Fantasy, Wonder and Magic

I sometimes wonder what it is that makes me love fantasy so much. Why specifically it’s SF&F that captivate me so much. And the other day I think I saw it, of all places, at a wedding reception, which had a magician. Card tricks, bending spoons, that sort of thing. And he was good, very good. He was mostly there to entertain the various children wandering around the place, but it was telling that every time he started doing a little show for the kids, every adult in the vicinity would turn around and watch too, and be just as impressed as the kids were.

And that’s what made me realise it, watching this magic. Because, rationally, we as adults are all supposed to realise that these magic tricks are ‘tricks’. That it’s skill, and not sorcery. But standing there watching this guy do his thing, I saw what the kids were seeing: magic. A little glimpse into the space between knowing things and believing things where weird, wonderful things are still possible.

There’s an ongoing arc in the Welcome to Night Vale podcast at the moment that touches on this theme. If you’ve never listened to Night Vale: a town in the middle of the American desert where all the conspiracy theories and cryptids and weird stuff are real, and just… accepted as a normal part of life. The podcast is the local radio station, which broadcasts adverts for the mysterious glowing lights above the local restaurant, run an interview with a flesh-eating ghost, and warn everyone to NOT GO IN THE DOG PARK AND NOT ASK WHY YOU SHOULD NOT GO IN THE DOG PARK. The point is that everything is weird, and wondrous, and that’s a good thing. It’s both funny and poignant in a great way. But the current storyline deals with a group of ‘normal’ scientists who have come to the town, and are going around explaining all the weird things that are happening. The ghosts are just noises, the lights are just atmospherics.

And it kills the wonder. In the case of Night Vale, it’s literally killing the wonders: once these impossible things are given a rational explanation, the magic is literally gone, and they no longer exist. The thing that makes them special is the not-quite-knowing, the leaving of a space for something that doesn’t make sense.

But it’s human nature to explore these things. It’s human nature to find explanations for things that can’t be explained – that’s science, that’s one of the things we do best. The drive to take the universe apart to see how it works is what makes us who we are. I know that desire so very well. We won’t ever explain everything, of course, because there will always be new mysteries, but we won’t stop trying.

But sometimes, maybe we shouldn’t try too hard. Maybe we should leave that little bit of space, even when we can explain everything about what we’re confronting. And even if we have figured it all out, we shouldn’t forget what we used to think. We know that storms aren’t a beardy bloke in the sky swinging a hammer around… but what if they were? You’re pretty sure that the magician’s trick is just sleight of hand, but what if it’s not? Kids are blessed with the ability to see into that gap where wonder lives. We could learn a thing or two from them.

That’s what writing is for, what fantasy is for, at least for me. Telling stories about places where those amazing things we’ve explained away can still be amazing, tapping into that wonder that we had so much of, when we were younger, and seem to lose inexorably over time. As the great Terry Pratchett said, “HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.”

And who knows? Doing card tricks and pulling rabbits out of hats would be an unusual career choice, if you had full-on wizardly magic. But maybe that’s the point.