I personally know James Norcliffe best as a fellow poet, but he has a strong presence in Kids/YA speculative fiction and I loved his latest novel The Loblolly Boy—currenty available as The Boy Who Could Fly in the USA. I suspect you will also very much enjoy Jim’s take on the series theme of “Why Fantasy Science Fiction Rocks My World”, which is—sadly—the concluding post in the series.

F-SF Guest Author Post: James Norcliffe—“Why I get a buzz from fantasy”

I’ve always enjoyed Ambrose Bierce’s delicious collection of cynical confectionaries The Devil’s Dictionary. One choice morsel is his definition of prayer which goes something like this: that the laws of the universe be suspended on behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy. While, in the real world, this is probably intended as a salutary warning to the hopeless  against praying for the impossible, it also hints at the nature of fantasy. What I love about fantasy is its ability to grant that prayer in the world of the imagination. In fantasy, the unworthy petitioner (reader or writer) can suspend the laws of the universe: people can fly with wings, a cape or a suitably adjusted Feltex carpet; a bottle can be rubbed to generate a wish-granting geni; non-human creatures can not only talk, they can riddle and dissemble; a beautiful woman sans maidenform  bra can terminate in a fish-tail yet speak passable English.

Any what-if possibility is possible, and once postulated can be explored, embroidered, can be pursued via its own crazy logic to its astonishing conclusions.

Paul Klee once said of drawing that it was “taking a line for a walk”. What I love about fantasy is that it allows the writer to take a possibility – or perhaps more accurately, an impossibility – for a walk. What often happens then is that the walk is transformed into an exhilarating ride.

This may suggest anarchy. If the “laws of the universe” have been suspended then the result must surely be a chaotic, untrammelled free-for-all. Literary mayhem.

Not so.

Even if the laws of the physics are abandoned, there are still the laws of fiction. And these are stern injunctions. Characters, whether human or fantastical must behave “in character” – there must be motivation, causes have effects and effects have causes. There must be the satisfying pattern of plot. Something must happen next and we must want to know what it will be, and when it does happen it must conform to the logic that has been created. Strange logic perhaps, but logic nevertheless.

What could be less real than the ringwraiths – the black riders  – who pursued Frodo Baggins as he set off to return the ring, the ringwraiths who terrified me when I first read The Lord of the Rings, who terrified my kids when I read it to them, and who still terrify me today. Not only unreal, but incorporeal to boot. And yet what at the same time could be more real, in the sense really, palpably, terrifyingly real? So real, you needed to check the doors and windows before you turned the light off (if you dared turn the light off) before you went to bed.

What I love about fantasy, as a reader, but especially as a writer, is that it allows me to play, to create, to take that exhilarating ride to places beyond the real, beyond the ordinary, to the limits of the imagination. It allows me not to break the rules, but to imagine new rules, new paradigms. I’ve often maintained that there is an association between poetry and fantasy . Both exploit the imagination, both  negotiate the tension between freedom and form, and both juxtapose original and surprising elements. A good poem is usually a discovery both for reader and writer. So, I believe, is a good fantasy.

About James Norcliffe:

James Norcliffe is the author of several fantasy novels for young people, of which The Assassin of Gleam (Hazard Press, 2006) won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Novel in 2007. The Loblolly Boy (Longacre, 2009), his most recent work, won the NZ Post Children Book Award 2010 for Junior Fiction and was shortlisted for several other awards. James is also a poet, editor and educator whose writing has been featured in journals and anthologies, with several collections of poetry to his name, the most recent being Villon in Millerton (AUP, 2007.) He has also been the recipient of several awards and fellowships, the most recent being the 2006 Fellowship as a participant in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Programme. James lives at Church Bay, Lyttelton Harbour with his wife Joan Melvyn and an ungrateful cat called Pinky Bones.

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To see—and read—the other authors who have posted in the Guest Series, click here.