Guns do work in Fantasy… but they make it Modern

Photo by Nik on Unsplash; it may not be a magic gun, but it’s magical to me… and that’s about the extent of the relation between this photo and the conversation below

This article is a reaction to some conversation I was seeing in the Notes section of Substack around this article:

Why is fantasy allergic to guns?

The topic is fun for me and I’ve been wanting to do some writing-on-writing. So, I decided to take a quick break from other things to throw some thoughts in the arena.

I will at times contradict B. A. Clarke’s points, but I hope I come off as respectfully as I intend to. I read it and have opinions, but it was Abigail Falanga’s comments that really brought to mind some things I feel are worth reiterating. Doubt I have any amazingly original ideas or anything, but maybe you’ll get some insight out of my way of stating things.

So, without pomp or circumstance…

Symbolism is the “First Cause” in Fantasy

Sometimes I feel too many people confuse Fantasy for Historical Fiction. But Fantasy is a far wider and more inclusive genre. A fantasy tale does not necessarily need to be based on or reflect our past—or any real thing at all. Fantasy is fantastical. Lewis and Tolkien’s landmark series and many of the other Fantasy heavy hitters draw from history to illustrate their worlds, but that is out of fittingness to their specific themes, not necessity.

When they use historical things, it is because of what those things represent to the audience of the time. They are, on one hand, there to anchor the imagined world to our own so that the audience may cross the bridge that much easier. The less of these connections you use, the more alien and strange that world becomes. In fact, you may even set the story in a different galaxy altogether… like Star Wars.

I’m certainly not the first one to say this, but it is relevant to be reminded that Star Wars is not Sci-fi. It is Fantasy. Space Fantasy. George Lucas threw out a lot of implicit assumptions with his choice in setting. Yes, there are a lot of real world analogues. There are of course humans all over the place, the Jedi Order pulls from several real religions (the closest I see being Taoism, but that’s my outsider opinion), many planets are exaggeration of some Earth biomes and cities, and the name Stormtroopers didn’t come from nowhere!…

But his humans aren’t our humans. They wouldn’t know what a horse drawn carriage is, and if they saw Christmas trees and lights, they’d have some wholly different explanation for what those things were (not that it has stopped some writers from putting those things in the world).

Lucas also doesn’t usually care to explain the science of anything. Not in rigorous detail, anyway. And often that science blurs with metaphysics. The lightsabers being a great example, as the crystals used to construct them very often have a spiritual element to their existence. They are often conduits of the mystical “Force” and take on characteristics of the emotions and events that occur in the space around where they form.

This is the other hand, and the main point here: Star Wars, like good Fantasy, is primarily concerned with the deeper truth behind the literal object of the story. They are symbolic stories. Yes, the lightsaber is also a very concrete gadget in the fictional universe, but it is also has an abstract or allegorical meaning. State quite explicitly, it is “an elegant weapon of a more civilized age.”

Serving both purposes is what makes it an effective symbol, which both pulls the audience into the imagined world while giving them something to take back to their own.

Guns are Symbols of Modernity

Yes, they arrived on the scene hundreds of years ago now, but humanity’s history is thousands of years old, and the largest cultures in the world have roots going back that far. Let’s take Egypt as an example. They can see and touch a piece of their history which is dated back to the 27th Century BC. And its mere existence points to a history that stretches back even farther, regardless of how much truth is in the stories and legends passed down.

The point is, people are old. A lot older than guns.

And through tradition, our memories do go back that far. When we learn and accept those histories, they become our memories. Maybe not as strongly, or vividly, but still in some small, real way.

That’s one half of the equation with guns. The other is that, while it came about gradually, guns do mark a distinct shift in the dynamics of the world. Even their earliest form, generally in the form of canons, redefined warfare in the regions where they were used.

Even a big stone wall wasn’t quite the invincible fortress it used to be when people could shoot balls of metal at extreme speeds into them. And if a wooden gate got hit, all the worse.

I am glossing over the finer technical details of how these things came and spread, but that’s because the technical details aren’t the point. The point is that everyone knows that the world changed when guns were born. Not as a matter of historicity, but as a matter of symbolic truth.

The fact that another fundamental change has since occurred—in the birth of information technology—does change the perception some, but it clearly has not been long enough to destroy it.

Not all Newer things are Equal

In his article, Clarke accurately points out that Full Plate armor, a staple of Medieval Fantasy, emerged and developed more or less alongside guns. He is absolutely correct in saying that technically it is as modern of a technology as firearms (at least in the form we usually think of it). And you could even argue that bows and crossbows are just rudimentary guns in the way leather and chainmail predate plate.

Fantasy does not, however, have to work within the constraints of these sorts of technicalities. Now, feasibly, there was a time in the 1400s (or whenever) where plate armor was an ultra-modern symbol of the day in the way I’m saying guns are now. But something important happened between then and now: humans wearing metal armor faded into antiquity and guns got bigger and better.

In the language of symbols, this proved that plate armor was the last parade of an old regime, while even the most basic smoothbore firearm was an infant king of the new world to come.

This line of distinction isn’t a solid thing. With the help of all the nice historical channels on YouTube, for instance, people are beginning to associate modern battle tanks with their lineage to plate-clad cavalry units. However, the gap between those two is still quite dramatic, given that the tank combines both with a third and even more recent technological invention: the combustion engine.

The inequality of these gaps in visible technological progress is a major element to why it’s easy for Fantasy writers and audiences to accept something new[ish] like plate armor into an older world like Tolkien’s Middle-Earth (even if that might have just been the movie adaptation), and why things that are actually old[ish] like guns feel a bit off in such a setting, even if it did have the same level of historical justification.

It’s not really about the historical or scientific technicalities, and it is the Fantasy writer’s right to do whatever he wants to address those as they arise.

What the Fantasy writer does need to mind carefully is the symbolic baggage that comes along with all the preexisting things he chooses to put in his world.

Ancient Science

On a slightly tangential note, because that newer sort of “Mistborn” trending Fantasy was mentioned in the article (I haven’t read it, but I know the kind from video games), I’ll point out that not every story with a dragon is a Fantasy. It is very often fantastical, but, if the primary purpose of the fantastical elements was to imagine in detail the possible technical truths of the world concept, and the “fairy tale” appearance is incidental or secondary….

Then that’s probably not Fantasy. That’s Sci-fi.

I would like to point out that the name “Science Fiction” has no word explicitly determining a “when” or “where” it must occur. Just that it is fictional and that there will be science involved.

Now, I know that by the same principle I described above, sci-fi does carry with it a heavy implication of futuristic settings grounded in scientifically observable reality and heavily focused around speculative technologies (believe me, as someone who wrote a very questionably “sci” piece of “fi” novel, I know about these expectations). Nevertheless, if a story happens to wear the clothes of one genre (Fantasy) but is written with all the sensibilities of another (Sci-fi), then you really ought to call it that other genre. At least primarily.

Genre can be based in aesthetic, but these two in particular are far too inclusive in scope, both in theory and practice.

It’s absolutely fine to write a Fantastical Sci-fi, of course, but guns are guns and cellphones are cellphones. That doesn’t change just because your magazines are full of magic crystals and your batteries are sourced from elemental essence salts.

Fantasy is the realm of dreams, myths, and legends

In practice, these things very often mix with the historical and the scientific. And even in theory there are no hard lines—even if they do have competing elements. But the stories that are called Fantasy come from a very different intention than other “speculative genres.” In such stories, the fundamental “meaning” of it all decides things long before history and science get a say.

And more than that, most Fantasy stories want to tell stories about smaller, more “personal” worlds in regards to the people, even if the physical terrain is grand in size. Such stories only get more popular as modern life has become impersonal and too grand in scope to comprehend, even as our physical space shrinks.

We have guns with us now in this age, if we want them (I do). And they have made longwords and plate armor utterly irrelevant artifacts of antiquity (sadly).

One of those things fits much better as a “more elegant weapon of a civilized age.” So, for dreams, myths, and legends, that’s what we’ll choose.

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Well, hope someone enjoys this random little aside. Now that it’s out on paper, I can stop thinking about it.