Accessible Texts

Yesterday my lap top went into the shop for an overnight service. Now it is back. Meanwhile, other, not entirely unrelated, reading has generated reflections relevant to Poul Anderson although placing him in a wider context.

The accessibility of a text to a reader is first a function of which language it is written in. Obviously. A Chinese or Japanese text is impenetrable to most of us here. However, there are several other factors. How long ago was the text written? Is it poetry, prose, drama or graphic story-telling? How dense or complicated is it? How archaic, obscure or specialized is its vocabulary? To which genre does it belong? What literary conventions or references does it assume familiarity with? An English text can be effectively unreadable. We have become familiar with the cliches that have accumulated within sf but imagine if the only sf that we had ever read was the pre-cliched texts of Wells and Verne.

Some Texts Referring To Fairies As Supernatural Beings Distinct From Gods, Angels Or Demons

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595 or 1596)

Edmund Spencer, The Faerie Queen (1590-1596)

Percy Shelley, Queen Mab (1813)

George MacDonald, Phantastes (1858)

Poul Anderson, A Midsummer Tempest (1974)

Neil Gaiman, The Sandman (1989-1996)

Accessibility

I have seen A Midsummer Night's Dream performed maybe five times. (Plays are written to be seen and heard, not read.)

I have never considered reading The Faerie Queen or Queen Mab.

I have just broken off a first reading of Phantastes and turned to a rereading of The Sandman as infinitely more accessible. (Yet Phantastes "baptised" CS Lewis' imagination when he read it in about 1914.)

I made perhaps two attempts to read A Midsummer Tempest before getting properly into it but now commend it as Anderson's most literary work.

The Sandman is endlessly rereadable.

Gaiman parallels Anderson in fantasy but has written no sf. Thus, both Gaiman and Anderson rework Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. The Dreaming incorporates all myths, including Odin, Thor and Loki. Gaiman's Inn of the Worlds' End parallels Anderson's Old Phoenix.