Fantasy And Reality

It would have been very easy - all too easy? - for Poul Anderson to write a fantasy story corresponding to the role play game played by characters in his hard sf story, "The Saturn Game." This does not happen. The fantasy remains only in the minds of those characters. We happen to know that another way for denizens of the Technic History to encounter magic is to visit the inter-universal inn, the Old Phoenix, but that has no impact on the uncompromisingly scientific setting of "The Saturn Game."

It would have been even easier for the play and film, Shadowlands, to alternate between the events of CS Lewis' life and scenes from his Narnia series but that also does not happen. When one of Lewis' future stepsons enters a bedroom and looks in a wardrobe, it is only a wardrobe.

Near the end of Bill Willingham's Fables graphic series, the military forces of the mundane world enter Fabletown, previously magically concealed from their sight, where the mayor, the former King Cole, awaits them... A new and fabulous age dawns and the series unfortunately ends.