Books : humans can do magic

Neil Gaiman has written a great deal about the power of books, reading, and the importance of libraries.  He tells a story of arriving in New York and listening to a talk on the building of private prisons.  The builders found they could predict how many prisoners they'd have in the future simply by asking what percentange of ten and eleven year olds couldn't read.

That's a scary thought.  Especially when we think about one of the functions of literature being to foster empathy in readers.  Looking through a character's eyes makes us see the world from a different viewpoint, be exposed to different values and beliefs.  And if we stay with that character to the end of their story we are irrevocably changed; absorbing new ideas, testing them against our own paradigms, adjusting our world view.

Carl Sagan saw books as "proof that humans are capable of working magic."  I entirely agree with him.  I'm re-reading C J Cherryh's Chanur series of books as I work on my own novel Starfire.  The breadth of Cherryh's invention still astounds me every time I read those books.  And they're firm favourites of mine, and I've read them many times,

I find myself stunned every time by the details of the operation of an interstellar jumpship.  The  detail is so rich that I feel like I'm on that bridge with that crew.  I feel that I almost know enough about the complicated operations of The Pride of Chanur that I could take the ship into jump myself.

But hold on a minute.  We humans haven't even left our home solar system yet.  And we still deny that travelling faster than light is possible.  So we have no idea how to do the things which Cherryh describes in such loving detail in her books.  That's magic to me.

It's a classic example of Carl Sagan's 'working magic'.  It's the ability of the author to make a world so real through their use of words that I can hanker after the places of that story.  It can make me yearn for the experience of being flung into the Wide Dark with Its starstations, Kif, stsho, Hani, and Ma'hendosat.

So it's true,  humans can do magic.  All we have to do is imagine the scene, then weave the spell with well-chosen words.  The pages of every book are one long extended magic spell, an invitation to enter a world strange and wonderful.