Temporality and Geography in Fantasy

[alecaustin]

So! One of the things that came out of truepenny and me talking at ckd's birthday party was her observation that Tolkien arranged different eras of history next to each other geographically in Middle Earth, instead of in temporal succession, so you could have the Rohirrim & men of Gondor as neighbors; and that David Eddings did much the same thing in the

Comments

[mrissa]

I wanted to remember to say Jorkens. The Dunsany that's very temporal pulp story stuff is Jorkens. It's the character name I couldn't come up with, and it's very Haggardy.

[alecaustin]

Cool, I didn't know that Dunsany did that sort of thing. Which collection(s) are those in?

[mrissa]

Nightshade has very sneakily put them out in three volumes called The Collected Jorkens, which you should under no circumstances buy, as you can borrow ours.

[alecaustin]

I will keep this in mind.

[alecaustin]

You raise a lot of interesting points! I will attempt to reply once my head is less full of stupid.

[mrissa]

I think that if you're worried about ruining the initial allure of the world with change, probably starting with a changing world as a hitting-the-ground-running will...if not help, at least drive away that subset of readers right away? Which may not be useful. But I think signaling, "This is not what I am doing here," is useful in that sense. Even the most hard-core vampire-fancier hardly ever gets frustrated at lack of vampires in something that is not signaling that it might have vampires, so perhaps the same will work with change? Or not; I am frequently wrong.

I would absolutely love near-future urban fantasy if it was done well. Write that! I will read it! Granted, it's doing more than one hard thing at once, but I don't mind demanding that writers juggling chainsaws while dancing on a tightrope for me.

[swan_tower]

I'm also glad you linked to this one. I suspect that writing the Onyx Court series (which has temporality forced upon it by the structure I chose and the nature of real history) will turn out to have radically changed the way I think about the issue in secondary worlds; at the very least, it has made me much more aware of it than I used to be.

The notion of geography substituting for time is an interesting one, too, even if it makes no sense anthropologically.