As a young reader fresh from the wonders of Narnia and Middle-earth, I was eager to find more stories of fantastical new worlds and ordinary children going on quests to defeat the powers of evil.

I tore through the classic tales of E. Nesbit and Christian authors George MacDonald and John White as well as secular children’s writers like Lloyd Alexander, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Susan Cooper.

But the more fantasy I read, the more I noticed a recurring and depressing trend: Many of the stories ended with the death or loss of magic.

What caused this emphasis on ‘death of magic’ themes?

In the last chapters of The Lord of the Rings, the Elves sail away into the West, leaving the wonders they worked in Middle-earth to fade and be forgotten.

In the third book of Le Guin’s series, the magic of Earthsea is dying and the world is falling into chaos.

At the end of Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence, not only are the Drew siblings told that magic is retreating from the world, but they must have all their memories of it erased.

Book after book seemed to preach the same lesson: there’s no longer room for magic in the world, and you’re better off forgetting that it ever existed.

I hated that idea, especially the memory-wiping, which to me seemed monstrously unfair. Why were so many fantasy authors determined to tear down the soaring castles they’d built in my imagination and instead leave me in a cramped 1970s apartment?

As a bullied child I was painfully aware of reality, but dreaming of far-off worlds gave me comfort. The last thing I wanted to hear was that my yearning for unseen wonders and my hopes of good triumphing over evil were childish and outdated, and that if I wanted to grow up, I had to forget about them.

Looking back, I believe the “death of magic” trend took root in late 20th-century fantasy because of widespread ambivalence about technology and the increasing pace of modern life. There was a popular expectation that science would soon answer all humanity’s questions, leaving no room for mystery. Some feared industrialization would destroy what little beauty and wonder remained.

How did fantasy recover from this ‘death of magic’?

Later fantasy, however, started to reject this notion.

One of the first to defy the trend was Pamela Dean in the early 1990s. Her Secret Country books describe a group of modern children who discover another realm and go on extraordinary adventures. But at the end, instead being forced to return to their own world and forget about magic, they are allowed to tell their parents and even move to the new world!

Around the same time, early works of urban fantasy emerged, such as Emma Bull’s adult novel War for the Oaks. Here, fairies and other mythological creatures secretly live in the modern world and make full use of its conveniences for their own ends.

Torch, book 3 of R. J. Anderson’s The Flight and Flame Trilogy series, releases Feb. 9, 2021. Read Lorehaven‘s advance review.

Many 21st-century authors have picked up on this urban fantasy idea, speculating about how various supernatural beings might live secret lives and have epic battles in the very same world we humans take for granted. Authors like Frank E. Peretti portray angelic warfare in books like This Present Darkness, and my own books¹ show the faery folk of modern England struggling to survive and rediscover their divinely appointed purpose. In any of these worlds, “low” or contemporary fantasy can still suggest many creative ways for supernatural and wondrous things to exist in our modern world. Other books, like Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series, celebrate the fun of blending contemporary culture and technology with magical and mythological elements.

Fantasy still often separates our reality from magical worlds

At the same time, classic portal fantasy’s popularity has waned. We rarely see traditionally published books about characters stumbling into magical worlds any more. Most “high” or historical/secondary world fantasy features characters born and raised in those worlds, and never explore the idea of people having to forget magic or the supernatural. That approach may seem like an improvement.

However, that approach may also result from our culture’s absorption of the late Stephen Jay Gould’s notion of “non-overlapping magisteria.” This idea completely separates the realms of mystical/religious and of material/scientific, and gives spiritual belief no bearing on factual reality.

If so, Christian fantasy stories can serve an important purpose in reminding readers that the supernatural and the natural are not exclusive, and that unseen beings and realms can and do influence the real world.

For instance, in my Nebula Award–nominated young-adult novel Ultraviolet, the neurological phenomenon known as synesthesia and other science fiction elements combine to teach divine sovereignty and providence to a confused, hurting teenage girl:

I heard the universe as an oratorio sung by a master choir of stars, accompanied by the orchestra of the planets and the percussion of satellites and moons. The aria they performed was a song to break the heart, full of tragic dissonance and deferred hope, and yet somewhere beneath it all was a piercing refrain of glory, glory, glory. And I sensed that not only the grand movements of the cosmos, but everything that had happened in my life, was a part of that song. … I realized then that even though I was a tiny speck in an infinite cosmos, a blip on the timeline of eternity, I was not without worth or purpose. And as long as I had a part in the music of the spheres, even if it was only a single grace note, I was not insignificant. Nor was I alone.

Modern readers may not have wholly lost their sense of wonder or their taste for fantasy. But too many have forgotten—or never learned—the Deep Magic of God’s grace. It’s up to us as Christian readers (and authors!) to restore their memory.