A secondary world?
A secondary world?
I viewed a rather ancient, but nevertheless interesting, documentary on JRR Tolkien on YouTube recently. The documentary was made well before Peter Jackson’s filming of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and concentrated on the books, with keynote contributions from Tolkien’s youngest son, Christopher…
Christopher Tolkien discussed his father’s concept of Middle Earth as a ‘secondary world’, that is to say an alternate reality that works by different rules, a notion that (amazingly) I was unfamiliar with; and the more he talked, the more it occurred to me that Lights in the sky, is in many regards, an example of this.
So I did some research on the concept and concluded that, although I’ve tended to think of myself as a writer of ‘realistic SF’, there are many of the elements of a secondary world in the series, particularly in the three novels set on Alpha 5. So without knowing it, I have (in some ways) been writing a work of high fantasy.
Now it’s important to keep a sense of proportion here. I have taken considerable care to make LITS as plausible and scientifically credible as possible, and what I have just said in no way invalidates any of that. But the series is many things not just one, and incorporates various literary tropes. At the end of the day it is also a work of the imagination.
Different books within the sextet are fantastic to a greater or lesser degree; After the Flood is definitely the volume with the most tenuous connexion to high fantasy, but both the books that feature Marta Camacho have long passages that dive headlong into the genre. In particular Ms Camacho’s journey down the Amazon River on her raft, following her departure from the riverboat Fitzcarraldo, which is deliberately presented in dreamlike terms.
But it’s the original trilogy that cleaves most closely to the idea of a secondary world. We have a series of novels that takes the form of a bildungsroman. The protagonist is a child when the action opens, but grows into adulthood, and comes into powers and skills beyond those of ordinary person back on Earth, although in my world these have a technological source. Marta Fernandes is also to all intents and purposes an orphan. The theme of good versus is central to the series, but the question of who is good? and who who is evil? is often indeterminate, and is left unresolved until the end of the series. This is where I mostly part company with most fantasy writers, as in my world relativism is part of the underlying philosophy. Thus the Alphanians are presented at different times (and in different ways) as both an apparent threat to the eventual triumph of good, and as its most effective proponents. The same can be said (to a lesser degree) about the Artificial Intelligence fronted by Nurse Six Gee.
The World of the series is revealed to be illusory, in the sense that the World is not as it appears to be, by a series paradigm shifts in the first three novels. A similar process is now taking place in the denouement of Maya, which I am currently writing. And at the end of the day there are beings within this cosmos whose powers are to all intents and purposes Godlike, and therefore (as far as the human actors are concerned) magical…
The Author May 2019