Do fantasy writers give the night short shrift?

[elfs]

One of the common complaints about much of the fantasy genre is that modern writers are so used to instantaneous worldwide communications, rich and deep libraries and knowledge, and other common physical and intellectual extensions of their selfhood that they have a hard time really grasping the vast well of ignorance about the world through which most of their characters move.  In the real world, even the best-informed prince received knowledge that was months out of date, and reactions had to be gauged based upon a very real understanding of the limitations of that knowledge.   Better writers try to write with this in mind, and I’ve seen Gene Wolfe and Joe Abercrombie pull this off admirably.

I’ve been reading Roger Ekirch’s At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, a history of what life was like after dark, and (as it’s been resting on top of my copy of Sails and Spells, an anthology of magical fantasy on the high seas) I find myself realizing just how poorly even the best writers deal with nighttime.

Ekirch’s book makes it clear that nighttime, at least on the European continent between Rome and the advent of the light bulb, was a damn scary place.  Beer was plentiful- even the kids drank it- and the night was just mindbogglingly dark. None of the safety implementations we’re comfortable with today existed.  Adults and children who wandered out after dark frequently died of drowning and falling at a rate that would be shocking today.  Fire was a constant terror, especially as urbanization butted one house up against its neighbors, such that “if one house caught fire, the whole town is obliged to burn down.”  Crime was also prevalent it a way we cannot even imagine, so much so that London courts accepted “sleeps in the daytime” as cause to suspect one was a burglar or other “nightwalker.”

In Ekrich’s telling, the Church used the fear of fire as a way of holding off the spread of artificial illumination (falling asleep with a candle lit was a frequent cause of whole city blocks going up in flames), and held that the night was the time when one’s soul was in peril, one should stay indoors, and sleep or pray.  Towns would not just close their gates but drag large logs into throughfares to prevent men and horses from moving about the city willfully at night.

I’m not sure if it’s personal artificial illumination, or light pollution in general, but it seems to me that most fantasy writers treat night as if it were daytime, only darker, and coincidentally a time for eating and sleeping.  Nighttime only becomes siginificantly different from daytime when it’s convenient.  (I’m looking at you, Jacqueline Carey.)

If part of the magic of speculative writing is to create a sense of a genuinely different place and time, writers could do better to handle the very real terror, mystery, and intrigue of the night itself.

Ekrich makes a strong case that, in pre-modern times, a very different and persistent culture emerged after dark, one with its own sensibilities that were rarely invoked in daylight.  Are there writers who you think handled this well?

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.

Comments

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

Fair is fair, i grew up someplace rural enough that there was little or no illumination after dark, and could navigate pretty well unless it was overcast.

Given this, you have two kinds of night, one that's black as pitch, full of traps, pitfalls and hazards, and another that's somewhat silvery and magical, and it can swap between them on the whim of the weather. (The phase and presence of the moon can make things nearly bright enough to read, if you don't mind a little eyestrain, too, so that's possibly a third kind of darkness)

Each of these is a different kind of world. Terry Pratchett, oddly enough, seems to have done a wonderful job of describing most of these in his Discworld series, especially the novels centering around Vimes and the Night Watch, since that's when quite a lot of their activity takes place.

[codeamazon.livejournal.com]

Well, do keep in mind that this writer has something to sell. I grew up somewhere that light pollution was minimal: the power to the entire island went out regularly, and there were many miles of sea to the next source.

It was dark a lot -- but not in a much darker way than anywhere else.

Crime in the cities may have been less checked if the police were home at night and there were no lights, but I doubt it was less safe than many places that continue to be present for the unwary in populated places.

There were probably more animals to worry about, and fewer ways to keep them at bay until relatively recently.

But -- completely different environment? I'm skeptical, unless one attributes the shift to evolution in the human base of experience. We may well be less afraid of the dark now because we have conquered more of it. Then again, I wonder if we are not more afraid of it when it occurs because it is even more alien to us.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

There's a huge, vast, and gulflike difference between the way medieval people saw and experienced their world and the way we experience ours.

Ok, so the power goes out. You have other options, and you're pretty confident it will come back eventually. You're not really worried that there might be evil spirits waiting out there to do mischief, or that you might meet up with the Devil at a crossroads. If someone knocks on the door after dark, it probably never enters your thoughts that it might be Grendel or one of his ilk come to eat you. You know that just because someone has bad breath or a cast eye doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with them spiritually or mentally.

We look at those beliefs now as quaint and folksy, but they were very real concerns at the time. The world we live in is completely and totally different than the one our medieval counterparts lived in.

[codeamazon.livejournal.com]

Right -- that's all in the category of "evolution of human experience". It sounded to me like the author was arguing in large part for physical/technological changes, and my point was that I grew up somewhere with dark more often than not. Some of that dark, as someone else mentioned, was quite lovely.

But any great fears were from the mind, not fear of tripping in the dark.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Mostly I was addressing the bit about the Church insisting that if you went out at night your soul was in peril.

The legal rolls contain many many instances of death due to drowning, but I don't know if they specify whether those deaths happened during the daytime or not and I am somehow reticent to plow through six hundred years of records to find out.

I *can* say that the quality of the road network was substantially lower than what we've got now, though, and it's pretty clear that most fantasy writers have never tried to walk through a forest in the dark on a poorly maintained dirt road.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

I'm going to have to read this book. *adds to reading list*

[gromm.livejournal.com]

And people used to be a whole hell of a lot more superstitious than they are now, in no small part thanks to the fact that we now understand much more of the world.

But where there is a lack of knowledge, there are guesses and assumptions. And not being able to see anything sure adds to that lack of knowledge.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

With regards to fantasy and communication, I especially liked Terry Pratchett's "Going Postal", which was about a scam artist who was put in charge of one town's dilapidated post office. It goes into some depth about communications.

[xengar.livejournal.com]

I *can* say that the quality of the road network was substantially lower than what we've got now, though, and it's pretty clear that most fantasy writers have never tried to walk through a forest in the dark on a poorly maintained dirt road.

Agreed. Having done that I can say that I wouldn't want to try it without having previously traveled that route in broad daylight. For that matter, while moonlight goes a long way to relieving the tripping hazard it would still be very easy to get lost if you're following a forest trail rather than straight road.

On the other hand, I did follow a particular set of bootprints for a quarter of a mile through a woodland trail system one night (admittedly with a full moon) just to see if I could. I'd say that outdoorsy folk such as woodsmen, game wardens, and bandits wouldn't have that different an experience of the night from our modern one. What I think a lot of fantasy writers miss is the difference between such people and city dwellers.


*Disclaimer* The forest trails in question were close enough to a city that it took specific weather conditions to provide me with true darkness and I had somewhat more light for that tracking than an olde tyme full moon would have provided.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Then there's the in-between people who lived in rural manors and small villages. Not quite outdoorsy and not quite urban, either, but I gather from my reading that they didn't spend a lot of time outside at night unless they absolutely had to.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Remember that the ale people usually drank was barely equivalent to 3.2 beer in the amount of alcohol in it, and much if not all of the wine they talk about medieval people drinking was diluted with water at least by half. So really, most people, even the children, weren't wandering around buzzed all the time.

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

[lemur123.livejournal.com]

yup! and in addition to the superstitions about monsters and trolls, wolves and bears and other beasties still wandered about freely, and viewed humans as nice tasty snacks.

Asimov?

[(Anonymous)]

What about "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov, as a look into the psychology of exactly this idea? Please ignore either of the atrocious films made from this - read the short story first, and the novel second.