![]() In Jim Hines’ Magic Ex Libris series (since 2012), Gutenberg was the first person to take advantage of that ability, and the Libriomancers protect our world from the power and danger of the inventions found in fiction!įiction’s self-celebration of its own powers and dangers isn’t limited to the above examples however. Less frequently, the opposite logic, in which readers’ love grants magical power to books, enabling creatures and objects to emerge from them into our world, can also be found. The journey includes an initiatory dimension for the young hero, who has been struggling since his mother’s death. John Connolly’s Book of Lost Things also offers a lovely story about entering a fairy-tale world that is darker than it seems at first glance. She summons characters from the 1,001 Nights and Peter Pan, and allows heroes from our world to enter the world of an imaginary book called Inkheart. Meggie inherits her bookbinder father Mo’s gift for opening the doors between the word of books and the real world by reading books out loud. The German novelist Cornelia Funke’s Inkworld trilogy (2003-2007) is another tribute to the power of reading. The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987), Shrek (2001), and Enchanted (Kevin Lima, 2007) all flaunt their fairy-tale roots that way, right from the opening sequence. The camera zooms in, plunging us to the heart of the words. Even in movies, when they want to bring spectators into the “enchanted world of fairy tales” – usually to parody them – they start with an image of a book opening. Fairy tales and legends are the archetypes of those primordial stories that allow us to rediscover a magical relationship with things. In Pierre Bottero’s La Quête d’Ewilan trilogy (“Ewilan’s Quest,” 2003), the magical dimension at the root of the heroine’s power is called “Imagination.” Heroes’ journeys through the other worlds they fall into also work as reflections of readers’ journeys through fiction – particularly through enchanted children’s stories. The idea that fantasy’s other worlds are equal to products of human creativity is omnipresent. Before returning, transformed, to our world, Bastian was nearly lost to his own dreams of omnipotence. Still, it also warns of the parallel danger of the appeal of escapism. So the novel celebrates the magic of creative imagination, of reading in a way that brings a text to life. He can grant existence to things by naming them. At first, the two worlds are distinct, but Bastian eventually literally enters the story: having turned into a character in the story, he realizes that he is very powerful. The goal is to save the magical land of Fantasia, a veritable “storyland” populated with all sorts of creatures, but one that is gradually vanishing because not enough humans believe in it any more. In the book-within-the-book, Bastian finds out about his doppelganger, the hero Atreyu, who is on a Great Quest. In it, Bastian, a shy, bullied boy who is neglected by his father after the death of his mother, is captivated by a magical novel called The Neverending Story. The Neverending Story (1979), by German novelist Michael Ende (film adaptation by Wolfgang Petersen, 1984), is surely the most iconic example of that motif. The Neverending Story, or the Magic of Creative Imaginationįantasy for young readers presents reading and imagination as powerful kinds of magic that open the doors to worlds brimming with wondrous marvels.
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