sensawunda

[marycatelli]

"The world will never starve for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder." G. K. Chesterton

Wonder -- for all the praise bestowed on it, it can be hard to find in SF or fantasy. Then, it is a brilliantly colored but sneaky, sure-footed beastie -- or is a birdie? That would explain how swiftly it can escape nets. And stories. And books, and authors.


One would think that magic would be the natural fount of wonder, but -- well, I think I blame Ursula K. LeGuin for her wizard protagonist Ged. Once magic came into the hands of the protagonist, it naturally acquired a degree of familiarity that militated against wonder. You can get the same effect in SF where the universe is run-down and grubby, and everyone's seen it all before.  Kinda hard to convey to the reader that sense of wonder where the characters feel nothing about it.   It is not for nothing that the newbie is so perennial a character.

The January Dancer managed it for the Dancer itself and for the cavern filled with alien artifacts that they found it in.  Some of the alien cultures, too.  Then, the Dancer was crucial to the plot, and like all crucial things, we got to see the scale of it.  Which did not destroy the sense, but damped it down some.  The Girl Who Chased the Moon has some nice stuff; then, it's magical realism rather than epic fantasy, and the wallpaper that changes in the room where Emily says hints at things but doesn't crucially move the plot.  It's a tradeoff.  Most books manage moments of wonder (if that) for that very reason.  The Prospero's Daughter trilogy by L. Jagi Lamplighter, and the Chronicles of Chaos by John C Wright, manage to pull off moments and even stretches of wonder despite the characters' being thoroughly familiar with many marvels, but there are the constraints of plot.

Patricia McKillip pulls it off in most, like in Winter Rose, The Book of Atrix Wolfe, or In the Forests of Serre.  Part of it is style, where she manages to convey things that are, as Dunsany would put it, beyond the fields we know.  Style is important in wonder.  You want to, you need to, evoke rather than merely inform to rouse a sense of wonder.

Some of Gaiman's work has it in touches -- Neverwhere or Stardust.  Though that starts to shade into questions of whether the uncanny and eerie are a branch of wonder or a nearly related category.  Like the witch in Jane Yolen's Snow in Summer.  Or in Teresa Frohock's Miserere, where the demonic is real and really dangerous.  The gorier side of horror is, of course, right out, but what about the unearthly evocation side?



Part of bittercon

Comments

[writerjenn.livejournal.com]

One drawback to characters who can use magic--I always wonder why they don't use it *all the time.* People (well, animals in general) don't waste energy; they usually take the most convenient route to do anything. So why wouldn't a magic user just do everything magically, making the magic routine? That's where it's good for an author to build limits into the magic, or have the magic user suffer a consequence / pay a price whenever it's used.

[marycatelli]

Yup. Limits are necessary for storying -- or at least the convincing appearance of limits. They do tend to lead to rationalized, homogenized magic with not much wonder left in them.

[branna.livejournal.com]

For me, the rational and the wondrous don't actually have to be at odds with each other, but can coexist. (I.e. magic doesn't have to be rare or unexplained to have a sense of wonder about it). But this seems to be a minority viewpoint.

I also get a sense of wonder out of novels with wonderful, unusual societies and cultures, especially where the magic of the world, no matter how prosaic, is integral to those cultural differences. For me where the sense of wonder fails is where the fantastical elements feel grafted on.

[marycatelli]

Can you name some examples of it?

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I am intrigued how you are defining 'wonder' here. To me, wonder is not intrinsically separate from the familiar : I feel that it is very much possible to feel wonder looking at a familiar face or a well known garden, just as much as when seeing a craggy new undiscovered landscape. The wonder is in the discovery, not the novelty as such.

I don't think Earthsea lacks wonder - in fact the scene where Sparrowhawk and Arren see the dragons dancing on the wind of morning is just about my personal definition of wonder. Even though it is something Sparrowhawk has seen many times before, it is quite clear it is just as much a wonder to him as it is to Arren, seeing it for the first time...

Diana Wynne Jones has a particularly nice way of conveying familiar wonder, I think. So often her characters look at a situation that is very domestic and routine or even dreary and realise something new and significant about the situation, or about themselves. I wish more writers would try wonder through realisation, rather than wonder through the rather easier technique of just flinging in someone who hasn't seen it all before.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

... though perhaps it is essentially inappropriate to start defining 'wonder'...?

Back to Tolkien again "He who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom" - so true, Gandalf!

[marycatelli]

Were I asked, what is a fairytale? I should reply, Read Undine: that is a fairytale; then read this and that as well, and you will see what is a fairytale. Were I further begged to describe the fairytale, or define what it is, I would make answer, that I should as soon think of describing the abstract human face, or stating what must go to constitute a human being. A fairytale is just a fairytale, as a face is just a face; and of all fairytales I know, I think Undine the most beautiful.

Many a man, however, who would not attempt to define a man, might venture to say something as to what a man ought to be: even so much I will not in this place venture with regard to the fairytale, for my long past work in that kind might but poorly instance or illustrate my now more matured judgment. I will but say some things helpful to the reading, in right-minded fashion, of such fairytales as I would wish to write, or care to read.

Substitute the same notion for wonder, and it works.

[marycatelli]

Possible is one thing. But a writer probably doesn't aim to write something that might, conceivably, inspire wonder. Nor will a reader look upon a passage as wonderful because it's imaginable that it might inspire wonder in someone.

Earthsea has its wonders, but it's the danger it unleashed that had the ripple effects -- by taming magic into something the POV characater knows and has mastered.

To be sure, transforming the familiar also works. Chesterton even had a word for it: mooreffoc. "The queerness of things that have become trite when they are seen suddenly from a new angle," as J.R.R. Tolkien put it. Piling strangeness upon strangeness is not a good way to create it -- which is part of why it is so hard to do.

[coldhighmountai.livejournal.com]

That Chesterton quote must be a throwback to "Manalive"

[marycatelli]

Possibly -- though I don't think there was ever a point in his life where he would have disowned the sentiment.

[castiron.livejournal.com]

Kinda hard to convey to the reader that sense of wonder where the characters feel nothing about it.

Though Susanna Clarke pulled it off for this reader towards the end of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell -- the viewpoint character was completely unaware of who he was speaking to and was viewing an incredible encounter as a mundane annoyance, but I was in utter awe and amazement.

[marycatelli]

That can sometimes be done, but it takes real skill.