Future Conditional

One great law of nature, if I understand it correctly, is that matter can be neither created nor destroyed. The best we can do is shuffle the DNA. If we come up with something different, it was already implied in the data; much as a windmill is implied in a box of Tinker Toys, or a space ship, automobile, or dinosaur is implicit in those transformers which young people currently find so fascinating.

This is true in the natural world: the objective, real world, here and now; the material world complete with grocery bills, dental problems, lurking nuclear disasters, and other cultural embellishments. We recognize this world as our immediate reality. At least, I hope we do. I, for one, would feel uncomfortable if, say, an airline pilot seriously believed in Peter Pan and Tinker Bell.

What of the artificial worlds? The worlds we devise by artifice, by artfulness; that is, the worlds of literature? Here, it would seem that writers are in total command of their material, ultimate authorities in their own creations; self-appointed demiurges, omnipotent, omniscient—as close to divinity as any human being is likely to get.

Nevertheless, I believe the same principle applies to the worlds of art as much as it does to the world of nature. First, as everyone lurching into middle age unhappily realizes, we are physical organisms. This includes writers, though we may like to pretend otherwise. We are subject to the laws of physiology, biology, gravity, and similar encumbrances.

No matter how amazing our inventions, no matter how inspired our conceptions, they are not zapped onto us from somewhere in outer space. Writers are often asked where their ideas come from. The ultimate answer is: they come from only one place: inside our heads. The divine afflatus, or whatever we choose to call it, can only operate through material structures: neural synapses, electrochemical processes. Mysterious—but not mystical. I don't find this demeaning to the human spirit. On the contrary, I think it's quite marvelous.

Even in literary creation, nothing comes from nothing. There is no output without input. We may seemingly create out of whole cloth, but our cloth is woven from a variety of threads; from all the experiences and information we have absorbed, consciously or otherwise, in the course of our lives.

These raw materials are all we have to work with. But they are susceptible to infinite restructuring and recombination. What we call creativity may have less to do with creation in the absolute sense than with finding unexpected connections and making new syntheses.

In some instances, this may be self-evident. Let me very briefly talk about the fictional modes that match our present topic, dimensions in children's literature—and that apply, as well, to adult literature.

The past: this would encompass the form of the historical novel. It may be the result of the most painstaking research, scrupulous accuracy, the greatest effort to reproduce the past as it was—or as we believe it to have been. Or it may be the type of novel that uses history as an occasional dab of color: as Pooh-Bah says, "Merely corroborative detail intended to give artistic verisimilitude to a bald and unconvincing narrative." We can recognize one type of pseudo-historical novel by the frequent occurrence of the words "Avaunt!" and "Forsooth!" In the trade, this is known as a "bodiceripper."

Even so, good or bad, to one degree or another, the historical novel obviously relies on, or evokes, reference points from real history.

The present: to oversimplify, let me call it the societal novel, the work of social realism, the novel of manners; or, to echo Anthony Trollope, "the way we live now." In this, the reference points are all around us; the main question, how the writer chooses to see them and how to express that vision.

The future: the world which has not yet come into being is, most fittingly, the realm of science fiction. The mechanism at work in most science fiction is: extrapolation. The reference points come from genuine science, extended to its furthest and most imaginative limits. The characters are essentially human...