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Sime~Gen Inc. Presents

ReReadable Books

June 2009

"Language and Magic"

By

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

 

 

 To send books for review in this column email Jacqueline Lichtenberg,jl@simegen.com  for snailing instructions or send an attached RTF file.  
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Draw One In The Dark by Sarah A. Hoyt, Baen Fantasy pb, May 2008

Reserved For The Cat by Mercedes Lackey, DAW hc Nov 2007

The Shenandoah Spy by Francis Hamit, Brass Cannon Books,TP, 2008.
http://www.brasscannonbooks.net/

Dawnkeepers by Jessica Andersen, Signet Eclipse Paranormal Romance, Jan 2009

Teach Me Everyday Spanish and Teach Me Everyday German, book and CD from http://www.teachmetapes.com 

Some people think magic is all about casting spells because the chanting (usually nonsense syllables) and gestures create drama. It makes good theater. Even Shakespeare knew that and had his Three Witches stirring a cauldron which has been famous for centuries now.

Stage drama, and now Theater and TV, have created the image of Occultism and all its practitioners using sigils and chants. The language of magical sigils and chants is usually a dead language known only to scholars or something native to another dimension. A magician’s effectiveness lies in his/her facility with language.

As mentioned last month, the worlds of Fantasy best sellers show us ordinary reality as a thin film over a tumultuous sea of evil. Keeping that tumult secret is viewed in most of these novels as a morally proper conspiracy.

That which is hidden by this "thin film" scintillates with the same aura of The Unknown that Science Fiction once reserved for Bug Eyed Monsters.

If we look at our everyday reality, we can see parallels between what is popular in fiction and what we have to cope with in daily existence. People see strange lights in the sky, the Air Force chases them, reports that it was nothing, and suddenly Area 51 holds Alien bodies. A violent enemy lands a telling blow on the USA and immediately there are those who wonder if it was a conspiracy of the US government not enemy action.

We don’t trust government because it holds secrets from us. If there’s something we don’t know, can’t see, are prevented from seeing, or just plain don’t understand (like computers seemed to older people when the machines first appeared in spare bedrooms across the nation), we imagine what must be in there, off in the darkness, beyond ken.

In a good mood, what you imagine would probably be happy, beautiful, butterflies and sunshine. But if the fear-flight-fight centers of your brain are activated, what you imagine will be scary, threatening, icky, a fascinating danger you obsess on.

Afraid of the dark, children have nightmares. That brain function doesn’t go away with adulthood. We just get used to it and have more concrete knowledge of the real world to pit against our imagination.

But as mentioned above, many people acquire their knowledge of the "real" world from fiction!

The core attitude that reading science fiction reinforces is a zest for embracing the Unknown. Star Trek brought that adventurous attitude to the small screen and rode to popularity with that message. The Unknown is not necessarily inimical to your health.

So Bug Eyed Monsters clutching scantily clad Maidens are no longer popular, and demons from another dimension slain by apparently defenseless not-maidens have come to dominate the Fantasy field.

Draw One In The Dark by Sarah A. Hoyt is a case in point. Here a young woman, Kyrie Smith, who has been fighting a lonely battle against her propensity to shapeshift into a black panther meets a young man, Tom, who shifts into a dragon. She reflexively rescues him from Hunters and becomes embroiled in a secret war among shifters.

Tom’s main goal is to keep the Pearl of Heaven, an object he stole from rival dragons because it helps him control the urge to shift. They want it back. But it’s attracting shifters of all sorts and life becomes complicated.

Draw One In The Dark is a sizzling Intimate Adventure with enough internal dialogue for a Romance reader and enough action for an adventure addict. This volume’s one flaw is in the wandering viewpoint that causes repetition of information the reader learned in a previous viewpoint. But it’s worth it because this is a story about the forging of a family in the cauldron of trust.

Mercedes Lackey, justly famed author of many series, brings us the fifth in the Elemental Masters series, Reserved For The Cat. In this universe humans with magical talent can Master an Elemental and command Earth, Air, Fire or Water to do human bidding. The Masters use this ability to combat incursions by nasty beings from another dimension.

Reserved For The Cat introduces a young ballerina, Ninette Dupond, to a talking Cat assigned by her Elemental Master father to protect her even after his death. Another dancer has been possessed by an invading entity set on attacking her – all consequences of events in prior novels. But you can read this volume independently and enjoy every word. Exposition of prior events does not impede the flow of the narrative, yet you learn what you need to know.

The Cat gives Ninette mastery of English smoothing her transition from Paris to London where she confronts a dire and threatening Unknown environment. Magically removing language from the problems she faces removes some of confusion and bewilderment when facing The Unknown, but only some.

It’s considered rude to converse in a language another person in the group does not understand because it triggers distrust and that discomfort with The Unknown.

In Draw In The Dark, the language problem is also dispensed with or ignored. Star Trek did the same by waving a hand at the Universal Translator. Large fantasy novels that provide a complicated constructed language (like Star Trek’s popular Klingon, or Tolkien’s Elvish) have a hard time getting published because readers don’t want to memorize a language before they can understand a story. But after enjoying a story, they want all the languages.

Language itself is the biggest, most insurmountable barrier among human cultures, but language learning is tedious and boring after about age 7. As any magician knows, the best Ward is boredom. Most people don’t have the discipline to focus on anything when feeling bored.

But a whole made-up language isn’t necessary to create that Unknown barrier. A mere dialect works just fine. Add the cognitive dissonance caused by the unexpected, such as a woman behaving like a man in Civil War times, and you have a cultural gulf rife with drama.

I don’t generally review historical fiction, but I’ve stumbled on one that makes this point sharply. The Shenandoah Spy by Francis Hamit is a well researched, factual account of the life and times of Belle Boyd, a woman of the South during the Civil War. This is not alternate history, and does not impute attitudes and actions to women that in fact did not happen during the era. This woman really existed and really did these things.

The novelization of pure history is difficult, and Hamit pulls it off with grace and style, filling in and smoothing over until it reads like the very best historical fiction. Belle plays the southern bell with all cultural ruffles and flourishes, then puts any of our modern kick-ass heroines to shame with her facility with cipher and sidearm. The dialogue isn’t written with a Southern drawl, but the difference between Yankee and Southern cultures is clear. They may as well be speaking different languages.

Read The Shenandoah Spy for contrast with our usual Fantasy novels, but also to learn something about the era.

Dawn Keepers, The Final Prophecy series, by Jessica Andersen is an alternate present day universe where magic users called Nightkeepers gather to fend off the incursion of supernatural beings when the Mayan calendar reaches year zero, Jan 20, 2012 CE. Prophecy destines certain couples to mate to enhance their magical abilities. Nate Blackhawk and Alexis Gray of course resist their fate, which seems to heat their sexual experiences. But neither of them understand the rules of the magical world. Some of the group can translate Mayan, but some inscriptions are in an even older language, from Atlantis. They must face The Unknown unarmed unless they can settle their Relationship.

Now we know that language, the spoken word, words framed within the mind, are the main tool of the magician. And we know that the USA school systems are mostly remiss in teaching foreign languages, so its up to parents (and grandparents) to introduce a child to the concept-sets embodied in foreign languages. The power to learn more languages later starts with learning several as a child. The more ways you know of seeing the world, the less afraid of the dark, and foreigners, you will be.

I recommend exposing children to language families other than their native language, so I have here a series of books and CD’s for children that now includes Chinese and Hebrew. "Teach Me Everyday Spanish" and "Teach Me Everyday German" are also based in the publisher’s successful use of music to teach language. Go to http://www.teachmetapes.com and check out this series.

To send books for review in this column email Jacqueline Lichtenberg,  jl@simegen.com for snailing instructions or send an attached RTF file.  

 

 

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