0693: "Children's Fantasy"

[Wlerin]

Long story short, the word is "he". I'm really getting tired of the confusion between grammatical gender and sex.

I'm really getting tired of languages having grammatically irrelevant characteristics like gender built into their design. Person and number reference basic logical features that can apply to any object... gender though? That's like building "color" into the language, in which case we might be having conversation about whether some abstract object like an abelian group or the number seven take the "light" or "dark" grammatical color. Gender in language is equally ridiculous.

I would not be surprised if there are languages that do this. Be glad that English gender is usually logical. Further, it is not "grammatically irrelevant". For it to be so, the distinction would need to convey no meaning at all.

Categories like gender, number, and person aid in distinguishing pronoun antecedents or verb subjects/objects, as well as many other relationships in other languages. They allow a little more syntactic flexibility, in exchange for having a few more word forms to remember. It wasn't until the early 1900's, when gender began to be used as a euphemism for sex, that this confusion started. The older meaning of gender, as it's etymology indicates, was simply "kind" or "sort" (and thus could include the distinction between male and female, but it is not limited to this distinction).

Lastly, and this is more of a conjecture, but proto-Indo-European gender itself does not appear to have been masculine vs. feminine, but rather animate vs. inanimate, or... perhaps more colloquially, doer (actor) vs. receiver. Again though, it is merely a device to aid in word agreement. Words don't have to fit the logical gender to belong in the grammatical gender.


If you dislike these things that much, go learn Finnish or Chinese. Yes, Chinese. Gender doesn't go hand in hand with a patriarchal society.

[RogueCynic]

"The Last StarFighter" was on a few days ago, maybe Randall was watching it. I prefer reality shows like Futurama myself. No mystical portals, no unexplained wormholes pulling the main character to another dimension, just an accidental cryogenic freezing. Totally believeable.

[gotcha84]

Wow, who the heck would do this? Only some kind of social outcast, y'know, those "nerds."
Heheh, they're so lame... You can stop staring at me now... Stop it... I don't.... [sniff]... It was the voices... They were so tempting... I'll return one day... T-T

[SummerGlauFan]

This. My sci-fi brain always began dissecting what was going on in stories like these even as it enjoyed them.

For example - the Pevensies lived entire LIVES from childhood to adulthood, despite apparently having no children. Those lives were entirely erased when they returned to England? Shouldn't they have all been enormously mature kids who were essentially late-middle English-speaking adults in kids bodies when they got back? Were they intended to learn NOTHING from their trip? How does that make sense? The four of them presumably got older, fell in love with someone, and then all of that was gone. The loss would be more than just "aw, we're not in Narnia anymore." Their entire LIVES were stolen from them. Yet there was no discussion of this.

What would Susan say if you cornered her in a room (before the train accident) and asked her why she decided to put away all thoughts of Narnia? Would it be a dismissive "oh, that was a children's game?" Maybe it would be, "because I'd like to actually get married and have a family one day. Because I had adulthood stolen away from me once, probably by Jesus Christ Himself, and I'll be damned if I'll let someone steal it away from me again."

Beyond that, there was the metaphysical/physical aspect -- what was the nature of the connection in the wardrobe? Wormhole? I guess it would have to be. Could the transit be studied? Repeated? Anything that exists in the real world -- including that connection, necessarily including Narnia itself because the children could also exist in Narnia and their bodies depended on the existence of nonmalleable physical laws -- can be quantified by science.

I've always wanted to write a scifi/fantasy story like this -- where does science end and magic begin? What is more awe-inspiring -- something that we don't understand at all, or the process of coming to understand it, coming to understand all its intricacies, the rules by which it operates, the grand design behind it?

I have done pretty much the same thing as I read fantasy stories. I remember as I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I was trying to figure out how the various magic worked, and I actually made up an elaborate back-story about how all the so-called magic was really lost-and-recovered technology from a previous era, and the wizards (and the main bad guys) had figured out how to operate them, at least in part. The seeing stones were some sort of communications system (that apparently no-one knew how to properly operate, since they weren't secure), the Ring had an AI, cloaking ability and nanotech, staffs could enhance the energies of the mind, etc.

Yeah, I'm a geek.

[D_al]

I have done pretty much the same thing as I read fantasy stories. I remember as I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I was trying to figure out how the various magic worked, and I actually made up an elaborate back-story about how all the so-called magic was really lost-and-recovered technology from a previous era, and the wizards (and the main bad guys) had figured out how to operate them, at least in part. The seeing stones were some sort of communications system (that apparently no-one knew how to properly operate, since they weren't secure), the Ring had an AI, cloaking ability and nanotech, staffs could enhance the energies of the mind, etc.

Yeah, I'm a geek.

That stung. Fanfiction is one thing, but fanfiction that attempts to override the elaborate back-story already carefully constructed by the original author over his entire lifetime is an evil that even I can't bear.

_{As a worse geek who has read and enjoyed the Silmarillion and the various rejected manuscripts published as "Unfinished Tales", I actually got offended enough at this to create an account just to reply, despite knowing that this post is probably as futile as the one in #386. I sincerely hope that, deep down, you're fully aware of these publications and are just out to aggravate your fellow fans via a not-very-obvious display of self-mockery.}

[SummerGlauFan]

I have done pretty much the same thing as I read fantasy stories. I remember as I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I was trying to figure out how the various magic worked, and I actually made up an elaborate back-story about how all the so-called magic was really lost-and-recovered technology from a previous era, and the wizards (and the main bad guys) had figured out how to operate them, at least in part. The seeing stones were some sort of communications system (that apparently no-one knew how to properly operate, since they weren't secure), the Ring had an AI, cloaking ability and nanotech, staffs could enhance the energies of the mind, etc.

Yeah, I'm a geek.

That stung. Fanfiction is one thing, but fanfiction that attempts to override the elaborate back-story already carefully constructed by the original author over his entire lifetime is an evil that even I can't bear.

_{As a worse geek who has read and enjoyed the Silmarillion and the various rejected manuscripts published as "Unfinished Tales", I actually got offended enough at this to create an account just to reply, despite knowing that this post is probably as futile as the one in #386. I sincerely hope that, deep down, you're fully aware of these publications and are just out to aggravate your fellow fans via a not-very-obvious display of self-mockery.}

Well, in my defense, I was 14 at the time. I was young and naive.

Now I try to use quantum physics to figure out how the wardrobe in the first Narnia book works. Also, I totally wanted to do this http://xkcd.com/665/

[exottoyuhr]

I have done pretty much the same thing as I read fantasy stories. I remember as I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I was trying to figure out how the various magic worked, and I actually made up an elaborate back-story about how all the so-called magic was really lost-and-recovered technology from a previous era, and the wizards (and the main bad guys) had figured out how to operate them, at least in part. The seeing stones were some sort of communications system (that apparently no-one knew how to properly operate, since they weren't secure), the Ring had an AI, cloaking ability and nanotech, staffs could enhance the energies of the mind, etc.

Yeah, I'm a geek.

http://flyingmoose.org/tolksarc/theories/metech.htm

The only mistake: mithril is titanium, not aluminum.

[exottoyuhr]

That stung. Fanfiction is one thing, but fanfiction that attempts to override the elaborate back-story already carefully constructed by the original author over his entire lifetime is an evil that even I can't bear.

_{As a worse geek who has read and enjoyed the Silmarillion and the various rejected manuscripts published as "Unfinished Tales", I actually got offended enough at this to create an account just to reply, despite knowing that this post is probably as futile as the one in #386. I sincerely hope that, deep down, you're fully aware of these publications and are just out to aggravate your fellow fans via a not-very-obvious display of self-mockery.}

I've perpetrated a few atrocities on the Tolkien corpus in my time, but the "high-tech" theory never struck me as the worst of them. Tolkien's skills will never cease to be awe-inspiring, but there were areas which he gave attention to -- above all, the theory of story structure (the Silmarillion's three core stories are an incredible tour de force), and the development of languages -- but others, especially the prosaic "accounting" parts, which he did not. The "space-age Silmarillion" theory is always at least a little tongue-in-cheek; but it at least explains how Nargothrond and Gondolin -- especially Nargothrond, which was built in a cave system rather than an isolated valley -- were able to both stay undetected and eat...

(As to how Angband fed itself: mushrooms. Were the orcs of Sauron more dangerous than those of Morgoth because they had access to New World crops from the Shire (...), and thus were eating potatoes, which contain vitamin C, where Morgoth's troops had chronically suffered from scurvy?)

_{C.S. Lewis was worse: Joy Davidman once reduced him to silence by asking him where the beavers got their marmalade.}

[SummerGlauFan]

I have done pretty much the same thing as I read fantasy stories. I remember as I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I was trying to figure out how the various magic worked, and I actually made up an elaborate back-story about how all the so-called magic was really lost-and-recovered technology from a previous era, and the wizards (and the main bad guys) had figured out how to operate them, at least in part. The seeing stones were some sort of communications system (that apparently no-one knew how to properly operate, since they weren't secure), the Ring had an AI, cloaking ability and nanotech, staffs could enhance the energies of the mind, etc.

Yeah, I'm a geek.

http://flyingmoose.org/tolksarc/theories/metech.htm

The only mistake: mithril is titanium, not aluminum.

Cool link!

[littlelj]

Or combine the portal fantasy with the ugly duckling for a twist on a morality tale.

A perfectly ordinary child is pulled through a magic portal into a fantastic land of magic and blah, blah, blah where he finds he is extraordinarily ordinary and, as much as he'd like to, he just can't reach the high bar of the low end of the range of specialness in the fantasy world. No special powers, no saving princesses, etc. Dejected, he returns home to find that he really is special, after all, in his humdrum, ordinary world.

*speechless with admiration*

Loved the comic muchly.

Not going to discuss grammar with people who don't have a linguistics degree. Can't be bothered any more.

[Ephemeron]

Just remember that every 'fantasy world' is based on our own. Moreover the real world is fanstasy. The very fact that we evolved from the ashes of burned out stars to become conscious collections of atoms is pure magic. And miraculously we aquired the superpowers of talking and walking (which is impressive when you consider the limited moveability of many organisms). And sapience on top of that? We are truly kings among a universe of dust!

But that's not enough. I would just love the ability to fly, preferably without a big cumbersome jetpack strapped to my back. And I'd also like to travel between parallel universes. When I read Northern Lights I wanted those worlds to exist. Everything do and see cannot rival the stuff we can imagine. So parhaps imagination is the greatest gift we have.

[scarletmanuka]

And the ents would really have been pointless if you had had rocked launchers, wouldn't they?

Not if the Ents had anti-ballistics systems and forearm mounted gatling cannons.

I think this needs to happen.

I'm surprised no one's mentioned The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever...

You obviously missed this:

At least he doesn't have leprosy.

And surely that's not really a comparable case. Covenant was an adult who was shunned by his family and his community; what difference did it make if they thought he was crazy, in addition to the other things they thought about him? In his case it was an internal issue, not a question of submitting to the common worldview against your own knowledge.

"The Last StarFighter" was on a few days ago, maybe Randall was watching it. I prefer reality shows like Futurama myself. No mystical portals, no unexplained wormholes pulling the main character to another dimension, just an accidental cryogenic freezing. Totally believeable.

Right. Did you ever see the episode The Farnsworth Parabox?
Or, for that matter, The Beast with a Billion Backs?

[project2051]

"The Last StarFighter" was on a few days ago, maybe Randall was watching it. I prefer reality shows like Futurama myself. No mystical portals, no unexplained wormholes pulling the main character to another dimension, just an accidental cryogenic freezing. Totally believeable.

Right. Did you ever see the episode The Farnsworth Parabox?
Or, for that matter, The Beast with a Billion Backs?

And "Bender's Game"

[ikrase]

Kid goes to magical world, saves the world from some evil, becomes king, goes home, everyone thinks he's crazy/pretending, kid goes back to magical world, gathers magical paraphernalia and maybe his royal army, goes home, takes over the real world as well. Ultimate domination. And then he doesn't become corrupt, but instead does eerything right and brings justice to two worlds. Because monarchies actually work if the monarch is benevolent.

Kind of a necro, but I have an idea I want to mention.

I had planned a story scenario in which Magical World is actually a more or less modern counterpart to our world. Magic has replaced technology. Scientific method exists but major science does not. It's pre-Rennaisance tech, and enviroment is more or less a VERY cleaned up classical world mroe than medival. Morality is somewhat humanist too, no more crazy repression,etc. magic both common and accesible, though people who can do it well can both work as VERY well paid skilled workers or join the army as a battle mage. Almost everybody knows at least a little magic. There is no huge middle class like in the West in our world, instead it's like the second world with people much less well off but still pretty healthy. Range of jobs is somewhat like recent premodern era: still a LOT of farmers, but the spell that converts water and atmospheric nitrogen to ammonium nitrate and distributes it into the soil is pretty cool (nobody knows what it actually does) Government is basically a powerful but not all-powerful aristocracy that struggles for power with the centralized republic. Everybody complains about dysfunctionality of this system, and never does anything about it. They know our world exists, the CIA and nobody else knows they exist. Heroine comes to our world in USA, meets hero, teaches magic, they get chased by Men in black. Completely differnt problems happen in magic world. The book ends with the portal OPEN and trade happening - but this is after _everybody_ involved has been thought crazy or has freaked people out.

[Pfhorrest]

I had planned a story scenario in which Magical World is actually a more or less modern counterpart to our world. Magic has replaced technology. Scientific method exists but major science does not. It's pre-Rennaisance tech, and enviroment is more or less a VERY cleaned up classical world mroe than medival. Morality is somewhat humanist too, no more crazy repression,etc. magic both common and accesible, though people who can do it well can both work as VERY well paid skilled workers or join the army as a battle mage. Almost everybody knows at least a little magic.

This sounds a lot like the city/nation of Tsuiraku in the Errant Story webcomic. Tsuirakushiti (which is basically the only major city of the small archipelago-nation of Tsuiraku) resembles a flying modern Tokyo, somewhat Americanized, and with pretty much all technology replaced with magic. Teenage girls fawn over the size of their crystal ball communicators (smaller is better), like cell phones; important doors are locked and unlocked with easy spells (need to know the exact right one though) instead of electronic keypads; golems take the place of robots; warp gate platforms are treated like airports (although they also have airships, but apparently airship travel has gotten really annoying since the security theater implemented after someone crashed an airship into the Tower of Artifex), etc.

Most of the rest of the world outside Tsuiraku is a medieval backwater dominated by an anti-magic theocracy (which reserves the use of magic for its "priests", and whose god is actually a huge artificial magical construct), though there is also a sort of libertarian wild west nation which has recently begun importing the guns which a loose confederacy of northern states reverse-engineered from the ruins of the ancient Dwarven civilization (which apparently has still-functional humanoid guard mecha with fully automatic weapons in some places). And then there are the Elves, who are pretty much like Tsuirakushiti except underground and far more pretentious; and wild lands inhabited by nomadic tribes of Trolls who have a much worse reputation than they deserve.

[ikrase]

I was looking at a much less 'magic as tech' setting. The setting, in fact, is really more immediately before teh industrial revolution, there-was-no-french-revolution-but there kind of was the enlightenment state. There is no mass produced magic, but almost everyone can do a little bit of it. There is also NO rapid magic development, rather it's more a matter of individual triumph and skill. Maybe you will do something that no-one has done before.

[Sprocket]

I wish life was as easy as your daemon settling.

[hedgi]

that kinda made me cry. i read a ton of those fantasy stories, and i'm always sad at the end, because, to quote one of the, " the worst part about adventures in other words is that when you say good bye, it's usually forever." it's just so sad, friends parted forever, sometimes they don't even get to remember all they did, although that might be a blessing, because after you save a world, and no one else knows, how do you go back to normal life? to the bullies and the mundane world?

still, i remember one where the kid was like, " wait a sec, i just helped over throw the ultimate evil, and rode a unicorn and fell in love, and now i have to go back to algebra and softball? screw THAT!" she promptly re-opened the portal and went back for a visit. it was way awesome.

I think thats what i got out of the alt text, not that science doesn't work, but how can we be satisfied with science when we know there is magic? then again, i failed every science test i ever took and am still not sure how i passed, so it could just be me.

[ikrase]

That analysis of LOTR is interesting, especially to somebody now interested in reedeeming the past and fusing the Enlightenment's justice and the Romantic's love.

I'd say that the most essential element of the non-cynical forms of these is that whatever magic or whatever is like, the protagonist can be important.

I remember this one book (in a series) in which an (adult) computer programmer is summoned to a world with magic by a spell that would summon the person fated to save them. IN this world magic is extremely inscrutable and convoluted: Casting a spell will most likely do nothing, and has a high chance of backfiring in a bizzaro way, unless you know EVERYTHING about the spell. There are intercontinental mage-battles. Dude manages to deconstruct magic, come up with a magic programming language, (full of Unix shell puns, tends to involve lots of summoned magic agents known (in plural) as 'Emacs'), and takes down the enemy largely by spamming magical detector nets and magic sinks that suck up all of the enemie's mana.

Unfortunately, various social aspects of the plot were very wish-fulfillmenty in a terrible way.



Another issue is that these people never come up against a problem that one cannot just win against. I'd like to see fantasy world heroes have to deal with modern society: They could not get through bureaucratic messes et al any better than we can, and they also would not be able to fight.

[rmsgrey]

I remember this one book (in a series) in which an (adult) computer programmer is summoned to a world with magic by a spell that would summon the person fated to save them. IN this world magic is extremely inscrutable and convoluted: Casting a spell will most likely do nothing, and has a high chance of backfiring in a bizzaro way, unless you know EVERYTHING about the spell. There are intercontinental mage-battles. Dude manages to deconstruct magic, come up with a magic programming language, (full of Unix shell puns, tends to involve lots of summoned magic agents known (in plural) as 'Emacs'), and takes down the enemy largely by spamming magical detector nets and magic sinks that suck up all of the enemie's mana.

Unfortunately, various social aspects of the plot were very wish-fulfillmenty in a terrible way.

Wizard's Bane by Rick Cook.