Oh, is THAT what they mean by "drop dead good looking"!

I love, I love, I love my calendar girl

Yeah, sweet calendar girl
I love, I love, I love my calendar girl
Each and every day of the year
- Neil Sedaka, Calendar Girl

Happy Hallowe'en, everyone. Once again, my niece Jody provides the research for today's quickie seasonal posting: undead calendar pinup girls...and, if this sort of thing is your sort of thing, you may also wish to visit their blog to find out how YOU could be on the 2011 calendar! (I have to admire their dedication to concept: the rules say that vintage lingerie is compulsory for calendar girl submissions.)

And don't forget, trick or treat safely tonight, kids.

- Sid

The Unknown Author.

For this posting, I'd like to discuss an peculiar literary phenomenon: an almost completely unknown author whose work is famous - specifically, Robert E. Howard.

Born in the small Texas town of Peaster on January 22, 1906, Howard wrote primarily in the niche markets of Western stories and "weird" fantasy tales, where he enjoyed a certain degree of success. His literary creations included Bran Mak Morn, the dour ruler of the Picts during the time of the Roman rule over Briton; the equally dour Elizabethan hero Solomon Kane; the villainous Skull-Face; the bumbling, battling Western strongman Breckenridge Elkins, and many others.

Howard's writing career might have transcended his pulp magazine roots, given time. However, this was not to be. On June 11th, 1936, in a fit of depression over the death of his mother earlier the same day, he took his own life with a .380 Colt automatic.

Now, tragic though Howard's short life appears, at this point I can almost hear the non-fans in the audience saying "So?" Ah, but if I'd started the biography by saying "Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian..."

The route by which Howard's raven-haired, grim-faced Cimmerian hero was separated from his creator is an odd one. During his writing career, Howard completed 20 short stories that featured Conan as their protagonist, along with one novel-length piece called The Hour of the Dragon, which originally appeared as a 5-part serial in Weird Tales from December 1935 to April 1936.

Following his death, Howard's work might well have sunk into obscurity. However, the enormously successful United States paperback publication of The Lord of the Rings by Ballantine Books in 1965* created a marketplace for fantasy material, one which publishers were eager to satisfy by releasing fantasy stories from any source available.

Perhaps too eager - the twelve Lancer/Ace** editions of the Conan stories, as "edited" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, represent a bizarre combination of content. In addition to including Howard's original Conan tales, de Camp and Carter completed unfinished pieces, wrote new stories based on outlines found in Howard's papers, and took existing Howard stories with other characters and rewrote them as Conan stories. (To illustrate this, imagine someone rewriting Dickens' Great Expectations with Ebeneezer Scrooge as the main character simply because A Christmas Carol has better sales in bookstores.)

The strange thing is that both de Camp and Carter were relatively successful with their own material, and as such one would expect that professional courtesy would make them reluctant to take such enormous liberties with another author's legacy. What's even worse is that the de Camp/Carter stories don't measure up to Howard's flair for sword and sorcery. I first read the collections in the mid-70's, and even at the age of 14 I was aware that some of the material lacked the same energy and excitement that distinguished the original work.

However odd these blends of original creation and poor imitation may have been, the Lancer/Ace Conans proved to be popular, and made fantasy artist Frank Frazetta famous for the cover paintings that he produced for the series. Based on this success, in 1970 Marvel Comics writer Roy Thomas convinced his reluctant employers to depart from their usual superhero model and try a comic based on the character of Conan. To Marvel's surprise, Conan The Barbarian proved to be a hit, and spawned another title, The Savage Sword of Conan, along with a daily newspaper strip.

The various comic versions helped to make Conan even more a part of popular culture. Finally, Dino di Laurentiis' movie adaptations, Conan the Barbarian in 1982 and Conan the Destroyer in 1984, made Conan the Barbarian a household name - but not Robert E. Howard.

At the current point in time, Robert E. Howard's name has almost ceased to be connected to his creation. There are over 50 Conan novels written by authors other than Howard on bookstore shelves, comic book fans associate the name Conan with Roy Thomas, and the character is almost a joke to most of the world, thanks to Governor Schwarzenegger's portrayal of Conan in the movie versions.

And what do I think Robert E. Howard's reaction would be, faced with a small army of opportunists making a living off his original idea? To quote the man himself:

"I am aware of an almost overpowering desire to spring from my chair and kick someone violently in the pants."

- Sid

* I'm going to ignore any possible influence from the unauthorized, no-royalities-paid US publication of The Lord of the Rings by Ace Books earlier in the same year, which Tolkien successfully urged his fans to boycott. The Ace editor responsible for this pirated version was Donald A. Wollheim, who was himself a science fiction author and should have known better.

** Lancer Books went bankrupt before the publication of the 12th collection. Subsequently Prestige took over the series, publishing the 12th collection and reprinting the others, but since Prestige was distributed by Ace Books, they're commonly referred to as the Lancer/Ace editions. Well, perhaps not "commonly", but you get the idea.



UPDATE:  MARCH 2013
I've closed comments for this posting, due to an recent attack of spam comments that's been dumping 40 or 50 garbage e-mails into my account every day for most of this month.

Please pull on the other leg, there's a bell on that one.

And so, an hour later, Sam was the happy possessor of a Philips time machine, as good as new.

"What I can't understand," he said to Deleu, "is that I don't see where your profit is. I mean: what's the use of granting me credit if you only get your money in about nine hundred years?"

Deleu laughed boyishly. "I'm going to get it immediately." He pointed to his private time machine.

"Oh," Sam said stupidly, and "Oh," again a few seconds later, when he understood.

Paul van Herck, Where Were You Last Pluterday?

Sunday night, hopping around on the Internet - why would anyone think this was like surfing? - when what to our wondering eyes did appear, but a banner ad for time travel. Now, you might not have been tempted, but I feel an almost professional interest in things like this.

So, a quick click on the link, and there it is - "VOYAGE IN TIME - ONLY 4 SIMPLE STEPS".

Step 1. Invest $18 in time travel fund and receive official certificate;
Step 2. Your fund grows extensively until the time machine is invented;
Step 3. Your investments finance your ticket on the time machine;
Step 4. Dreams become reality — Travel in Time!

Ah, and it doesn't even matter if you die before the time machine is invented, because they'll just return to before you died to pick you up. Sorry, but this has to be a scam - because logically, if this was legitimate, wouldn't the time travellers already be here, shuttling people around?

But let's try to be fair, you may be one of those people who is okay with travelling back in time and creating new timelines as a result or some such Star Trek silliness, even so, the concept may be flawed financially

Okay, let's say that you bravely fork over $18 for a time travel certificate, and that $18 is invested at 3% compounded annually. In 500 years that money will be worth $47,193,790.22. (Well, $47,193,790.2154417, but I rounded it up.) The bad news? If the inflation rate stayed at a constant 2% annually, that money would be worth $2,364.82 in 2509 dollars, which really doesn't sound like a lot. But then, we're talking 500 years - who knows, maybe you'd be able to pick up a nice used time machine for under a grand if you looked on Craigslist, and going back in time and taking people on sightseeing trips might be like driving cab on the weekend, just something that people do for extra money.

As much as I would love for any of this to be feasible, it's pretty obvious that this web site is based on a different time-related phenomenon: the fact that there's a sucker born every minute...which means that 48 possible buyers of time travel certificates entered the world during the time it took me to put together this posting.

- Sid

The Goblin Market

I know how a novel will end before I begin to write it - and before I write it these days, I sell it. I realize that sounds backwards, but it's true. I make a summary, and my New York literary agent shows it around, and if a publisher offers a contract for it, then I go ahead and write the novel. I have any number of summaries that no editor wanted, so those novels have never been written.

- Piers Anthony

Until you have your following established, you have to meet the expectations of the market, which judges suitability based on how you categorize your book, on how it matches the conventions.

- Annie Wong

Life is full of little coincidences, and that's what provides most of the impetus for the creation of these postings. As a case in point, it turns out that one of my co-workers is planning to write a fantasy novel for the middle school age market, and her approach provides an interesting look at the creative process versus the practical aspects of actually being published.

Annie, who performs a variety of esoteric duties in area of shipping and receiving, has already completed the manuscript for a mainstream novel, but to her disappointment she has been unable to sell it, at least to date. Undaunted, she has found the inspiration for a fantasy series in a short story that she wrote as a gift for her 9-year old niece Emily, and now she is doing research before she starts work on it, or, as she says, "I have the clay, just wanting to have a better look at the mold before I throw the clay on the spinning table, that's all."

My initial assumption was that she was doing research in the same fashion that someone would do research for any project. For example, if you were going to write a novel about gunrunners in 60's Africa, logically you would want to make sure that your knowledge of Lewis guns and Sierra Leone was accurate, but that's not why Annie has lined up a year's worth of fantasy reading.

Her actual reasoning is much more pragmatic than any desire to bring herself up to speed on orcs, dragons, jabberwockies and marshwiggles. Annie feels that her first novel didn't succeed because she failed to write it for a specific market. She is obviously proud of that first effort, but equally obviously doesn't want to tear her creation apart in order to make it more marketable.

My concern would be that after a 12-month regimen of reading fantasy, mixed in with middle grade classics such as Tom Sawyer and Black Beauty, it would be difficult to avoid being influenced, but Annie isn't worried about that. She feels that "it is easier to write your own story than someone else's," and hopefully this will prove to be the case. What she is looking for from her research are the conventions that define any subgenre of literature: darker versus lighter plot elements, the inclusion of romance versus actual sex, and so on.*

I have to admit that my first thought was that Annie's approach would take all the fun out of writing a novel, but I suspect that her previous experience with the system makes her a much better judge of things. After all, Annie has already written a novel for "fun" - which is to say without concern as to a marketplace or an audience - and her current plan does not in any way restrict her creativity, only the mold, as she calls it, into which she needs to pour that creativity.

However, I will be curious to see how her plan to use a fantasy novel as a stepping stone to the successful release of her erotic chick-lit novel works out. If J. K. Rowling released the British version of Sex in the City, would her fame successfully transfer to a new audience?

- Sid

* I haven't read all the Harry Potter books, but my impression is that as the series progresses, the plot elements become progressively darker and more mature. Given the ten year gap between the publication of the first and the last books in the series, this approach would nicely address the changes in a maturing audience. (Of course, this approach fails to address future generations of readers who, with access to the entire series at once, may not be content to read one book every 17.14 months of their young lives...)

...In A Galaxy Far, Far Away.

Although I write screenplays, I don't think I'm a very good writer.

- George Lucas

Let's face it, eventually someone will remake the Star Wars movies. Some latter-day Peter Jackson - sigh, or J. J. Abrams - will take upon themselves the monumental task of applying a different vision to George Lucas' epic but admittedly imperfect magnum opus.

This as yet unborn revisionist will obviously make changes, large and small. They'll rewrite the dialogue (please God), make Jar Jar Binks less of an annoying stereotype, fix the gaffe about parsecs, and lose all of that midi-chlorian nonsense.

Larger decisions will alter the entire direction of the series. The simple choice as to whether Han shoots first is just the first step in establishing a different moral or psychological direction for the saga. Emphasize the incestuous romance between Luke and Leia, and you suddenly have a subplot right out of Greek tragedy à la Oedipus, or a reference to Arthurian legend.

But all of these questions pale beside the really big one: in what order do you tell the story?

The existing IV - V - VI - I - II - III sequence is a matter of circumstances more than planning. However elaborate the existing combination of movies, comics, novels and animation may be, at the time of the release of the first movie George Lucas was completely unaware that he was initiating a franchise.

Our future auteur has an open field, though. Personally, my vote is for starting the series with The Phantom Menace. In fact, in my version, the Anakin Skywalker that Qui-gon Jinn discovers is a dark child more reminiscent of Damian than Beaver Cleaver, an object of fear and suspicion in the slums of Mos Espa, perhaps winning the pod race through an unseen act of cruelty in the wastes of Tatooine.

In this version, we would actually see some of the anger and fear that dissuaded Yoda from wanting to accept Anakin. He would be like a caged demon at the Jedi Academy, wounding or even slaying his fellow padawans in training, but like a demon in power and skill, as well, towering over even the members of the Jedi Council in his abilities with the Force. But of course he would - Anakin is after all the Chosen One - or is he? The Council would be in a constant state of turmoil over the saviour/savage in their midst.

And then...love. The possibility of redemption, a time of peace and happiness with Padme. But eventually Anakin succumbs to destiny and turns to the Dark Side - part Jesus, part Judas, he contains the seeds of his own betrayal, but still manages to topple the Jedi knighthood before falling to Obi-Wan in battle.

From that point, Luke's role becomes that of the true Chosen One - the irony being that the Chosen One is in fact a child on a faraway desert planet, but it's Anakin's son, not Anakin himself. The odd thing about Luke as he is portrayed in the original movie is that there's not even a hint of his eventual mastery of the Force. Surely there should be some clue in his childhood, some sign of buried talent other than a knack for being able to bullseye womp rats. Since we already know that Ben Kenobi is on Tatooine to watch over Luke, my version allows him to become involved in Luke's early fumbling attempts to tap into his abilities.

With Anakin's story already established, we see Obi-Wan's lie about the death of Luke's father for exactly that, a lie, and in the attack on the Death Star Luke's initial survival is caused by a moment of hesitation on the part of Darth Vader, unwilling to kill his son. Unlike his father, Luke is able to deny the temptation of the Dark Side, and his time with Yoda allows the agèd master to redeem his failure with Anakin.

And in the final reel, we would see the culmination of the struggle between saviour and betrayer, Christ and Antichrist, as the Emperor watches, gloating and smirking, a figure of Satanic temptation for the younger Skywalker as to his father. And, as with Satan, we see him cast into the abyss at the climax of the battle. Finally, rather than a teddy bear picnic, the closing scenes would show Luke welcoming the first class of younglings to the reborn Jedi Temple, as the greenscreen figures of Yoda, Obi-Wan and his father look on with approval.

Or you could just do it as a comedy. More Jar Jar Binks, more R2-D2 noises, more cute romantic arguments between Leia and Han, and something falls on Chewbacca's head every ten minutes. The elements that allow for my altered view of the plotline are certainly in the existing story but then so are the ones that would allow for something as ridiculous as, oh, having Ewoks win the war.

- Sid

Post 100: blogging - it doesn't look like this.

Several studies indicate that most blogs are abandoned soon after creation (with 60% to 80% abandoned within one month, depending on whose figures you choose to believe) and that few are regularly updated.

The 'average blog' thus has the lifespan of a fruitfly. One cruel reader of this page commented that the average blog also has the intelligence of a fly.

The Perseus report noted above indicates that 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months, "representing 2.72 million blogs that have been either permanently or temporarily abandoned".

Jeffrey Henning of Perseus sniffed that "Apparently the blog-hosting services have made it so easy to create a blog that many tire-kickers feel no commitment to continuing the blog they initiate. In fact, 1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days."

Perseus claimed that the average duration of the remaining 1.63 million abandoned blogs was 126 days, with some 132,000 blogs being abandoned after a year or more. The oldest abandoned blog surveyed had been maintained for 923 days.

- Caslon Analytics, an Australian research, analysis and strategies consultancy

Wow, 1.09 million blogs that only lasted for one day. And here I am, 33 months and 100 posts in, and I feel guilty if I don't post for a couple of weeks.

Please take a look at the full-size version of the photocomp image that starts off this posting. It was a fun little project - as usual when I do this sort of thing, the result isn't exactly what I hoped for, but it's not too bad. Thanks go out to my friends Alan and Colin for comments on the early drafts, your input was greatly appreciated, gentlemen.

And I'd also like to thank my small but (apparently) dedicated group of followers for actually taking the time to read any of this. Hopefully a few of the posts demonstrate an intelligence level somewhat above that of a fruitfly.

- Sid

P.S. And still waiting for any guest postings...

Well I dreamt I went away on a Steam Powered Aeroplane.
I went and stayed and damn near didn't come back again.
Didn't go very fast on a Steam Powered Aeroplane,
Oh the wheel went around, up and down, and inside and then back again.

Sittin' in a 747 just watching them clouds roll by,
Can't tell if it's sunshine or if it's rain.
Rather be sittin' in a deck chair high above Kansas City,
On a genuine old fashioned Steam Powered Aeroplane.

- John Hartford, Steam Powered Aeroplane*

For those of you unfamiliar with steampunk, it's an interesting phenomenon, a sort of bastard child of history and imagination that is difficult to categorize - is it a movement, a philosophy, an art, a science? Perhaps a bit of each, really.

For a long time, Fantasy was basically a medieval homage, with occasional forays into the Renaissance. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is a useful case study for this approach, because so much is taken on faith. In a society containing beer, barrels, boots and bread, there have to be brewers, tanners, cobblers, bakers, farmers, millers, coopers, and a plethora of other trades, but Tolkien rarely touches on the mechanics of Middle-Earth society, that's not what he's interested in. The near-fate of the Shire as a smoke-belching wasteland would seem to clearly demonstrate Tolkien's general position on technology and progress, a position shared by some of his fellow fantasy authors.

The other side of the coin is, of course, Science Fiction, with the emphasis on Science. In its purest form, SF worships at the altar of technology, but technology at a remove, technology inaccessible to the man on the street. Star Trek in its various incarnations is the perfect example of this approach, an almost clinical future without moving parts, grease or grit.

Steampunk stands between these two options. As the name suggests, the steampunk aesthetic dates from the era of the steam engine, but it's really a sort of retro-futurism, in which technological developments like robots, computers, and time machines are created using the technologies of the past: steam, rivets, gears and dials as opposed to electricity or electronics. It is heavily influenced by the work of its patron saints, H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, and steampunk fiction is often set in an idealized Victorian milieu.

The term "steampunk" was coined by science fiction author K. W. Jeter in a 1987 letter to Locus Magazine. Looking for a term to describe the work being written by himself and his friends Tim Powers and James Blaylock, he jokingly suggested "steampunks", a play on words regarding the cyberpunk genre of science fiction:

Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term... Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like "steampunks," perhaps.

In addition to Jeter, Powers, and Blaylock, authors such as Paul di Filippi and Jay Lake have contributed to the steampunk library, and cyberpunk authors William Gibson and Bruce Sterling paid tribute to the genre in their 1990 collaboration The Difference Engine. Jay Lake and S. M. Peters have presented an alternative approach to steampunk in their writing, which they refer to as "clockpunk", revolving (no pun intended) more around clockwork and spring-powered technology than steam.

Another related style is that of the gaslamp romance, which is less involved with technology but which takes a mash-up approach to the Victorian era, combined historical and fictional characters to create alternative histories. A perfect example would be British author Kim Newman's 1992 novel Anno Dracula, wherein Count Dracula marries the widowed Queen Victoria, and Jack the Ripper stalks vampire prostitutes through the foggy streets of Whitechapel.

Surprisingly, steampunk has developed a role beyond that of just a literary sub-genre, and has established itself as both a fashion trend and an artistic movement, and for some people a philosophy and a lifestyle. Followers of steampunk fashion sport top hats, goggles, and muttonchop whiskers, and accessorize their frock coats and corsets with brass ray guns and complicated ocular mechanisms.

Steampunk artists embrace an aesthetic based around copper, glass, wood and leather, and build both fantasy creations and reconstructions or modifications of modern technology such as laptops, iPods, electric guitars, and even vibrators. (N.B. there are certain devices which do not successfully combine extreme heat and metal. Apparently the steam-powered vibrator is one of them.) In addition, a wide variety of characters and stories have been re-imagined into the steampunk milieu: Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel and DC comics characters, and so on.

Steampunk has inspired or influenced a number of movies and television programs, such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or the movie version of Wild Wild West, and is the milieu of Katsuhiro Otomo's 2004 animated film Steamboy. Last year's Doctor Who Christmas special featured a marvellous steampunk robot, a gigantic smoke-belching automaton that stalked across Victorian London, leaving the traditional path of destruction in its wake. However, in spite of these attempts to move steampunk from the fringe into the mainstream, to date steampunk has yet to have its Star Wars, as it were.

But there's still hope - a quick Google search resulted in over 500,000 hits for the phrase "steampunk star wars", so obviously someone is working on it.

- Sid

* With this set of lyrics, we once again pay homage to the infamous Colin Campbell. Colin sometimes bemoans the cleansing process of a few years back when he divested himself of his vinyl collection (records, that is, he didn't collect 60's tablecloths or fetish clothing or anything like that). I seem to have a certain knack for finding what we might charitably describe as "unlicensed" music online, and when he wistfully mentioned John Hartford and his album Steam Powered Aeroplane as among the deceased, I had the great good fortune of finding eleven digitized John Hartford albums online for him within minutes, including the one in question.

(The Star Trek Steampunk wallpapers are from the Rabbittooth web site, credit where credit is due.)

By a show of hands, please.

Just a little housekeeping - is everyone aware that if you click on the pictures, you get larger versions?

- Sid

Challenging reality.

Fantasy did not start and will not end with Tolkien, black-and-white morality, escapism and nostalgia for fairy-tale feudalism. There are very different traditions: Surrealism; the populist modernism of the pulps; Peake's Gormenghast; Borge's dreams. For them, fantasy doesn't fall back on a stock of clichés – it estranges, it undermines and challenges reality.

- China Miéville

In spite of the fact that this blog claims to deal with both genres, I'm probably more of a fan of science fiction than fantasy. However, they're both well represented in my little library here, even if my fantasy collection leans more toward the classics than that of most readers: The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia series of course, but also lesser-known older books like The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison, the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake, Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter, and so on.

I also have my share of the adventures of heroic (or anti-heroic) fantasy characters: Conan, Elric, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Prester John, Brak, Kane, and a few other of their sword-toting brethren - or sisters, in the case of C. L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry.

But, as Mr. Miéville's introductory quote quite accurately points out, any attempt to limit the boundaries of fantasy is futile. Many of the examples I've listed above are well-known standards or classics as far as fantasy publishing goes, but let's not ignore Neil Gaiman's urban fantasies, China Miéville's own tales of New Crobuzon and its mixed bag of denizens, Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books, Tanith Lee's dark, sexually oriented tales, Ursula K. LeGuin's thoughtful Earthsea series, Roger Zelazny's brilliant Amber novels, or Jack Vance's quirky storytelling.

But in spite of having all this source material to draw upon, it took me a surprisingly long time to write this post. I had all these bits and pieces, all these observations and fragments regarding fantasy, but I couldn't find the hook, the connecting element that would get it all to make sense together.

In an attempt to further the progress of things, I did what I consider to be the equivalent of free association - I went to Google™ and typed in "fantasy". After moving past a lot of admittedly intriguing offers by buxom young women regarding my fantasies and their willing if expensive fulfillment thereof, I made my way to the Wikipedia entry regarding Fantasy, which contains the following statement:

Fantasy is a genre that uses magic and other supernatural forms as a primary element of plot, theme, and/or setting. Many works within the genre take place on fictional planes or planets where magic is common. Fantasy is generally distinguished from science fiction and horror by the expectation that it steers clear of scientific and macabre themes.

My first thought was, "No, that's not what distinguishes fantasy from science fiction, that's like saying that the ocean is generally distinguished from dry land by its lack of trees and grass. " Sadly, as a definition the Wikipedia entry seems to be far too close to the sort of narrow viewpoint that Mr. Miéville derides in his statement.

In my opinion, I think that at some very basic level the creative desires of the science fiction author and the fantasy author are completely different. The science fiction author accepts the rules, however much he may then proceed to bend them. If an SF author wishes to have his starships travel faster than light, they have to be able to provide some explanation of how this violation of current physics is possible. This explanation may not be a scientific possibility under current state of the art, but the author recognizes the need to acknowledge the limiting factor of c as a constant.

The fantasy author approaches things from the other direction. They create a world in which they make the rules, with no need to explain or justify them. Floating cities, talking trees, seven league boots, the author has complete freedom, unhampered by any need for explanation or logic - as in the opening quote, challenging reality.

To illustrate what I mean, if a science fiction author wants to include a flying horse as an element in their story, they have to consider the physics of flight: the surface area required to lift the weight of a horse, the question of how wing muscles would be integrated into a horse's physical structure, and whether or not a flying horse would need to be hollow-boned, like a bird.

A fantasy writer may have an explanation for the existence of flying horses in their story, but it doesn't need to be rooted in science. It might involve a drunken dalliance between a stallion and a roc (giant bird for those of you who don't follow these things); a magical cantrip that keeps the horses aloft; or it might simply be by decree, as this scene from The Magician's Nephew, the first book in the Narnia series: *

"Be winged. Be the father of all flying horses," roared Aslan in a voice that shook the ground. "Your name is Fledge."

The horse shied, just as it might have shied in the old, miserable days when it pulled a hansom. Then it reared. It strained its neck back as if there were a fly biting its shoulders and it wanted to scratch them. And then, just as the beasts has burst out of the earth, there burst out from the shoulders of Fledge wings that spread and grew, larger than eagles', larger than swans', larger than angels' wings in church windows.

Voilà - a flying horse, literally on demand. What better symbol could Fantasy have?

- Sid

* Not everyone is aware that the Narnia books were written out of sequence. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe was written first, and then in later years some person, possibly from Porlock, demanded an explanation from C. S. Lewis: why a wardrobe? Why is there a lamppost in Lamppost Waste? The result was The Magician's Nephew, a prequel novel which is probably the weakest of the books due to its dutiful filling in of the gaps. Thanks to my mother's wisdom, I read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe first, and never for a moment wondered why there was a lamppost flickering away in the middle of the forest on the other side of a wardrobe - for me, it was just part of the author's world and I accepted it. Interesting that Disney made the same decision in terms of filming the adaptations.