I’m too lazy to look it up, but I can’t help but feel that there is some cognate root shared by these two words.

I believe that we are the only animals on Earth who can think of things that aren’t real, and even better, strive to make these thoughts actually real nonetheless. We shape the world into how we want it to be, for better or for worse.

The only difference between this and magic is that with actual magic, you don’t have to sweat the details. But what if that’s what wizardry really is? What if it’s simply knowing all the details? Like Arthur C Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Like Schmendrick the Magician from The Last Unicorn said, “That is most of it, being a wizard—seeing and listening. The rest is technique.”

So I meditate once again on the value of the genre of fantasy. Thanks to writers like China Miéville, I think I can see how the genre can become an agent of social change, fantasizing about much more than simple escapism. It can be, in a way, a complete deconstruction of the actual world we live in. In a fantasy world, except for maybe the conventions of the genre itself (which also probably need deconstructing), there is very little than you can take for granted. Nothing can really be assumed. Everything eventually needs to be made explicit. This discarding of assumptions is the very act of deconstruction, and it is necessary to write good fantasy.

Sure, Tolkien railed against allegory, and perhaps it becomes too facile to simply make 1:1 relationships between your fantasy world and the real world, but I think there can be value in metaphor. By definition, because this is fantasy (and not science-fiction), certain elements of your story are never expected to be plausible, no matter how advanced technology ever gets. Complex fantasy can never be completely transliterated into the real world. But in a world where you can’t assume anything (meaning, you can’t assume that your reader will intuit what you are thinking), characterization becomes even more important. I think this is where fantasy can shine the most: the characters frequently get faced with extraordinary tasks, but good fantasy will let the characters actually take on these tasks, and either succeed, or maybe fail. Deus ex machina is simple laziness. It is characterization that will really pin down your world and make all the various rules of magic, all the fantastic cities, mountains, seas, and continents worth investing in.

Given that, in many ways, fantasy demands deconstructing our assumptions of the real world, it becomes easy to translate various real world problems into similar situations that characters can interact in. Again, it doesn’t have to be a 1:1 correlation, but you’re likely to get the point.

Anyway, my mind is flickering in and out, so I’ll stop here for now.