Disambiguation, as Wikipedia says.

[truepenny]

(I love that word.)

(And, in case you're wondering, I chose the icon to make fun of myself. Not to imply that my Ph.D. gives me any kind of moral authority.)

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Part I: secondary world

In the comments to this post, it became clear that "secondary world" was not, as I had hoped and thought it was, a transparent and illuminating phrase.

I freely admit this is my fault. I'd thought I'd gotten it from Tolkien, and when I went and looked at "On Fairy-stories," I found that, yes, he uses the phrase "Secondary World," but he uses it to mean any fictional creation; for him it's all tied up with suspension of disbelief. Philip Sidney's golden and brazen worlds apply here.

And that's not what I mean. But the phrase is still a good one, so with suitable apologies to Professor Tolkien, I'm going to keep using it my way.

"But what is your way?" the peanut gallery wants to know.

Well, that's where things get tricky.

Because this turns out to be part of the shifting generic sands of fantasy--so my definition is partial, has infinite counter-examples, and will be subject to change without notice.

But today, what I mean by "secondary world" is a world (a setting in a novel) which is not an extrapolation from the real world. The War for the Oaks, under this rubric, is not secondary world fantasy, because it takes place in Minneapolis. Witch Week is not secondary world fantasy, because that world is very explicitly extrapolated from ours. The Lord of the Rings is secondary world fantasy; Spindle's End is secondary world fantasy; Howl's Moving Castle is secondary world fantasy, as is Dog Wizard, although both of them involve crossing from the secondary world into the real world. (I keep wanting to put "real" in sarcastic quote-marks, but I'm not up for epistemology on a Saturday morning.)

Looks so simple, doesn't it? But what do I do with books like Neverwhere and Charmed Life? How alternate history does a world have to be before it crosses the line from extrapolation to secondary world?

And here is where we draw the line. I'm not interested in classificatory schemes that pin every last beetle to a bit of pasteboard. The answer is, it depends. You decide on a case by case basis, depending on what the story is doing with the world and how it fits in other regards into the continuum.

But--my clarification of my earlier post--what I was talking about was worlds that are NOT extrapolations from our world and why those worlds are being imagined in such narrow ways.

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Part II to follow.

Comments

[calanthe-b.livejournal.com]

If you haven't already, have a look at The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, which develops a really useful vocabulary of fantasy tropes including Secondary World, crosshatch (eg Charles de Lint's short stories), wainscot (that's where Neverwhere comes in), portal etc...it's very useful for being able to isolate exactly what kind of world-structure one's talking about in a text.

[pedanther]

It would never have occurred to me that Neverwhere was a borderline case. It's set in London, just as The War for the Oaks is set in Minneapolis.