Yzabel / July 18, 2005

On the verge of finishing Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Summer Tree, here’s a thought that came to me regarding the concept of “people from our world suddenly transported into another, fantasy world”. A theme that is actually dear to my heart, given that my own current writings is done with this theme in the background (well… in a way, at least).The concept itself, of course, isn’t exactly new. Stephen Donaldson has used it in the Mordant’s Need and Thomas Covenant series. In the Amber cycles, Roger Zelazny’s characters travel through a myriad of worlds (and it is interesting to note that prince Corwin, after all, begins his journey on Earth, while believing himself to be a “normal” man).However, I’ve been struck at times by a certain amount of illogism regularly happening in many stories centered around this theme. While I’ll be the first one to agree that fantasy is fantasy and that readers wouldn’t care anyway about long explanations regarding the why’s and how’s, sometimes too much unlikeliness tends to kill the magic just as well in my eyes. If my first thought is “how the hell can a primitive tribe living deep in the woods in another universe speak modern English, there’s a problem. Which is exactly what happened in my current read. The story in itself is nice to read, but the theme of the travel to another world seemed rather useless to me – in that the characters could just have originated from Fionavar itself, period.Catch that: five students from Toronto, dropped in a medieval-like world full of seeresses, priestesses, aging kings, magicians and old, angry evil gods waking up… and they instinctively understand the Court’s politics, how to wield an axe, how to ride without ever getting stiff (whoever has ever mounted a horse knows that on the very first day, one can only feel like run over by a tramway), and they don’t exactly seem very surprised by all of this either. ‘Why, yes, Sir Magician, we’ve known you for one hour only, but we’re going to follow you in your world”. And this isn’t the only story where such things tend to happen a little too easily. Why do none of these characters ever get into fits of hysteria and bang their heads against a wall a little in disbelief? There wouldn’t be any need to follow such paths for 100 sheets along… but no reaction at all is just as annoying.Is it just me overreacting a little, due to actually trying to make my own story enjoyable while not being so unbelievable that it just sends the reader into pits of boggling? Or is there indeed a pattern, here, that sometimes – sometimes – some things in the fantasy genre should be taken a little less… “lightly”?