I recently completed my
reading of Joe Abercrombie’s young adult “fantasy” trilogy The Shattered Sea comprising Half
a King, Half the World and Half a War and as with all of
his writing, I was thoroughly entertained. But it was the faux-fantasy setting
which interested me the most conceptually. Which is ironic since Abercrombie
has never been one of speculative fiction’s most interesting world-builders.
The trilogy appears to be set within a typical pseudo-medieval world, albeit
one with a cultural aesthetic reminiscent of the Vikings and Norse mythology.
But through subtle allusions over the course of the series it becomes apparent
that the narrative is neither set in an alternative world, nor a properly
medieval one. It is in fact set in a post-apocalyptic future of our world where
society has regressed to a medieval level of technological development and
political ideology following what appears to be a global nuclear cataclysm.
Judging by the map of The Shattered Sea, it
appears that it is set around the Baltic Sea, particularly in Sweden. This
makes the world closer to Mad Max than
A Song of Ice and Fire despite
appearing the share a stronger affinity towards the genre tropes of the latter.
The
post-apocalyptic nature of the world is never made explicit because the
historical perspective of the characters is so distorted. The ruins of our
present (or near-future-equivalent) civilization are known to belong to “elves”
while guns and radiation are feared as magical phenomenon rather than
recognized as technological and natural in kind. And though there is mention of
unrecognizable territories such as Gettland, Vansterland and Throvenland, they
are simply the new names assigned to territories of a post-apocalyptic
Scandinavia rather than independent nations within another world. It is only
through the description of the elves, their ruins and “magic” that the reader
is able to incrementally recognize that they are mundane artifacts of our future’s
mythologized past rather than a fantastical world utterly divorced from our own
history. Hence the quotes around my label of the trilogy as fantasy fiction.
Despite talk of apparently non-human elves, their forbidden magic and a dead
God, the world is thoroughly naturalistic even if the continuity between the
future and our present is occluded by the ignorance of the characters.
Stories
which are structured around the “feudal future”, “days of future past” or
“magic from technology” tropes are fascinating to me because they have the
potential to complicate the most fundamental distinction between fantasy and
science fiction narratives: historical continuity. Science fiction presupposes
its imagined futures (or alternative pasts and presents) as a historical
possibility. These visions of the future are mediated by projected scientific
discovery and technological ingenuity, hence the genre being science fiction. In contrast, the worlds
of the fantasy genre represent a discontinuity
with historic possibility, recognizing that such worlds are impossible for
the reader to actualize. The paradoxical appeal of the fantasy genre is to take
these impossibilities seriously, to
explore a world that not only may never come to be real, but never could be real. Fantasy fiction doesn’t
lack a sense of history itself (epic fantasies such as A Song of Ice and Fire and The Malazan Book of the Fallen have
immensely complicated histories to their worlds), but rather disregards the
possibility of actualizing its world over the course of our own history whereas
science fiction takes seriously its potential self-actualization.
The aforementioned tropes are
a translation from the genres of fantasy to science fiction by way of projected
superstition its demystification over the course of the narrative. The
cataclysm of a global nuclear apocalypse in The
Shattered Sea series divorces the world-text from the genre of science
fiction and reframes the narrative in the recognizable tropes of the fantasy
fiction genre. The event of a nuclear apocalypse erases the continuity between
the reader in the present and the characters in the future; the world is
described unrecognizably to the reader not merely because war and nuclear fallout
has reformed the world to a dramatic extent but also because the collapse of
civilization has deprived the characters of a modern ideology and vocabulary
that the reader would recognize. Characters conceptualize their world in
categories reminiscent of a more primitive and fantastical imagination and so
the reader is misled along with them into understanding their world to be
another world entirely: one governed by magic, elves and gods. Readers accept
these elements uncritically at first as indicative of a fantasy world but as
the narrative progresses these elements become recognizably more mundane and
less mystical. Once it is recognized that the elf ruins refer to the concrete
skeletons of modern cities, and elf magic refers to gun-powder weaponry, one is
inclined to immediately re-imagine the story as post-apocalyptic science fiction
rather than post-apocalyptic fantasy fiction.
Yet this reversal is not
necessary warranted by the world-text itself. There is no explicit
identification between the world of the Shattered
Seas and our own world that world necessitate re-imagining the series
according to the conventions of science fiction as opposed to fantasy fiction. Although
the translation of fantasy fiction into science fiction necessarily involves
demystification (to the extent that spiritual and magical phenomenon belong to
the former and not the latter), demystification itself does not require genre
re-identification. It is perfectly consistent to deconstruct superstition from
within the fantasy genre itself while consistently identifying with the genre. Magical
abilities and supernatural deities are not essential to the fantasy genre;
historical discontinuity, the impossibility
that divorces the world-text of the fantasy novel from our own world, is what defines the genre.
Magic and gods are the most explicit and familiar mediators of this
discontinuity but they are not the only techniques. Describing the world as
populated with alien ethnicities and animals, bounded by unrecognizable
political boundaries and allegiances, and grounded by a history estranged from
our own is also sufficient. A Song of Ice
and Fire would still belong to the fantasy genre if the White Walkers never
came out of the North, dragons never returned from extinction and R’hllor never
granted a magical ability because the world-text of that series involves
peoples, nations and historical events with no recognizable relation to our own
world. It is a world of impossibility, of fantasy.
What is relevant is whether
the world-text in its totality can be identified as continuous with a point in
our history or not and by what means this continuity is established. The
recognition that the elves of The
Shattered Sea are mere humans and magic as mundane modern technology may
demystify the world from magical (high) fantasy to mundane (low) fantasy but it
doesn’t require us to totally re-categorize it as science fiction from fantasy
fiction. The inclusion of modern gun-powder technology in a fantasy narrative
is no less disruptive than the inclusion of medieval weaponry and armor would
be to a fantasy world. Both are technological artifacts of history and the
fantasy genre is not restricted to any historical period since the inherent
logic of the genre is anachronistic and distinct from the history of our own
world. Fantasy worlds follow their own historical logic of development (or
lack-there-of as is the case in the trope of “medieval stasis”) and it could be
perfectly natural for a fantasy world to feature medieval and modern technology
alongside one another. As it just so happens, this is the case with the world
of The Shattered Sea: the majority of
weaponry is at a medieval level of development but elf magic weapons (guns)
provide immense power to those who can monopolize possession of them. The
anachronistic juxtaposition of medieval and modern technologies and lack of an
historical awareness (beside a supernatural and superficial remembrance of the
collapse of civilization) reflect fantasy fiction’s disengagement with
maintaining historical continuing between the reader and the world-text
itself.
If the distinction between
genres depends upon historical continuity or lack thereof, then whether a text
is identified as science or fantasy fiction depends upon the narrator of the
text having a historical self-awareness relative to that of its reader. The narrator
must recognize their self as rooted in the history of the reader’s world if the
reader is to recognize the text as the projected future of science fiction
rather than the imagined impossible world of fantasy. Lacking any such
historical self-understanding deprives the reader of identifying a shared
historical connection between their world and the speculative world of the text
and therefore the text is more akin to the impossible worlds of fantasy. If
science fiction constructs its worlds by projecting the marvelous potential of science
and technology through history as a bridge between our world and the future of
the world-text, then apocalyptic fiction is the inversion of this. Apocalyptic fiction
deconstructs such worlds by projecting the massively disruptive and destructive
power of science and technology to retroactively erase history. The apocalypse
opens up a space of interpretation for the reader amidst the destabilized boundary
between science fiction and fantasy fiction. The apocalypse that occurred in
the past of Abercrombie’s series didn’t just shatter the foundation of the
world, it shattered the possibility of definitively recognizing that world as
our own and as a distinct genre.
Abercrombie’s
series appears to encompass a transition from fantasy to science fiction genres
but it is actually more subversive than that. What Abercrombie’s writing has
accomplished, whether he intended or even realized it or not, is a subversion
of the distinction between fantasy and science fiction itself. This is
ironically the complete opposite effect of a surface reading of his world-text.
When it becomes apparent to the reader that the elves are merely human and that
the breaking of the world was merely nuclear disaster rather than apocalyptic
punishment, this does not mean that the world-text transitions genres from
fantasy to science fiction. It is a transition from high magical to low
technological fantasy, it is an invitation to question and reimagine the
conventions of the fantasy genre itself. Why can’t elves just be humans? Why can’t
there be nuclear war, concrete architecture, and gunpowder weaponry in a
fantasy world? I am more comfortable interpreting Abercrombie’s writing
according to the genre of fantasy fiction rather than science fiction because
the narrator and characters of his world-text do not understand their world in
a way compatible with our own understanding. The apocalypse erased the past of
their world and with it the necessary scientific ideology that would ground it
as a projected continuation of our own world history.
But simply identifying
it with the fantasy genre is inadequate to address the unique indeterminacy
inherent in his world-building (or apocalyptic un-building). If fantasy fiction
is the speculation fiction genre of the impossible then Abercrombie’s series is
fantasy in the ironic sense that it is impossible to say whether it is fantasy
or science fiction. It is both, it is neither, it is up to the reader.
Determining the genre of his world-text is an act of archaeology, digging
through the apocalyptic ruins of his world-text for relics that would allow one
to reconstruct the past and thereby recognize its genre. The Shattered Sea trilogy is
post-apocalyptic fiction that is post-fantasy, post-genre. It is a work of
young adult speculative fiction which asks its readers to mature along with its
characters, to grow out of an adolescent understanding of binary genre
conventions into the adult complexity of infinite possibilities and
impossibilities, and mediate the path between the two for themselves.
Note: the above artwork is the property of Marko Djurdjevic for the tabletop RPG Degensis which I found to be both beautiful on its own and useful in conceptualizing some the world of the Shattered Sea
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