Dr. Lori began this series with an attempt to give some shape and form to the genre of fantasy, to draw boundaries around what truly IS fantastic, and thus what is NOT. She got some help with this from Tolkein and LeGuin, and while I do not agree with everything those luminaries have ever said, the diaries are well worth reading. However, one issue that was not addressed directly in those earlier discussions was the boundary between Fantasy and Science Fiction.
A lot has been said on this topic, and it comes to mind when reading something like the books in L.E. Modesitt’s Imager Portfolio. This is a series that, as of Assassin’s Price (to be published in July of 2017), runs to 11 books, featuring three different main characters in three separate historical eras of the nation of Solidar — which vaguely resembles France. Each of these main characters is an Imager — a particular sort of magic user, who can change or create things in the world by clearly imagining them in the mind.
I have only read the first three, featuring the painter turned police captain turned spymaster Rhennthyl, and was charmed from the start. The first book mainly circles around Rhenn discovering his powers, joining the college of Imagers, training to be a bodyguard to the legislature, thwarting international espionage, and dealing with the fallout from annoying a powerful noble family.
I loved these books because of their focus on day to day life. We follow Rhenn from class to class, day to day, meal to meal. We learn which restaurants in which neighborhood have better food, about the common vintages of wine favored by the various characters, and all sorts of other details of daily life. I love this stuff. I loved it in the Harry Potter books when Rowling would devote several chapters to ordinary life at Hogwarts, and was always sort of annoyed when this day to day living was interrupted with The Big Plot. Modesitt follows Rhenn’s rise to legend at a snail’s pace, and it is satisfying and fun to read.
This was only really possible, though, because as far as I could tell, the power of the Imagers was the ONLY fantastic element in these stories. The Solidar of Rhenn was otherwise a mid- to late-nineteenth century European power, engaged in the rather ordinary struggles and rivalries that such a power would face in an ordianary, secular world. Furthermore, we learn a LOT about the theory and practice of Imaging. After all, Rhenn, as a student at Imagisle, has a chance to absorb and deploy the collected learning and wisdom of generations of Imagers before him. This is not a mysterious lost art, but an ordinary human faculty that has been with people from the distant ages of yore. In a more fantastic world, with more fantastic doings, I cannot help but think that there would be no time for this focus on the ordinary details of life in a comfortably familiar secondary world.
This reminds me of another series that takes a historical setting and infuses a singular element of fantasy — Naomi Novik’s Temeraire novels, which began with His Majesty’s Dragon. These books are set during the Napoleonic Wars of a world where dragons are common and ordinary. Other than the dragons, things are much the same as they were in history, except where Novik proposes that the presence of dragons would have moved history in a substantially different direction.
I heard it proposed once, by an author who I could no longer remember, that when magic is fully explained and made an ordinary part of the world, that one is not reading fantasy any more, but rather science fiction in costume. By that standard, both The Imager Portfolio and Novik’s books would be closer to a kind of soft SF than they are to “real” fantasy.
What do YOU think? Tell me in your comments.