I am so over reality.
Oct. 25th, 2008 03:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerFun Spanish word of the day: carraspear, to clear one’s throat. I like the interplay of the c and the long rolling r and the rasp in the middle.
I’ve been reading this awesome Argentinean children’s book called Dailan Kifki, which is about an elephant that falls asleep above a sapling which grows as fast a Jack’s beanstalk, leaving poor Dailan Kifki trapped in its branches until a fireman climbs up and fastens wings to his back and they fly away, and our heroine has to track him down which requires the aid of half the ambassadors in South America and a consortium of kite-flying boys.
Why are adult books never this cool? They always have to make sense. Realism is so overrated.
…of course immediately after typing that I went to Eagle Eye, which is about computers gone bad and main characters who remain improbably alive after being shot repeatedly and falling in liquid nitrogen. A movie that purports to be set in the real world needs to follow strict causal reality, but I don’t think for that for something to be good (in the sense of high quality, not just entertaining) it has to be set in the real world or an approximation thereof.
I’m been reading Limyaael’s fantasy rants, which are thought-provoking. I agree with her that psychological coherence (not consistence; people aren’t consistent) is necessary to high quality work, but I think she’s too harsh in suggesting that fantasy has to follow strict causality in order to be good. If you adhere too strictly to that, you end up with a fantasy world as harsh and ugly as ours, but without the occasional glints of the numinous that ours allows out—because the numinous is just not realistic.
There are good fantasy books written like this. But I think it would choke the genre to insist that realism become the rubric of good fantasy fiction.
I’ve been reading this awesome Argentinean children’s book called Dailan Kifki, which is about an elephant that falls asleep above a sapling which grows as fast a Jack’s beanstalk, leaving poor Dailan Kifki trapped in its branches until a fireman climbs up and fastens wings to his back and they fly away, and our heroine has to track him down which requires the aid of half the ambassadors in South America and a consortium of kite-flying boys.
Why are adult books never this cool? They always have to make sense. Realism is so overrated.
…of course immediately after typing that I went to Eagle Eye, which is about computers gone bad and main characters who remain improbably alive after being shot repeatedly and falling in liquid nitrogen. A movie that purports to be set in the real world needs to follow strict causal reality, but I don’t think for that for something to be good (in the sense of high quality, not just entertaining) it has to be set in the real world or an approximation thereof.
I’m been reading Limyaael’s fantasy rants, which are thought-provoking. I agree with her that psychological coherence (not consistence; people aren’t consistent) is necessary to high quality work, but I think she’s too harsh in suggesting that fantasy has to follow strict causality in order to be good. If you adhere too strictly to that, you end up with a fantasy world as harsh and ugly as ours, but without the occasional glints of the numinous that ours allows out—because the numinous is just not realistic.
There are good fantasy books written like this. But I think it would choke the genre to insist that realism become the rubric of good fantasy fiction.
