Well the point at issue was fantasy novels and *physics*. Al said he like fantasy world building, but if the book was recognizably about “our” world he didn’t like the woo, he wanted physics. You don’t get that in magical realism. You might think Holmes's logic is full of holes but DOYLE'S physics isn’t full of trees that weep blood because *sob* the lovers must part. If a character can read in the sky the death of his brother five hundred miles away I put the book down.
Sorry, for some reason I didn't see any of the intervening posts before mine went up. I didn't mean to ignore all your comments.
Anyway, the other day some woman running for president in the US put up a post suggesting that if we all concentrate on the hurricane not hitting the coast, maybe it wouldn't. She deleted the post, but she thought that might work in the real world. Some writers share her sense of...reality. Paul Coelho, perhaps. I hate that stuff. I don't think Garcia-Marquez really thinks a tree might, under any circumstances, bleed human blood out of sympathy. But he might use it as a poetic metaphor. In the "General in His Labyrinth" the ocean by the corrupt tyrant's country was gone, and there was a desert where it had been, because he had sold it to an American company. That's clearly an image, and a political statement, rather than an indication of his lack of understanding of basic principles of reality. Shakespeare has lots of magic in "The Tempest." In Macbeth, too, I suppose, and there's the ghost in Hamlet, but those don't bother me at all. But when a Native American detective sees a vision that helps solve a grisly murder in a "realistic" police procedural, I have a problem. In Twin Peaks, however, I enjoy it quite a lot (especially as there were giants, dwarves, and people who speak backwards in the vision). I guess my view is that authors can make any laws they want in their fictional world, and its fine if they are consistent. But using the tools of true realism (or naturalism) indicate they are subjecting themselves to the laws of empirical phenomonology, as does using real historical events and figures, unless the story is parody or comedy or tongue-in-cheek. I hated when Tarantino showed moving and horrific scenes of Nazi brutality and then turned the movie into a fantastical farce. So was all that human suffering just "entertainment"?
Anyway, sorry to ramble on.
