Prospero has his wonderfully researched and studied Book.

The second fallacy is that some fantasies show the same pattern of civilization as Earth's. The Bronze Age, then the Age of Steel, animal technology, the Industrial Revolution/Steam Age, the age of electricity/radio/telegraph, the computer age/DNA technology/laser technology, and the space age, etc. But this particular sequence seems wrong to me. One culture might be more knowledgable about one type of technology than another. Or, one culture might have a technology that is considered magical or superstitious or "impossible" or "godly" in another culture. Also, some aspects of a certain technology might be explored in one culture but not explored in another. In addition, certain technologies are lauded, then forgotten, then rediscovered.

For instance, the Chinese had "gun" powder for many years but the Europeans invented the gun before the Chinese did. Some western cultures used "leeches" medically in the past and have begun using them again. Some so-called "primitive" cultures understood the nature of homeopathy (like curing like) before the sophisticated Europeans discovered the cowpox/smallpox connection. Other so-called "tribal" cultures understood how to use flies and centipedes for crime detection before European civilization got the idea. (Flies are often used by some African tribes to determine whose murderous-but-newly-washed dagger still retained the victim's blood and centipedes were used in ancient Korea to check if the blood on a dagger was human or animal.)

Thus it is possible for the technology of a particular world to NOT fall into the western model.

In my novel, The Constant Tower, the characters are warriors. Some would say the setting is "Bronze Age/medieval." But one tribe has solar panels because they understand the nature of light, and the studiers of this world understand music and the effect of "unheard sounds" in ways that would be considered miraculous by some of Earth's less "civilized tribes" or might seem merely fantastical to those with a western mindset.

Carole McDonnell is a writer of ethnic fiction, speculative fiction, and Christian fiction. Her works have appeared in many anthologies and at various online sites. Her novel, Wind Follower, was published by Wildeside Books. Her forthcoming novel is called The Constant Tower. http://carolemcdonnell.blogspot.com/

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Valjeanne Jeffers

Technology and fantasy: put them together and you have a delicious synergy that's not quite SF, not quite fantasy. Some of my favorite authors have skirted the divider between fantasy and science fiction. Octavia Butler, for example, while she is almost always described as a science fiction author blended the two quite brilliantly in books like Wild Seed and Clay's Ark. Nalo Hopkinson also combined them with sheer genius in her novels Brown Girl in The Ring and Midnight Robber.

 The existence of technology in fantasy often results in the co-existence of “science and sorcery,” as Charles Saunders (creator of Sword and Soul) has described my Immortal series. In my novels you have werewolves and vampires—totally in control of their preternatural abilities and using said abilities to protect their universe; but still such characters are most often found in fantasy or horror genres. Yet, the Immortal series also has time travel, aliens... and technology to support its futuristic setting. Such as in the excerpt from Immortal book 1:

Karla walked across the wooden floor of her living area into a kitchenette. A press of her fingers on the first sphere of a triangular pod started coffee brewing.

She filled a cup with chicory, walked back into the living area and pushed the second button on her remote, activating a blue panel beside the window. Jazz music filled the apartment. Like her bedroom console the unit kept time, transmitted holographic images and played tapes. Using the third button, she opened the curtains.

Thus, the Immortal novels have been described as both fantasy and science fiction novels. Use a little science and one still can be considered a Fantasy writer. Use a bit more and you've inched into the science fiction genre. An excerpt from Colony: A Space Opera (my novel in progress) illustrates this point:

She was born 20 years after Planet Earth's decline. The same year IST began building the probes: lightweight spacecrafts that humans could live in for years, if need be, and that moved fast enough to break the sound barrier—traveling millions of miles within weeks.

In 2065, global warning had accelerated. The final stage in Earth's destruction had begun. Temperatures of 150 degrees scorched the planet. Tidal waves, monsoons and cyclones tore it apart. Those who could afford it moved underground. Food became the world's most valued resource. The rest were herded under the domes.

Scientists scurried to genetically reproduce fruits and vegetables—with horrible side effects. Money still ruled the world. But money was gradually becoming worthless. That's when the government saw the writing on the wall and created IST and the probes: spacecrafts designed for one purpose, to seek out planets capable of sustaining human life.

When a writer uses technology in fantasy, the lines between the genres are even more gloriously buried. Thus, what may be described as science fiction by one reader/writer can just as easily be characterized as fantasy by the next. The only real rule here is to make one's technology believable; credible; plausible. Although it doesn’t yet exist—in a kind kind of literary sleight of hand.

Pulling this off, just gives me one more reason to absolutely love speculative fiction...even if no will ever be able to figure out whether I'm a science fiction or fantasy writer yet. In fact, I think I prefer it that way.

Valjeanne Jeffers is a graduate of Spelman College and the author of the SF/fantasy novels: Immortal, Immortal II: The Time of Legend, Immortal III: Stealer of Souls, the steampunk novels: Immortal IV: Collision of Worlds and The Switch II: Clockwork (includes books 1 and 2), and the space opera Colony.

Valjeanne's fiction has appeared in Steamfunk!, Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology, LuneWing, PurpleMag, Genesis Science Fiction Magazine, Pembroke Magazine, Possibilties, 31 Days of Steamy Mocha, and Griots II: Sisters of the Spear (in press). She works as an editor for Mocha Memoirs Press and is also co-owner of Q and V Affordable editing.

Preview or purchase her novels at: http://www.vjeffersandqveal.com

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Theresa Crater

I recently reread Bram Stoker’s Dracula for my Speculative Fiction workshop. While my writing students bemoaned the fact that Stoker does all the things they are advised not to do in their writing, I noticed Stoker’s love of technology.

The vampire is deeply rooted in old ways. His castle sits on a precipice, difficult for attackers to penetrate—and for Harker to escape from. His house is lit by multiple candles and furnished with old and moldy brocades. He uses centuries-old methods of travel for the most part—carriages and boats—yet maintains an interest in the trains in London, in particular their schedules.

But our group of heroes out to kill the Count rely on new-fangled machinery. Mina practices her shorthand, which her fiancé Harker relies on to send her secret message—although Dracula intercepts the letter. She types manically to escape her fears, but this useful skill allows her to compile a complete history of all the group knows about vampires and the Count’s doings. Dr. Seward records his diary on the phonograph, a technology that still mystifies me.

Our intrepid group also relies on a new mental “technology”—they hypnotize Mina after she’s been bitten to gain access to the vampire’s consciousness. Mesmerism was a new-fangled idea created by Anton Mesmer in the early 19thcentury, but which gained popular fascination during the spiritualist phase of Victorian society. If not technology, it certainly is a new way of looking at human consciousness.

Stoker sprinkled his novel with the gadgets his readers were finding popping up in their world. I don’t think he intended this contrast, but it’s there.

Theresa Crater has published two contemporary fantasies, Beneath the Hallowed Hill & Under the Stone Paw and several short stories, most recently “White Moon” in Riding the Moon and “Bringing the Waters” in The Aether Age: Helios. She’s also published poetry and a baker’s dozen of literary criticism. Currently, she teaches writing and British lit in Denver. Born in North Carolina, she now lives in Colorado with her Egyptologist partner and their two cats. Visit her website at http://theresacrater.com.

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Sylvia Kelso

Technically, you should excuse the pun,“technology” is any form of applied science/knowledge, from a hand-axe to a nuclear bomb. For a fantasy writer “technology” becomes a most pressing question in the planning or first-paragraph stages of a novel or a world-building. The level of “technology” you factor in, whether by planned outline or draft-impulse, will decide almost everything about your invented societies, and quite a lot about the actual world.

A classic if rather hypothetical example is Middle-earth. Whatever Tolkien pre-invented in The Silmarilion, the pre-Industrial nature of Middle-earth was decided at the moment early in the first chapter, that he made hobbits mighty hunters with hand-thrown stones. He might have let them “take a gun out” like a Heyer Regency hero, given that Bilbo was the picture of a wealthy early 20th Century middle-class English male. Whether conscious or unconscious, or possibly prompted by the equally spontaneous choice of a children’s story genre, denying Bilbo the weapons of his Real-Earth period affected every further page of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

The nexus of Tolkien’s personal stand-points behind this choice does generate fascinating contradictions. While the Shire’s weapons are limited to stones, staves and bows, Minas Tirith has swords and spears, and magic defends Lorien. But evil, paradoxically but inevitably, introduces to Middle-earth the very technological level that Tolkien most loathed. Isengard and Mordor are copybook unregulated high industrial complexes, complete with waste, pollution, desolation, wheels and hammers, and “‘mind[s] of metal and wheels.’” (The Two Towers, Ch. 4)

But The Hobbit’s original gunpowder ban does not allow these fearsome lairs to spew out steam engines, aircraft, big guns, mechanical soldiers or machine-guns or mustard-gas, not even rifles and muskets. The Orcs seem to have been bio-engineered – which would not require all this mechanical paraphernalia –and they, like everybody else, fight with sword, bow and spear. Even the mighty Grond only uses muscle-power. The sole exception to this pre-industrial ban is the “blasting fire” by which the Orcs manage to infiltrate the stream-way at Helm’s Deep. Everywhere else, evil as industrialism can affect Middle-earth only through its environmental damage.

Other fantasies happily introduce later forms of real world “technology” in secondary worlds. Martha Wells’ Ile Rien series begins with a just-pre-Industrial society using pistol and arquebus, then moves to a faux Edwardian/Victorian period that still uses pistols, and in the second series, uses magic to present WWI and later technology like airships. Here, as with Naomi Novik’s Napoleonic War dragons, the tech. level is pre-set to industrial. But if less strikingly than with The Lord of the Rings, much of the available real-world technology, from cine cameras to machine guns, is again not admitted.

More dissonant cases exemplify what has been touted as “science fantasy” – where “science” – ie actually some form of very modern tech – is juxtaposed with an earlier technological level. A really striking example, and one of my favourites, is Barbara Hambly’s Windrose trilogy, whose second title epitomizes the type: The Silicon Mage. Though the cover appears pure fantasy, in fact, an impressive apparatus of spells, spell diagrams, sigils, and simple wizardly capabilities is connected to and through computers, to work in both primary and secondary worlds, with astonishing discrepancy and more amazing lack of fuss – now THAT is a real fantasy-tech.

There is, of course, an older wholly invented technology, the matrix science of Darkover, but though that otherwise pre-industrial world and its societies beg to be classified as fantasy, the origins of Darkovan “humanity” from a space diaspora make a strong claim that the whole world and series be called SF.

Which opens the other question about“Technology in Fantasy” – namely, if fantasy, apart from contemporary urban primary world stuff, starts to introduce really current tech. like gene-engineering, nanotech, and less realized forms such as cyborgs, even if the actual society is (apparently) pre-industrial, has the form then become SF?

SF is usually seen as the genre of the future, however often overtaken. Modern fantasy, to use a paradox, is usually seen as the genre of “the past.” How close can such a fictional “past” come to the “present,” or with imaginary tech, to a future, without sliding over the generic boundary? Whatever the writer’s intent, or the bookshelf label, if the savvy specfic reader perceives the conventions, icons and protocols in the text as SF, why isn’t it SF?

The generic SF/fantasy boundary concerned me deeply while I was struggling with the SF theory chapter of my PhD. Past/future-time, science/magic as unreality’s ennabling device, evidence of change, progress; I canvassed those and a number more of the abundant definitions. In the process I suddenly found myself, like Octavia Butler’s heroine in Exogenesis, conducting an experiment “in the field.” Once the opening paragraph of Amberlight arrived, the conscious project was to see how nearly I could make a text walk the tightrope, marked by Hambly’s Silicon Mage,between fantasy and SF.

Hence, the McGuffin in Amberlight, the “qherrique” which turned up as opening donnée, became the basis for a thought experiment in gender-role reversals, as well as the key to society’s shape. Only women could “work” the mysterious – substance, entity, animal, vegetable, mineral? The society became a matriarchy. Qherrique’s most crucial quality was its psychic effects, coveted by every other society, making Amberlight-the-city unthinkably rich. But qherrique had a bouquet of other attributes – pizo-electric, photo-synthetic, it could be worked like a mix of pearl and stone to drive machines, to power tools, to produce guns. Light-guns and horseless vehicles. Is this fantasy, or is it SF?

It charmed me immensely when I sent the novel in ms to Andrea (Hosth), asking outright, Do you read this as fantasy or as SF? And she responded that she couldn’t decide. The indecision reappeared among reviewers when I finally got the novel into print. It was political fantasy, it was high fantasy, it was a sub-genre of feminist SF: a whole grab-bag of answers turned up. Leading, perhaps, to the most interesting general conclusion – that the level and type of technology a writer consciously or haphazardly bestows on a specfic novel will not merely dictate the shape of that world and its societies, but even the genre in which the work will belong  - or, if as with Amberlight, Loki or Coyote was around at the moment of inception, not.

Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia, and writes fantasy and SF set mostly in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some stories in Australian and US anthologies. Her latest short story, “At Sunset” appears in Luna Station Quarterly for September 2012.

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Warren Rochelle

Fairies don’t really need machines, do they? Not the ones in my novels Harvest of Changelings, and its sequel, The Called. Elemental beings—Fires, Airs, Waters, and Earths—they have magical powers to use and manipulate these elements, with extra abilities for their particular element. Fires, for example, are best suited for heating things, so there is no need for electrical stoves. Instead, Fires, heat up stones, and in war, create fireballs. Airs are the most gifted telepathically and the winds answer to their call. Waters can call the rain and raise waves. The garden of an Earth is fertile, verdant, and productive; Earths can awaken volcanoes, make earthquakes. Machinery as we know it Here never developed There.

But the magic of this Faerie uses machines—at least it does Here. When Hazel, one of my four main characters, and one of the changelings, is called to return to Faerie, her gateway is not a wardrobe or a door in the side of the hill, rather it is a computer. Hazel has on her computer, Worldmaker, a program that allows the user to construct his or her own world from the ground up, to its people and civilization, its climate, its history. And it is through this portal that Hazel, accompanied by her loyal Siamese, Alexander, enters Faerie. As the dragon she encounters explains, “It was your machine . . . and your game. The machine knocked at the door and the game opened the door to this place; the machine answered a call from this place. It can talk to other machines, yes? Create invisible links of energy, of electricity? Such a link was made to here, which is beyond dreams . . .” (Harvest of Changelings 69). The computer, as a pegasus tells Hazel later, is “a dream-gate” (154).

In The Golden Boy, a novel-in-progress, I explore this link between machine and magic. In this novel the world is dominated by the Columbian Empire and the New World and a rational, science-privileging super-church, which is in opposition to the Old World and those who would also embrace magic and those who use magic, and those who are, the fey. Fairies, who are again Elementals, are iron-sensitive. The only way they can touch a car without pain is to touch one sealed in a plastic coating. Magic and machine in this universe are ways for one to fight the other.

So what? Is this just another take on the famous quote by Arthur C. Clarke, one of his Three Laws, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”? On reflection, no; rather I find myself doing something perhaps connected, but still different. Machines give us the power of magic: they can enhance speed and allow us to travel over great distances in a short amount of time—seven-league boots and aircraft. The magical can call down the lightning; laser rifles and cannons harness light for war. Software such as Hazel’s Worldmaker and the software that creates virtual realities allow us to enter the hills, go through the wardrobe. Through television and film, through computer monitors, we enter, and for a time, live in any number of alternate worlds. Technology, then, allows us to explore just the kind of world my changelings find in Faerie, the kind of world the heroes in The Golden Boy are trying to save.

Magic, in the literature of the fantastic, in counterpoint, allows the reader to contemplate a world without the mechanical. It reminds us that we can—really we can, despite what my students tell me—survive without the machine. It reminds us that the Morlocks and the Eloi are possible. Magic warns of the possibility of the Borg.

Technology then, is magical; it is fantastical. Technology allows us to create a magic of the mind, and magic reminds us that it is the mind that we can find real magic. Any sufficiently advanced technology really is indistinguishable from magic.

Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, "The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. Most recently, his story, “The Boy on McGee Street,”was published in Queer Fish 2 (Pink Narcissus Press, 2012). http://warrenrochelle.com

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That's it for this month's Travelling Round Table! Feel free to join in the discussion in the comments.

Travelling Fantasy Roundtable : Part 10 : Food in Fantasy

Part 10 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, our roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature, is up at Sylvia Kelso's blog. This month we're talking about food in fantasy.

The Travelling Fantasy Round Table : Part 9 : SFF Greats

Part 9 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, our roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature, is up at Theresa Crater's blog. This month we're talking about some of the greats of fantasy.

The Travelling Fantasy Round Table : Part 8 : Fantasy/Horror Crossover

Part 8 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, our roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature, is up at Chris Howard's blog.  This month we're looking into the crossover between fantasy and horror.

The Travelling Fantasy Round Table : Part 7 : Animals in Fantasy (Pt 1)

Part 7 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, our roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature, is up at Deborah J Ross' blog. This month is the first of a two-parter looking at animals in fantasy.

The Travelling Fantasy Roundtable : Part 6 : LGBT Issues in Fantasy

Part 6 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, our roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature, is up at Warren Rochelle's blog.  This month we're looking into LGBT issues in fantasy.

The Travelling Fantasy Round Table : Part 4 : Sexuality in Fantasy

Part 4 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, our roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature, is up at Deborah J Ross' blog.  This month we're looking into sexuality in fantasy.

The Travelling Fantasy Round Table: Part 3: Religion in Fantasy

Part 3 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, our roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature, is up at Carole McDonnell's blog.  This month we're looking into religion in fantasy.

The Travelling Fantasy Round Table: Part 2: The Baggage of Language

Welcome to Part 2 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, a roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature! 

Today, Theresa Crater, Carole McDonnell, Warren Rochelle, Deborah J. Ross and Sylvia Kelso join me in discussing the baggage of language.

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Andrea K Höst

One of the seminal essays dealing with language in fantasy is Ursula K Le Guin's "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie".  Le Guin examines a passage from a secondary world fantasy novel which, she notes, could very well depict politicians in Washington DC.  She suggests the problem is with the style, which does not transport the reader away from our world to a world of heroes and magic, but instead creates cardboard scenery, leaving the reader feeling cheated, as if they were promised another world, an Elfland, but travelled no further than Poughkeepsie.

Although few fantasy novels today resemble the master stylists Le Guin recommends, her point stands that a secondary world which sounds exactly the same as our world will ring untrue, and any writer venturing to create a whole new world needs to pay attention to language.

Stepping back from style to focus on word choice, we can look to the example set by Mary Robinette Kowal's regency fantasy Glamour in Glass, where Kowal pared her word use down to words which existed prior to 1815, creating an exceptional level of verisimilitude. 

For writers who create secondary worlds (instead of alt histories), the challenge is not dissimilar, for even though a truly secondary world novel would not employ a language of this world at all, terms which are particularly modern or wedded to a time and place on Earth will jar the reader – and thus most fantasy writers don't reference "freeways", or name cities New York or Mumbai.

But all words bring their own baggage, and you don't have to mention a warp drive to slingshot a reader to Poughkeepsie and beyond.  A word such as "okay", though debatably around since the 1800s, has a very modern feel which will not ring true when spoken by a Knight of the Round Table.  And certain words and phrases are so absolutely embedded in a real-world event that use of them is fraught with extra meaning.

One of my favourite phrase origin stories is that of "Sweet F.A.", which means "nothing at all".  It has a semi-modern feel and the common incorrect expansion of the phrase (sweet fuck all) would not feel too out of place in a hard-speaking warrior's mouth.  But "Sweet F.A." has its origin in 1867, when an eight year-old girl named Fanny Adams was murdered and dismembered.  With a turn for dark humour the Royal Navy began to refer to newly distributed tins of mutton as "Sweet Fanny Adams".  It is a phrase which means "worthless", "nothing", but it means that for very specific reasons.

A writer creating a secondary world, aware that our modern languages are not the language of that world, must pick and choose from broad vocabulary to eliminate terms which will throw the average reader out of the story, while accepting that the story is still being written in a modern language, because the reader is a modern reader.  Is it unreasonable, for instance, to say "Beowulf stood silhouetted in the mead-hall's doorway", even though 'silhouette' is derived from one Etienne de Silhouette, a French minister of the 1700s?

The word choice I struggle with most frequently is that of ranks and titles.  To neologise or not to neologise?  If you create a new hierarchy of titles for aristocracy, priests, or civil positions, the reader must learn a series of new words and their relationship to each other.  Kier, Kierash, Keridahl...they mean nothing to the reader, and an entire hierarchy of neologisms may swiftly lead to reader overload.  So why not fall back on Emperor, Crown Prince, Duke...?

There are two layers of meaning which come with most Earth hierarchies – an assumed culture, and gender issues.

I recently noted that I started placing guns (flintlock pistols) in my fantasy novels to signal to the reader that the book was not set in the middle ages.  Too often I have seen one of my stories described as "pseudo-medieval", even though the people in those stories clearly had far more education, upward mobility, and freedom to move about than those generally enjoyed under a feudal or manorial system, and usually a highly different relationship to God(s).  But clearly I had conjured an entire culture by the use of the word 'King'.  If I had used Shah, or Daimyo or Pharaoh I would conjure entirely different cultures – but none of those cultures would match the world I had created.

Most problematic of all is the baggage, the immense complexity, which comes with the use of the word "Queen".

There are very specific terms for different types of queens (helpfully provided by Wikipedia):

• Queen regnant: a female monarch of equivalent power to a male king.
• Queen consort: the wife of a reigning king.
• Queen dowager: a former queen consort whose husband has died.
• Queen mother: either a queen dowager, or a queen regnant who has abdicated, whose son or daughter has become the monarch.

If you look up "King" in Wikipedia, it redirects to "Monarch".  There is no "King widower" or "King regnant" or "King father".  King is a word which means "monarch".  Queen is a word which means "wife or mother", and only in the most exceptional of occasions "monarch".

Of all the words which have baggage in fantasy, rank carries one of the heaviest toll.  Baggage-free neologisms may be the better option after all.

Andrea K Höst was born in Sweden but raised in Australia. She writes fantasy and science fantasy, and enjoys creating stories which give her female characters something more to do than wait for rescue.

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Theresa Crater

“The Baggage of Language in Fantasy” is the topic this month, and my short answer to this dilemma is “that’s why I write urban fantasy.” But even then, problems arise. I like to explore alternative theories in my work, and people naturally bring their preconceptions and own certainties to the text.

My partner – now there’s a language problem for you. If I say “partner,” most people will think I mean I’m a lesbian and I’m referring to a woman. If I say “husband,” most people will think I’m 100% straight and we did a traditional marriage ceremony. If I say “domestic partner,” I sound like a social worker. I sometimes say “my guy,” which is quite ambiguous and sometimes causes confusion, but I sort of enjoy that.

Anyway, my partner is an Egyptologist, but not exactly. He came up with a new term. He says he’s created a new field, “Khemitology.” This is the study of pre-dynastic Egypt sort of. Or the study of Egypt as seen from an indigenous perspective, because his teacher was an indigenous elder of Egypt. His teacher claimed that Egyptology was created by the Greeks, who were imperialists, and as such didn’t get told the whole truth about the civilization they were dominating.

One of their ideas that I put into my first fantasy, Under the Stone Paw, was that the word “pharaoh” was a misunderstanding of the term “Per-Aa.” The Greeks, being patriarchal, assumed there were male rulers in Egypt, but Egypt was a matriarchy. (We could pause here and say this doesn’t mean that matriarchy is the reverse image of patriarchy, with women in charge and perpetrating whatever acts they wish upon men with no repercussions. But let’s not.) Descent was from mother to daughter. “Per-Aa” meant “the High House,” which was the woman’s house. The woman chose her consort to help her rule. He was perceived to be the king by the Greeks and the term “Per-Aa” became “pharaoh.”

How would you put this idea into action in fiction? You can’t have someone standing there explaining it. Who are they explaining it to? All the characters belong to that world and understand this as the basis of their reality. So in comes the stranger who needs things explained. Or the text just lives in this world and tells a story, but will the reader relate to and enjoy the story? It might take a while for the reader to acclimate. The Big Six publishers might not like that. They’re in Business. And not in the business of changing minds and hearts primarily. The book must make money first.

Avatar did something many other texts do, and here I’m thinking of some South African anti-apartheid films a few decades back that told the story of apartheid beginning with a naive white guy who had good intentions, but learned the nasty truth through a series of shocking (to the white guy) encounters. Avatar begins in a world familiar to the viewer, then slowly takes us into a foreign world. We learn that world through the character until we suddenly look back at that once familiar world and see . . . . Well, perhaps T.S. Eliot said it best: “The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”  

Theresa Crater has published two contemporary fantasies, Beneath the Hallowed Hill & Under the Stone Paw and several short stories, most recently “White Moon” in Riding the Moon and “Bringing the Waters” in The Aether Age: Helios. She’s also published poetry and a baker’s dozen of literary criticism. Currently, she teaches writing and British lit in Denver. Born in North Carolina, she now lives in Colorado with her Egyptologist partner and their two cats. Visit her website at http://theresacrater.com.

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Carole McDonnell

Recently, there was a bit of an uproar about the Hunger games. Apparently, many folks who had read the book were not aware that certain "dark-brown" characters were what we in the United States would call "a black person."

Words are a powerful thing.  I've had moments when I simply wanted to describe a character as a Native American or a Chinese person -- but such countries and groups did not exist in my story. I therefore had to use words such as "crescent-shaped eyes" (which only made a few people wonder if my characters were aliens.

But there are other issues besides physical descriptions of characters. I always seem to trip over what to call eating implements: Forks...meat spear? Pronged utensil?

Of course, Language can be revitalized in fantasy as well. We all know what a zombie does without calling them "zombies." Same for "vampires" and "witches." It's great using words in a new way. 'Friend age-long' for a best friend. 'Unfleshed ones for spirits.' By changing language, a Christian can do a lot with the idea of zombies versus Resurrection  -- true spiritual growth versus a spiritual legalism herd-mind. Or vampires and cannibals and the Christian idea of taking on the lifeforce of another. Or witchcraft and the spiritual power of words to curse or heal.

My biggest issue in fantasy is all the high english or high fantasy language. Noble folk should speak nobly, and poor uneducated folk should speak badly. But even if one creates a world without class distinctions, there will be different cultures who all  use different greetings, vocabulary, customs. Of course if the fantasy takes place in a world that is very like Europe, one can fall into the old patterns created by other fantasy authors. But how does one create a Native American fantasy language with a folkloric language when high fantasy Arthurian words are whispering in one's ear? And how does one get one's reader to understand the grammar, vocabulary, lingo, of the various non-European clans and castes one has created?

Carole McDonnell is a writer of ethnic fiction, speculative fiction, and Christian fiction. Her works have appeared in many anthologies and at various online sites. Her novel, Wind Follower, was published by Wildeside Books. Her forthcoming novel is called The Constant Tower.  http://carolemcdonnell.blogspot.com/

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Warren Rochelle

The problem or the question posed for this round is this: we write our fantasies in English—usually—and those words have their own history that does not—usually—match up with the history of our fantasy world. 

What does this mean? Does this refer to the language of magic? Or Elfspeak in some form or another? No, I don’t think so. Rather, that by using English to write stories set in worlds which cannot possibly be using English—words particular to the Anglophone world, with their etymologies, words that are charged and layered with meaning and history—we cannot possibly match the world we have imagined. This means that on some level the created fantasies cannot be truly described or expressed. Our language must invariably fall short of the fantasy we have imagined.

Give up in despair, go home? Contemplate the wasted years spent on this stuff?

No, because this is always the case when one is trying to tell a story in words, to write down the dream. The idea—the dream—the vision—must be translated into a narrative through language. We can only retrieve an approximation of that dream, a suggestion of the vision, the idea, no matter what genre. The task becomes one of process and an approximation of a product. The added element of the fantastic would, it seems, push this approximation even farther away from vision and dream. The other world of fantasy is at even farther remove than that of the mainstream writer of fiction.
Back to going home, deleting that file?

A solution that I have tried (although solution doesn’t seem to be the right word—we are not going to stop writing just because writing is more process than product) is to set my fantasies here, in the world in which I and my readers live, albeit a skewed, peripheral distortion of said world. My goal is to weave the fantastic into the reader’s world—whether that world is North Carolina, particularly the central Triangle region in which I grew up—or another real-world locale.  This is the vision I am trying to capture and express and tell my story—currently in Richmond, Virginia, and various places in England. So far.

But, the created worlds of any writer is a personal vision, whether it is North Carolina or Virginia, North Queensland, or Prydain/Wales, or the world behind the walls where Mary Norton’s Borrowers live, or something far more divorced from primary reality, such as George R. R. Martin’s Seven Kingdoms.

I think a more hopeful way to approach this question of the gap between the language employed by the writer to describe a world which has no connection to this language is metaphor and symbol and myth. Language is inherently metaphoric and symbolic and the created world of the fantastic is, more often than not, a metaphor, a symbol, of the world of the writer and the reader. And it is the reader we want to connect to with our fantastic vision and so we use their metaphors, their symbols. We want them to glimpse our dream and the language of metaphor is the common ground for this glimpsing.

This may be easier when the writer, as I do, employs the stuff of his or her world. Perhaps.  The writer is still speaking in metaphor and is still describing a vision, regardless of the distance between the writer and the imagined world. The stuff of the dream is still inherent in the language weaving the tale. And that dream, its people, its places, is still made out of the writer’s stuff, as it were.

But the gap remains.

Perhaps the gap should be there, as long as one is mindful of it, and if one remembers it is the process, the telling, that matters. It is the process that casts the spell, that allows the reader to make his or her way into to the product of the fantastic world, world, if created successfully, is there before the reader arrives, and will be there when the reader leaves—an ongoing world revealed in metaphor and symbol, glimpsed in words.

Mind the gap. Enter the dream. Write.

Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, "The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010). He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections.  http://warrenrochelle.com

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Deborah J Ross

This topic brings two things to mind. One is the level of diction in fantasy prose, the other the role of language and languages in fantasy stories.

Once upon a time – and you see right away that this phrase conveys a host of expectations about what follows – “fantasy” conveyed images of far-off lands, usually exotic, times-gone-by, and heroes of courage, dignity, and high rank. Whether fairy tales for children or the Arthurian cycle, these stories often (although not always) centered around royal or at least aristocratic characters. Even those who weren’t (the poor woodcutter, the third son off to make his fortune) partook of the same elevated language. The works of E. R. Eddison and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings did much to cement this association in the mind of the reader.

The subsequent explosion of Tolkienesque fantasy stories varied tremendously in the skillfulness with which prose language was handled. We can undoubtedly all come up with examples of laughably inept examples that stem from lack of research or incomplete understanding of diction.

Almost in reaction to the “high-falutin’” language of kings and elves, the “cozy hedge-witch fantasy” introduced contemporary slang (and social attitudes) into medieval and other “fantastical” settings. Again, the results ranged from fresh and innovative to awkward to inadvertently hilarious. Many of these represented attempts to reconcile fantasy elements (including what was regarded as the necessary pre-industrialized setting) with “the way people really talk.” The style of narration had shifted from omniscient to tight-third person (or first person), and this required that the diction level in exposition be roughly equivalent to that of dialog and internal monolog.

Finally, as fantasy expanded into properly contemporary urban settings, prose language and setting regained a measure of congruence. The language itself became as modern as the surroundings.

For most of us, the way people spoke three or five hundred or two thousand years ago might as well be a foreign language. We have to take classes in order to properly understand any writer before Shakespeare (and most of us need a “Reader’s Guide” to Will). With the exception of literature classes on Middle English, Chaucer gets read in translation. So those of us who are not linguists approach creating the “elevated” language of high fantasy with several handicap. If we’ve grown up in a single-language community (or worse yet, a single-class community), we’ve never had the direct experience of the interactions of culture, language, attitude, and personality, or of public versus private languages, or of separate men’s and women’s languages (although one could argue the latter does exist in English). We have to stop and think about how people who speak different languages learn to communicate – sign language? Translators? Trade dialects? Telepathy? How does a long-established, stable mutual-language/translation convention differ from those that have come before? What are the cultural assumptions that come with each language and each social class within that language-culture? What are the occasions for misunderstanding and what are the consequences? I find these questions fascinating in themselves, but also fertile ground for exploring character, culture, and conflict (not to mention alliteration). Fascinating in themselves, but also fertile ground for exploring character, culture, and conflict (not to mention alliteration).

Deborah J Ross began writing professionally in 1982 as Deborah Wheeler with JAYDIUM and NORTHLIGHT, and short stories in ASIMOV'S, F & SF, REALMS OF FANTASY and STAR WARS: TALES FROM JABBA'S PALACE. Now under her birth name, Ross, she is continuing the" Darkover" series of the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, as well as original work, including the fantasy trilogy THE SEVEN-PETALED SHIELD. She is a member of Book View Cafe. She has lived in France, worked for a cardiologist, studied Hebrew, yoga and kung fu, and is active in the local Jewish and Quaker communities.
http://deborahjross.blogspot.com/

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Sylvia Kelso

Time was, everything appearing on the SF and Fantasy bookshop shelf (ah, those pre-Kindle days!) could have been assessed against Ursula Le Guin’s ukases in her now famous 1973 essay, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie.”

Forex:

"Many readers, many critics and most editors speak of style as if it were an ingredient of a book, like the sugar in a cake ... The style, of course is the book...”

And:

"Why is style of such fundamental significance in a fantasy?... In fantasy there is … no borrowed reality of history, or current events... There is no comfortable matrix of the commonplace to substitute for the imagination, to provide ready-made emotional response... There is only a construct built in a void, where every joint and seam and nail is exposed...”

As exemplar,  Le Guin did a masterly hatchet job on one unfortunate fantasy writer of the early ‘70s whose language could not move from the Poughkeepsie of a contemporary political or spy story to the rarefied air of Elfland.

Le Guin charted a number of the traps, now listed all over the Web, that await young players attempting such Elsewhereness. Archaisms the writer can’t handle, esp. the old second and 3rd person singular verbs (I just found a current blog purporting to speak for Chaucer and using 3rd singular for an imperative.) Exotic but evanescent oaths and ditto gods. The Dreaded X-Y-Z-apostrophe invented-word: Xard’ril the Warrior (Princess?). Yarrin the Village. Zal’ope the God of  Small Things.  (Many others are pilloried in Diana Wynne Jones’ Tough Guide to (High) Fantasyland.)

(At this point, please note, I am now using Elfland as a metonym for Elsewhere – elves are optional, but a successful fantasy must still transcend Here.)

Le Guin did cite two master stylists whose passports to Elfland were secure: Tolkien and E. R. Edison. The latter, I have seen dismissed recently for “too elaborate language,” and the other is probably going the same way,  but everything Le Guin found in them is still true. The fantasy she wrote about does demand language from Elsewhere, it goes best with a real stylist, and, as Le Guin also wrote,

"A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you."

Except, nowadays, most of what’s sold as fantasy isn’t high fantasy.

So, does it need a master stylist to reach Elfland if you aren’t producing a secondary world, a “construct in a void” totally reliant on your language skills? Can you even see Elfland from the streets of a contemporary urban fantasy, even one as sharp as Katharine Kerr’s License to Ensorcell series? Or have Stephanie Meyer and Peter Jackson’s hairdressers overloaded the genre with tall pale handsome men who either glitter or carry FAR too much hair?

And if you can’t see Elfland, is the language to blame?

It’s certainly easier for the less-skilled writer to handle characters with “realist” names and venues he or she may walk through daily. But it’s also harder. Because how do you invest these places and people with “the air of Numenor?” How do you get Elfland to happen, right here?

It can be done. Peter Beagle’s The Folk of the Air transformed parts of San Francisco with no more than some SCA players, a goddess, a witch, and some time travel, but Peter Beagle, like Tolkien, is a stylist par excellence. I have to admit that it doesn’t happen for me in most current urban fantasies, where the Otherworld element either has really dorky names, or appears so mundane I feel I’m in The Gated Hell Community or Vampire Suburbia. These are Elvenlords. These are vampires. They are not the Guyz Next Door. They are danger, REAL danger, they carry the scent of Elsewhere. They should raise your neck hair, not your fashion sense.

So, yes, language in fantasy does still matter. For this reader there is no substitute for a word-smith, whether in modern San Francisco or beyond a helpful wardrobe. The old traps still pertain, and so do the old demands. By the end, as Le Guin stipulated, a “real” fantasy novel, high or contemporary, will have to deal successfully with archetypes. And hence it will need to be, “a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is.” And ‘’[l]ike psychoanalysis, … it will change you."

I don’t know that huge numbers of the contemporary fantasy and paranormal romance market will reach that last criterion. It will be the language that does it, if they do.

Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia. She writes fantasy and SF set in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some short stories in Australian and US anthologies.

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That's it for this month's Travelling Round Table!  Feel free to join in the discussion in the comments.

The Travelling Fantasy Round Table: Part 1: What's Fantasy For?

If you're interested in unpicking the bones of fantasy, check out Part 1 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, a series of discussions I'm contributing to which will be delving into some of the whys and wherefores of the fantasy genre.

Part 1 takes us broadly into the genre, asking "What's Fantasy For?" and has contributions from Sylvia Kelso, Theresa Crater, me, Carole McDonnell, Warren Rochelle and Deborah J Ross.

Future discussions will delve into gender, sexuality, language, and all sorts of fun questions behind the books we read and love. Come join in the discussion!