-Poul Anderson, The Star Fox (London, 1968), 203.
So reflects Gunnar Heim. But he has at least killed the dragon. In real life, that would not necessarily happen either!
Fiction can be more or less realistic. A novel, whether mainstream or sf, can have any kind of ending: happy, unhappy or ambiguous. However, when the sf is also action-adventure fiction, certain genre conventions become applicable. The hero always defeats the villain even if he does not always wind up with the heroine.
Imagine traveling to a universe where the laws of probability were those of heroic fiction. Thus, if a Villain points a gun at a Hero and begins to squeeze the trigger, then it is a foregone conclusion that the Hero's Trusty Sidekick will creep up behind the Villain and KO him just in the nick of time. Depend on it. Elliot S Maggin suggested that Lois Lane, trapped underground, merely wonders how long it will take Superman to show up. In the Last Action Hero feature film, a Villain, traveling to (what we call) the real world, is amazed to discover that, in this world, the bad guys can win.
That film, like DC Comics and Anderson's Old Phoenix stories, features a multiverse where:
what is fiction in one universe can be real in another;
travel between universes is possible.
In such a scenario, there could be a universe where life is a fairy tale.
2 comments:
Hi, Paul!
The sentence where you said a villain was amazed to find a universe where the bad guys can win made me laugh!
And Poul Anderson did write some stories where we see the bad guys winning, or at least a worse alternative world coming to exist. Examples being "Murphy's Hall," "Welcome," and "Eutopia."
Not sure if PA wrote any novels where we see the bad guys winninng. Even GENESIS is not like that since it shows the human race again existing.
Sean
"Imagine traveling to a universe where the laws of probability were those of heroic fiction"
That is a running joke in the Terry Pratchet 'Discworld' stories. The world runs on 'narrativium'.
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