Hard Fantasy

[nancylebov]

http://www.sfnovelists.com/2008/07/16/hard-fantasy/

Hard fantasy is concerned with how things work, and why. Fantasies can be meticulous about that in some areas while being completely casual in others.

I recommend Margaret Ball's Lost in Translation as hard fantasy. Magic flows through the ground and into plants. Clear too many plants, and the magic comes out as monsters. What follows is some nice world-building. Not being able to clear large areas has all sorts of implications. And the book has one of my favorite villains. He comes up with a "clever" way of working around his world's restrictions on magic, and in the middle of the havoc he's causing, he regrets that he can't publish his findings. Also, he has trouble understanding that the scary people he's dealing with will remember the promises he makes.

To my mind, the other pole of fantasy is dream logic, with the Alice books as the prime example. Dream logic needs little bits of rationality to ground it-- if Alice keeps growing, she won't fit in a house, and if she keeps shrinking, she's floundering in a pool of tears from when she was gigantic... but the size changes don't have to be connected to any large structural ideas.

Mieville's Perdido Street Station and Un Lun Dun are probably my favorite relatively recent dream logic fantasy, with the latter not nearly as famous as it deserves to be.

Any recommendations for hard and/or dream logic fantasy?

Link thanks to yhlee.

Any

Comments

[madfilkentist]

The classics for hard fantasy, of course, are Heinlein's "Magic, Inc.," and Poul Anderson's "Operation Chaos." They're so hard they border on science fiction -- or maybe they're science fiction that just looks like fantasy.

[avram]

I think Leiber's "Conjure Wife" is an even better example, if you can swallow the premise.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

I tend to not like explicit hard fantasy - fantasy with the magical rules too explicitly exposed to the reader. There are a number of reasons for this but the biggest is that I tend to think they're a writeup of someone's tabletop FRP game.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

It depends for me on whether the rules actually feel solid and scientific as descriptions of a solid world, or just arbitrary in the D&Dish sense (in within-world logic) because of coming from a bunch of extra-universal predecessor notions of How Magic Works/Should Work.

I would recommend Walter Jon Williams' Metropolitan and particularly the sequel, City on Fire, as examples of what feels to me like hard fantasy, in which the magic (geomantic/feng shui-ish by nature) is a utility and is treated as such.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

* When the Magic Goes Away -- Niven, and followers ("When the magic returns").
* The Ethshar series (Watt-Evans) gets into this with different schools of magic, and the story that follows from taking one or more to their logical extreme. (Notably, the first three books; it gets more into world-building after that.)
* Master of the Five Magics, Secret of the Sixth Magic, and (to a lesser success) Riddle of the Seven Realms, by Lyndon Hardy, are a trio of books based on a similar premise ("Here are the types of magic, and how they work. How does society evolve as a result?") plus a coming-of-age story in each.
* I'd almost put His Dark Materials in this category, at least, the second and third books when the scientist gets involved.