Somehow with everything else going on I'm managing to read A Song of Ice and Fire and am halfway through the third book. It happens in a fantasy world that carries over a lot from classic High Fantasy and the Middle Ages. The landscape isn't quite as pseudo-European as are those of Middle Earth or the Hyborian Age but there are still many similarities. The social structure is very post-Roman and pre-Magna Carta. Supernatural elements are real but fairly subtle.
Somewhere in the back of my brain a science fiction novel percolates. It combines human origin theory, Burning Man culture, and the "fact" that extraterrestrials sort of look like us. The Burning Man part is just my way of finding a place here on Earth for my oddball aliens to live. They're not the usual aliens: They're completely human, except for a hundred or so millennia of evolution within other ecosystems. They're just weird, and don't fit in, and are here as part of an ongoing religious conflict. Where are they from? Planets far away that were terraformed for them a long time ago, planets with unearthly geographies and alternate combinations of compatible flora and fauna, planets where for whatever reason, things are a little bit different in ways that to us might appear magical.
My weird idea is that G.R.R. Martin has placed his fantasy on such a planet, not Earth, but Earth-like, with the mysteries of Fire and Ice and Others and Wall explicable by a science tens if not hundreds of thousands of years old.
I know, that's my weird idea, not his, and therefore completely wrong. But I like it for the time being.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I like it. In The Number of the Beast, Heinlein hinted that the "normal" originating universe in his story might not be the one we, the readers, inhabited. Kind of fun. I thought about that in Busy Bee Cafe--that the "alternate' reality might be the one where, you know, Kennedy was shot, and we actually LOST the VietNam war.
I think of it as a parallel universe. There's a lot of Wars of the Roses in that story and especially in the cast.
As I get further along my weird idea sounds even better. Think of it as science fiction about an Earth-like world far away, settled sometime in its dim past by Earthly humans, with today (storytime-today, whenever that is) the only thing left of the old science being the Wall, and the Others, and the glass candles, and a little incidental magic. After all, as Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Or better put by Leigh Brackett: "Witchcraft to the ignorant, ... simple science to the learned."
Post a Comment