I have this crazy idea. I want to get Stephen King, Carl Sagan, and Lord Dunsany (Edward Plunkett) in a room together …
At first glance, these writers could NOT be further apart in terms of tone and subject matter. One of the books I am reviewing for this post isn’t even fiction. But as I started to think more deeply about what I’d read, I realized it would be possible to draw a thematic thoroughfare through the three of them. These same themes, incidentally, I have also been juggling with in my upcoming novel, The Magiq of Aenya*, so there’s that. It is the intersection between truth and belief, imagination and physical reality, magic and science. This literary trifecta includes Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, and Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter.
*working title
I started with my go-to comfort author, Stephen King (again, sorry). Despite its late-70s release date, I picked this one up for its timely subject matter. The Dead Zone introduces us to Greg Stillson, a bully, an “outsider,” and an ex-Bible-salesman (believe it or not) who runs for president and potentially starts World War III. I say potentially because this is the story of John Smith, a psychic with the ability to accurately predict the future. To save the world from nuclear holocaust, Smith makes it his mission to stop Stillson from becoming president, and in light of current events, this stirs in the reader an uncomfortable ethical dilemma regarding the ends justifying the means. And if you still can’t figure out why this book might be relevant today, I won’t spell it out for you.
I bought Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World shortly afterward. Now, I don’t often discuss non-fiction books on this blog, mainly because it is not my area of expertise. Still, I love reading history and science nearly as much, and Sagan is possibly the most brilliant science communicator to have lived in my lifetime. Despite its fantasy-sounding title, Sagan’s magnum opus is not about demons, other than the ones we create for ourselves, monstrous metaphors for scientific illiteracy and the challenges posed to the future and well-being of the human race. Sagan argues for greater education, skepticism, and critical thinking, while accurately predicting the dumbing down of America and the rapid rise of anti-intellectualism and misinformation. With his death in 1996 at the age of 62, the world lost a powerful and much-needed voice of reason. But I somewhat feel like the universe did him a favor, given the egregious rise of the Flat-Earther cult and the much more dangerous Anti-Vaxx movement. Like King in The Dead Zone, Sagan also speaks to our current, intractable political climate:
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bambooze. We‘re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new ones rise.
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
This literary experiment I unwittingly developed, however, illustrates the differences between a plot device King uses in The Dead Zone and the psychic charlatans challenged by Sagan’s skepticism. While we may never know King’s actual beliefs on the matter, I suspect he takes a more rational approach to the supernatural. I believe King would appreciate Sagan’s skepticism while finding room in his mind for the imaginative artifacts of our creativity. And this is where Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter enters the stage.
When it comes to high fantasy, you can’t get any higher than The King of Elfland’s Daughter. My favorite fantasy classics, The Neverending Story and The Last Unicorn, pale in comparison, seeming, by contrast, as dry as a lecture on number theory. Dunsany’s novel reads like a fever dream, like a Grimm’s fairytale on acid. The prose is so purple it falls into the ultraviolet range, and at times, I felt, the language was enough to rival the esoteric ramblings of James Joyce. Every sentence is a run-on sentence, mostly beginning with “And,” and there is never any shortage of semicolons. Here’s just a taste:
It was many days before Alveric found these four; and more he could not find but a lad that was quite witless, and he took him to tend the horses, for he understood horses well, and they understood him, though no human man or woman could make him out at all, except his mother, who wept when Alveric had his promise to go; for she said that he was the prop and support of her age, and knew what storms would come and when the swallows would fly, and what colours the flowers would come up from seeds she sowed in her garden, and where the spiders would build their webs, and the ancient fables of flies: she wept and said that there would be more things lost by his going than ever folk guessed in Erl.
Lord Dunsany, The King of Elf-Land’s Daughter
And yet, Dunsany exemplifies the imaginative part of our brains, and the worlds we know do not exist, at least not in a rational sense. He taps into the part of ourselves that craves meaning in the mundane, searches for fairies where there is only nature, strives for belief when we have no good evidence for that belief. This is what Sagan keeps returning to: humanity’s need for God, alien visitors, and otherworldly powers beyond our everyday experience. But while Sagan dismisses these notions as nothing but the products of irrational thinking, a primitive evolutionary holdover we should overcome, I maintain there is considerable value to be mined from a sometimes irrational mindset. To throw away this critical part of who we are as a species is to do humanity a disservice. And this begs the question, whether Dunsany literally believed in what he was writing, elves and unicorns and magical planes of existence slightly beyond our realm of perception, or did he take them for the literary tropes they are? Again, like King, I suspect he would be skeptical. But authors who dwell so comfortably in worlds of their own making, I believe, hold to very different perspectives from scientists like Sagan.
Imagine King, Sagan, and Dunsany in a room together. Think what a conversation they might have! Or what conclusions they could reach. As men of the written word, I suspect they would come to a cordial agreement, concluding that while elves and psychics and UFOs do not occupy the rational, scientific world, they exist in a very real sense on the page, in our stories and our thoughts. Sagan, of course, would go on to explain that the brain is a physical thing that can be studied by science, and in the same vein, that storytelling and our need for meaning are apt domains of study for psychologists and anthropologists. But whether you take the approach of a scientist, a priest, an imam, or an author, the ultimate conclusion, I believe, is this: metaphorical truths can matter just as much as literal truths. To confuse one for the other, or to reject one for the other, is a mistake we must never make—here, I fully agree with Sagan. It is the same profound truth Michael Ende so cleverly expressed in The Neverending Story, when Gmork, the Big Bad Wolf, warns the reader of the dangers of things escaping from Fantasia into the real world. Science and magic can coexist in their own ways, so long as we recognize them for what they are, and the values each can provide the human experience.
The Art of Storytelling 
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