Fukushima, Superheroes, Mars, and P, F, and Q: F/Phantasy Meets Reality

Today I’m going to do the usual “werd nerd” stuff and also talk about fantasy (or “phantasy”) and how it relates to reality in literature. Deep stuff, but first, some ads:

My newest novel, Sea and Sunset Lands, is out: the second of the MadStones books; the second “Tond” series. Besides being part of a sequel to “Tond”, it relates to some of my other writing, such as the novel and “Ussers and the Echo of Nothing” (yes, “ussers” with two S’s) and the collection of short stories, “Fronds”. Also, check out a new sister blog, TheFronds in Tond (if you just read the rest of this paragraph you should get the joke) and the old one: The SoundScroll.

The ”Werd Nerd” Stuff

Today’s words: Fantasy, Phantasy, Fantastic, Phantastic, Fantastical.

Fantasy: a genre of speculative fiction that includes magical or supernatural elements.
Phantasy: an archaic spelling of the same, also used in psychology to describe imaginative mental images.
Fantastic: excellent or great.
Fantastical: imaginary or related to fantasy. “Fantasy” and “fantastical” have overlapping meanings, but according to AI, "fantastical" can carry a more negative connotation in some contexts. I’ve never known that to be true.
Phantastic: an old form of “fantastic”, not really used any more, with connotations of “strange and weird” rather than what we now think of as “fantastic”.

Okay, what’s with that PH and F?

Yeah, it’s a way to make up new words. “Phat” and “fat” are not exactly the same, and a “pharm” might be a “phield” where one grows prescription medicines. At the risk of making some people yawn and read something else, I’m going to do a deep dive on that. This is a nerd blog, after all.

Usually in English, a “PH” designates a word of Greek origin. This is because Greek spells an F-sound with letters that transliterate as P and H. There’s a deeper reason behind this: it’s part of the “H makes a fricative” rule used elsewhere in English (i.e. TH) and Scottish (i.e. CH, the “hard” German-style CH, not as in “church”). Deeper still, maybe you’ve noticed the run of phonemes: U (“ooh”), W, V, F, P, with B showing up either after V or after P. What am I talking about? It is very common in (any) language, as it evolves over time, for an “Ooh” sound to get squashed into a W sound, particularly if near another vowel. Think of the Chinese surname “Guo”, pronounced Gwo. It is equally common for a W sound to become a fricative V (think of German, where a W sounds like a V in English). Also, a V can devoice to become an F, or become a B. Both B and F can morph into P: “Pilipino” is another word for the Filipino language Tagalog, with certain political ramifications. In any given language, or even any given word, the stream of sounds may stop, reverse, or morph into two coexisting forms: lieutenant may be pronounced “leff-tenant” in some parts of the world. To confuse matters more, there are a couple of other sounds in the mix: so-called bilabial fricatives, spelled by linguists as ɸ and ß (like a F and V respectively, but pronounced through both lips).

Okay, enough nerdity. Back to fantasy. Or it that still nerdiness? (I’m going to treat “fantasy” and “folktales” as roughly synonymous here, and I’ll draw mythology into the mix; bear with me if you disagree.)

Book Reviews (Some of these were originally posted on the local public library's website first.)

Fantasy has a lot of forms in books: “high” fantasy, “low” fantasy, magical realism, etc., but I’m not really going to go into all of that now. I’m just going to highlight how it interacts with reality in four books.

March in the Island of Happiness
by Amy Lange Kawamura
Illustrated by LiLiCat

This Middle-Grade book is really two stories in one, with an occasional hand-drawn illustration. In one story, Haruka and her brother are in school in Fukushima, Japan, when the giant earthquake of March 2012 strikes. News of the tsunami on the coast follows. The rest of the story follows the two children as they navigate the post-disaster world, finding what was not destroyed, and nervously waiting for news of their mother (who had travelled to the coast on business) amid growing rumors of nuclear meltdown. The second story takes place some weeks later; the children have been evacuated to a small island to avoid the radiation; here they take up residence with two eccentric great aunts. Haruka soon finds herself in a fairytale world where there are magical cranes, a girl who isn’t a human, and at least one witch. (The author retells an old Japanese folktale at the beginning of the book, ending with wordplay that will become relevant later, to set up the premise and quell the possible disorientation the reader might experience as the all-too-real and the all-too-mythical stories meet.)

The author has stated in posts on social media that it’s unfortunate Fukushima (like Chernobyl) had become a linguistic shorthand for nuclear disaster. The book, in my opinion, may be an attempt to restore Fukushima’s “Island of Happiness” reputation without getting into any of the nasty politics which is apparently still going on there as a result. (“Island of Happiness” is a translation of “Fuku-Shima”; I’ve also seen it as “Island of Good Fortune”.)

Through a lot of Japanese history, Fukushima (and the surrounding Tohoku region) seems to have been regarded as mysterious, remote, and possibly wild — so much so that Bashō could title his famous travelogue “Narrow Road to a Far Province” and have his audience know of what area he was speaking. When I was in Fukushima — I lived there for a couple of years in the late 1980’s — I found it a beautiful, mountainous and forested region, far from urban sprawl. (Despite the existence of Fukushima City itself, about the size of Portland (Oregon) with its suburbs, my first reaction upon seeing the mountains and after spending a sweltering summer in crowded Tokyo, was to think, “Wow — They have air here!”) The mountains and forests give it a touch of the mythical, rather like the Seattle area where I currently live. It might not seem particularly out of place for a bigfoot to walk into a hotel lobby in Seattle and ask for a room; likewise, a TikTok of a girl suddenly becoming birdlike and then taking flight around Mt. Shinobu would somehow be unexceptional.

So, in this book, the mundane and the mythical meet. In the end, “Island of Happiness” is left unexplained. Is it Fukushima itself, which is beautiful but was hit by a natural and then a human-made (if unintentional) disaster, or is it the half-fae island of Flap and Flutter (the great aunts)? It comes to the reader to decide. In both, there are unknowns and things beyond one’s control, and maybe the children’s sojourn in one is to help them face their difficulties in the other.

Fantasy and Superheroes

Of course, folktales take quite different forms in the contemporary world. Where there were witches, elves, knights (or samurai) and dragons, there are now aliens, superheroes, and the multiverse matrix in which we all may be living. The commercial world of Marvel, Star Wars, and anime has taken the place of the traditional. A recent conversation highlights this:

Me: The movie Princess Mononoke is mostly Japanese mythology, right up to the last ten minutes or so where it suddenly turns into a Godzilla movie.

My friend: But you could consider Godzilla to be Japanese mythology.

Me: *pauses, scratches beard* …I’ll buy that.

I’ve heard aliens in contemporary tales compared to the demons of folklore (at least one religion denomination takes this idea literally) and I’ve also heard of Superman as an avatar of Zeus. The latter seems a little off-kilter to me — considering Superman’s propensity for doing good and saving people, and considering the Hebraic references in the Superman mythos, he could be (if the idea isn’t blasphemous) a fictional avatar of Jesus. Thus he joins the ranks of Aslan, Shar in my own “Tond” books, and possibly Gandalf, Spielberg’s E.T., and Jerry Spinelli’s Stargirl.

Barbara and the Rage Brigade
by Karen Eisenbrey

…The story continues and the reader is dropped right into someone else’s life, but that doesn’t seem to matter (even if you haven’t read the first book in this series, The Gospel According to St. Rage). The storyline, along with events from the first book, emerge as recollections, texts, and bits of conversations. What’s remarkable is that this does not seem entirely random (or tedious) before anything resembling a plot emerges. The characters are well-drawn and distinct, which is good because there are a lot of them. Most of them are on the comic-booky cover. The setting is more or less the real world of high school and college — but with a difference. As hinted in the comic-booky cover, it’s a “real” world tinged with superpowers. Several of the main characters have them. Ms. Eisenbrey is careful to delineate (if not “how they work”) at least how the characters are able to call them up and use them. Hint: it has to do with the title, though positive emotions are also important: “St. Rage” and “Rage Brigade” notwithstanding, this turns out to be (even before the plot emerges) a feel-good story with an encouraging message. All in all I enjoyed it, perhaps more than the first book in the series. I’m looking forward to future installments. …And I have to admit some of the superpowers are beyond cool and I’d like to be able to do what Barbara does when she gets in a snarky mood. (No spoilers, but it has to do with figurative and possibly literal birds.)

Fantasy on Mars

Some fantasy is based on mythology, as I said above; and some may be based on nothing more than misunderstanding.

A Princess of Mars
by Edgar Rice Burroughs

We’ve all heard the names: Tars Tarkus, Dejah Thoris. These are most famous Martian names; also many of the Martian words have been borrowed into more recent space epics (“Jeddak” sounds a little too much like “Jedi” to be a coincidence). But what of the story? This early 20th century “science fiction” is virtually indistinguishable from Sword and Sorcery tales; the feudalism and barbarity of pseudo-Medieval civilization has been replaced by feudalism and barbarity of an alien world. The familiarity of Barsoom goes further, however; much of the tale is derived from classical mythology — some of the characters and incidents are different, of course, but to a large extent it’s a retelling of Homer’s Iliad. Even the language is classical: characters give grand speeches, and the prose includes set phrases (“wine-dark sea” has been replaced by “ice-clad south” and the River Styx has become the River Iss, still with S’s and a “short I” sound, and the mythic quality remains). However, much of the work is ambiguous: there is no obvious good or evil (which avoids the question, would alien morality be different from ours, or is morality universal?) and the storyline wanders until the rescue of the Princess and the “War of Troy” part begins. Overall I enjoyed this less than I thought I would; written as serialized pulp fiction, it’s certainly entertaining, of course, but I expected more in the way of character development and explanations of made-up Martian technology (even if it was based on theories about ethereal rays and on Percival Lowell’s writings, both of which turned out to be erroneous). Still, it’s campy fun if you can suspend disbelief (and intellect) for a while.

Fantasy (or folktales) in another context

The final book I’m talking about is only tentatively connected to this discussion of fantasy (or phantasy) but it sheds some light on how it relates to reality.

The Real Story of Ah-Q
by Lu Xun

I picked this up more or less at random, looking for some fiction that I knew nothing about. Most of the first 3/4 of the book are (sometimes very) short stories; most have a political bent. Some are depressing (even shocking) stories about people mired in poverty and ignorance. Others are almost Kafka-esque nightmares of government bureaucracy. Still others are about the tendency (also found in USA society) to trust either old, received wisdom and knowledge or newer theories and explanations — but never both. The bleakly satirical "Real Story of Ah-Q" would benefit (in this edition) from more footnotes explaining the society that is being satirized, though at least it's obvious that the protagonist is a learned do-nothing who gets involved in a revolution that would destroy him. Some of the politics comes to a head (literally) in something as seemingly trivial as a hairstyle: men wore their hair long and braided in a "queue" (as in Ah-Q; the English pun was intentional, as was the visual pun of the letter Q as a head with this type of hair). Since this hairstyle was seen as being worn in support of the emperor, having it meant death if seen by certain political factions; whereas not having it meant death if seen by certain other political factions. There are a couple of comical stories where rumors of X political group approaching a village sends the people into a frenzy of gluing on fake hair or cutting it all off. This collection ends with a series of myths and folktales retold. Some of these are as strange and otherworldly as such tales often are, but the author has “modernized” and politicized others. Some of this latter group are hilarious, particularly as told in a grand mythic style (in this translation, reminiscent of Tolkien!) but with overstuffed, pompous sages and government officials, along with other absurdities. Recommended for anyone interested in political and satirical fiction.

Epilogue

So that about wraps it up. This has been a long blog post, but I haven’t posted in this “blogg” for a long time and I had phun writing it. Comment if you phound any of this interesting or entertaining, or, better yet, read one or more of the books I reviewed. Signing oph phor now.