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If anyone has emailed me in the last 10 hours, you may want to think about resending. I don't know how it happened, but all my emails were deleted from the server without reaching me. This is a first and I'm very impressed with it. I think it was my email client, because I was told that there were 37 messages and then suddenly there were none. Time for a new email client!

Just as well it was Sunday morning and most of the 37 messages would have been spam.

The Medieval Imagination, Sydney, July 14-15

Sydney announcement (This is of the 'you know you can avoid me if you try' variety.):

I will be teaching at the Writers' Centre in Balmain next weekend, at the very beautiful NSW Writers' Centre. Bookings will be open until Friday, I believe.

The course is called "The Medieval Imagination" and will cover all sorts of fun stuff, from how to recognise a fairy (must pack my pretty pictures) to how Roland died. I'll talk about epics and Arthurian literature and book production and how the French and English created their myths and monsters and heroes in the Middle Ages. All of this will target writers' needs - the aim is to give you stuff you can use in your fiction. I can talk about the Grail till the cows come home, if the Grail is what you need in your life. No Beowulf, though. Beowulf and I have never got along nearly as well as we ought.

Given Robin Hood finishes tonight, I might teach a segment of Robin Hood - the Medieval musical. It all depends on how evil I am. I will accept bribes if folks don't want to sing.

You can find out more here: http://www.nswwriterscentre.org.au/html/s02_article/article_view.asp?id=295&nav_cat_id=236&nav_top_id=56&dsb=817

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A third entry today? Blame sartorias. She got me thinking about this when I was supposed to be reading a review novel. It wouldn't leave me alone until I had written it out a bit further. You see, I was playing some of my ideas about how individuals take on cosmologies at an everyday level on sartorias’ blog. What I said (with the typos fixed) was:

“I've been thinking about cosmology again (quick, run and hide!) and one of the areas where the play can change the way we describe and interact with our reality is by giving us a workable cosmology. A cosmology we can use in our lives, as opposed to one that we nod and say 'look, the scientists have explained the world for us again.' A really good instance of how fiction creates a transition from play to reality came at a Conflux, when a practising magician pointed out that some modern magic is derived from particular fantasy novels.
And I suddenly realise that I need to write a lot more words for what I'm saying to make sense. Basically, I suspect that our play can help us explain our realities where our formal education has failed and that this can affect fundamental world constructs.”

To be honest, I’ve been playing with this idea for a very long time. Not ‘playing’ as Sartorias used the word, but ‘playing’ as in trying it for size in a number of contexts.

A while back here I talked here about how long the Ptolemaic world view has lasted into the modern world, even when science had declared it entirely defunct. It isn’t a zombie-lingering, either. To fully displace it, the niches where it endures need to be analysed and usable stuff provided to take its place.

Obviously this hasn't happened as completely as I was taught at school. Astrology, for instance, fills a variety of functions and just saying ‘the universe doesn’t operate like that according to this theory you won’t understand without higher mathematics’ doesn’t displace those functions. The argument is, however, quite sufficient reason to continually try to debunk it, to relegate it to the side, to further change its functions and how it works in everyday lives.

All this was good and fine, but I was missing important dynamics in how it all operated. Fiction as a form of play that adults can engage in filled in some of the missing dynamic in my mental playground.

How could the Ptolemaic universe survive in people’s lives when it wasn’t being formally taught? Because it was being brought into people’s games. How can people re-introduce notions based on a Ptolemaic reality when mainstream religion and mainstream science are so very disbelieving of them? Because of the strength of play in promulgating new ideas, reinventing old ones and preserving even older ones.

Fiction is one of the biggest providers of dynamics in all this. When I read speculative fiction as an historian*, I notice the world views that writers use to create their universes and how they are presented to readers. In fantasy novels and in historical fantasy novels (and in quite a few historical fiction novels) over and over and over again I see a gap in understanding.

The demise of the Ptolemaic cosmology and all its implications means we (as in we-in-the-mainstream-West) have lost easy access to a highly developed alternate world view. While the Ptolemaic world view would provide a good explanation for a fantasy world or a good underpinning for developing a sophisticated reality, very few writers use it this way. What they do is create worlds from what they think of as scratch. They create play that rests on other assumptions – some of them are pseudo-scientific; some of them are based on modern science; some of them actually do start from scratch and work out implications and possibilities and logical conclusions.

Every now and again an invention in these play-worlds is so convincing that it leaps boundaries. This is what happened with Marian Zimmer Bradley’s work and some modern magic practitioners.

The magic she creates is flawed from an historical point of view. It’s derivative and half-hearted. From an enactment point of view it can be inspirational.** Why this extraordinary difference? Why isn’t it the most accurate descriptions that make the best play? I think it’s because our lives are really not at all like RPG manuals. I suspect, in fact, that it comes down to MZB’s writing, which is highly emotive and has strong characters. Readers can feel their way within her best books and re-enact them in their minds.

This is where the play side of reading comes in. When readers interact, they learn. They transfer a set of values or ideas or processes into their lives and into their world view. A thousand smaller writers using the same set of ideas can translate into play, or one writer of significantly greater magnitude, whose vision imposes itself on our mind’s-eye.

It’s precisely the aspect of ‘play’ between the reader and the writer’s invented universe that changes things in our world. It’s a fabulous dynamic in cultural change.

What I don’t understand is why so few hard science fiction writers make use of it. It’s seldom tempting to play in their worlds these days and so, when it comes round to the ideas informing the deeper thoughts of specific groups, they largely inform the already-converted.

Good and thoughtful writing isn’t what changes things. Play is what changes things.

I could have just written those last two sentences and skipped the rest of the essay. Would they have been convincing? Probably not. We play with ideas differently to the way we play with stories – it’s as powerful to get people involved in an argument with examples they know and can relate as it is to get them involved in the universe of a novel. The thing is that the novels are more fun. And that’s why playing in fictionland can transform the world. And so I have another facet for my theory of how sidelined cultures can live on.


*I can’t tell you what I think of this as a writer. I’d love to know which group I fall into in my own creation of play, but I can’t see myself analytically and continue to write.

**I don’t speak from personal experience in this, and if any of the friends who have described this to me find that I’ve misheard what they’ve said, please correct me

PS I cheated. I’ve left how people use cosmologies on an everyday level.

PPS My stuff next weekend is much more fun than this essay. Much less theory and many more stories. The story of Brutus and how he colonised Britain rather than cultural dynamics.