Somewhere down towards bedrock level is the desire to make worlds which, however apparently complex, bizarre, and downright dangerous they may be, have graspable rules and probably also a moral basis. We know the third brother who gives food to the poor old woman is going to win through, we know the last desperate million-to-one chance that might just work will work, we know that any item presented to the main character in mysterious circumstances will be a major plot token. We know the humble swineherd is really the royal heir in disguise because in our hearts we know that we are, too, but in this little secondary world there are understandable imperatives and prohibitions which he, unlike us, can thread through to achieve the … well, the end of the book.
There is a dark side. Take The Lord of the Rings, which for many of my generation was the first fantasy book they read. My adult mind says that the really interesting bit of LOTR must have been what happened afterwards—the troubles of a war-ravaged continent, the Marshall Aid scheme for Mordor, the shift in political power, the democratization of Minas Tirith. Well, that could be a funny fantasy. Or a satire. But not a straight fantasy, because it’s too close to our reality. What we want is heroes and solutions, and, yes, singing elves.
We also know in our hearts that the universe isn’t really like that. We always have, ever since the first little circle of firelight when the shaman told us about Zog, who could kill mammoths. The world isn’t really like that but it ought to be, and if we believe it enough we might get through another night.
Fantasy imposes order on the universe. Or, at least, it superimposes order on the universe. And it is a human order. Reality tells us that we exist for a brief, beleaguered span in a cold infinity; fantasy tells us that the figures in the foreground are important. Fantasy peoples the alien Outside, and it doesn’t matter a whole lot whether it peoples it with good guys or bad guys. Putting “Hy-Brasil” on the map is a step in the right direction, but if you can’t manage that, then “Here be Dragons” is better than nothing. Better dragons than the void.
Right at the bottom, at the tip of the root, is the fear of the dark and the cold, but once you’ve given darkness a name you have a measure of control. Or at least you think you have, which is nearly as important.
The desire to build structures is as strong as ever even now, among brilliant, intelligent us, who know all about Teflon and central heating. For example: reality tells me that, when I’m bored on a long journey, I stop off at a gas station and buy a cassette tape from the rack, and, since these racks are invariably stocked by someone with the musical taste and discernment of a duck egg, I generally play safe and buy a compilation album by a middle-of-the-road group I won’t actually throw up listening to. So odd corners of the car fill up with cheap compilation albums. That’s reality’s story, anyway. But I’d found myself developing the superstition that any tape cassette, if left in a car for about a fortnight, turns into a Best of Queen album. Friends say this is ridiculous. They say their cassettes turn into Bruce Springsteen compilations.
Okay, it’s a gag. I hardly believe it at all. I’ve found the rational explanation. Like the whispering in our old house; I traced that to starlings roosting under the eaves. If you want a definition of the word susurration, it’s the noise starlings make at night. And the great beast that stood behind me, breathing heavily, while I was reading one day; someone down the street was mowing their lawn with one of those old-fashioned push mowers, and the noise was bouncing around, hitting the corner of the room behind me, and sounded, with the clatter of the cutting stroke and the freewheeling of the chain, like—well, like some horrible beast. The twenty seconds it took for me to analyse the sound without moving my head seemed to last a whole lot longer.
Let me tell you about the nuclear power plant built on—well, nearly on—an Iron Age burial mound. Pixies’ Mound, the locals called it. And during the course of its construction the station workers got into the habit of blaming everything from a lost hammer to a major project delay on the malign influence of the Pixie (apparently someone had accidentally driven a lorry over his mound, which is the sort of thing pixies really hate). Of course, they didn’t believe it. And as a joke, when the station was finished, the contractors presented the first station manager with a model garden gnome—the Pixie. And it was put in the station’s trophy cabinet. And a story sprang up that if it was ever moved, something would go wrong on the site. And one day it was put in a cupboard. Three weeks later a freak storm swept up the estuary and flooded the pump house to a depth of six feet, knocking four reactors and hundreds of megawatts of generating capacity off-line.
TV crews came out the next day to film the cleanup and, yes, one of the work crew mentioned the Pixie, who was duly exhumed from his cupboard for his moment of celebrity. Ho ho ho, the pixie curse shut the station. Ho ho ho.
In those days you could still be funny about nuclear power. It made a good story on the TV news, and headed up quite a decent piece about the speed with which the station had been brought back on line.
The story went round the world. Somewhere early in its travels the vitally important “ho ho ho” element got removed. And we got letters from everywhere. What was then West Germany led the field, I seem to remember. “Please tell us more about the creature that shut down a nuclear power station,” they said.
I was told to draft a suitable form of reply, and I have to say it was a pretty good one.
It talked about the concept of gremlins, and how lots of trades created little superstitions and mythologies. But as a PR man for the place, I became aware that not everyone on the site was 100 percent behind my cheery statements saying that, of course, we didn’t actually believe it. They were engineers. They knew about Murphy. They weren’t about to upset no pixie.
In fact, I had a conversation with one senior engineer, in the shiny, bright, and modern power station, that went like this:
“You can’t say that no one here believes it.”
“Do you want me to say that people here do believe it, then?”
“No. Say it’s just … a story.”
And later one of them said, “I wonder what legends will accumulate around this place in a thousand years’ time, when it’s just a mound. The villagers will probably say that at midnight you can see a team of physicists walk their rounds.” And we agreed that, if people didn’t think very carefully about warning signs, a dead and buried nuclear reactor would make the classic cursed tomb: not long after breaking into it, people would die mysteriously.