Monday, Monday, Monday… so, as usual, I’ve got a Fantasy with Friends post for you! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is on anachronisms in fantasy:

Do anachronisms in fantasy bother you? Should fantasy be “similiar” to the time period it’s based on, either in terms of language used or things like invention, fashion, customs, etc.?

I think the question implies an assumption that all fantasy is necessarily copying a historical period and should do so in its entirety, rather than coming up with an aesthetic and historical background of its own, which is interesting! I don’t see fantasy that way: obviously, historical fantasy needs to believably fit into the period it’s set in to work, but otherwise, I don’t see why a fantasy story needs to be copying a given time period with all of its assumptions. If it’s making its own thing, why should things be the same as in our world’s past?

When it comes to something like language, unless the dialogue is written in Anglo-Saxon, a book set in a fantasy setting that’s kind of like Britain in 999AD is just as “anachronistic” whether the protagonist is speaking modern English or weird faux Ye Olde Englishe. Most of the dialogue people think is “appropriate” in a pseudo-medieval setting is far more modern than that (and also super fake and contrived), but people are so lacking in education about how language has developed that they somehow think that a) that’s “Old English” and b) it actually suits the period.

Just gonna say it straight, unless the dialogue of a given “medieval” fantasy novel set in Britain sounds something like this, it’s already anachronistic: “Haþel, by heuen, þyn askyng is nys, and as þou foly hatz frayst, fynde þe behoues. I know no gome þat is gast of þy grete wordes; gif me now þy geserne, vpon Godez halue, and I schal bayþen þy bone þat þou boden habbes.”

(That’s Middle English, from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.)

Pretty much nothing about the way fantasy novels are written actually sounds anything like “authentic”, and few modern readers can parse sentences like the above, so I don’t personally care when authors choose to avoid faux Ye Olde Englishe in favour of something more familiar. I definitely prefer that over badly done faux archaic phrasing.

(That said, there are also authors who do it well, usually those who’ve considered exactly what they’re doing and are building congruent, sense-making worlds of which that language is a part.)

Moving on from language, often there are assumptions that come with certain levels of technology (“if you’ve got peasants with carts you must have knights and homophobia as well”) that lead to accusations of anachronism as well. Mostly, I think that kind of thing is often used as an excuse for unexamined assumptions (like sexism and racism), and again… if you’ve got a fresh new world where you control all the rules, why should you feel constrained by what “actually happened”?

Sometimes, when writers don’t include sexism and racism in their world, it’s used as a stick to beat them with because it’s not “historical”. Well of course not — it’s fantasy!

I would also gently note that a lot of what we think “actually happened” and things which we think are “true” are not. When it comes to sexuality and gender alone, there are so many assumptions about what the past was like which don’t hold true… and the same is true on almost every topic. I’ve seen readers claim things are “anachronistic” when they’d existed for hundreds of years by the time a given story was set. Your average fantasy reader is a terrible judge of what’s “realistic” for a given “period”, even assuming you grant that fantasy is set in any specific “period” at all.

Overall, I’m personally less worried about anachronism and more about what feels congruent: does your social structure make sense with the other moving parts like, I don’t know, levels of literacy and provision of education? I don’t need it to look exactly like a specific period of history: mixing and matching if you need inspiration is fine, or just coming up with something out of whole cloth, just… try to have it make sense. Don’t, for example, have “Christmas” in a world that doesn’t have Christ, and consider carefully whether the social mores you’re importing make sense without factors like religion and colonialism that have affected our history.

Overall, my grasp on what is historical is not always amazing anyway: I’m terrible with keeping historical periods straight, especially when you add different countries into the mix. So I’m fairly easy to please on that front, even in historical fiction! For me, it just has to make a certain amount of sense, and we’re good.

Happy Monday! Time for Fantasy with Friends: all the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about tropes in children’s fantasy:

Is there a common trope or concept you see in children’s fantasy stories that you think would be fun to see more of in adult fantasy?

I don’t actually read children’s fantasy or YA these days — at least not very often, except maaaaaybe a bit in graphic novel form — so I’m a little bit stumped here. If I think back to the tropes and concepts I loved in fantasy when I was a kid, I think a lot of it is being done in adult fantasy: I think fondly about stuff like The Worst Witch in the School, but then we have Emily Tesh playing around with a magic school in The Incandescent, and Caitlin Rozakis doing younger kids in a magic school in The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association, for instance. Maybe I’d love a bit less dark academia and more “holy crap I’m attending a magical school/university”?

As for portal fantasy, that’s always been around, I think, and e.g. Seanan McGuire’s playing around with it a lot in Every Heart a Doorway et al, and again in Over the Woodward Wall etc. Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar books are a bit dated now, but lovely; more stuff that takes portal fantasy seriously and isn’t trying to be meta with it might be nice.

I suppose Brian Jacques’ Redwall books also count as fantasy and I loved them, but the plots weren’t super unique, only the fact that they were all animals. So I guess I don’t see a lot of that and I’d kinda like to: there is stuff like The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper and, though this is mystery rather than fantasy in every other sense, Juneau Black’s Shady Hollow books. So maybe we can see a bit more of that?

Kinda curious what other people will answer for this question, and what I’ve failed to think of!

Monday’s here again, so we have a new Fantasy with Friends prompt to consider! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is all about magic systems:

What are some of your favorite magical systems in fantasy? Do you like magic to be explained in detail or to be a bit vague? Do you think magic should have a “cost” or not?

Let’s set the general rules first, I think: for me, it depends a bit on how important the magic is to the plot. If the main character doesn’t have magic, and magic exists in the world but not as something they need to access or understand, to me it’s fine (even better, sometimes) if the magic is a bit vague. It’s there to give flavour, and when magical things happen, in a limited POV narrative it makes sense for the character/s to potentially not know very much about it. Sometimes even when a character does use magic (like using magical items, or using magic on an instinctive level), it makes sense for them to not understand: I don’t totally understand why my PC works, but I can use it!

What bothers me is when magic is repeatedly used to solve problems without any indication of what the limits are. Obviously an author can set any limits they want and make the magic system as convenient as they please, but it works best for me when the rules and constraints are introduced early on, before magic gets used as a solution. It’s much more convincing if we know a thief-mage can unlock a plot-relevant door by smearing blood on it and murmuring an enchantment beforehand, rather than at the moment the thief gets to the locked door — even if that is shown to us by the thief-mage doing that to some other, less consequential door earlier in the story.

And while I don’t think magic always necessarily needs to have a cost, to keep tension and the ability to suspend disbelief in the narrative you do definitely need it to have limits. Maybe the limit is that the thief-mage can only work the spell once a day, or during certain phases of the moon. Maybe it’s not just a little blood, maybe the spell consumes two pints and you definitely don’t want to work it again for a good while. Maybe it only works once per door. These kind of constraints can give you the drama your story needs: on the way back, the door’s been relocked, the moon’s set, the thief-mage is way too low to do another blood donation, there’s no other door they can open instead… now how will they get out? What if they use someone else’s blood, does that work?

(These are all my own examples, by the way — I’m not saying they’re great, they’re just here to illustrate my points!)

I think The Lord of the Rings is a good example of where we don’t get clearly defined limitations on magic, but it’s clear that Gandalf can’t just do whatever he wants. He works within a framework, and we know that, so we’re not shocked when he can’t simply teleport out of the Mines of Moria — even though he’s a powerful wizard, and we can believe other amazing feats of him. Likewise Galadriel: we don’t know exactly what she can do, but we believe that she can’t just make Frodo invisible to Sauron. This also works in part because Gandalf and Galadriel aren’t the main characters, so we don’t need to be able to follow their decisions exactly in the same way as we need to understand Frodo’s mind and limitations.

For something with clearer boundaries, I quite like the world of Daniel M. Ford’s The Warden. I can’t say I’ve bothered to memorise the types of magic or even which types Aelis can use, but the fact that the clear delineations exist show me that she does have boundaries. We see her tire, we see her spells fail, and we know that no matter how powerful she is, she can still die. The fact that she’s so competent in multiple forms of magic is where the story sometimes strains belief a little… but because she’s within a system, and because things sometimes come as a struggle, we can accept that we probably have a fair idea of what she can do and what kind of foe might stretch her limits.

I’d be hard-pressed to really name favourite magic systems, because there are so many fun ones and so many of them draw from very similar ideas (without being carbon copies, because what authors do with it depends on the needs of the plot). I think I tend to enjoy things that are a unique take on something familiar: Julie Leong’s The Teller of Small Fortunes, for example, in which the main character tells fortunes… but endeavours only to tell small ones, ones with little impact. The fact that some small things (such as telling someone “you will give your daughter a kitten”) turn out to have large meanings is one of the joys of that book, to me.

I definitely also enjoy stories where there are multiple forms of magic, like in the aforementioned The Warden. In a world where someone can be skilled at alchemy but useless at divination or amazing at battle magic but unable to so much as mend a pot, there are loads of ways for magic to provide as much friction as it does a way forward.

Another type of magic I liked is where you have to understand something deeply in order to be able to use magic on it — A Wizard of Earthsea comes to mind, where Le Guin has someone explain why a mage can’t simply quiet the whole sea: you have to name what you want to change by its true name, and the sea has many names, many parts. A mage who turns themself into a dolphin can indeed swim vast distances, but at risk of losing their true self and even their name. Ged’s first master, Ogion, doesn’t even do “small” magics like shunting a cloud aside, because he knows that every change he makes can have unforeseen consequences.

I could go on for days, so I’ll stop here!