Wonder – A Matter of Perspective

I like having little guys around. I have done since I was a kid, and one of the great things about adulthood is that while your parents may roll their eyes or even tut disapprovingly, nobody can stop you from continuing to be a child at heart. More specifically, my parents and now my wife get to put up with my occasional, continuing project of conjuring adventures for this little fellow:

This is Takua. For those of you who, like me, were children at the turn of the century, LEGO’s Bionicle series may be familiar to you: mighty heroes questing after masks of power and fighting the forces of darkness, in the form of buildable plastic robots. An advantage of working with LEGO for a living is that I can now happily continue collecting said robots to add to the ones I had as a child, including this little guy. This particular character works as a Chronicler; he travels around his island and beyond recording stories and important events. And so before one family holiday a few years ago I had the bright idea to bring him along, because I’d been looking at some rocks on a beach and thinking that while they might be just a pile of stones to me, to something smaller they’d appear a little more dramatic.

And I think that turned out to be true.

Defying death at every step!Definitely not approximately 2 feet off the ground!

So Takua has accompanied me to various places now, where I have indulged this occasional desire to play with toy photography and to irritate whoever I’m on holiday with by slowing them down on walks. Because when you’re four inches tall, a stream is a mighty river; a weed is a colossal tree; a big rock is a towering cliff-face. A journey of a few metres is a multi-day odyssey. A bit of interesting lichen is barely worth a glance, if you’re the size of a human, but to Takua, these rust-red boulders are fascinating. These weird mushrooms we found are interesting enough to look at – but imagine if they were literally knee-high!

Scaling up these environments, transforming them in the context of Takua’s view, is immensely satisfying and fun to do. He always comes home safely from these grand adventures, of course, but it doesn’t always look like that’s going to happen. Thankfully he has a Giant Sky God to pluck him from harm’s way if necessary. And also to repeatedly put him there.

And this is, I think, at the very heart of good SF&F: looking at reality and recontextualising it. What looks normal or mundane at first glance can be turned into something weird beyond imagining with a little effort and tweaking. Look at how many props and costumes are just ordinary things rebuilt. There are levers on the bridge of the starship Enterprise that are just barcode scanners glued to a bit of wood. Qui-Gon Jinn’s Space Radio is just a razor handle. The lightsaber – one of the most iconic bits of sci-fi equipment ever created – is some bits of old camera welded together. And so too are landscapes and bits of environment.

A crumbling archway in a forest can become a gateway to anywhere you’d like. A stream on the riverbed of a gorge in Morocco can become a mighty, surging river on a planet seared by an unforgiving sun… as it did for me in The Scar, a long story turned short story that I really must revisit and expand back into the novel it was rapidly becoming.

A tiny stream can a mighty river make.The Giant Chair of Doom, however, is a mystery that none dare explore in full…

A lighthouse can become a towering beacon of knowledge like the Lantern in the Boiling Seas. A strip of woodland can become a hostile jungle. A bit of rock two feet high can become a treacherous cliff face for a little plastic robot.

Plants are fascinating things, especially if you consider what they’d be like scaled up.

Building fictional worlds can simply be a matter of looking at the real world in a different way. And pocketing Takua for a little adventure is a great way, I find, to do just that: to see things differently, to turn the mundane into the wondrous. Anything can be amazing if you just see it differently. Then all you have to do is write about it.