Seanan McGuire’s new book Every Heart a Doorway explores how to deal with real life once the portal to your own personal magical world has closed. It also gives readers a rough guideline for how all of these different portal worlds–like Narnia, Oz, Wonderland, and so on–relate to each other. From the book:
Here in the so-called “real world” you have north, south, east, and west, right? Those don’t work for the most of the portal worlds we’ve been able to catalog. So we use other words. Nonsense, Logic, Wickedness, and Virtue. There are smaller sub-directions, little branches, but those four are the big ones. Most worlds are either high Nonsense OR high Logic, and then they have some degree of Wickedness or Virtue built into their foundations from there. A surprising number of Nonsense worlds are Virtuous. It’s like they can’t work up the attention span necessary for anything more vicious than a little mild naughtiness.
We saw that and wondered…could we use Every Heart‘s guidelines to map ALL of the different portal worlds in fiction into a single multiverse?
It took some doing. “Portal worlds” are only as knowable as their author/creator allows them to be and the aspects of some of them change over the course of the story in which they are featured. In addition, the four main axes–nonsense, logic, wickedness, and virtue–are themselves subjective on a personal and cultural level: One person’s estimation of High Virtue can easily be another person’s estimation of Wickedness.
Thankfully, McGuire’s Every Heart gives us a few different portal worlds that serve as examples of various degrees of the aspects known as nonsense, logic, wickedness, and virtue. With these in hand, we were able to form subjective gradations that could encompass all of the guidelines and examples presented by McGuire, allowing us to place all magical portal worlds into a precise grid (our “multiverse”) while remaining generalized enough to allow those worlds to move around the grid without conflict.
Here’s How The Grid Works:
y axis = Virtue 3, 2, 1, 0, 1, 2, 3 Wickedness
x axis = Nonsense 3, 2, 1, 0, 1, 2, 3 Logic
The below grid has two axes based on the four Aspects noted in Every Heart.
The y axis (up and down) starts in the north with High Virtue. Worlds become less virtuous the further south on the axis you go, until they’re High Wicked. There are three gradations of Virtue and three gradations of Wicked, with a null (zero) state in between them. This means our portal world multiverse is 7 rows tall.
The x axis (right and left) starts in the west with High Nonsense. Worlds become more logical as you head east, until they’re High Logic. There are three gradations of Nonsense and three gradations of Logic with a null (zero) state in between them. This means our portal world multiverse is 7 columns wide.
How Nonsense Is Your Favorite World?
It’s one thing to say that Eleanor’s portal world in Every Heart is “Nonsense 2” but what does that mean? Here’s how we’re defining the three gradations of every Aspect:
- Nonsense 3 = Environment completely pliable and redefinable. Change motivated by personal whim. Near-chaos. Examples include: The Dreaming from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.
- Nonsense 2 = World on the tipping point between fantastical chaos and realistic environments. Examples include: Oz.
- Nonsense 1 = Reality is pliable through wish fulfillment, but cause and effect actions are still most effective. Examples include: Neverland from the Peter Pan tales.
- Nonsense/Logic 0 = Stasis, no change occurs in world.
- Logic 1 = Most things follow rules of cause-and-effect but there is still doubt as to how many things follow rules. Examples include: Lyra’s world from The Golden Compass.
- Logic 2 = Everything can be explained eventually, but there will always be unique exceptions. Examples include: Our own world!
- Logic 3 = Everything can be explained, no exceptions to rules. Examples include: Narnia, and most any other world where its god/creator has a direct influence.
How Virtuous Is Your Favorite World?
- Virtue 3 = Pure and providential, world provides everything you need. Is in an “ideal” state. Examples include: Narnia once Aslan’s control is restored.
- Virtue 2 = Overriding harmony in world, active championing of human/being rights, but still threatened. Examples include: L. Frank Baum’s Oz, after the Wicked Witch and Wizard are taken out of power.
- Virtue 1 = World provides for its denizens but in a limited capacity, passive promotion of human/being rights. Could be seen as only slightly better than our own world. Examples include: UnLunDun, from China Mieville’s book of the same name.
- Virtue/Wicked 0 = Balance between virtuous and wicked desires, but not harmony. Examples include: The Dreaming from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.
- Wicked 1 = Unbalanced. Passive or secondary limiting of human/being rights. Examples include: Our own world!
- Wicked 2 = Overriding disharmony. Active limiting of its denizens. “Crapsack World” but livable. Examples include: Narnia when the White Witch is in power.
- Wicked 3 = Actively malevolent, apocalyptic, near-unredeemable, near-unlivable. Examples include: The Dark Tower.
OMG Just Let Me See the Grid Already
Here you go! Design credit goes to Jamie Stafford-Hill.
Hey You Have Narnia On There Twice
That’s because we discovered something really interesting when plotting out this portal world multiverse. Worlds move over time. They slide into Wickedness or correct into Virtue. Check it out:
This means that worlds in a multiverse don’t just have spatial “x, y” coordinates, they have an additional “t” coordinate for the moment in time that you’re measuring them within! Magical worlds float, drift, move…they have vectors, velocity, they insist on being fourth-dimensional! Portal worlds–those magical places we are drawn into–fizz around us like soda pop.
Interestingly, the worlds we chose to depict on the grid only move along the y axis, between Virtue and Wickedness. We couldn’t think of a world that moved along the x axis, which suggests that the Aspects along that axis are more intrinsic to the definition of a world, comprising the core of their reality’s structure.
You’ll also notice that fictional worlds tend to group in certain quadrants and gradations. Worlds don’t really like being in that High Virtue / High Logic space, for example, but that’s probably because we don’t like telling stories about those kinds of worlds. Perfect, happy places where everything is tended to and everything makes sense are a goal, they’re not a story.
Hey You’re Missing…
Oh yes. We stuck to sci-fi/fantasy books mostly, because the multiverse is VAST and full of terrors and we couldn’t make an infographic big enough to contain everything we’ve read. (There are hundreds of portal worlds in comic books alone!)
Really, we can only show you the way.
It is time, perhaps, to chart your own journey through your favorite magical worlds…
(A printable PDF version is available here.)
Chris Lough is the Content Director of Tor.com. Jamie Stafford-Hill is a Senior Designer at Tor Books. The map of portal worlds was created with the help of Tor.com staffers Bridget McGovern, Emmet Asher-Perrin, Natalie Zutter, Leah Schnelbach, Sarah Tolf, and Tor.com Publishing staff Carl Engle-Laird, Katharine Duckett, and Mordicai Knode. It was a true team effort, is what we’re trying to convey here.
This chart is high nonsense.
If you are going to have an axis like nonsense vs. logical, then they actually have to be opposite ends of a definable continuum. The claim everything is pliable and redefinable is not the opposite of it being explainable. For example Sanderson’s Cognitive Realm has a very strict rule structure on it.
It sounds like you want a dichotomy of pliable vs. unpliable, as a strong creator would prevent anyone from enforcing their will.
And I’m sorry, calling something like Narnia “High Logic” just because there’s a God involved? That’s silly. You can just as easily call it Nonsense 3, with the “personal whim” being that of the God. There’s plenty of stuff in Narnia that just plain doesn’t make any logical sense.
I was interested by the secondary classifications mentioned in the story, and how they interact with the main ones. Do they just get treated as defined sub-types? Or do you end up with a full multi-axis like Myers-Briggs only more so?
Maybe nonsense is the wrong word? Things might not be fixed in the Cognitive Realm, but there are certainly rules. Sanderson like rules. We’ve had glimpses of those rules through Shallan and Jasnah. Maybe fluid reality vs fixed reality? Sense and Nonsense makes it sound like there are quality issues.
@ghostly1 While I too agree that the placement of Narnia as “high logic” is debatable, “logic” in this chart is clearly intended as a trackable “internal logic”, not as “our world logic”, I think. So what do you mean with “plenty of stuff in Narnia that … doesn’t make any logical sense”? In Narnia, the guiding principle is probably – I don0t fully agree with this interpretation but whatever – explained by “everything is coherent in accordance to the creator plan”, so logic. In contrast to, for instance, Fantasia, where random wishes are granted without any “plan”.
@5: But then you could just as easily claim that a nonsense world has an internal logic as “whatever you imagine, happens!”
That’s perfectly logical, in it’s way, but it leads to nonsense from an outside perspective.
I’m fine with classifying stuff that follows a logic that our world doesn’t as “logic”, but IMHO it has to have more to it than “God says it’s this way!” (Unless, perhaps, those rules are clear from the outset and don’t involve things like “Do as I say and everything will be fine” but rather “Energy is freely convertible back and forth between matter if there’s music playing” or “Steam really can power robots!”) If you allow Narnia, why not put say, “Un Lun Dun” in High Logic, just because there are presumably rules that underly everything, even if we don’t understand them and it looks silly to US.
Most SF worlds (aside from the very hardest) don’t involve real science principles as we understand it, there’s hyperspace and teleportation and time travel… but hopefully it involves internally consistent science that DOESN’T rely on (or, for that matter, usually explicitly refute) an all-powerful deity. That should be what marks a logic world.
I Only know them by reputation, but does The Magic Goes Away or the Elric books move the x axis?
This seems to be a variant on the D&D alignment. Switch virtue/wickedness for good/evil and nonsense/logic for chaotic/lawful and you’ve got the same system.
Two dimensional grids are, by their very nature, very simplified representations of a multidimensional world. However, working in two dimensions is far more useful than working in one.
We’ve got that going on in politics, where we try to analyze the world on a Left/Right one dimensional space. There have been some efforts to go to two dimensions (The World’s Smallest Political Quiz, Jerry Pournelle’s doctoral thesis, and others), but there are still issues with mapping to only two dimensions.
On the other hand, I like the non-static nature of your mapping. Things do change over time.
Going back to politics, when I was younger, the two issues which defined being a liberal was (a) the War in Vietnam was a really bad idea, and (b) blacks should vote and have all the other rights that whites have. I still believe these things, but I am no longer considered a liberal. So the political world of liberalism has moved on whatever mapping system you use.
I’m beginning to think that we need a Marauder’s Map, not a Rand McNally atlas.
@7: I knew I would find an example of a laterally moving world in the end! Yes, any world with magic dying or being reborn probably qualifies. Take Arda for instance: It starts being created as music, then gets transformed by the whims of any Power that exists on it, and it ends up being our world with its rigid science: clearly it has shifted logicwards. And of course, when the barriers between two worlds become thinner, the resulting reality will get shifted toward the middle of them, in… Hmm, we also need new words for latitude and longitude. Ethics and Sense?
I agree with the other posters here: Sanderson’s Cognitive Realm is high Logic. Just because we don’t yet know what the rules are doesn’t mean there aren’t any. (Contrast Alice’s Wonderland/Looking-Glass realm, where basically anything can happen.)
Pamela Dean’s Secret Country world is high Logic (I would be inclined to say that nearly every world in books intended for adults will be, in fact) and pretty well neutral on the Virtue-Wickedness axis. High Rhyme, with poetry from our world being magic spells there.
Should Sanderson’s even be on this list? It’s not really Portal Fantasy as most of the others are. It’s a secondary world portal maybe but say someone on Earth wouldn’t be able to go to the Cognitive or Physical realm, right?
I tried mapping Discworld, but it turned out it manged to occupy every grid square over the course of the entire series. Then the grid imploded.
Very cool chart!
I wonder about the inclusion of “Yesod” from the Urth of the New Sun. The New Sun series is ostensibly SF (even with all the4 fantasy trappings) and Severian travels to Yesod on a spaceship. How is that portal fantasy?
I’m not limiting myself to portal fantasies. Vance’s “The Men Return” is about a shift from nonsense to logic. Walton’s Lifelode has an east-west logic/nonsense geography built into the world. Eve Forward’s Villains by Necessity is medium nonsense, weird about virtue.
Kelewan should at most be as virtuous as the real world, assuming you mean pre-Mistress of the Empire. There was slavery, women were barred from becoming magicians, and the Cho-Ja were bound by an oppressive contract.
@random22 – Actually one of my favorite parts of Discworld is that it maintains a song, internally consistent logic. Even going back as far as TCOM, wherever possible even silly throwaway comments have been treated as canon by the later books. Its not *our* rules, but pterry followed his own rules at least as well as other major sagas have.
The Island from Lost, my favorite setting, seems to fall into “virtue 1” as there is a sort of moral power exerted over it by the Protector’s rules. I can’t decide if its Nonsense or Logical in terms of consistency though. Its transtemporal nature means effect occasionally precedes cause, but it is controlled by a godlike figure.
I’m with Athreeren, above:
A major aspect of certain fantasy structures is a Thinning that slowly drains / drives the magic from the world, and either this continues unabated (with the story itself often being magic’s last hurrah and/or existential tragedy) or the Eucatastrophe reclaims the magic. Either way, if the magic itself provided a position on the Nonsense/Logical axis (e.g., via being wild and capricious but being slowly supplanted by industry and science), the world’s pre- and post-story states will differ appropriately.
@13 – LOL. Depends on who you ask.
@12 – Stormlight Archives is here because it is a hot property of Tor. Much like Shades of Magic. I’m now more interested in reading that series.
But we yet to understand how the SA Cognitive, Spiritual, and Physical Realms truly work. Sanderson likes his worlds and magic systems to follow a logic. We just don’t always know what that logic is at first.
I think the world as portrayed in Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series has the potential to move along the nonsense-logical axis. It begins as a somewhat nonsense world, due to the presence of magic; but then the Empire attempts to eradicate magic from the world, which would have made it much more logical. They fail, though, so I suppose this is just hypothetical.
Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber should be on every single point of this chart, simply due to the fact that Shadow is infinite. But if that spot on the chart is actually talking about Amber the realm and not the book series, then it’s on the wrong side.
Amber, the realm, is very orderly. Even the royals can’t manipulate Shadow there. Go out into the Golden Circle and yeah, the royals can do pretty much whatever they want, but that’s maybe 15 people, depending on the timeframe you’re looking at. 15 out of millions. For everyone else, they’re people like us on a world like ours.
Now the Shadows around the Courts of Chaos most certainly change on their own. The CoC could certainly fall on the Nonsense side of the axis. (As would Tir-na Nog’th, despite being a reflection of Amber.) But Amber and Rebma and the rest of the Golden Circle would be Logical. Heck, even the Shadow Brand was imprisoned in could be considered Logical; even though it had rocks flying through the skies, those rocks followed very specific rules for that particular Shadow.
Would Robert Heinlein’s _Number of the Beast_ qualify as moving along the X axis? From right to left. The individual universes that are visited (including Oz) would of course have their own place(s), but the overarching narrative seems to be going from a logical world to increasingly nonsense as fictional worlds begin to appear and any universe that can be imagined exists.
Hoo boy.
The House (Keys to the Kingdom): Nonsense 2. Goodness harder to say. It was supremely dysfunctional when ruled by the Seven Sins.* But the Seven Virtues were exceedingly obnoxious and, after taking power, proceeded to (rollover for spoiler) ///destroy the universe./////
Xanth: Nonsense 3. Goodness also harder to say. It’s goofy and fluffy, and I think it’s supposed to be a paradise where everything good grows on trees and Major Characters explicitly never die and always get happy endings. But with the worst misogyny and rape culture I’ve ever encountered in fiction,** it’s a place where I increasingly don’t want to go.
*But I love the scallywags anyway.
**Even worse than Westeros and Essos, where women are occasionally valued for/judged on something besides their appearance, and rape, while rampant and often excused in-world, is generally done by cruel people and without a giant narrative stamp of approval.
I would have to disagree about Narnia. Aslan is not consistent, nor are many of his decisions good. Lewis clearly intended for Narnia to be a purely good place ruled by God, but what he intended is not what he portrayed. Some examples:
1) Two different creation stories. In LWW, Aslan speaks of the Deep Magic that his father put into Narnia when it was created. In MN, the readers see Aslan creating Narnia with a song. There is no sign of his father and there is no mention of either the Emperor-Over-Sea participating in Narnia’s creation (or being present) or of the laws of Deep Magic. Yet both versions are supposed to be true, when it is evident that they are not. (Nonsense 3 = Environment completely pliable and redefinable. Change motivated by Aslan’s personal whim.)
2) Two very different descriptions of the White Witch’s role and authority. In LWW, the White Witch is supposed to be a being with authority given by Aslan’s divine father. She has a right to the blood of traitors and if she is not given that blood, Narnia will perish. But in MN, the White Witch is an intruder from the world of Charn who steals the fruit of immortality. Aslan speaks of her as an evil brought into newborn Narnia by others, not someone he or his father willed to come there, and he sends Digory Kirke on a quest to find a tree that will keep her out of Narnia at least for some time. Seems like a strange way to treat someone who has power and authority given by his father. Again, both versions can’t be true. They’re contradictory. (Nonsense 3 = Environment completely pliable and redefinable. Reality is pretty much what Aslan says it is, even if he said something else in a book published earlier.)
3) Two different treatments of the same offense. In Prince Caspian, Professor Cornelius drugs the guards in Miraz’s castle so that he and Caspian can escape, knowing that Miraz will almost certainly kill the guards for sleeping. Aslan does not punish or even reprimand Cornelius for this. But in The Horse and His Boy, Aravis drugs her stepmother’s slave girl so that she can escape, knowing that her stepmother will almost certainly whip the slave girl for sleeping. Aslan gouges Aravis’s back with his claws because “she needed to know” what being whipped felt like. (Wicked 1 = Unbalanced. Passive or secondary limiting of human/being rights.)
(This is undoubtedly down to Lewis’ personal taste; he liked women to be whipped. But Aslan’s behavior is nonetheless unjust.)
4) Speaking of the stepmother’s slave girl, that’s the only time that Aslan demonstrates any concern for slaves in the entire series. He never speaks against slavery in Calormen, does nothing to free the slaves (or to help the Dawn Treader crew free the slaves) in the Lone Islands, and gives Corakin power over an entire people (the Duffers), whom Corakin then treats as his servants by right. Aslan is Jesus in the world of Narnia…and Lion Jesus has zero problems with slavery. Granted, the Old Testament God doesn’t either, but the Old Testament was not written in 1952 CE (when The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was published). (Wicked 2 = Overriding disharmony. Active limiting of its denizens. “Crapsack World” but livable–depending on who you are.)
(This is undoubtedly because Lewis thought that some people were “naturally” slaves and others were not. But I’m going on the principle that if behavior or belief would be abhorrent in a human, it’s geometrically worse in a god.)
5) Lewis explicitly states in Chapter 4 of LWW: “… she [the White Witch] knew, though Edmund did not, that this was enchanted Turkish Delight and that anyone who had once tasted it would want more and more of it, and would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed themselves.” She then tells him that if he brings her his brother and sisters, she would “be able to give [him] some more Turkish Delight”, that her house has “whole rooms full of Turkish Delight”, and that as her heir, Edmund “would wear a gold crown and eat Turkish Delight all day long”.
In other words, Edmund is enchanted to crave magical food–food for which he would do anything. even eat himself to death. Which means that his free will has been compromised. And the Witch is his only source
But although it is stated outright that Edmund has been enchanted and does not know it, Aslan never acknowledges this. Lewis even tries to have it both ways, saying that Edmund knew deep down that the Witch was bad and cruel. He is judged as an adult with free will who knows Aslan well and who consciously betrayed him–not as a small boy under a spell who didn’t know Aslan from a hole in the wall. Furthermore, Aslan states that the Deep Magic demands the death of this ignorant child–for everyone else’s good.
I’m getting visions of Le Guin’s Omelas. (Wicked 3 = Actively malevolent, apocalyptic, near-irredeemable, near-unlivable. The god of this world, who supposedly created the underlying laws of Narnia, has no mercy.)
6) Aslan could have died to redeem everyone in Narnia, not just Edmund. There are signs of imports from elsewhere that could not have been obtained without service to the Witch; after all, it’s been winter for a hundred years, so nothing can grow in Narnia. There also don’t seem to be any industries or any forges. Bread, canned sardines, honey, sugar, sewing machines, beer, milk, butter, potatoes, marmalade, “hams and strings of onions hanging from the roof, and against the walls were gum boots and oilskins and hatchets and pairs of shears and spades and trowels and things for carrying mortar in and fishing-rods and fishing-nets and sacks”…where did they all come from? They could not have come from Narnia, and they could not all have lasted for a hundred years. Service to the Witch in order to get the necessities of life would seem to be commonplace.
Wouldn’t that make Narnians as a group traitors to Aslan? (Granted, she’s not calling for their blood, but if Aslan is determined to die for one person, why not just state before he dies that he’s dying for all of them?) (Logic 1 = Most things follow rules of cause-and-effect but there is still doubt as to how many things follow rules.)
6) Why didn’t Aslan prevent the genocide of the Narnians by the Telmarines? He is a god who is physically present; there is no question that he exists and knows what happens to everyone, and he definitely has power. So why not use it to save his people? Why depart Narnia for three hundred years–while his people and his land are suffering? (And he does depart. Trumpkin didn’t know that Aslan was real, and Nikabrik thought that appealing to the White Witch made more sense because she didn’t just fade out of stories.) (Wicked 2 = Overriding disharmony. Active limiting of its denizens. “Crapsack World” but livable–depending on who you are.)
I think that Lewis would have wanted people to see Narnia as logical and virtuous, and I’m sure that’s what he meant to write. But the world has quite a number of ethical and logical problems. I’ve only mentioned a few. I can’t look at it and say that Lewis succeeded in his intentions.
Great conceptual mapping, folks.
i think that both LOTR (with the loss of the Rings and the passing of the elves) and S.M. Sterling’s novels of The Change show definite movement over time along the horizontal axis.
The Dark Tower’s has worlds that fit ’bout every square on the map. Actually, it could be argued that the DH *itself* is at 0,0 and that the beams cross the map in a symmetric fashion.
This kind of sounds like the DD classification of good/evil, lawful/chaotic. I suppose the worlds are kind of like characters.
If you have Narnia, you should also have Charn, the native world of the White Witch. Wicked 3, Logic 1 or 2. Also there is the Wood Between the Worlds, very hard to define. Is it purely virtuous because nothing changes, or a strange kind of neutral where neither good or evil can exist? Is it completely logical if time has no meaning? Perhaps it is a true “Nonsense/Logic 0 = Stasis, no change occurs in world.”
In Inkheart, certain people called Silvertongues can enter any fictional world. The main one (I suppose we call it Inkworld?) is full of villains, but does have an overall positivity, and is certainly malleable. It’s first subject to the whims of its original author, and then to the meddling of any Silvertongue clever enough to write his own plot. Nonsense 1 or 2, Wicked 1.
What about Landover? Talk about a place that changes over time. It wobbles all over the place with the state of the king and the schemes of all sorts of baddies. Nonsense 1-3, Virtue 0 or 1 on average.
There are several versions of Faerie in fantasy books, from Name of the Wind to Bedlam’s Bard. It’s usually more on the side of nonsense but neutral in morality.
There are wall portals between worlds in the Abhorsen trilogy and Stardust. It’s sometimes hard to say which one is the portal world. The Old Kingdom is a strange one. I would say Nonsense 1 or 2. Close to neutral morality.
For an older world that moves along the nonsense/logic axis, see Brunner’s The Traveler in Black; the Traveler is an observer who sometimes acts, but what he mostly observes is the chaotic powers becoming more and more confined. The stories may be a bit antique for modern tastes as he was deliberately imitating Cabell, but IMO they still hang together well.
Some of the Liavek stories look at the eclipse of magic by technology and/or the reduction of magic to a packaged tool that anyone can use reliably (who needs Electro when you can get batteries at the hardware store?). One of the last stories has plans to use magic for rapid prototyping of flying machines — the machines would be completely unmagical but magic lets the retired top magician help his partner go quickly from idea to test flight.
what about the sub-cardinal points- rhyme, reason, wild, whimsy? If you apply them to their proper places the entire graph is ruined
Yeah, but where do the RAMA environments appear? Kind of Narnia-like?