remember clearly when realized that there were other

I

I remember clearly when I realized that there were other powers at work in the world, inscrutable non-human entities who had their own goals and desires and who had the ability to interfere with human affairs. I was eating from a take out container by a lake in Louisiana, and judging my fellow citizens for the sorry state of the trash-strewn lake shore. There’s a trash can right there, I thought, but these lazy bums just toss their trash all over the place. I finished my food and put my takeout container in the trash can like a good citizen, but the very moment I closed my car door, a seagull swooped down and plucked my container out of the trash. It dropped my trash on the ground and with a practiced movement of its beak popped the container open, as deftly as any thumb-possessing human, and began eating my scraps.

The world, it turns out, contains creatures who do not care about human concerns like the proper placement of trash, and who have the ability to enact their will.

John Crowley’s novel Little, Big is about fairies - elementals, sylphs, gnomes, elves - supernatural beings with powers a bit beyond that of a seagull and intentions that are much more inscrutable. Little, Big is also about a marriage, a union of two natural human beings whose powers and intentions are basically just like yours.

The marriage of Smoky Barnable and Daily Alice Drinkwater spans the entire book. The parts that are not about them are mostly about their family, their ancestors and their descendants. We see them fall in love and get married and have children and navigate various challenges and difficulties in an always changing world. It sounds very boring, so let’s talk about the fairies first.

Early on we get some backstory on Daily Alice’s ancestors, who are the recipients and inheritors of the fairies’ special attentions. Living in the woods far from cities and roads and rails, the Drinkwaters reasonably think that their connection to the Other Side might be somehow related to the wild nature of their surroundings, that the other world is more present in streams and oaks than it would be in the concrete and steel of the City. The fairies have promised or seemed to promise to protect the area inside a “pentacle” of five towns surrounding the Drinkwater home. So when August Drinkwater acquires a Ford and wants to establish a gas station in the community, his family fears it might upset their otherworldly neighbors. So August goes off to inquire how fairies feel about gas stations.

This is not necessarily an easy thing to do. Fairies do not exactly want to be contacted, certainly not directly.

He was trying, without exactly trying to try, to see or notice something, without exactly noticing or seeing it, that would be a clue or a message; trying to remember, at the same time as he tried to forget he had ever forgotten, how such clues or messages had used to appear, and how he had used to interpret them.

In this case - unusually in the story - the fairy, or whatever it is, appears more or less directly in the form of a kingfisher and proceeds to instruct August how the contact should be made.

“Now you address me,” the kingfisher said. " ‘O Bird!’ you say, and make your request."

“O Bird!” August said, opening his hands imploringly, “Tell me this: Is it okay if we have a gas station in Meadowbrook, and sell Ford cars?”

“Certainly.”

“What?”

“Certainly!”

Expecting the usual ambiguity and equivocation, August is surprised by this straightforward response, and unsure of what to do next. This blog’s readers will recognize what follows as a version of the AI box experiment, only written by John Crowley in 1981.

“Now,” said the kingfisher, still bird enough to be unable to look at August with more than one eye at a time, and that one bright and smart and pitiless, “was that all?”

“I… think so. I-”

“Yes?”

“Well, I thought there might be some objection. The noise. The smell.”

“None.”

“Oh.”

“On the other hand,” said the kingfisher - a laugh, a raucous laugh, seemed always just beneath his words - “since you’re here, and I’m here, you might ask for something else altogether.”

“What?”

“Oh, anything. What you most want.”

He had thought - right up until he had voiced his absurd request - that he was doing just that: but, with a terrible rush of heat that took his breath away, he knew that he hadn’t, and that he could.

August enters the encounter with an idea, an agenda, a way he intends to act upon the world. He exits acted upon by other forces. He forgets the gas station completely, driven by other desires that are not entirely his own.

II

Many characters in this book, perhaps most of them, believe they are the driving force, that they make the planets spin and turn. As the book progresses it becomes more and more clear that the offstage fairies are likely running things. Perhaps the clearest and most dramatic example of this comes near the end of the book when a populist would-be emperor of North America who sometimes goes by the name Barbarossa is speaking to his advisor Ariel Hawksquill, a magician well acquainted with the Other Side, as she explains what might be behind Barbarossa’s apparent political and military victories.

“I don’t know why you say there’s no war,” the President said, “and then talk like that.”

“Not a war,” Hawksquill said; “but something like a war. […] Something like two caravans, […], mixing it up, jostling through that gate, for a time one caravan only, and then, on the far side, unwinding again toward their destinations, though perhaps with some few having changed places; a saddle bag stolen; a kiss exchanged…”

“What,” Barbarossa said, “are you talking about?”

She turned her stool to face him. “The question is,” she said, “just what kingdom it is you’ve come into.”

“My own.”

“Yes. The Chinese, you know, believe that deep within each of us, no larger than the ball of your thumb, is the garden of the immortals, the great valley where we are all king forever.”

He turned on her, suddenly angry. “Now listen,” he said.

“I know,” she said, smiling. “It would be a damned shame if you ended up ruling, not the Republic that fell in love with you, but some other place entirely.”

“No.”

“Someplace very small.”

This passage gets at the question of control - who is ruling and who is being ruled. But it also gets at another inversion of the book, the folding of physical space, which is perhaps even more important. The title, I must awkwardly remind you, is Little, Big. A private park in the City seems small from the outside but once inside you find yourself walking for miles without emerging. One section of the book even describes the experience of a trout who has grown large enough to be trapped in a small pool in the stream, but it is not clear if his world has actually shrunk or expanded because of this circumstance. The Drinkwaters inhabit a house designed by a mystical architect (the same one who designed the private park) particularly to facilitate interaction with fairies, with a funhouse mirror quality of rooms whose sizes are deceptive or even seem to change. Barbarossa’s empire ends up very small, but the entire universe fits in the Drinkwater home.

One narrative thread involves the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club, nameless titans of industry and owners of television networks and presidents of universities who meet in secret to decide things like who should be the next president of the United States. They end up opposing Barbarossa, or joining forces with him - it’s actually not so clear - seeking more power and more wealth. At the same time, we follow the twists and turns of a love story between a struggling screenwriter and a messenger in a tiny rented room in a run-down office building that has been converted into a kind of farm. The book is telling us, more or less explicitly, that the sizes of the kingdoms ruled by the emperor and the television hack cannot be so easily compared.

III

A typical fantasy novel features an actual war, horses and spears and fortresses and death, not two caravans that wind together as they travel through a city. Little, Big has no battles, only passing mention of wars in the distance. There is almost no violence of any kind. The book lacks many, perhaps most, of what you might expect in a high fantasy. It opens with a kind of quest - Smoky Barnable on his way to win his bride - but there is no real physical danger on the journey, no forces that oppose his progress. There is no hidden treasure, very little concern whatsoever with money or wealth, no palace intrigue. No one rides to the rescue, no one forges a sword with ancient magic, no one fights a dragon or lays siege to a castle.

What happens instead is architecture, gardening, falling in love, milking goats, growing old, speaking to animals, a marriage, children. Perhaps that sounds boring. But Crowley paints it all with a brush of enchantment, of magic, of strange importance. Where questions of war and politics intersect the story, they are just setting the scene for the seemingly boring questions of love and family that in fact become filled with lore and drama and weighty importance. To be too cute and too obvious, again, you might even say that the little questions and the big questions become strangely inverted.

This is especially true for Smoky, who has the feeling that his life is not just enriched, not just saved, but in some sense created by his marriage to Daily Alice. He was nobody, completely anonymous, but Daily Alice took away his anonymity and made his identity solid and real:

If he was a character, she had made him one. And if he was a character, he was probably a minor one: a minor character in someone else’s story, this tall story he had got himself into. He would have his entrances and exits, contribute a line of dialogue now and then. Whether the character would be crabby schoolmaster or something else didn’t seem to matter much, and would be decided along the way. Well then.

He examined himself carefully for feelings of resentment at this. He did feel a certain nostalgia for his vanished anonymity, for the infinity of possibilities it contained; but he also felt her breathing next to him, and the house’s breathing around him, and in rhythm with them he fell asleep, nothing decided.

One reason you might read a book that ignores war to focus on a marriage is because it is simply different. You’ve read all the books with dragons and warriors on their covers, so maybe it’s time for something else, just for variety. But another reason has to do with a possible purpose of fantasy: to make you consider a different way the universe could be. Thinking about a strange, bizarre premise for a world gives you a broader horizon for what is possible and what is important in this real world where you walk.

Whenever you talk about fantasy you are always, like it or not, talking about the figure looming over the genre, the oliphaunt in the room, J. R. R. Tolkien. One common and timeworn critique of Tolkien is moral simplicity, the claim that his characters are clearly and boringly delineated as good or evil, while we all know that real life is a complicated stew of mixed and shifting motivations. The convincing response to this standard critique comes from Alan Jacobs:

It may be true that the story of the Ring is less morally ambiguous than the average realistic novel, but that’s primarily because Tolkien wasn’t especially interested in the problem of knowing right from wrong. His concern was to explore the psychology of the moment when you know right from wrong but aren’t sure whether you have the courage and fortitude to do the right thing.

Thinking about different moral universes gives you different options when you face your breakfast tomorrow. Perhaps, as in J. R. R. Tolkien, you face a defining moral question where you know what is right and what is wrong, but some other attachment - to your job, your family, your respectability - tempts you to cowardice. Or perhaps you live in George R. R. Martin’s world with shifting and difficult to grasp shades of good and evil mixed in a compromised and confusing morass, and you need to weigh an alliance with moderately evil people in order to defeat truly evil foes. Or maybe the world you inhabit doesn’t even have meaningful categories of good and evil, so your task is to somehow create them, to forge a true and authentic path for yourself.

A fantasy can illuminate or highlight one of these worlds, give your brain and your imagination practice - actual practice, not just abstract thought - for living in such a world. To put it another way, one mistake you could make is to stay home in the Shire, ignoring the threat growing over Middle Earth. Another mistake would be to misjudge good and evil and end up fighting on the wrong side. But the mistake John (not two, not one, but zero R’s) Crowley is concerned about is that you might devote your energies to the wrong battlefield, try to fight a war when you are actually riding in a caravan, that you might become an emperor of something trivial when your wife is right beside you.

Let me be a bit more concrete, perhaps too concrete. You may imagine yourself sitting on Flight 93, preparing to ram a beverage cart into a cockpit door, knowing that great evil will happen unless you take dramatic, even violent action. Or you may firmly believe that you are on a different flight, there are no terrorists at the controls, and storming the flight deck is lunacy. Fine. But what if who is in the cockpit does not matter, terrorist or not, really, it does not matter, and the most important thing Todd Beamer did was not rolling the beverage cart, but calling his wife to tell her he loved her.

IV

Readers of this blog will be familiar with the notion that we are living in a simulation, inside of a computer rather than in a base reality. In this case the Simulator presumably has a purpose. They are tracking something, watching something, measuring something, maybe our human political systems, maybe swirly clouds in distant galaxies. Our ability to know the Simulator’s purpose may be very limited, and even knowing it might not change how we behave. But their purpose might be the closest thing we can get to an objective idea of the purpose of the universe, and, if so, our place within it. We can of course rebel against that purpose, or decide it is so alien that it does not influence what we do. But we might embrace it.

As with moral questions, fantasy can provide a range of answers to the purpose of the universe question, to give us practice living in a world where the writer has decided to focus on one thing rather than another. It may be useful to inhabit the possible alien purposes of a Simulator or an AI or a God rather than being stuck with boring human concerns. You thought the win condition should obviously be the number of starships constructed or voters persuaded or money accumulated, but you learn instead that you win by finding love.

I opened this review by contrasting two of the subjects in Little, Big. There are supernatural fairies, and a natural marriage. But maybe that is not right. Our own host, though not generally a spiritual soul, has described the pull of marriage this way:

The lure of some sort of supernatural unearthly beauty - beauty apparently intense enough to die for.

In Little, Big we learn very little of what the fairies actually want. We know they are unconcerned about the establishment of a gas station in their neighborhood. The Noisy Ridge Rod and Gun Club is very concerned with political power, but the fairies are not. They seem entirely unconcerned with social and political events - when they influence them, it is for some other, seemingly smaller purposes. But we do see them pay rapt attention to one thing, near the beginning of the book, when Daily Alice’s younger sister sneaks close to observe the consummation of Smoky and Daily Alice’s marriage, acutely aware (as she usually is) of the fairies:

She had, before her eyes closed, known or felt anyway that there were others around come also to spy on this marriage. Now in her dream they were quite concrete; they looked over her shoulders and her head, they crept with cunning to be near the gazebo, they lifted atomies of children above the myrtle leaves to see the wonder of it. They hung in the air on panting wings, wings panting in the same exaltation as that which they witnessed.

We may not be in a simulation, and there may be no god, and there may never be a superintelligent AI. But in this book we get practice in understanding a world where there are supernatural observers - fairies, simulators, AIs, gods - and they care more about some things than others. And those things are not money or power or politics.

I want to be careful here. A book might try to convince you to embrace the small delights of everyday life because that’s your humble lot, to say that marriage is a worthy back-up vocation, you know, if you can’t be a king or a warrior. But Little, Big is not that book. The argument is not “Be realistic.” I am not saying wizards are great but you’ll never make it as a wizard. No. That’s not it. This book is much bolder. Wizards suck. It is actually better to be a peasant. To be a king or a corporate titan or a starship captain is to be a failure. Do not reduce your aspiration to be merely an emperor. Raise your sights, do the best thing there is to do, and be a husband.