THE DAWN OF THE MAGICAL ERA

 To be more specific, it's the dawn of my term "magical-era stories," which takes the place of the former term "magical fantasy stories." I introduced that term in the essay-series MIND OUT OF TIME, which wrapped up here. In that essay I provided this rationale for reworking the term "fantasy" so that its dominant exemplars, like CONAN and LORD OF THE RINGS, fall into a more specific category of fantasies that take place in an era that validates magic over science:

Thus I am saying that magical fantasy stories recapitulate the sense of a space and time far from our own profane world, where all wonders spring from the loins of magic. This world can be entirely divorced from our own, as with Middle-Earth, or it may also be a very abstracted version of some distant historical era, like the unspecified Arabian setting of ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. The world may display an author's scrupulous intent to center all the fictional events within a specific historical period, as Marion Zimmer Bradley does in THE MISTS OF AVALON, or it may utilize a hodgepodge of historical eras, like the teleseries XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS. The fidelity to history is only important according to the creative priorities of any given author, and often the religious sources of magical fantasy stories may also be a hodgepodge of material from different historical periods, as is said to be the case with both the Arthurian corpus and the Thousand and One Nights. 

  The more I thought about in the ensuing months, calling something a "magical fantasy" didn't speak specifically to my formulation: that certain fantasies are categorically different than others in that the former evoke an archaic era in which magic supervenes science. Thus, "magical-era stories" at least specifically references my main concept.  

The two types described above also broadly describe the way magical-era fantasies were structured. The narratives we commonly call "myths" tend to emphasize large-scale events, some of which take place largely in the worlds of the gods, of the heights of Olympus or the depths of Hades. In contrast, many folktales tend to be more limited in scope and deal with ordinary humans encountering supernatural presences. However, in keeping with today's review of Jack Vance's DYING EARTH, I should mention one other form of archaic fantasy that indirectly influenced many pop-cultural descendants: the apocalyptic fantasy that describes the final fate of the profane world, seen in both the Norse Ragnarok and the Christian Book of Revelations. To the best of my knowledge there were no archaic apocalypses that involved the concepts of science, because such concepts had yet to become systematized. Modern "futuristic" magical-era stories can't avoid being influenced by science-fiction tropes, which is the case with both DYING EARTH and its literary ancestor, Clark Ashton Smith's ZOTHIQUE. More on these matters later, perhaps.