A Slip of the Keyboard (12 page)

Since a lot of fiction is in some way fantasy, can we narrow it down to “fiction that transcends the rules of the known world”? And it might help to add “and includes elements commonly classed as magical.” There are said to be about five subgenres, from contemporary to mythic, but they mix and merge and if the result is good, who cares?

If you want to write it, you’ve probably read a lot of it—in which case, stop (see below). If you haven’t read any, go and read lots. Genres are harsh on those who don’t know the history, don’t know the rules. Once you know them, you’ll know where they can be broken.

Genres are also—fantasy perhaps most of all—a big bulging pantry of plots, conceits, races, character types, myths, devices, and directions, most of them hallowed by history. You’re allowed to borrow, as many will have done before you; if this were not the case there would only ever have been one book about a time machine. To stay with the cookery metaphor, they’re all just ingredients. What matters is how you bake the cake; every decent author should have their own recipe, and the best find new things to add to the mix.

World building is an integral part of a lot of fantasy, and this applies even in a world that is superficially our own—apart from the fact that Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar consisted of hydrogen-filled airships. It is said that, during the fantasy boom in the late eighties, publishers would maybe get a box containing two or three runic alphabets, four maps of the major areas covered by the sweep of the narrative, a pronunciation guide to the names of the main characters and, at the bottom of the box, the manuscript. Please … there is no need to go that far.

There is a term that readers have been known to apply to fantasy that is sometimes an unquestioning echo of better work gone before, with a static society, conveniently ugly “bad” races, magic that works like electricity, and horses that work like cars. It’s EFP, or Extruded Fantasy Product. It can be recognized by the fact that you can’t tell it apart from all the other EFP.

Do not write it, and try not to read it. Read widely outside the genre. Read about the Old West (a fantasy in itself) or Georgian London or how Nelson’s navy was victualled or the history of alchemy or clock making or the mail coach system. Read with the mind-set of a carpenter looking at trees.

Apply logic in places where it wasn’t intended to exist. If assured that the Queen of the Fairies has a necklace made of broken promises, ask yourself what it looks like. If there is magic, where does it come from? Why isn’t everyone using it? What rules will you have to give it to allow some tension in your story? How does society operate? Where does the food come from? You need to know how your world works.

I can’t stress that last point enough. Fantasy works best when you take it seriously (it can also become a lot funnier, but that’s another story). Taking it seriously means that there must be rules. If anything can happen, then there is no real suspense. You are allowed to make pigs fly, but you must take into account the depredations on the local birdlife and the need for people in heavily overflown areas to carry stout umbrellas at all times. Joking aside, that sort of thinking is the motor that has kept the Discworld series moving for twenty-two years.

Somehow, we’re trained in childhood not to ask questions of fantasy, like: How come only one foot in an entire kingdom fits the glass slipper? But look at the world with a questioning eye and inspiration will come. A vampire is repulsed by a crucifix? Then surely it can’t dare open its eyes, because everywhere it looks, in a world full of chairs, window frames, railings, and fences, it will see something holy. If werewolves as Hollywood presents them were real, how would they make certain that when they turned back into human shape they had a pair of pants to wear? And in
Elidor
, Alan Garner, a master at running a fantasy world alongside and entwined with our own, memorably asked the right questions and reminded us that a unicorn, whatever else it may be, is also a big and very dangerous horse. From simple questions, innocently asked, new characters arise and new twists are put on an old tale.

G. K. Chesterton summed up fantasy as the art of taking that which is humdrum and everyday (and therefore unseen) and picking it up and showing it to us from an unfamiliar direction, so
that we see it anew, with fresh eyes. The eyes could be the eyes of a tiny race of humans, to whom a flight of stairs is the Himalayas, or creatures so slow that they don’t see fast-moving humanity at all. The eyes could even be the nose of our werewolf, building up an inner picture of a room by an acute sense of smell, seeing not just who is there now but who was there yesterday.

What else? Oh yes. Steer clear of “thee” and “thou” and “waxing wroth” unless you are a genius, and use adjectives as if they cost you a toenail. For some reason adjectives cluster around some works of fantasy. Be ruthless.

And finally: the fact that it is a fantasy does not absolve you from all the basic responsibilities. It doesn’t mean that characters needn’t be rounded, the dialogue believable, the background properly established, the plots properly tuned. The genre offers all the palettes of the other genres, and new colours besides. They should be used with care. It only takes a tweak to make the whole world new.

Bookcase
(W. H. Smith), 17 September 1991

You want fantasy? Here’s one.… There’s this species that lives on a planet a few miles above molten rock and a few miles below a vacuum that’d suck the air right out of them. They live in a brief geological period between ice ages, when giant asteroids have temporarily stopped smacking into the surface. As far as they can tell, there’s nowhere else in the universe where they could stay alive for ten seconds.

And what do they call their fragile little slice of space and time? They call it real life. In a universe where it’s known that whole galaxies can explode, they think there’s things like “natural justice” and “destiny.” Some of them even believe in democracy.…

I’m a fantasy writer, and even I find it all a bit hard to believe.

Me? I write about people who live on the Discworld, a world that’s flat and goes through space on the back of a giant turtle. Readers think the books are funny—I can prove it, I get letters—because in this weird world, people live normal lives. They worry about the sort of things we worry about, like death, taxes, and not falling off. The Discworld is funny because everyone on it believes that they’re in real life. (They might be—the last I heard, physicists have discovered all these extra dimensions around the place which we can’t see because they’re rolled up small; and you don’t believe in giant world-carrying turtles?) There are no magic swords or mighty quests. There are just people like us, give or take the odd pointy hat, trying to make sense of it all. Just like us.

We like to build these little worlds where everything gets sorted out and makes sense and, if possible, the good guys win. No one would call Agatha Christie a fantasy writer, but look at the books she’s most typically associated with—they’re about tiny isolated little worlds, usually a country house, or an island, or a train, where a very careful plot is worked out. No mad axman for Agatha, no unsolved crimes. Hercule Poirot always finds the clues.

And look at Westerns. The famous Code of the West largely consisted of finding somewhere where you could safely shoot the other guy in the back, but we don’t really want to know that. We’d rather believe in Clint Eastwood.

I would, anyway. Almost all writers are fantasy writers, but some of us are more honest about it than others.

And everyone reads fantasy … one way … or another …

Speech given at Novacon, 1985

I want to talk about magic, how magic is portrayed in fantasy, how fantasy literature has in fact contributed to a very distinct image of magic, and perhaps most importantly how the Western world in general has come to accept a very precise and extremely suspect image of magic users.

I’d better say at the start that I don’t actually believe in magic any more than I believe in astrology, because I’m a Taurean and we don’t go in for all that weirdo occult stuff.

But a couple of years ago I wrote a book called
The Colour of Magic
. It had some boffo laughs. It was an attempt to do for the
classical fantasy universe what
Blazing Saddles
did for Westerns. It was also my tribute to twenty-five years of fantasy reading, which started when I was thirteen and read
Lord of the Rings
in twenty-five hours. That damn book was a half brick in the path of the bicycle of my life. I started reading fantasy books at the kind of speed you can only manage in your early teens. I panted for the stuff.

I had a deprived childhood, you see. I had lots of other kids to play with and my parents bought me outdoor toys and refused to ill-treat me, so it never occurred to me to seek solitary consolation with a good book.

Then Tolkien changed all that. I went mad for fantasy. Comics, boring Norse sagas, even more boring Victorian fantasy … I’d better explain to younger listeners that in those days fantasy was not available in every toy shop and bookstall, it was really a bit like sex: you didn’t know where to get the really dirty books, so all you could do was paw hopefully through
Amateur Photographer
magazines looking for artistic nudes.

When I couldn’t get it—heroic fantasy, I mean, not sex—I hung around the children’s section in the public libraries, trying to lure books about dragons and elves to come home with me. I even bought and read all the Narnia books in one go, which was bit like a surfeit of Communion wafers. I didn’t care anymore.

Eventually the authorities caught up with me and kept me in a dark room with small doses of science fiction until I broke the habit and now I can walk past a book with a dragon on the cover and my hands hardly sweat at all.

But a part of my mind remained plugged into what I might call the consensus fantasy universe. It does exist, and you all know it. It has been formed by folklore and Victorian romantics and Walt Disney, and E. R. Eddison and Jack Vance and Ursula Le Guin and Fritz Leiber—hasn’t it? In fact those writers and a handful of others have very closely defined it. There are now, to the delight of parasitical writers like me, what I might almost call “public domain”
plot items. There are dragons, and magic users, and far horizons, and quests, and items of power, and weird cities. There’s the kind of scenery that we would have had on earth if only God had had the money.

To see the consensus fantasy universe in detail you need only look at the classical Dungeons & Dragons role-playing games. They are mosaics of every fantasy story you’ve ever read.

Of course, the consensus fantasy universe is full of clichés, almost by definition. Elves are tall and fair and use bows, dwarfs are small and dark and vote Labour. And magic works. That’s the difference between magic in the fantasy universe and magic here. In the fantasy universe a wizard points his fingers and all these sort of blue glittery lights come out and there’s a sort of explosion and some poor soul is turned into something horrible.

Anyway, if you are in the market for easy laughs you learn that two well-tried ways are either to trip up a cliché or take things absolutely literally. So in the sequel to
The Colour of Magic
, which is being rushed into print with all the speed of continental drift, you’ll learn what happens, for example, if someone like me gets hold of the idea that megalithic stone circles are really complex computers. What you get is, you get druids walking around talking a sort of computer jargon and referring to Stonehenge as the miracle of the silicon chunk.