Words of the Month - Most Beautiful Words

         Beauty being in the ear of the be-hearer, any arguments about the most beautiful words in the language are going to be purely subjective.  When I say “in the language,” of course I mean any given language, but since different languages have different phonetic systems, their speakers are bound to have different judgements about what sounds the most mellifluous.  I will say that one of my favorite words is the Spanish el tenedor, which I consider to be noble and heroic-sounding.  My favorite word in German may be zurück, which is fun to say, like whipping around a pole on ice skates.

        Focussing on English, however, many writers and linguists have put forth their opinions about the most beautiful words in our language.  These include tremulous, murmuring, radiance, ephemeral, mellifluous itself, and the famous cellar door.  Linguist David Crystal put together a matrix of ten criteria that he claimed contributed to a word’s auditory appeal.  These include: 3 syllables, with the stress on the first, use of m and l, and avoidance of certain consonants (such as h, g, j, ch, sh, th).  Crystal ranked tremulous on top, but also gave an example of a word that failed on every one of his criteria: zoo.  I disagree that this word is particularly displeasing.  It may not be pretty, but it’s hardly ugly, either.  (For the ugliest word in the English language I have to nominate puberty.)  It’s also worth noting that some words that may not be beautiful, are nonetheless delightful to say, such as kerfuffle, nincompoop, gargantuan, and grinch.

        The other point about beauty is that even if we frame this as being a purely aesthetic question, people find it almost impossible to ignore the meanings of words.  For that reason, most of the words on these lists have positive meanings to reinforce their positive sounds.  Cellar door is more neutral than most, and one of the few truly negative-meaning words that made one list is nefarious.  Demonstrating this even more strongly, according to a 2004 survey conducted by The British Council (among non-English speakers, interestingly) the most beautiful word in English is mother.  Mother is certainly a wonderful concept, but I can’t say I find the sound of the word particularly euphonious.

        So what are my choices of euphonious words?  At the top of my list has long been clarity.  Although Crystal might claim that the hard c and t disqualify it, my own opinion is that their sharpness adds a little sparkle that’s more pleasing than the undifferentiated blandness of something like murmuring.  (That may also explain the appeal of a nonsense word that has currency in our family: skibbledee.   Although perhaps that belongs more on the list of fun words than truly beautiful words.)  I do also like cellar door and ephemeral that have been mentioned already.

        This question at its most basic is simply an entertaining novelty.  As a poet, however, the sounds of words can be just as important as their meanings, and picking the right words definitely includes consideration of their syllables, stresses, and sounds.  That’s why I love it so much that English has so many synonyms, allowing me to rummage through all sorts of varied options when arranging words into a poem.

        What words do you consider to be the most beautiful?  Do you have certain sounds that you love (or hate)?  How much does the meaning influence you?  Do share your favorites!

[Picture: El Tenedor, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2023 (Image from NydamPrints.com);

Closing Doors, reduction linocut by Lori Biwer Stewart (Image from the artist’s Etsy shop Lori.Biwer.Stewart.)]

What’s Black and White and Green?

         First, to celebrate “Black and White” - It’s our Blogiversary!  Fifteen years ago I started blogging, and in 1,507 posts so far I’ve shared my thoughts, theories, and enthusiasm for relief block prints and speculative fiction, and of course Words of the Month.  My audience is small, and I’m really not much of a social media type, but I’ve appreciated the opportunity to connect with the folks who have found this blog over the years.  If you’re reading this, thanks for being here with me!

        In the past few years I’ve been posting a little less frequently, and I’ll admit that sometimes I really don’t have time for this.  But even though sometimes it feels like a chore, there are other times when I still really enjoy it.  So perhaps I’ll be scaling back my posts still further - but on the other hand, who knows?  I probably wouldn’t have guessed 15 years ago that I’d still be doing this now.

        In addition to Black and White’s fifteenth birthday, another item to celebrate today is the publication of another poem.  “The Green Girl Thinks of Home” just came out in the Summer 2025 issue of New Myths, and you can read it (plus the rest of the contents) here.  I hope you enjoy my poem - but it will help if you know about the legend of the Green Children…

        The character of the Green Girl comes from a folk tale from Suffolk in the East of England.  Some time in the 12th century two mysterious, green-skinned children were found near the town of Woolpit.  The brother and sister spoke an unknown language, were dressed in unfamiliar style,  and could eat no normal food except broad beans.  The boy soon died, but the girl eventually learned English and explained that she came from a land that was always in twilight.  While watching cattle in this green, twilit land, the children entered a cave, and following the sound of church bells, at length they emerged in England.

        Of course the motif of entering another world through a cave is a very common one in folklore, but it’s interesting that this time we are the strange other world.  Folklorists have come up with various explanations and interpretations: tales of aliens ranging from faeries to indigenous Britons to Flemish settlers to extra-terrestrials… or tales of ancient harvest rituals or metaphors of death and rebirth, or perhaps garbled tales of some historical event such as a kidnapping, arsenical poisoning, or hypochromic anemia…  According to the story, the Green Girl learned to eat other foods, was given a job as a maid, and eventually married.  I don’t know whether she had children.  A number of other writers have explored the story in various ways, but for me the interesting part is the defamiliarization of what our world would seem like to someone who had known only twilight.

        The idea for the poem and a first draft date back a long time, probably some 35 years.  But relatively recently when I started getting back into writing and submitting poetry, I came back to it and reworked it considerably.  However, the basic idea has stayed the same: everyone always says that enduring the “troughs” of experience is worth it in order to enjoy the “peaks” — but what if it’s better not to have any extremes at all?  Certainly someone from a land of perpetual twilight might think so.  What do you think?

        My illustration is a rubber block print that didn’t really turn out as I’d hoped.  I used the bad rubber and I had such a tough time with the printing that I don’t know whether I’ll even bother making an entire edition of originals for sale.  But I wanted to illustrate the poem because TEASER ALERT: I expect to include it in my next collection of stories, poems, and art, which now has the working title Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns.  Stay tuned for exciting updates in the coming months!

[Picture: “Then the Magic Happened,”cover art by Paula Hammond for New Myths Vol. 19, Issue 71, Summer 2025 (Image from NewMyths.com);

Green Girl at Twilight, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2025.]

Pollinator Week

         It’s Pollinator Week, so let’s celebrate with block prints of some of our world’s wonderful pollinators.  I’ll start right off with a bang with this beautiful, bright image of a variety of bees and butterflies visiting a variety of flowers.  This piece by Kate Heiss took seven blocks and is full of summery color.  Butterflies are particularly beloved, being beautiful and gentle.  They are often considered symbolic of the soul and of rebirth.  How fitting, then, that their pollination helps ensure the rebirth of the plants they visit.  If you want to support butterflies, you should grow not only the flowers they pollinate, but also the plants on which they lay their eggs (such as milkweed for monarchs.)

        Another piece by Heiss, using only one block, shows a wonderful graphic quality.  This one reminds us of the incredible importance of bees for pollination.  It shows sunflowers (with wonderful patterns) in the foreground, while the background shows a cultivated field.  Scientists estimate that about a third of the food we eat (as many as three quarters of the different crop species) are dependent on pollination by bees.  So yes, you should be concerned that many species of bees are in serious decline.  Please lay off the pesticides in your yard, for the sake of bees, butterflies, and other pollinators - and for the sake of the humans who like

to eat the food they pollinate!

        Up next is a pollinator from the Americas that everyone loves: the hummingbird.  Each block of this two-block linocut by Alynn Guerra is printed with a color gradation for a fiery red palette that any hummingbird would love.  Where I live we get only one species of hummingbird, and they always seem like a wonderful gift.  Where there are many species you can see the evidence of co-evolution between the flowers and the hummingbirds’ bills.

        A less well-known pollinator is the bat, mostly the fruit-eating bats of tropical and desert areas.  (All the bats in my area are insect-eaters.)  Still, over 500 species of plants rely on bats, including bananas and mangos, so don’t underestimate their services to flowering plants.  Here’s a two-layer reduction linocut by Emīls Salmiņš, showing three bats feasting on the berries that probably wouldn’t even be there without the bats’ pollination.

        And finally, here’s one of my own rubber block prints, featuring another night-time pollinator: the moth.  A study in 2023 found that moths were actually more efficient pollinators than bees, carrying more pollen, and visiting a wider variety of species.  On the other hand, they pollinate fewer vital food crops.  A number of our beloved flowers are pollinated by moths, though, including morning glories, honeysuckle, monarda, and evening primrose.

        In addition, wasps, flies, beetles, other birds, and small mammals can also provide flowering plants with that vital pollination.  Never forget that nature is a wildly complex, interconnected, finely tuned machine, and every time we mess up part of it (like using all those pesticides on foods crops - or your lawn), we cause unintended and sometimes disastrous consequences.  Pollinator Week is a reminder that we need to protect these creatures, both the beautiful beloved ones and the less flashy ones.  And of course it’s also a good excuse for block prints.  (To see the collection of pollinators I posted way back in 2013, see that Pollinator Week post.)

[Pictures: Poppies and Pollinators, linocut by Kate Heiss (Image from VK Gallery);

Sunflower and Bees, linocut by Heiss (Image from VK Gallery);

Hummingbird, linocut print by Alynn Guerra (Image from Red Hydrant Press);

Bats, linocut reduction print by Emīls Salmiņš (Image from Two Lovers Printmaking);

Wee Hours, rubber block print by AEGNydam (Image from NydamPrints.com).]

Distant Stars

         Here’s my most recent block print, an epic one by my standards, as it's very nearly the full size of the rubber blocks that I use (18x12 inches) and therefore as big as I can ever go.  (It is cut down slightly just to make it fit well into a standard size frame.)  The process was not too unusual, and indeed the star areas with white carved into black actually go very quickly, despite all the words.  On the other hand, carving black words on a white background, as in the title, is much more difficult.  Also, I tried a few experiments with pressing instead of carving: the circles and diamonds in the border were pressed with small bits of metal tubing.  The stars were also pressed in with a couple of different sizes of phillips screwdrivers.

        Because people always ask me how long it takes to make a print, I once again tried to keep track of my time.  The end result was about 17 and a half hours, including 3 hours to draw the design, 12 and a half hours of carving, and 2 hours of printing.  I have not yet matted or framed any, which will of course take more time.  Generally I never worked for more than an hour at a time, although I might carve for a few sessions in one day.  This was spread out over many days - even longer because the block was too big to bring with me to carve during art shows last month, so there was a bit of a hiatus while I worked on smaller pieces.

        The idea for this block had been floating around in my head for some time, because I’ve always thought the constellations are so random.  I thought it would be fun and funny to make up a batch of constellations highlighting the crazy selection of pictures people could claim to see in the stars of some alien fantasy world.  I brainstormed lots of possible constellations, but the ones I ended up including are

     The Kiwi - Because I love kiwis!

     The Dirigible - Maybe a common form of transportation for these people

     The Guppy - Not all constellations are large and complex

     The Silverfish - I was trying to think of something utterly random and not usually considered to be worth the stellar treatment

     The Polypodrollery - An inside joke; this is one of the malacomorphs I invented in a little block print, for inclusion in my book On the Virtues of Beasts of the Realms of Imagination

     The Salad Fork - I was amused by the specificity: it’s not just any fork

     The Five Socks - Does this world have 5-footed people, or 6-footed people missing a sock, or bipedal people missing one sock out of 3 pairs?  Presumably there’s a myth that explains this.

     The Glekprunk - I found this creature in the Luttrell Psalter, a manuscript from 1325-1340.  Because it’s a marginal doodle, I had to make up a name for it.  (Prunk is German for “magnificence.”)

     The Starnose Mole - What more appropriate creature to be a constellation?

     The Teapot - People born under the sign of the celestial Teapot are warm and inviting, but can be quick-tempered.

     The Diploceraspis - This is (or was, anyway) one of those real creatures that seems as strange as any fantasy beast.  Perhaps in this world they’re still around.

     The Crwth - An intrinsically funny word in English

        Having decided on my constellations, I also had to figure out how to fill the corners of my star chart.  Many of the fancy renaissance star charts feature decorative scenes in the four corners, and they’re often scenes from mythology.  Obviously my distant world needed its own mythology, so I depicted Night weaving a starry blanket for her daughter the Moon.  (I also wrote a poem about this, which will no doubt be shared in due course.)  In the lower corners I put philosopher-astronomers’ towers for their observations.  These are more-or-less copied from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), but with the telescopes added.  The sun is also adapted from a renaissance woodcut.

        Of course, since the people who view this sky aren’t Romans with Roman mythology, they obviously wouldn’t speak Latin, let alone English, but since I wanted people in our world to be able to read the captions, I had to put them “in translation.”  Therefore I went with English for the constellation names for maximum comprehension, and Latin for the title cartouche for maximum fancy learnedness.

        All those little words aren’t ever as perfectly carved as I would like, and I didn’t notice until after I’d printed the whole batch that it’s missing the little connecting spots in the lower right corner of the border.  Despite my measuring and drawing guidelines, the border elements are pretty wonky, and I accidently carved away a border line from the left edge of the title cartouche.  I probably should have added a lot more stars, and the experiment with the phillips screwdrivers  did not make as clear an X as I had hoped.  So many imperfections!  And yet on the whole I’m pretty pleased with it.  I hope it pleases the imagination of others, too.

[Picture: Distant Stars, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2025 (Image from NydamPrints.com.)]

They

        Despite a couple of recent posts about my own poetry activities, it’s actually been quite a while since I shared a fantasy poem.  So here’s one called simply Fantasy, by Ruth Mather Skidmore from 1933.

I think if I should wait some night in an enchanted forest
With tall dim hemlocks and moss-covered branches,
And quiet, shadowy aisles between the tall blue-lichened trees;
With low shrubs forming grotesque outlines in the moonlight,
And the ground covered with a thick carpet of pine needles
So that my footsteps made no sound, —
They would not be afraid to glide silently from their hiding places
To the white patch of moonlight on the pine needles,
And dance to the moon and the stars and the wind.

Their arms would gleam white in the moonlight
And a thousand dewdrops sparkle in the dimness of their hair;
But I should not dare to look at their wildly beautiful faces.

        This poem is a bit unusual, for a couple of reasons.  For one thing, the odd number of lines in the final stanza leaves it feeling abrupt, almost unfinished.  To be clear, this doesn’t feel like a mistake, but like pulling the rug out from under the reader to leave us feeling unbalanced.  The structure is also sneaky: starting with that conditional “if” and then walking us into the woods with those long descriptive clauses building up and building up… Until suddenly we’re confronted with the mysterious gleaming figures, beautiful but terrifying.

        There’s also a bit of a mystery about the author, who apparently never published another poem except this one, which came out in an anthology called Off to Arcady when she was a student at Vassar College.  It’s certainly easy enough to believe that a woman might be an extremely accomplished poet without ever having more than one poem published - especially after she got married and had a family to care for.  Still, you’d think that this early taste of success would have encouraged her to continue.  Ruth Mather Skidmore’s complete disappearance as a poet is almost as strange and unsettling as those dancers in the white patch of moonlight on the pine needles.

[Picture: The Fairy Dance (slightly cropped), painting by Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, 1895 (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

Thanks to Theodora Goss for posting the poem at Poems of the Fantastic and Macabre.] 

World Oceans Day

         World Oceans Day will be June 8, so here’s a selection of block prints of the ocean.  I’m starting with waves in the rain off a coast.  I love the colors in this woodcut by Henri Rivière.  This is an ocean that’s paradoxically almost soothingly rough - I wouldn’t want to be out on a fishing boat in the rain, but there’s no storm or drama.  It would be a good ocean to look at from the cozy warmth and safety of a cottage on shore, reminding us of the ocean’s enormity without being threatening.  Rivière was one of that

first generation of European artists who encountered Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and were enormously influenced by them.  In this piece he uses about 5 blocks, I think.  (You can see some of Rivière's views of the Eiffel Tower in this post 36 More Views.)

        Next is a piece with a bit more drama as a full moon shines down on a much larger wave.  There’s no shore in sight, and this piece is meant to illustrate the oceans before the evolution of humans.  Its caption says “Originally, when the Moon was much closer to the Earth, it caused tremendous tidal waves.”  This is a sort of primordial ocean, with a sense of solitude.  The very fine engraving makes the shading in the clouds less carve-y than I usually like, but I think the portrayal of the moonlight reflecting on the water is gorgeous.

        Yet another version of rough waves uses yet another carving technique.  In this one by Merlyn Chesterman the engraved lines are very carve-y indeed, and I love the roughness of the lines building into the roughness of the waves.  This piece looks like it may use about 3 blocks, with gradations of grey in two of them.  Water and oceans are a very common theme for Chesterman, and I’ve shared one of her pieces before that demonstrates how she uses wood grain to portray water.  You can see that in my post Carving Water.

        And now let’s take a look at a couple of pieces that highlight not just the ocean but humans’ interaction with it.  This one by Molly Lemon is the positive side of the relationship.  A diver explores the wonder and beauty of the deep, perhaps studying in order to help with conservation.  The light filtering into the clear water is beautiful, and its fading calls the diver into the mystery of the depths.  (In another prior post you can see a couple of Lemon's Tiny Reduction Landscapes.)

        I have to end, however, with the warning.  Our relationship with the ocean has been careless at best and abusive at worst.  This piece by Beth Robertson mixes visual symbols to remind us that time is running out before our

oceans are completely choked by plastic and other threats.  Humans have always been fascinated by the ocean, which is our earthly world’s conjoined twin.  We are smitten with its beauty, terrified by its power, enticed by its mystery, greedy for its resources.  It has moved us to both poetry and piracy.  Let’s remember that ultimately we are utterly dependent on it for our lives, so it’s time - and long past time - to straighten out our relationship with Earth’s oceans.

[Pictures: Wave in the Rain, color woodcut by Henri Rivière, 1890 (Image from The Cleveland Museum of Art);

Tremendous Tidal Waves, illustration from The World Before the Creation of Man by Camille Flammarion, 1886 (Image from Project Gutenberg);

Rough, wood engraving by Merlyn Chesterman, 2021;

Odyssey, wood engraving by Molly Lemon, 2021;

Pandora’s Message Got Lost, wood engraving by Beth Robertson, 2021 (Last three images from The Society of Wood Engravers).]

Words of the Month - Vocabulary Tests

         With my children graduated from college last spring, this has been the first year in my entire life that has not been explicitly tied to the academic calendar, and I’m feeling slightly unmoored!  Still, the broader culture is certainly sufficiently affected by the academic calendar that I’m not in any danger of forgetting.  So in honor of all those students who still have a few weeks left in their school year, and are probably thinking about all their final projects and exams, here are a few Words of the Month.

project - Originally a “plan or scheme,” project entered English around 1400 from Medieval Latin meaning “something thrown forth.”  You can see how the sense could shift to “an undertaking.”  Interestingly, in the verb form (which came after the noun), the sense of “to plan, scheme” came before the various physical meanings “to shoot forth,” “to protrude,” “to cast an image on a screen,” etc.

test - In the late 14th century a test was a small vessel used in ascertaining the content or quality of metals.  The name of the vessel is ultimately from “shell.”  By the 16th century it could mean the “trial of the correctness or quality of something” more broadly, by the 18th century it could mean the “means of examining something,” but not until the very early 20th century did it gain its specifically academic sense.  (In general, the verb versions of these meanings followed behind the noun, often by about a century.)

exam - This is a mid-19th century slang shortening of examination.  In this case, the verb was first, appearing around 1300, from Latin meaning “to weigh,” and thus “to ponder, consider, and judge.”  The sense of “a test of knowledge” (as opposed to “a judicial inquiry”) dates to the early 17th century.

quiz - Since this began as slang, its origins are a little murky.  The meaning “a brief oral examination by a teacher” first appears in 1852.  The slang word quiz meaning “odd, ridiculous person” dates back to around 1780 (where we get the word quizzical), but it’s not entirely clear whether that’s the origin of the “test” meaning.  If so, the derivation is probably by way of “to make someone look ridiculous by means of puzzling questions,” which appeared by the end of the 18th century.  Another theory is that the test quiz derives from Latin qui es? (“who are you?”) which is said to be the first question in Latin oral exams in the 19th century.

essay - This comes from the same ultimate Latin root as exam, although in a different form.  Also, English acquired essay after it had spent a lot more time in French, and it may have been coined in English by Francis Bacon in the late 16th century, under the inspiration of Montaigne.  Bacon’s meaning “discursive literary composition” also had the sense of “trial, endeavor.”

assessment - This didn’t enter educational jargon until the mid-20th century.  Its first use in English was from around 1530, meaning “the value of property for tax purposes,” a meaning that remains.  It derives from Anglo-French assess, “to fix the amount of a tax, fine, etc,” from Latin for “sitting beside,” as in someone assisting a judge.  (And yes, assist is ultimately somewhat related to assess.)

evaluation - I’ll throw this onto my list of synonyms, although there’s nothing very exciting in its etymology.  It entered English from French in the mid 18th century, and simply means “to determine the value” of something.  The somewhat less concrete sense of assessing performance as opposed to tangible goods is later, and “job performance review” isn’t until the mid-20th century.

Lots of other synonyms for tests, such as finals, midterms, orals, etc, are all simply the adjectives that described various types of examinations.

        For anyone still dreading their exams, I wish you the best of luck.  Summer is almost here!

[Pictures: A Study, wood block print from Orbis Sensualium Pictus by John Comenius, translated by Hoole and printed for S. Leacroft, 1777 (Image from Google ebooks);

Detail of color wood block print by Walter Crane from The Absurd A.B.C., engraved and printed by Edmund Evans, c 1874 (Image from Internet Archive);

“Y was a Youth” alphabet from The Hobby-Horse, or the High Road to Learning, published by J. Harris and Son, 1820 (Images from A Nursery Companion by Iona and Peter Opie, 1980).]

Garwood's Wood Engravings

         Tirzah Garwood (UK, 1908-1951) was one of those artists whose work was overshadowed in the minds of art historians by the work of her artist husband.  If you want to see what I’ve shared of his work, you can revisit Eric Ravilious here.  But today let’s have a little sampling of Garwood’s wood engravings, which have a witty style all their own.

        First, here’s “The Wife,” a self portrait (made when Garwood was engaged to Ravilious) sitting up in bed beneath a picture of a house.  I like all the patterns and textures - the wallpaper!  that tablecloth! - the details of the architecture and furniture, and the young wife gazing somewhat enigmatically at the viewer.  This was part of a whole series on relationships.

        “Brick House Kitchen” is another with lots of texture, plus the added charm of a lot of cats and a large chicken.  It certainly looks like a cozy kitchen, if possibly a danger of fur and feathers in the food!  The technical skill of all those textures creating their varied effects is impressive.  I’m especially admiring the shading of the bricks at the side of the fireplace.

        For a subtle touch of the humor that marks many of Garwood’s depictions of people, notice how this baby has tossed their teddy bear overboard from the pram while the

nurse looks the other way.  How long before the loss will be noticed?  What adventures will Teddy have, perilously close to the road, before it’s reunited with the baby?

        And finally, another possible self-portrait in which the young woman looks away from the other travellers in the third class carriage, inviting us into her world despite her neutral expression.  Again, the details are masterful, from the view outside the window to the dozing men inside, and the careful depictions of clothing.  Garwood has other pieces depicting broader caricatures, or more riotous action, but I’ve chosen the ones I particularly like, which seem to be those that give me a chance to contemplate these places and people.

        Garwood and Ravilious were married for 12 years before he was lost at sea.  During that time she set aside much of her own work to help him with his - uncredited, of course.  She did get back into her own work (and eventually remarry), but she no longer did wood engraving, which I think is a real shame.  She died of cancer just shy of her 43rd birthday, so we’ll never know where her art might have gone if she’d had more time.  If you happen to find yourself south of London this weekend, you have a chance to see the first major exhibition of her work, showing at Dulwich Picture Gallery through May 26.  Alas, I won’t be there!  But it’s nice to see an excellent block printmaker with a distinctive style finally coming back into the public eye and getting her due.

[Pictures: The Wife, wood engraving by Tirzah Garwood, 1929 (Image from invaluable);

Brick House Kitchen, wood engraving by Garwood, 1932 (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

The Grandchild, wood engraving by Garwood, c. 1928-9 (Image from invaluable);

The Train Journey, wood engraving by Garwood, c. 1928-30 (Image from invaluable).]

Plausible Impossibilities

         When telling stories, Aristotle wrote, it was better to include a probable impossibility than an unconvincing possibility.  Aristotle wasn’t much of a fan of spec fic and his advice may be intended to hold for all fiction, but for me its interest lies in its application to fantasy world creation.  It’s a strange and fascinating fact that when telling stories of impossible worlds, it is nevertheless the case that some things seem less impossible, more real, than others.  Why is this?  And how is an author to make sure their stories are “believable” even when no one really believes them?

        Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined an important phrase when he wrote that he wanted to endow his poems of the supernatural with “a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”  Of course “suspension of disbelief” doesn’t mean that readers (or viewers of movies, or whatever) really believe in the fantastical things they’re being told in the same way that they believe in the world outside the story.  Rather, they’re agreeing to engage in the story’s exploration of What if?  Yes yes, we know there’s no such thing as ghost-crewed ships, faster-than-light space travel, or dragons, but what if there were?

        Even for that conditional suspension of disbelief, the author needs to make the impossibilities seem probable.  J.R.R. Tolkien pointed out that readers are not so much setting aside or suspending their disbelief, but rather putting together a secondary system of belief based on the presented reality of a secondary world.  Whatever impossible rules apply within a fictional world, they must be consistent so that they are internally plausible.  (This is why, for example, I don’t quibble with Aragorn’s kingship in The Lord of the Rings even though democracy is a better system of government.  I accept the truth within the story that Aragorn being put on the throne is the best outcome in that world.)

        But all this still leaves the question of how to do it?  How to make those impossibilities in that fictional world seem plausible enough that the audience willingly suspends their disbelief and constructs a solid secondary belief system?  There are a whole host of strategies, and authors can make the magic work in a variety of ways for a variety of effects.  Some things to consider…

        • Although breaking the laws of physics is really a simple binary (possible or impossible), in fact people respond to a sense of how much natural laws seem to be pushed.  It seems that it would be harder to levitate a building (or a crash-landed X-wing) than a toad, and harder to control a hurricane than a local breeze.  So don’t break laws carelessly; don’t defy reality gratuitously.  In the 1920’s Walt Disney introduced a revolutionary concept to animation when he made sure that his animators paid attention to the laws of physics in everything except their magic.  The water sloshes realistically in the buckets of marching brooms, if a dwarf trips his beard flies up just like that of a real man tripping in the real world, and even a flying elephant is realistically affected by the wind.  Even while tweaking one thing, an author can keep the rest of our webs of reality intact.

        • On the other hand, sometimes it’s necessary to distort a whole section of the web around the breach.  Even when considering the impossible, humans have a sense of the logic of what would make something possible.  That’s why we like our magical systems to follow rules and our sci fi to have quasi-scientific explanations.  Magic should come from ley lines, or from the original language of creation, or from angels or demons or Old Gods, or from something…  Space ships should fly because of warp drives, or ion drives, or infinite improbability drives, or something…  Depending on the context, those rules and explanations can be pretty vague or far-fetched, but the author still needs to manipulate enough of the world around the magic to give the audience a sense that it’s internally consistent and plausible within that world.  Sometimes it’s just window dressing, but it can make or break an illusion.

        • Like any good con, speculative fiction works best when you tell a story people want to believe.  That’s where all the sparkly bits of the story come in.  If it’s fun, or beautiful, or intriguing, or full of wonder, the audience will want to spend time there.  Of course people like stories with dragons, because dragons would be so cool!  Ditto exploring the universe, or saving the gnomes from oppression, or going to a school for wizardry, or finding love with a faerie prince…  Offer the audience invitations to suspend their disbelief, and situations they want to spend time considering.

        • In all the discussion of far-future technologies and the glittery laws of magic, people sometimes forget that the most important aspect of “realism” may have little to do with the magic and more to do with those fundamental aspects of what it means to be a person responding to the world and our relationships within it.  In other words, it’s easier to believe in a fairy godmother who reacts to her loved ones in a plausibly human way than to believe in a perfectly mundane woman who doesn’t.  A sensitively portrayed friendship between a space kraken and a moonfrog will ring more true than a sloppy and shallow portrayal of relationships between “normal” humans.  That’s Coleridge’s “human interest,” I think.  If the author tells what feels like the truth about the deepest things, we’ll happily accept most of the other stuff.

        What are some of your favorite plausible impossibilities?  Or what are some things or tropes that you can simply never suspend your disbelief about?

[Pictures: Full many shapes, that shadows were, wood engraving by Gustave Doré from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1877 (Image from Parigi Books);

Marching broom, still from Walt Disney’s Fantasia, 1940 (Image from Disney Fandom).

Quotation from Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817.]