Fantasy Secret

[Niklas Terki]

Today's #secret responses were 97% clean, but we did get some rather naughty ones. So what did we do? We had Nick the intern read them! These are all pretty much sexual in nature so you probably shouldn't listen to them at work or with small children around because they will have some questions for you afterward. And we mean both your children and your co-workers.

This Fantasy World has very large monsters, intelligent humanoids, expansive unique biomes, ect. While I was making my fantasy world I realised how hard it would be to hide all of this from humans. I was thinking of a few ways this could work out, maybe the world is on another planet, maybe during this time humans are in a more early stage of development (think the middle ages). But I feel like these reasons wouldn't really suite my story, but I wouldn't be too opposed if they made sense. I was thinking of magic, but in my story magic is quite minor and not a very dependable art.

You added a magic tag, plausibility may be less important, you could cloak the island with a magic spell.. but I can note on Earth, in Europe around 1350, most islands far away were myth. Any remote island would do. Out of reach for Europeans. However, for other people.. elsewhere.. that was not the case. Let's do a few candidates,

Obvious, but better skip the pacific.. in medieval times, the Chinese had ships, peoples in the pacific colonized islands everywhere (1200), people able to read and write would find you and spread the news. Maybe Easter Island would be a candidate, near the Chilean coast but I'm not sure.

The Caribbean would be out of reach for you, if you don't want to be discovered: islands and areas up north were inhabited, they even received Maya and Inca colonists and there was Maya trade in the Caribbean.

In medieval times, the Falklands would do fine. Kelpers claim they are native population, but it is not clear how many lived there in medieval times. The local population of Patagonia were nomadic hunters without ships, and European discovery expeditions had not reached that far. The Falklands were discovered in 1504.

If you put your story before 1800 AD, and your wizards can create some artificial heat, you'd be safe anywhere on Antarctica. It was unpopulated. With magic tricks at your disposal, there's a lot of options to build your world. You could e.g. melt all snow 200km around a lake inland, you'd have water, agriculture, fishery, domestication of penguins for their meat.. you could built cities there.. chance is, nothing would be discovered, until satellite images of Antarctica were published. Candidate..

I think a better way is to have an escort - a guide who can step between worlds and who can show you the fantastic world adjacent to and intertwined with ours. Eventually you can make the trip yourself.

I wish I could find my copy of Grimbold's Other World - Grimbold the cat can (like all cats) walk between the worlds and he brings the boy Muffler to the Night World. It is an echo of the day world but cats are huge and dogs are tiny; forests still have their ancient grandeur. A old mans shack on the mountain is revealed to be a castle. The fantastic coexisting unperceived with the real is more or less the premise for Mary Poppins, and Harry Potter, and the world of Spirited Away - the magical coexists with the real and the protagonist can move between worlds, somehow.

Draw a 2-dimensional character on a piece of paper. Now pick up that piece of paper, move it to another room. Note that it remains a 2-dimensional character, but it has in fact physically traveled through a 3-dimensional world.

Likewise, while us 3-dimensional beings may not be able to perceive or understand the 4th-dimension, the existence of, and ability to travel through the 4th dimensional axis can be part of the nature of your world. Magic need not be used, it is part of the metaphysical reality of the world, and the fantasy world occupies a 3-dimensional world on a parallel 4th-dimensional axis. Only those who understand this principal may be able to open a portal to traverse between worlds. So this is ultimately a "Portal" method to separate the real world from fantasy, but may have different implications for your story to build upon.

One of the most common fantasy trope. Fantastical things are happening on another plane of existence, sometimes it influences the real world but we can't interact back with it, which might explain paranormal phenomena.

The fantasy population is limited, but held together by an organized structure and everyone mutually agrees to avoid letting regular humans learn of their existence due to the inconvenience or threat of a unified human response. This is employed in Vampire Diaries universe and many isekai Anime series.

A personal favorite Mahou Sensei Negima blends all of the above; The magic world is actually a literal underground world within the Martian core, connected through a massive gateway generated by the stonehenge. There's a whole explanation why that is the case and how it was necessary to sustain all the fantasy world people and the impending issues due to it.

Fantasy is more than just sword-and-sorcery novels or epic adventures. Here are innovative tales where mythology, fairy tales, and archetypes are reimagined into a new style of storytelling. From the depths of a dangerous English forest to the top of the Tower of Babel, discover The Secret History of Fantasy.

Anthologist Peter S. Beagle knows fantasy. The author of the inventive fantasy novel The Last Unicorn and the introduction to The Lord of the Rings now introduces the gifted writers that returned to the classics and thoroughly redefined the genre: Gregory Maguire, Francesca Lia Block, Robert Holdstock, Patricia McKillip, and Steven Millhauser, and others who have lead the way to expanding imaginative frontiers.

Not on the one-in-a-million-ess: saying that you love The Secret History is a bit like saying that you love fox terrier puppies. Everybody is on board. But saying out loud that you think it is fantasy? That is like saying that you love those puppies medium rare. Folks will take a step back.

Give me a chance here: The Secret History is about magic. Explicitly so. At the heart of the story is a ritual that goes wrong because it works. Four excessively civilised students put it in their mind to invoke Dionysus, one of the wildest gods in any pantheons, but they start small, and the god does not come. They realise that they need to up their game, and they go full on with the fasting, the sex, the wine, the wild acts which are supposed to make Dionysus appear. We are in b-movie territory: these guys are the better educated equivalent of your typical horror-movie gang of young people who fool around with a Ouija board for a laugh. And then the Ouija board works.

Life first. An orgy was part of the ritual: this much is obvious. It is easy (reassuring, even) to think that the orgy was all there was, and the ritual was only an excuse to get down. What can possibly be divine about an orgy?

Quite a lot, actually: there are myths about Dionysus punishing people for their impiety when they refuse to join his revelry. Yes, probably the students were playing at magic to get some good sex, but good sex, at times, calls down the gods. In our life, in modern times, we keep flesh and spirit neatly separated. That is not always been the case: carnal pleasure too is a form of worship. The moment we read there was an orgy, we instinctively refuse to believe there could also be magic, but the gods know better.

The characters of The Secret History are not the best human beings one could come across, but it is easy to resonate with their attempt to break out of the cage of a reality that was set for them before they were born. They touch something older, something wilder, something, perhaps, truer; and that thing touches them in turn, and there problems begin.

At the core of The Secret History is what Rudolf Otto called a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a terrifying and alluring mystery. Which is, I think, a perfect definition of fantasy, both as a genre, and as the deed that makes us human.

From the driveway, Charlotte and her friends could hear faint music pulsing from a dark structure at the end of a winding path through the garden. Charlotte hopped from one concrete lily pad to another, then paused before the barn door. She rolled down the waistband on her skirt one last time and took a deep breath. And then: Bodies, so many bodies that she slicked herself with their sweat when she took a step. The lights were off. There was no furniture. A girl crouched in the middle of the floor, peeing. Couples lined the walls, gyrating in the cold white flashes of a digital camera.

It was a Saturday night in early spring 2011, and Charlotte was cold. She wasn\u2019t yet drunk enough not to be. The zipper on her North Face kissed her stomach, and she shivered. Under their jackets, she and her friends were wearing nothing but thin tube tops and leopard-print spandex skirts, matching uniforms purchased from Wet Seal that afternoon to reflect the party\u2019s theme: \u201CWelcome to the Jungle.\u201D This was the weekend ritual in high school: Coordinate outfits, plan the pregame, secure the booze, put on the costumes, drink the booze, take pictures, then trek 20 minutes into the hills to whatever house was hosting that week\u2019s big \u201CDP\u201D (short for \u201CDance Party\u201D). Above Highland Avenue in the wealthy enclave of Piedmont, California, the land sloped sharply toward the sky, as did the property values. Walls of windows looked out over the San Francisco Bay. The body of water was a black morass in the dark, the city a scintillating constellation beyond it.

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