You're touching on one of the axes of SFF I often think about, which I can only describe as "grounded vs. dreamlike." A "grounded" piece of SFF is doing what you describe as your preference; the researched and historically-derived world where thought has gone into how the economic, political, physical, etc. elements all fit together and make the story feel, "real."
I see "hard magic systems" as actually trying to do the same thing to the magic, in a sense forming the "grounded" magic to set against your preferred spiritual/poetic, "dreamlike" magic.
With this lens I see you advocating for SFF that has a "grounded world" and "dreamlike magic." This is also my preference, but I also have a soft spot for stories that go dreamlike in both ways - "dreamlike world" and "dreamlike magic." I don't know if these types of stories need to serve any politic purpose aside from engaging with poetic beauty, with the surreal, with emotions over thought (though of course one can argue that those things in and of themselves can be political). Just wondering what you think of that way of looking at SFF and the merits of stories that stay in the dreamlike and the surreal.
Also wondering if you've ever read Le Guin's Earthsea books. I see them as having a relatively "hard magic" system in the original trilogy, only to have those assumptions explicitly and politically challenged in the subsequent sequel, as Le Guin refined her own politics and upended the assumptions that the first trilogy (which I still think are fantastic, quality wise and in the magical sense) had baked in. I also have a little pet theory that Le Guin's anarchism is best seen in her SF and her Daoism best seen in her fantasy.
Re: Le Guin, I read Earthsea's magic as not particularly hard/soft, there's still so much mystery in it for Ged that the rules to me read more as a sort of inculcated craft knowledge that's not definitely working. The rules also double in those early books as terms of psychological engagement for the characters, Wizard is so much about Ged's ego structure and desires for aggrandizement that the magic becomes a pretty clear manifestation of his libidinal drives. Tombs of Atuan is similar in the investigation of repressive gender norms through the realization of social death in its magic.
I love those books so much that I'm willing to concede wizard schools can occasionally be cool when kept to a minimum and when their rules are unstable and open to interpretation. Alas that there must always be counterexamples.
I think grounded vs. dreamlike is a false dichotomy. Take Book of the New Sun: Wolfe obviously knows how this world works and has structured it in a very intentional, material way, but that knowledge isn't available to most of his characters most of the time. We get a dreamlike narrative and dreamlike world that has these moments of incredible lucidity: 'The Just Man' as told by Loyal to the Group of Seventeen in Citadel is like pure anthropology, but also beautiful and alienating. Same thing with the ceremony of the Alzabo or the return to the Lazaret after the bombing. But then the books are a long argument of Catholic theology.
Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy can be read as historical fiction and maintains the surreal and the grounded throughout in a way that dissolves that line, and like Wolfe has an explicit political/critical project.
This is why I wanted to attack specific facets; hard categories are almost always porous for a form as expansive as the novel. Which, I guess, is a long way of saying I like high surreal stuff, but I reject the premise of the question.
Okeydoke. I concede that a lot of SFF is historically illiterate. I even agree that hard magic systems are overused.
But there's no bottom to the type of criticism that you're offering on world building. You'd like grain and wool production to be historically accurate. Others will obsess about plate tectonics and the weather. Still others will want the languages referenced in the narrative to follow known rules of grammar and syntax. Every mistake or omission will take some readers out of the narrative, but it's a hopeless task to get the history and culture completely right. And if any of us ever did our novels would suck, because it's impossible to both set the perfect scene and write compelling characters and plots.
I do concede that a writer who wants to do a generic, bog standard medieval fantasy should read some of the works you cite or others as good. But some aspects of medieval life are completely orthogonal to good writing. No modern reader wants to read about a female character who sits in one room spinning 12 hours a day. And if everyone in the village has historically accurate levels of literacy and education then the dialogue is going to be ridiculous focused on farming and the weather and conversations that explain the world and its culture will only be possible if the characters talk to the local priest or well to do merchant, which they will have solid in character reasons for not being able to do. In short, good writing requires breaking historical verisimilitude, and knowing when to do so, as much as adhering to it.
As I said up top, I think there are too many hard magic systems and I think they've reached their maximum development in Brandon Sanderson's work. I think most writers that try to emulate him because of his success will produce far inferior works. That being said, there's nothing wrong with treating magic like physics. And doing so doesn't require the writer to have creepy, apocalyptic Mormon beliefs. Classic Vancian magic systems reach audiences in the hundreds of millions via books and video games. One can say that these are cliched, and that Tolkien and GRRM are doing something more sophisticated, but that claim is frequently bollocks and writers should always have the freedom to choose their preferred method of storytelling.
I want to read about a woman who sits in one room spinning 12 hours a day. I think those lives are vested with as much meaning and literary potential as the lives of Kings and prophets.
I think we're talking past each other to some extent, though. I'm not arguing for a strict mimetic realism: I'm arguing for a work that replicates and understands a social totality. I'd argue some of Vance's work approaches that; the dying earth series is intimately about the decay of a whole society. Work that encapsulates the totality doesn't have to mimetically reproduce every experience in that society, it just has to be convincingly alive and withstand a bit of critical scrutiny of its inner logics. Shows like The Wire or the Sopranos and novels like those of GRRM or Wolfe or Morrison or, say, Moby Dick, Infinite Jest or Hearts in Atlantis, are all examples of works that I think pull off the totality without dedicating themselves to the reproduction of a modal social experience.
I agree with you that there is, sometimes, a tension between verisimilitude and style/good writing, but the point of polemic is to stake out a deliberately provocative position, rather than an unassailable one.
I do, however, actually think there's something wrong with treating magic like physics. If you're going to do that, just write hard sff and leave the human soul alone.
“I object, on an aesthetic level, to so-called ‘hard magic systems.’ Indeed, I object to any system of magic. I think it is telling the foremost proponent of logically coherent magic systems in American Letters is an adherent of Mormonism, a spiritual regurgitation of capitalist mysticism so shocking in its theological arrogance, so bold in its narcissism, and so systematic in its cosmology as to drive me into sympathy with Catholicism.”
I’m salivating. I was just musing this idly as I was reading Mistborn recently, and unable to verbalize my criticism of it succinctly.
This was a great and thought provoking read, thank you.
With respect, will you invest your time and money in writing an actual book about a woman spinning alone all day in a room? Because that kind of claim seems to be grounded in virtue and in these cynical times we see a lot of virtue signaling. I share your interest in the lives of real historical people and in stories that are about common folk, and not just kings and prophets, but most of us if we're honest with ourselves are willing to make some compromises to interest readers.
I feel like on some level totality is just a quality that we ascribe to a secondary world that we think has been well executed. But I think that's a fairly subjective determination, and while I'd agree with you that The Wire and GRRM's work achieve totality, I disagree on The Sopranos. But I think those disagreements are mostly a matter of taste.
I should also have to observe that if The Wire achieves totality it does so by being completely false to the way the actual drug trade is carried out on the streets of Baltimore. Virtually all real drug dealers are on the street level themselves, have addicts for employees, and are caught in weeks or months because they have no discipline in their phone and online communications. If they're lucky they have a nice car.
I'm more of less okay with something like The Wire being good drama but bad history. But I don't know how to reconcile that with your claims that the writer must research intensely to achieve totality. Again, it seems to me that yes there is intense research, but quite a lot of it gets thrown on the cutting room floor.
I love that you've basically thrown the entire genre of hard SF under the bus and said it's not worthy of the concerns of real writers. I'm not going to defend the quality of the average SF novel that gets published, but certainly there are at least a few examples of good stories of the human heart in conflict with itself.
I should reiterate all my comments are meant with respect even if they sometimes come off as harsh. You should be commended for writing a long and thoughtful piece and exploring these ideas.
I appreciate the harsh commentary, you're making me interrogate and defend my own opinions, it's what we're here for.
What I said was unnecessarily dismissive of hard SF, I guess what I meant there is that hard SF is concerned with exogenous forces that are more powerful than individual humans, and I think good fantasy uses magic to externalize facets of internal life/emotional drives. There are obviously counterexamples, but that's how I was approaching that dichotomy.
Yeah, The Wire's excesses are part of the critique Simon is advancing in them imo. As you've said above, good writing/storytelling transcends any hard guideline.
Funny enough, I am writing--though it's on pause while I get my degree--a novel about a wool spinner, it's part of the same fantasy series all that research is for, along with a novella about weavers and dockworkers.
I have much more sympathy for hard magic systems, thinking of them as mysterious crafts like already acknowledged in comments or as the heka of the Egyptians or as the confused but systematically empirical sides of Paracelsus and van Helmont, but this is still a wonderful fiery criticism and I've put the recommended readings on my list. I stopped reading Sanderson and Martin because of almost exactly this totality issue, many years ago. I was even reading Lukacs at the time, though subjectively my decision felt more driven by Schumpeter's sly irony about big-picture visions for society in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.
I'd also like to recommend a series I found surprisingly excellent for this, specifically for demonstrating the problem self-consciously and critically: The Prince of Nothing trilogy by R. S. Bakker. It got a bad reputation in some quarters for being on the wrong side of some culture war lines and it has a sort of Bret Easton Ellis GenX depressive cynicism that it's easy to get too much of and get tired of, but nonetheless, I've found The Prince of Nothing excellent for people bothered by these issues of totality and willing to wade through some grimdark for some excellent wrestling with Frankfurt School pessimism and the Dennett & Dawkins-style evolutionary materialist atheism.
I’m still trying to work out whether I agree with what you said about the purpose of historical fiction. If we take it as true, how do the historical novels of writers like Dorothy Dunnett and Hilary Mantel (the Wolf Hall trilogy specifically) fit in with that? I have to admit I have never seen any trace of a desire to critique the present through their writing, yet they are among the finest of all historical novelists
I guess there are always counterexamples, which is one of the flaws with an unscientific, vibes based argument like the one I'm making and a sign that I came on too strong with this argument. I'd have to do a close read of those works myself to comment on them. I wouldn't be surprised if there's an oblique critique of political power or social mobility in them.
But as I say at the top, I don't think Literature writ large needs to have a purpose, so any genre will have counterexamples and masterworks that are antithetical to any identifiable direction in that genre.
It's appropriate that you invoke Transubstantiation because, as it is truly magical, nobody can agree on what the fuck is going on when the priest raises that little cracker and it becomes Jesus. Appropriately as well, the "hard magic" explanation, that the bread and wine literally transform into the body and blood of Christ and that the true miracle is that our sense are fooled, was rightfully left behind in the middle ages (although it was a minority view even then).
Oddly it's the Roman Catholics who try to approach the miracle with a legalistic sense, trying to divine through logic and close analysis when, exactly, the magic happens that transforms the bread into Christ. If you were to ask a member of the Eastern Catholic Church when, precisely, the bread becomes Jesus, they would likely give you a look like, "What the fuck, who cares you dork, the important thing is that the bread is Jesus."
There is a reason why the Eastern Catholic Church is as important as the Roman Catholic Church.
Anyways - fantastic writing here. I love your takedown of how empty an ungrounded historical story is.
A question though - assume that a writer doesn't want to go through and bbwrite about precisely how many bushels of grain a field produces. If a writer wanted to construct a story that is smaller in scale than a historical epic, but one that is still grounded in historical reality, where would be the best place to start eating that elephant?
I loved this essay. Everyone has language for the scientism vs. mysticism dichotomy, and, as every student of philosophy knows, the choice of language to describe the insight runs the risk of obscuring more than illuminating. Food for language mavens.
While I consider myself a huge fantasy fan, I am bored with shabbily conceived worlds, shallow characters, and motivation that exists solely to serve plot outcomes. I’m also bored with extravaganza world building whose purpose is to dazzle, and likewise, I’m bored its opposite: those unremittingly grimdark places that, like Gaza, any normal person would just want to leave. (If you’ll forgive my extraneous political point, I’ll forgive yours.)
I lean more to the mystical in my fantasy writing, but it must be grounded in a sense of plausibility. That such extraordinary experiences are, at least potentially, part of the human experience. (That’s why I also like to read survivor tales.) Plausibility is a highly subjective measure, but it is crucial for a writer to deliver it, unless the work is satire or comedy. GRRM correctly treats magic with a light, deft hand, because if we unleash vast powers in a world, how does it make a world at all? How do we have a realm of shared experiences and values if I can annihilate another human being with a thought? Ideas have consequences, and the fantasy/sci-fi writer’s job is to dive deep and unpack those consequences. The historical fiction writer has a leg up: everyone already knows the consequences. We’re still living in the unfolding aftermath of the Protestant reformation and the Enlightenment.
I think it was the science fiction writer/historiographer Adam Roberts who astutely observed that there are no sheep in Tolkien’s world.
You're touching on one of the axes of SFF I often think about, which I can only describe as "grounded vs. dreamlike." A "grounded" piece of SFF is doing what you describe as your preference; the researched and historically-derived world where thought has gone into how the economic, political, physical, etc. elements all fit together and make the story feel, "real."
I see "hard magic systems" as actually trying to do the same thing to the magic, in a sense forming the "grounded" magic to set against your preferred spiritual/poetic, "dreamlike" magic.
With this lens I see you advocating for SFF that has a "grounded world" and "dreamlike magic." This is also my preference, but I also have a soft spot for stories that go dreamlike in both ways - "dreamlike world" and "dreamlike magic." I don't know if these types of stories need to serve any politic purpose aside from engaging with poetic beauty, with the surreal, with emotions over thought (though of course one can argue that those things in and of themselves can be political). Just wondering what you think of that way of looking at SFF and the merits of stories that stay in the dreamlike and the surreal.
Also wondering if you've ever read Le Guin's Earthsea books. I see them as having a relatively "hard magic" system in the original trilogy, only to have those assumptions explicitly and politically challenged in the subsequent sequel, as Le Guin refined her own politics and upended the assumptions that the first trilogy (which I still think are fantastic, quality wise and in the magical sense) had baked in. I also have a little pet theory that Le Guin's anarchism is best seen in her SF and her Daoism best seen in her fantasy.
Re: Le Guin, I read Earthsea's magic as not particularly hard/soft, there's still so much mystery in it for Ged that the rules to me read more as a sort of inculcated craft knowledge that's not definitely working. The rules also double in those early books as terms of psychological engagement for the characters, Wizard is so much about Ged's ego structure and desires for aggrandizement that the magic becomes a pretty clear manifestation of his libidinal drives. Tombs of Atuan is similar in the investigation of repressive gender norms through the realization of social death in its magic.
I love those books so much that I'm willing to concede wizard schools can occasionally be cool when kept to a minimum and when their rules are unstable and open to interpretation. Alas that there must always be counterexamples.
I think grounded vs. dreamlike is a false dichotomy. Take Book of the New Sun: Wolfe obviously knows how this world works and has structured it in a very intentional, material way, but that knowledge isn't available to most of his characters most of the time. We get a dreamlike narrative and dreamlike world that has these moments of incredible lucidity: 'The Just Man' as told by Loyal to the Group of Seventeen in Citadel is like pure anthropology, but also beautiful and alienating. Same thing with the ceremony of the Alzabo or the return to the Lazaret after the bombing. But then the books are a long argument of Catholic theology.
Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy can be read as historical fiction and maintains the surreal and the grounded throughout in a way that dissolves that line, and like Wolfe has an explicit political/critical project.
This is why I wanted to attack specific facets; hard categories are almost always porous for a form as expansive as the novel. Which, I guess, is a long way of saying I like high surreal stuff, but I reject the premise of the question.
Okeydoke. I concede that a lot of SFF is historically illiterate. I even agree that hard magic systems are overused.
But there's no bottom to the type of criticism that you're offering on world building. You'd like grain and wool production to be historically accurate. Others will obsess about plate tectonics and the weather. Still others will want the languages referenced in the narrative to follow known rules of grammar and syntax. Every mistake or omission will take some readers out of the narrative, but it's a hopeless task to get the history and culture completely right. And if any of us ever did our novels would suck, because it's impossible to both set the perfect scene and write compelling characters and plots.
I do concede that a writer who wants to do a generic, bog standard medieval fantasy should read some of the works you cite or others as good. But some aspects of medieval life are completely orthogonal to good writing. No modern reader wants to read about a female character who sits in one room spinning 12 hours a day. And if everyone in the village has historically accurate levels of literacy and education then the dialogue is going to be ridiculous focused on farming and the weather and conversations that explain the world and its culture will only be possible if the characters talk to the local priest or well to do merchant, which they will have solid in character reasons for not being able to do. In short, good writing requires breaking historical verisimilitude, and knowing when to do so, as much as adhering to it.
As I said up top, I think there are too many hard magic systems and I think they've reached their maximum development in Brandon Sanderson's work. I think most writers that try to emulate him because of his success will produce far inferior works. That being said, there's nothing wrong with treating magic like physics. And doing so doesn't require the writer to have creepy, apocalyptic Mormon beliefs. Classic Vancian magic systems reach audiences in the hundreds of millions via books and video games. One can say that these are cliched, and that Tolkien and GRRM are doing something more sophisticated, but that claim is frequently bollocks and writers should always have the freedom to choose their preferred method of storytelling.
I want to read about a woman who sits in one room spinning 12 hours a day. I think those lives are vested with as much meaning and literary potential as the lives of Kings and prophets.
I think we're talking past each other to some extent, though. I'm not arguing for a strict mimetic realism: I'm arguing for a work that replicates and understands a social totality. I'd argue some of Vance's work approaches that; the dying earth series is intimately about the decay of a whole society. Work that encapsulates the totality doesn't have to mimetically reproduce every experience in that society, it just has to be convincingly alive and withstand a bit of critical scrutiny of its inner logics. Shows like The Wire or the Sopranos and novels like those of GRRM or Wolfe or Morrison or, say, Moby Dick, Infinite Jest or Hearts in Atlantis, are all examples of works that I think pull off the totality without dedicating themselves to the reproduction of a modal social experience.
I agree with you that there is, sometimes, a tension between verisimilitude and style/good writing, but the point of polemic is to stake out a deliberately provocative position, rather than an unassailable one.
I do, however, actually think there's something wrong with treating magic like physics. If you're going to do that, just write hard sff and leave the human soul alone.
What if I want different physics though
“I object, on an aesthetic level, to so-called ‘hard magic systems.’ Indeed, I object to any system of magic. I think it is telling the foremost proponent of logically coherent magic systems in American Letters is an adherent of Mormonism, a spiritual regurgitation of capitalist mysticism so shocking in its theological arrogance, so bold in its narcissism, and so systematic in its cosmology as to drive me into sympathy with Catholicism.”
I’m salivating. I was just musing this idly as I was reading Mistborn recently, and unable to verbalize my criticism of it succinctly.
This was a great and thought provoking read, thank you.
With respect, will you invest your time and money in writing an actual book about a woman spinning alone all day in a room? Because that kind of claim seems to be grounded in virtue and in these cynical times we see a lot of virtue signaling. I share your interest in the lives of real historical people and in stories that are about common folk, and not just kings and prophets, but most of us if we're honest with ourselves are willing to make some compromises to interest readers.
I feel like on some level totality is just a quality that we ascribe to a secondary world that we think has been well executed. But I think that's a fairly subjective determination, and while I'd agree with you that The Wire and GRRM's work achieve totality, I disagree on The Sopranos. But I think those disagreements are mostly a matter of taste.
I should also have to observe that if The Wire achieves totality it does so by being completely false to the way the actual drug trade is carried out on the streets of Baltimore. Virtually all real drug dealers are on the street level themselves, have addicts for employees, and are caught in weeks or months because they have no discipline in their phone and online communications. If they're lucky they have a nice car.
I'm more of less okay with something like The Wire being good drama but bad history. But I don't know how to reconcile that with your claims that the writer must research intensely to achieve totality. Again, it seems to me that yes there is intense research, but quite a lot of it gets thrown on the cutting room floor.
I love that you've basically thrown the entire genre of hard SF under the bus and said it's not worthy of the concerns of real writers. I'm not going to defend the quality of the average SF novel that gets published, but certainly there are at least a few examples of good stories of the human heart in conflict with itself.
I should reiterate all my comments are meant with respect even if they sometimes come off as harsh. You should be commended for writing a long and thoughtful piece and exploring these ideas.
I appreciate the harsh commentary, you're making me interrogate and defend my own opinions, it's what we're here for.
What I said was unnecessarily dismissive of hard SF, I guess what I meant there is that hard SF is concerned with exogenous forces that are more powerful than individual humans, and I think good fantasy uses magic to externalize facets of internal life/emotional drives. There are obviously counterexamples, but that's how I was approaching that dichotomy.
Yeah, The Wire's excesses are part of the critique Simon is advancing in them imo. As you've said above, good writing/storytelling transcends any hard guideline.
Funny enough, I am writing--though it's on pause while I get my degree--a novel about a wool spinner, it's part of the same fantasy series all that research is for, along with a novella about weavers and dockworkers.
I have much more sympathy for hard magic systems, thinking of them as mysterious crafts like already acknowledged in comments or as the heka of the Egyptians or as the confused but systematically empirical sides of Paracelsus and van Helmont, but this is still a wonderful fiery criticism and I've put the recommended readings on my list. I stopped reading Sanderson and Martin because of almost exactly this totality issue, many years ago. I was even reading Lukacs at the time, though subjectively my decision felt more driven by Schumpeter's sly irony about big-picture visions for society in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.
I'd also like to recommend a series I found surprisingly excellent for this, specifically for demonstrating the problem self-consciously and critically: The Prince of Nothing trilogy by R. S. Bakker. It got a bad reputation in some quarters for being on the wrong side of some culture war lines and it has a sort of Bret Easton Ellis GenX depressive cynicism that it's easy to get too much of and get tired of, but nonetheless, I've found The Prince of Nothing excellent for people bothered by these issues of totality and willing to wade through some grimdark for some excellent wrestling with Frankfurt School pessimism and the Dennett & Dawkins-style evolutionary materialist atheism.
I’m still trying to work out whether I agree with what you said about the purpose of historical fiction. If we take it as true, how do the historical novels of writers like Dorothy Dunnett and Hilary Mantel (the Wolf Hall trilogy specifically) fit in with that? I have to admit I have never seen any trace of a desire to critique the present through their writing, yet they are among the finest of all historical novelists
I guess there are always counterexamples, which is one of the flaws with an unscientific, vibes based argument like the one I'm making and a sign that I came on too strong with this argument. I'd have to do a close read of those works myself to comment on them. I wouldn't be surprised if there's an oblique critique of political power or social mobility in them.
But as I say at the top, I don't think Literature writ large needs to have a purpose, so any genre will have counterexamples and masterworks that are antithetical to any identifiable direction in that genre.
You could do a lot worse than dip into the sublime Dorothy Dunnett. But you might never want to emerge. If you do, please let me know what you think.
It's appropriate that you invoke Transubstantiation because, as it is truly magical, nobody can agree on what the fuck is going on when the priest raises that little cracker and it becomes Jesus. Appropriately as well, the "hard magic" explanation, that the bread and wine literally transform into the body and blood of Christ and that the true miracle is that our sense are fooled, was rightfully left behind in the middle ages (although it was a minority view even then).
Oddly it's the Roman Catholics who try to approach the miracle with a legalistic sense, trying to divine through logic and close analysis when, exactly, the magic happens that transforms the bread into Christ. If you were to ask a member of the Eastern Catholic Church when, precisely, the bread becomes Jesus, they would likely give you a look like, "What the fuck, who cares you dork, the important thing is that the bread is Jesus."
There is a reason why the Eastern Catholic Church is as important as the Roman Catholic Church.
Anyways - fantastic writing here. I love your takedown of how empty an ungrounded historical story is.
A question though - assume that a writer doesn't want to go through and bbwrite about precisely how many bushels of grain a field produces. If a writer wanted to construct a story that is smaller in scale than a historical epic, but one that is still grounded in historical reality, where would be the best place to start eating that elephant?
What's wrong with systematic cosmology?
I loved this essay. Everyone has language for the scientism vs. mysticism dichotomy, and, as every student of philosophy knows, the choice of language to describe the insight runs the risk of obscuring more than illuminating. Food for language mavens.
While I consider myself a huge fantasy fan, I am bored with shabbily conceived worlds, shallow characters, and motivation that exists solely to serve plot outcomes. I’m also bored with extravaganza world building whose purpose is to dazzle, and likewise, I’m bored its opposite: those unremittingly grimdark places that, like Gaza, any normal person would just want to leave. (If you’ll forgive my extraneous political point, I’ll forgive yours.)
I lean more to the mystical in my fantasy writing, but it must be grounded in a sense of plausibility. That such extraordinary experiences are, at least potentially, part of the human experience. (That’s why I also like to read survivor tales.) Plausibility is a highly subjective measure, but it is crucial for a writer to deliver it, unless the work is satire or comedy. GRRM correctly treats magic with a light, deft hand, because if we unleash vast powers in a world, how does it make a world at all? How do we have a realm of shared experiences and values if I can annihilate another human being with a thought? Ideas have consequences, and the fantasy/sci-fi writer’s job is to dive deep and unpack those consequences. The historical fiction writer has a leg up: everyone already knows the consequences. We’re still living in the unfolding aftermath of the Protestant reformation and the Enlightenment.
I think it was the science fiction writer/historiographer Adam Roberts who astutely observed that there are no sheep in Tolkien’s world.
Thank you again. You have another subscriber.