4.0 KiB
[DC][RT] "Relentlessly Mundane", by Jo Walton
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Author: u/None *
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URL:
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Score: 19
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Created: 2015-10-28T12:45:00
Post:
Comments:
u/ZeroNihilist [+9] (5 hours later)
Meanwhile, a very confused group of children find themselves in a strange place. It takes a little while but they manage to confirm what they all suspected: they are in another world.
It's simpler, with none of the sophisticated magitech that the worldsmiths use to shape the cosmos. There is great beauty in the marvels that the people here created without the aid of thought-tools, manipulating the world to fit the shape of their ideas with sweat and blood, but there is also great danger. The unspoken fear is that some unstable government will get its hands on nuclear weapons and initiate a world war or an apocalypse or both.
Though there are no AI oracles to predict their roles in the coming events, they are filled with certainty of purpose. It is hard to imagine how a group of four children scarcely old enough to receive a neural implant can save an entire world, but they have one thing on their side, one crucial thing. A thing that overpowers all opposition, that burns in the hearts of the righteous and will always triumph: they have a desire for knowledge.
u/Transfuturist [+4] Carthago delenda est. (12 hours later)
How prolific is the genre of genre characters finding themselves in mundane worlds? I know Bouletcorp did one...
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (7 days later)
TV Tropes used to have an entry for "Reverse Portal Fantasy", which is that trope, but it looks like it got deleted or merged in some stupid way. Examples:
- Enchanted
- Fables
- The Devil is Part-Timer
- Arguably the first Thor movie
- Redshirts
- Howard the Duck (kind of, in that he ends up in Cleveland, but it's the Cleveland of the Marvel universe)
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (7 days later)
Hm, Fables seems more like a conventional urban fantasy with a mass exodus to Earth in the backstory. In TWAU, everyone seems pretty accustomed to Earth, and the story itself is entirely about the hidden world. Is the comic about the exodus?
And in the first place, I'm talking about the world being mundane, as in, magic not working. Time travel to the past works too, as long as the traveler's technology is unavailable in some way. What I want is more like, characters accustomed to having much greater ability, through technology or magic, who are thrown into a situation in which they can't access those abilities.
Like survivalism, but not just naturalist. Survivalism from the perspective of a more powerful society/individual. Even an average American teenager or a business executive or politician having to survive in rural Africa would do it for me, I think. Post-apocalypse, too. I just want more of a perspective where this society is the less powerful one.
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (7 days later)
Ah, I get what you're saying. Genre characters finding themselves in mundane worlds and becoming mundane there. That's a much more narrow filter, probably a subtrope of Brought Down to Normal, but longer term than that usually ends up being. I can't really help you there.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (7 days later)
Three clicks, found Your Magic's No Good Here and Humanity Ensues, though the former is neglected, and the latter is not nearly as related). Thanks for the link.
I also just remembered a great book, Dogsbody, where a star is tried in, um, star court, and is sentenced to find an important item in the lifetime of a dog on Earth.