The Other(s)

The other of the other is still other

Yesterday I found the term ‘hard fantasy’ which seems to have no original meaning, as all the discussions on it centered around trying to root out possible meanings for it.

As a genre matures (or goes forward through more adherents and further times and cultures) it washes, like the tides, in and out, with smaller movements like waves, washing in and out, and cross-currents adding complexities. The genre spawns sub-genres which in turn splinter and rejoin. Something like this has brought on the term ‘hard fantasy’ — some new trends have been espied in the literary landscape, and a few authors have been seen as betraying similar tendencies, which some thoughtful critic has termed ‘hard fantasy.’

One attempt to define the term has resulted in an oxymoron: ‘hard fantasy is realistic.’ Magic that is unscientific, but science. A world that is created according to all the physical laws that govern our own.

Eartherea has no roads, no high-ways, no pavement, and very few trails. Even those trails are like the faint footpaths and deer-trails in the deep woods: at one point or other they are sure to peter out, and when we try to follow them, we will be left imagining the way forward, until we find ourselves out of trail, lost in the wood.

Eartherea is the Other. The Other Self with the Other Sex on the Other World pursuing the Other Career.

But, other than what?

That is what is crucial here. The first trends in modern fantasy formed in reaction against ‘modern life’ in its industrialism, even as Romanticism arose in reaction against the first waves of the Industrial Revolution.

Those first fantasists saw Eartherea as Other than Industrialism and modernity.

But the writers who are credited as the first of our new term, ‘hard fantasy,’ were forming worlds in reaction against the Eartherea that their forefathers in fantasy had created.

Their Eartherea is Other than the Other of the real world, and as such (in somewhat poor imaginative prowess, I fear) is more like the real world.

Only, not quite.

Anyone can find his own personal Eartherea, and in defining Eartherea as the Other, we see that is is built out of a negative. And yet even as some aspects of Reality are denied to envision an Other world, other aspects of Reality are held onto; few indeed have been the attempts to dream an Eartherea that has no link to our common Earth at all.

Thus, we who sing of Earthereal realms, reject some of what we find around us, and hang onto other parts.

For those writers of the ‘hard fantasy’ clique, what was objectionable in the world, that they rejected, included the visions of Eartherea that other talesmen and dreamers had conjured up.

But all are welcome in the compass-less, map-less, road-less, unexplored wilds of the Other World.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, July 17, 2008)