"The cold drink tasted of citrus, and the steaming pitcher turned out to contain hot coffee. Agnostic though he was, Bryan sent up a prayer of thanks for the latter."
-Julian May, The Many-Colored Land (London, 2013), Part II, CHAPTER ONE, p. 149.
See "Tea Or Coffee, Sir?"
May's text acknowledges the Connecticut Yankee and Narnia.
After discussing the creative process here, I then reflected on its progression from the abstract to the concrete. In Hegelian terms, abstract being and nothing interact as becoming which results in determinate being which is necessarily one thing and not any other thing. A creator must decide what to create, whether to write an epic, novel or film script etc, then which particular novel etc. Creative energy focuses on and condenses into some concrete form.
Fictional time travelers, e.g., in Wells' The Time Machine or in Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever," set out to travel into the (abstract) future but must then arrive in a particular future with concrete features that might have been otherwise. The Time Traveler does not enter the future described in The Shape Of Things To Come and Anderson's Martin Saunders does not travel through the History of Technic Civilization. One good reason is that their authors had not created those futures yet! However, the main point is that they must enter some particular future, not "the future" in general. Authors make momentous choices and decisions.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Ha! One thing I remember about the SAGA OF PLIOCENE EXILE books (perhaps in THE MANY COLORED LAND itself) was how the "exotic" (a word used for aliens from other worlds) king was somewhat put off by the prosaic, businesslike competence of good human administrators. He was more used to floridly elaborate ways of managing things.
Sean
Post a Comment