Warehouse of Wonder

So Warehouse 13 just had its season finale. I didn't watch it - which isn't necessarily a comment on its quality. When a series develops long-form arcs over seasons, it makes the assumption (and takes the risk) that you'll stay current on the backstory. By Year 3 or 4, I've usually detached from the show. I'll miss an episode here or there, and before you know it, the series has rumbled by without me. It happened with The Sopranos, with Mad Men. And it's true even for shows I really, really like (as opposed to respect): I've barely remained current with Game of Thrones, and I think that's one of the best F/SF TV shows ever.

But Warehouse 13 is the current incarnation of a dead trope: the SECRET GOVERNMENT WAREHOUSE that has accumulated all the world's legendary/magical items. It's okay to use the notion as a background somethin'-somethin' - e.g. the final sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where it's not only cool, but a sarcastic comment on the nature of government vs. individual heroism. Unfortunately, too many producers make it the central premise of their projects, or use it for additional cool points, and add nothing else. "Hey, look, it's Noah's Ark! Isn't that cool?" "Hey, look, it's Tesla's death ray! Isn't that cool?" "Gosh, I hope nobody finds out about this place, they could steal the Spear of Destiny and then we would all be in trouble!" Sigh.

The Librarian.
Area 51.
Warehouse 13.
Every fourth episode of The X-Files.

It's an idea whose time has come, and gone.

Particle AND Wave

A little complementarity on Niels Bohr's birthday...

The walls between science fiction and fantasy are breaking down. Back in the day, it was either Tolkien or Heinlein. Not only was fantasy non-technological, it was almost always pre-technological. Horses, not cars; swords, not guns. Even fantasy ostensibly set in the modern world would often wend its way to a secondary world - through a wardrobe, for instance - where technology simply wasn't.

Then came wainscoting (which I've mentioned before) where magic does exist in the here and now, but is carefully hidden away from ordinary muggles...er, mortals. Obviously, the magic's hidden away in Harry Potter, but Rowling was far from the first to use the wainscot. Any pre-True Blood vampire story, for instance, has the undead hidden away. The Borrowers is classic wainscot. [Decades later, wainscoting is still going strong. Percy Jackson, Neverwhere, Highlander. Tim Powers turned history into wainscot fantasy with masterpieces like The Stress of Her Regard and On Stranger Tides.]  Fantasy and science fiction edged closer and closer. 

And then came the '60s. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," said Arthur C. Clarke. And in the '60s, writers like Michael Moorcock and Jack Chalker took him at his word, creating futures whose inhabitants no longer understood the forces that gave them their magical powers. But there was one writer who followed that avenue while delineating the philosophical difference: Roger Zelazny.

He created worlds full of characters who were literally deii ex machina - people with godlike powers granted by technology; so godlike, in fact, that they assumed the identities of the Hindu, Egyptian (and even alien) pantheons. But even while he was doing this, Roger never lost site of the border:

"It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy – it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool."  (Lord of Light)

Science and magic, SF and fantasy, reason and the unknowable, particle and wave - complementarity. The next big step in fantasy is bridging the gap, writing science and magic in the same story at the same time.

Why Joss Whedon Is Awesome and I Liebehassen Him

Hate/love - when someone is so damned good that you hate him for being better than you even while you love what he does. It's an emotion common among creative types and athletes. I felt it for Neil Gaiman when he was writing The Sandman. And of course, I feel it for Joss Whedon.

Okay, so we all know Joss is awesome. But let's dissect this for a moment. Forget about him inventing two whole new kinds of dialogue (Buffyspeak and Firefly), or reintroducing gunpowder and horses to space opera. Let's go almost all the way back, to when Buffy was a mid-season replacement that was supposed to flicker and vanish; instead it grabbed hold of people's eyeballs and wouldn't let go. Why? Metaphor, metaphor, metaphor.

Granddaddy Nerd

Ah, the Emmy nominations for 2012. Notice what's on there? Game of Thrones. The young folks may now shrug their shoulders. "So what?" they say. "It's a good show." Yeah, it is. But I'm not young folk. I'm a Granddaddy Nerd.

And that means I remember a time when a series like GoT could have been the love child of I Love Lucy, All in the Family, and Roots, and it STILL wouldn't have gotten an Emmy. Hell, it wouldn't even have been financed. And a bunch of Entourage types in Italian suits would have rolled their eyes if you'd dared to suggest it.

In the last thirty years, an amazing thing has happened - science fiction, fantasy and graphic novels have been mainstreamed. When I was in college, I would have bet heavy money that this was as likely as, well, as likely as a Columbia grad being elected president. (Yeah, I'm looking at you, Barry.)

Another Example of "Magic as Metaphor"

One of Robert Heinlein's lesser-known stories, Magic, Inc: Magic as Main Street business operations. (In fact, you could make a good case for this being the earliest "contemporary fantasy" story. Once again, RAH gets there first...)

Fun!

Tricks of the Trade - Magical Thinking

If you want to make magic seem real, try making it seem other.

When it comes to creating a universe, magic is a pain. It suffers from a reality gap that doesn't afflict geography, economics, or any of the other world-building disciplines. If your alternate world cries out for verisimilitude in politics, weather patterns, or zoology, you can fall back on thousands of real-world examples; not so in magic.

Powerful and Limited

That's best kind of magic. Powerful because, well, power is cool; and limited because the more restrictions there are on it, the more interesting magic becomes.

Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy is still the peak of magic in fantasy, because her system was both powerful (magicians could do just about anything) and limited (everything was bound by two great rules).  In Roger Zelazny's underappreciated Jack of Shadows, the Powers are only great within their own domains; and the nightsiders pay for their immortality by being soulless.

For every advantage, a disadvantage. Nihil gratis.

A Scrabbling in the Wainscot

My fantasies aren't wainscots.

Wainscoting is wood paneling for walls. It's also a term used by F/SF writers to describe a fantasy in which a magical world exists side-by-side or hidden within the mundane world...just as elves might be hidden in the wainscoting of the family manse. It's very common in contemporary fantasy: Harry Potter is a wainscot fantasy, as are Percy Jackson and The Dark Is Rising. The Dresden Files is a good example of wainscot urban fantasy for adults. In the YA classic The Borrowers, the main characters are literally (sorry) in the wainscoting.

By contrast, Lord of the Rings is a "secondary world" fantasy - Middle Earth is its own fictional world, and isn't connected to the real "primary world" at all.

But my two fantasies are very much NOT wainscots. More after the jump-