Fantasy And Reality

Usually, fantasy and realistic fiction don't mix. It would be unacceptable if magic were suddenly to work as a deus ex machina on the last page of a contemporary novel. But authors can be creative.

Characters from fictional works of different genres can meet in Poul Anderson's Old Phoenix - as long as they don't meet anywhere else.

In a biographical film about CS Lewis, it would be easy to alternate scenes of real life and of Narnia provided that it was understood that Narnia remained imagination/fiction. However, in Shadowlands, a child looks into a wardrobe - and it is only a wardrobe.

In Dornford Yates's novels, characters who have visited a fantasy realm/magical country somewhere on the border between France and Spain interact with characters who have not - but any reference to the magic is confined to a single novel.

In "The Saturn Game," explorers who have just landed on Iapetus behold a glacier:

"Broberg was the first to breathe forth a word. 'The City of Ice.'

"'Magic,' said Garcilasco as low. 'My spirit could lose itself forever, wanderin' yonder. I'm not sure I'd mind. My cave is nothin' like this, nothin' -'

"'Wait a minute,' snapped Danzig in alarm." (II, p. 9)

Broberg and Garcilasco are characters in a hard sf story who are enacting a fantasy. Anderson could easily have written both the hard sf and the fantasy but this time confines himself to the former - except insofar as he tells us what the game players are imagining.

In a work that is an avowed fantasy, there is no need to rein in remarks like Garcilaso's above about a spirit losing itself forever.

"The Lapps believe that it is unwise in any way to attract the attention of the dancing northern lights, or they will carry you off into the sky to be one with them forever."

-Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Brief Lives (New York, 1994), Chapter 4, p. 1, panel 4, caption 1.

So far, that is merely a statement about what some people believe. However, read panel 4, caption 2:

"The alderman is old enough to know..."

(Wait for it.)

"...how rarely this happens."