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The Fae Are in Your Firewall
Why Looking Back Isn’t the Way Forward
One fantasy trope has started making my eyeballs itch. You’ve probably read it: magic is dying, fairies are vanishing back to Neverland, no one leaves offerings for the Brownies anymore–and it’s up to one special someone to bring back the good old days.
The costumes are amazing–peasants in homespun linen and nobles in velvet cloaks, while wizards hide behind long white beards and rune-covered robes. But what these books are really offering is nostalgia–a longing for a time when women were subservient, people of color were invisible, and witches were first drowned, then burned.
All this is contrasted with the boring present, where magic is gone. Instead we get parking lots filled with cars, hundreds of workers treated like cogs in a machine, strip malls and smart phones, and no one looking out for their neighbor unless it benefits themselves.
That’s not magic dying. That’s just power doing what it always does–consolidating in the hands of wealthy white men.
When fantasy dreams of going back to a simpler time, there is a tendency to forget that those simpler times were not as rosy as they remember. There may have been fairies in every garden, but those gardens were also populated by wispy, consumptive children dying of an incurable disease–tuberculosis.
I read fantasy to escape from the realities that are unpleasant or uncomfortable. But the idea that we should want to go back to a mythical golden era, whether that’s medieval Europe or 1950s America, is regressive and does nothing to move us forward in the world. It’s not just bad history; it’s bad storytelling.
What if Magic Hasn’t Died in the World?
What if we’re just too close to it to see it?
This is dating myself, but I watched re-runs of “Star Trek” as a kid. And one of the things I thought was super cool were the way the doors just slid open automatically when people walked up to them.
So when super markets started putting in these doors with strange black rubber plates on the ground in front of them, I was intrigued. You still had the option of pushing open the door with no plate. But if you walked onto the black rubber, that door would open automatically. These contraptions grew more and more common and more sophisticated. But I never stopped seeing them as magical marvels–I lived in the world of “Star Trek,” almost.
When I’ve mentioned that to friends, they often scoff. “What’s so great about a supermarket automatic door?” they’d ask. But that’s just it, the magic is still there, all around us. The doors weren’t powered by spells, but they felt like they were–and that wonder never left me. Magic hadn’t vanished; it had just changed mediums.
Instead of yearning for a problematic past, we should be striving towards an amazing future. And that’s true of fantasy as of anything else.
If the magic has left the forests, where did it go? I see magic living in the global information network that we are all connected to. I see magic in the science that shows us the connectivity of plants in a forest, communicating beneath the ground through their roots and the fungal network.
Magic didn’t die. It moved forward.
We need to recognize that magic and learn to use it again, just like the hedge witches and herbalists did in medieval times. We don’t have to leave milk out for the brownies, but we can run anti-virus software on our laptops. We can connect with online communities of like-minded, progressive fantasists who see magic in the digital world just as clearly as Merlin saw it in Arthur.
Taking Back the Magic of Our World
I like to think that my Digital Dryad universe is a small step on the path forward to new mythologies–ones that merge ecology and technology, accessibility and diversity. My novel, Digital Dryad, blends code and nature in a new way. Sierra is a tree spirit who longs for connection in a digital world. Does she have her roots in the Greek myths of hamadryads living within their oak trees? Certainly. But she, like the world, has grown and evolved from those roots.
Fantasy can be more than medieval cosplay. It can be visionary. Let’s stop mourning a magic that upheld hierarchies and burned difference at the stake–and start imagining magic that liberates, uplifts, and leads us forward.
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