(I have copied this post from the Science Fiction blog because it was written as an introduction to some further comments on Poul Anderson's Operation Luna.)
The premise of Robert Heinlein's "Magic, Inc." is that magic works and
is practised like a set of technologies. Magical practice is based on
the reality of supernatural entities and forces, not on any new theory,
discovery or application of the natural sciences. Thus, "Magic, Inc." is
fantasy, not science fiction (sf).
We might call it "hard fantasy" to indicate that the implications of the
premise are deduced as rigorously as are the consequences of any new
technology in hard sf.
Two other "hard fantasies":
in The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, there is time travel to
historical periods with circular causality as in an sf novel but here
the time travel is one of several applications of magic;
in Black Easter/The Day After Judgement by James Blish, demons are real.
Blish wrote mostly hard sf. It is possible, when reading his fantasies,
to forget that they are a different genre from his sf. Indeed, some of
his characters find it hard to believe that their high technology
coexists with demons. In fact, Black...Judgement is the second
volume of a trilogy about the conflict between secularism and
supernaturalism. Volumes I and III remain ambiguous but it is a premise of Volume II that demons exist and are
neither technological nor extraterrestrial but supernatural.
No comments:
Post a Comment