Jonathan Carroll's The Bones of the Moon, maybe? Julia's story in Lev Grossman's The Magician King (which I didn't like well enough to finish)?
Does it have to be fantasy specifically? An analogous pattern is all over sci-fi.
Sarah Connor in Terminator 2
A fair few protagonists of Philip K. Dick books
Bruce Willis' character in Twelve Monkeys
Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five
You are talking about what Tzvetan Todoriov called the Fantastic (his book of the same name remains a great, accessible piece of criticism). My favorite instance in the 19th-c is Gerard de Nerval. Umberto Eco was a fan of both, and his Foucault's Pendulum could fit your criteria.
I have read Foucault's Pendulum and I'm not sure that it would. But I read it long ago.
This is the condition, in one way or another, of everyone in The Leftovers.
"The Nose", cited here, certainly doesn't fit, wonderful though it is, nor can I see how the Gormenghast novels do. The examples there (I haven't, obviously, read the Todorov) seem more in line with something like "August Heat" which is great but not really what I'm after.
I mean, minus the isolation, so if that's what you care about, less so. But people cope to various degrees.
I mean, minus the isolation, so if that's what you care about, less so. But people cope to various degrees.
I've never read Nerval. If you've read Cora Diamond's The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy (which is reproduced in that volume; I don't know where it was first published), the sort of baffled alienation that Elizabeth Costello feels in The Lives of Animals (because all around her there's mass systematized murder going on, and no one cares or notices, but that could just be a sign that she's crazy, not that everyone else is—phildickian!), that kind of thing. I guess. I may be running together multiple things.
C.S. Lewis, _Till We Have Faces_, about Psykhe's sister and Kupid and Psykhe...
The protagonist whose name I cannot remember in M. John Harrison's Light.
I think the first book in Stross's Merchant Princes series started like this, before rapidly becoming about how evil neocons, Cheney in particular, are.
Another favorite of that period is Charles Nodier. I can particularly recommend the short story "Ines de las Sierras."
Nerval is sort of amazing stuff. Aurelia is the free-base versioning what you're describing.
That Diamond essay is really great, bee tee dubs.
For that matter, probably The Giver.
Not a novel unless it was based on one: They Live
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever.
12 monkeys is good movie
Hello! I too have been drinking heavily.
Hi urple! I have also been drinking, but maybe not as heavily.
On perhaps the more "pop" side and less totally alienated (b/c if the protagonist is too isolated, it is hard to be the heroic leader type? Charisma is the difference between being a prophet and another kind of crazy person?):
--Bujold*'s The Curse of Chalion and, more so, its sequel Paladin of Souls (though really, in flashback).
--haven't finished it yet, but Robin Hobb's Soldier Son trilogy--particularly the second one?
I am also reminded of two Orson Scott Card stories--one, collected in The Changed Man/King of Swords (I think) having to do with a guy attuned to people whose breathing is sycnhed, and the other, "Eugenides," about a man who suddenly starts to see ...something. the latter was in fat anthology called "Tales of Terror and the Supernatural" I got for my birthday in 1990, with a dustjacket illustrated by Gorey, and I think there may be many stories in there that sort of straddle between the absurd Lovecraftian trope you are setting aside, and the more "realist" revelation you seem to be describing.
*if I sound like a Bujold fangirl it's because I am.
Valis is such a perfect example of this that you would think Philip Dick was inspired by Kierkegaard, if you didn't know that it was based on something that he believed happened to himself.
31: Oh, Valis is a perfect example. I feel like this may be a story more common in science fiction than in fantasy, actually.
Tim Powers does a fair amount of this. Last Call is maybe the best example?
34: I haven't seen much Sesame Street lately. Can you explain this to me?
Back when I was a kid, Big Bird would see Mr. Snuffleupagus but nobody else would ever meet him. BB would try and try to introduce his other friends to Mr. S., but never succeeded and they all assumed Mr. S. was an imaginary friend and that BB was huffing paint.
In the 90s, they did a big reveal where everybody else sees Mr. S. This is why kids today are so unable to deal with tension and uncertainty.
Under Plum Lake! more SFnal than fantasy, but 100% this.
37: Heresy! What's next? A version of Harvey in which everyone sees the giant bunny!
I know what's next -- a Peanuts Halloween special, in which the Great Pumpkin appears and gives Linus tons of candy.
The Great Pumpkin only appears because he gets hit on the head by a football that Charlie Brown kicked while Lucy held it.
The Wheel of Time kiiinda fits. No unseen, unimaginable world, everyone in the world is aware of the basics of what's going on, but the protagonist's discovery of his role in the world definitely leads to isolation, alienation, apparently insane actions, etc.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell fits, kind of.
42: I have. I really enjoyed the (rare for the genre) focus on relationships. I do worry that it's not going anywhere coherent.
I'm doing terribly coming up with this. Played for comedy/drama, it's pretty close to the standard time-travel narrative where the protagonist is trying to pass as normal and conceal knowledge of the future (e.g., Lest Darkness Fall, but there are a million of them), but that's not quite what's being asked for here.
Wait, you know what fits exactly? Horton Hears A Who!
43: that's because he's literally driven mad through mechanisms fully explained by how things work in that world, though, right?
I still haven't read Solaris because Matt McIrvin said the translation was bad.
Gerard de Nerval is great but I barely remember what I've read it's been so long. I've never read Nodier but he's going on the list.
50: So did Lem apparently (via Wiki): Lem himself, who read English fluently, repeatedly voiced his disappointment about the Kilmartin-Cox version, and it has generally been considered second-rate. But apparently there is a new one that may be better.
Was interested to see that Kandel--who I think is his most well-known translator, but who did not do one for Solaris--has a degree in Slavistics (a term I had never seen before).
"I just want to say one word to you, Dmitri. Just one word. Slavistics."
The modern science of Central and Eastern European languages.
45 We're about halfway through, and it seems to be getting better and better. It's not too early to start wondering where it's going to go, ultimately.
54: Which spawns the Church of Suprematology.
The Wheel of Time kiiinda fits. No unseen, unimaginable world, everyone in the world is aware of the basics of what's going on, but the protagonist's discovery of his role in the world definitely leads to isolation, alienation, apparently insane actions, etc.
I only read the first 4 or 5 thousand pages so I don't think I ever got that far.
In Pynchon "the conspiracy" generally plays the role of "the other world" you are talking about.
59, yeah but nothing leads me to think that living to 112 is a good idea even if it's marginally possible.
That is, I'm thinking that show jumps the shark around 80 . . .
43: Sort of? There is a fully-explained madness mechanism, but he's also stressed and persecuted, and one character who's in a position to know says that he's protected from the madness mechanism somehow, and as soon as he has a psychological epiphany he stops acting mad completely, which isn't part of the mechanism. Spoilers, I guess.
61 is a good point!
My friend's YA books Seraphina and Shadow Scale are explicitly about taming and hiding those magical-world things but then also figuring out how to release and embrace them, basically.
Death Note. Except that the world does learn to a degree that Light has the power to kill people, but not that it is shinigami derived
As far as I can tell from the post, we want a "magical world" that is real, and only ever seen/known by the protagonist. This excludes most if not all superpower media.
I actually can't think of much PKD that literally applies.
Lathe of Heaven? nah
(Hanging out at tv tropes for a while...)
Here ya go: Properly Paranoid with sublinks to "Cassandra Truth" and "You Have to Believe Me" and "The Cuckoolander was Right"
68: You are correct. Looneytunes after Scanner Darkly
It's sci-fi, but isn't that basically the plot of The Sparrow?
Well, it depends on what we mean by unseen. I guess contact stories are a tad different, though I still think the main character in it experiences both of the two scenarios laid out in the last paragraph.
contact stories
Reminded me that "Story Of Your Life" by Ted Chiang could qualify. The main character is involved in first contact with aliens, and figuring out how to communicate with them ends up changing her perception of language (and her mind) greatly.
Alienation and isolation cover a lot of Tim Powers protagonists. It's not uncommon in less sophisticated urban fantasy books for the protagonist to become even more of a loser wierdo in the mundane world while trying to deal with the fantastic one. (Though series tend to concentrate on powering-up the protag book by book and skipping the real-world disjunction.) I think of Buffy as suffering philosophically from a lack of angels and excess of demons.
It's common for a novel to turn on the time the world-at-large has to admit magic exists; _Lud in the Mist_ or Susannah Clarke. Mirrlees' characters are probably having culture-bound madness about it.
NickS, you might like The Dialect of the Tribe.
NickS, you might like The Dialect of the Tribe.
Yes, thank you, very well done (though not as ambitious as "Story Of Your Life").
I think we have Susannah Clarke around the house, but I never read it.
73 - I was actually thinking of Chiang's "Division by Zero" as a plausible answer to the question in the OP (although it's, again, not fantasy).
Oh, and Donnie Darko.
I don't think Susanna Clarke quite qualifies, as the characters aren't alienated by the strangeness of their experience itself, but are magically prevented from communicating it. That's a bit different.
79: Was thinking of Strange, not the ones who are trapped.
With Strange, the problem is that he really is, if only temporarily and instrumentally, insane.
There's a lot of this kind of thing in Doctor Who.
I just re-read The Dark Is Rising (the first book) (not as good as I remembered), and there's a lot about how the young protagonist is radically different and cut off from his family and most people he knows, but he immediately comes into a very tight-knit community of other people who have the same special powers he does. And the book then does a lot of emotional bridging between the protagonist and his family members so you don't have to be too horrified at his being cut off from them. It's pretty overpoweringly small-English-villagey, actually, in a way that must have been consciously reactionary even in 1970 or whenever it was written.
Isn't Greenwitch the first book?
the latter was in fat anthology called "Tales of Terror and the Supernatural" I got for my birthday in 1990
Oooh! I think I got that for my birthday around then too. Also had one called something like Tales of Madness and the Macabre. One of them had a great story about ghouls in the NYC subway that I've always wanted to read again.
77: Her working title, Doctor Strange and Bernie Worrell, was superior.
Oh yeah. Okay, I reread the second book.
86: Oh, right. All I really remember is "Time and tide and buttered eggs wait for no man."
novels in which the discovery of an unseen, unimaginable world leads the protagonist to isolation, alienation, and despair, because the world no longer seems to make sense, or to acting on faith and being reviled by everyone else for his or her apparently insane actions?
If we're allowed TV series, then the obvious one is "Yes Minister".
I think I have the novelization of that.
Actually being a civil servant isn't nearly that entertaining.
Possibly you're just letting ethics, intelligence, or some combination of the two get in the way.
I don't know, my dad was a civil servant and he said that "Yes Minister" (with a light sprinkling of "The Inimitable Jeeves" was pretty much exactly accurate. Maybe your civil service is just less funny than ours. Or funny in a different way. I can imagine that working for Chris Christie has its entertaining moments, but it's more Bartertown than the Department for Administrative Affairs.
89: Or maybe it told Uncle Joe not to sail on the Titanic. That's where the story usually ends.
Howsabout a story where Stalin, on a secret mission for the Okhrana, boards the Titanic in the guise of a wealthy Russian aristocrat, somehow saves the day and becomes a huge hero upon arrival in New York, where he then becomes involved in machine politics in immigrant communities and winds up a Senator just in time to capitalize on the Palmer Raids and whip up an even crazier anti-immigrant, anti-Black backlash in 1919, plunging the US into chaos from which he emerges as a dictator in the mid-1920s, completely remaking the country and the history of the 20th century.
In Jon. and Mr, the titular characters make magic public again, but aren't there lots of side characters who are already suffering from... estrangement? The Venetian who eats mice?
25: the Internet being what it is, I'm sure this can't be the first outbreak of Drunk Kierkegaard Blogging, but well done anyway.
It's been a rough week. I found myself earlier in the evening telling one of the line attorneys to give me a heads-up by email if he was planning a mass shooting in the office.
Apparently he wasn't quite at that point yet, but did say he'd let me know if it came to that.
"Changing, the bureaucrat fell into the sea."
95: I haven't read it, but I think pretty close to that book came out in the last couple of years.
98: You should have asked about mass shootings not in the office and targeted shootings in the office.
Lawyers are supposed to be very precise in their use of language.
"I'm Jewish. It'll be more of a seder shooting."
Do Jewish people in America do spree-type shootings? I think there have been Jewish serial killers (David Berkowitz?), but that's not quite the same.
Okay, fine. How about Hitler immigrating to the US after WWI and discovering a hitherto unsuspected talent for baseball, which he parlays into fame and fortune, becoming a sort of role model for Central European immigrants, who flock to his lectures and shower him with adulation, so that he winds up as a sort of Renaissance man figure in US political and entertainment life -- kind of a Will Rogers-meets-Joseph Kennedy figure and synthesizes a populist-reactionary hybrid politics that carries his sons to the Presidency and avoids the Depression and changes all the players in WWII around?
There was one in a AH anthology where Al Capone went into politics, did well enough to become FDR's last VP and succeed him, and built on his multi-term legacy by staying president for another generation. Written as an imitation of Studs Terkel, as I recall.
I suppose it's not exactly The Iron Dream. But close.
106 was going to close with something like "...but I'm sure Harry Turtledove has already beaten me to it."
(Although of course, Stalin was Georgian, not Russian.)
How about one where Stalin, Hitler and Tojo gang up on Harry Turtledove and beat the crap out of him for besmirching their reputations?
How about Hitler immigrating to the US after WWI and discovering a hitherto unsuspected talent for baseball
I'm pretty sure I've read an alternate history about Castro getting signed up by a Miami baseball team and deciding to ditch the whole revolution concept. (Just been reading a bit about the Cuban Revolution, with two takeaway points: first, a Cuban province and the Party newspaper are both called Granma after the yacht that brought Castro to Cuba, which in turn was named by someone who really liked his grandma; second, Castro was a nasty little shit once he got into power.)
A really interesting one (inspired by 1491) would be: European settlement of the New World, minus the epidemics. Say that an earlier wave of settlement (by Norsemen, for example) brings pigs and zoonotic diseases, so that by the time Cabot etc turn up, the epidemics are hundreds of years in the past and American Indian society has recovered from the plagues, much as Europe did from the Black Death. No deserted villages and fields for European settlers to move into; how does that history work out?
The good ship Granma lies at anchor in the harbour / waiting for the evening tide to rise and bring high water / it's bound for Cuba - she must go across the Gulf of Mexico / and the Caribbean Ocean
The Wheel Of If, by L. Sprague de Camp. Roughly what you were asking for, with sort of a Tammany Hall political corruption plot.
Contrariwise, Wen Spencer's A Brother's Price is excellent microbiology/game theory extrapolation from (probably) a contact disease that undoes human society in both hemispheres.
103: I was prepared to be extremely shocked that Harry Turtledove was still alive, but I checked and I was confusing him with Harry Harrison.
The good ship Granma lies at anchor in the harbour
I don't know which version you like, but Dick Gaughan Live In Edinburgh is fantastic.
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Lead vocals/rhythm guitar: "Are we still in tune?"
Lead guitar: "Probably?"
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I shall eat poutine tomorrow, and I care not who knows it.
94. If you're a very senior civil servant like Sir Humphrey (a few dozen people) and if your minister isn't given to irrational shouting fits like many in all the major parties over the last several years since forever, it may be entertaining. However, the established culture in the British civil service is to kiss up and kick down, and if you're middle management or below the experience is at best tolerable and at worst dreadful, always highly stressful.
The italics were meant to be strike.
the established culture in the British civil service is to kiss up and kick down, and if you're middle management or below the experience is at best tolerable and at worst dreadful, always highly stressful.
Never worked in the civil service myself, but that isn't my impression from those who do - it probably differs a lot from department to department.
Speaking from reports out of BIS, DfE, FCO, HO. There are little oases of calm and good management here and there if you're lucky, but not reliably.
I have a friend of a friend who worked for Gove when he was in Education. She was fairly discreet, but reading between the lines, it wasn't a happy experience. On the other hand, I had another friend who worked for Prescott when he had his massive Office of the DPM/DETR (which had loads of responsibilities), and he was fairly positive about the experience.
Whether the minister and the SPADs are abusive is important; Gove was personally civil, but hired SPADs who were extremely nasty; also, he orchestrated getting rid of permanent officers who disagreed with him, which did not go down well. When the Labour leadership thing started there was much sucking of teeth at the prospect of Lammy, who was well known for his tantrums as a minister.
The other structural is that increasingly the senior posts are filled by fast track kids who are running a division by the time they're 30 because they have the stamina to deal with the ridiculous work loads that are now expected by the politicians. But of course they have no idea how to manage anything, since they haven't had time to actually do anything, and are prone to panic.
Treasury under Brown and Darling and the Scottish Office generally were apparently happy places. I don't know anyone who enjoys the MOD but that's not so much because of the civil service culture as much as the impossible objectives they're set, and the complete mutual cultural incomprehension between the civil service and the armed forces.
I find mutual incomprehension enjoyable. Unless I have to get something done, I guess.
The beginning of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe goes this way, though of course it resolves when the whole set of siblings goes through the wardrobe together.
Last night we watched Voyage of the Dawn Treader. That kid who played Eustace Scrubb had the most memorable voice I've heard in a kid that age.
131: Does he almost deserve it, like his name?
99: Haven't read that one in a long time. Didn't really understand it when I did. Wonder if it's any good.
Wonder if it's any good.
Stations of the Tide? Yes, it is!
The wikipedia plot summary is one sentence, so I can't tell if it is good or not.
Well, they've already spoiled the ending. Also, there's a talking briefcase.
119: I have a slight suspicion at least one of my parents were at that gig....
I remember growing up with that album, particularly on Sunday afternoons when there was housework to be done - and I particularly remember that recording of Victor Jara, which still makes me weep.
(and they rule with Hawker Hunters / and they rule with Chieftain tanks.)
121: "I shall eat poutine tomorrow, and I care not who knows it." Is this the point where I say that a Poutinerie has opened up in Berkeley, but I have not yet dared to go? Or is this the point where I say that I have indirect evidence that Harry Turtledove is not only still alive, but has slept in my bed?
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_14185.html#1757255
(I'm sure she'd enjoy the poutine, though.)
119: I have a slight suspicion at least one of my parents were at that gig....
I'm (slightly) jealous. That is the Dick Gaughan album I know best, and one of the most powerful, passionate live albums I've heard. I would expect that it would have been amazing in person.
I had a copy of the album on tape, which I listened to a lot and then, when I got it on CD and read the liner notes I found out that it was his first concert after a period in which he didn't perform for health reasons (and, IIRC, that he didn't know if he would be able to perform again). I imagine that part of that passion of the performance comes from appreciating and wanting to feel that capacity again.