I've been reading Brandon Sanderson recently. Love the way he wrote his two stand-alone novels: Elantris, and Warbreaker. He seems to have a fondness for creating fantasy worlds with chim names. I'm reading Mistborn now, which is a series rather than a novel.
I think recently I've been taken to fantasy stories. Still a big fan of Agatha Christie though. But I think my liking for fantasy is highly subject to how the author creates his/her fantasy world. How 'logical' are the events in the stories. Whether they follow the created 'rules of the world' or not.
In his website on fantasy writing tips, Brandon Sanderson categorized fantasy stories (those with 'magic') in a continuum in which one extreme is 'hard magic', and the other extreme being 'soft magic'. Hard magic are stories that have set rules in them, and although magic exist, they operate under certain constraints, and characters have to fulfill certain 'rules' to use magic. Soft magic is more towards 'magic' without any rules.
Take the famous Harry Potter series for example. The 'hardness' in the writing of the story falls in the fact that magic only occurs 1) when the character uses a wand, 2) the correct incantations are said and maybe other conditions like the wand is gestured properly. J. R. Tolkien's Gandalf in Lord of the Rings however uses soft magic. He doesn't have to explain how he does the magic. It is just there.
It's easy to create tension when writing stories that apply 'hard magic', because a character's abilities are definitely limited. In soft magic writing however, tension has to be created otherwise (e.g. Gandalf disappears after battling some evil creature, leaving Frodo and team to fend for themselves alone).
Sanderson's own stories, are said by himself to be of around 80% hard magic. I wouldn't say that the Harry Potter series are as 'hard' as Sanderson's fantasies, as some time here and there, some unexplained 'ancient magic' occurs to save Harry's skin. Sanderson's worlds, on the other hand, each have a distinct characteristic, and they pretty much abide by the rules most of the time. Even they don't, they don't deviate too far from them. And each 'world' he created are originally unique. Like Mistborn's character's abilities to use metal to create magic; and Warbreaker's Awakeners that use a person's 'Breath' to awaken objects. He is a creative man, and supports his created fantasy world well.
I wonder however of Sanderson's own perception of deity, for he uses deity as a common theme across all his stories, although in different ways. And all of them seem to imply that a person's religious belief is merely an extension of culture, and there is 'no right answer'. This is a 'logic' (if it were called to be so), that I am unable to comply with. If truth is truth, shouldn't it be absolute, and not relative? If there are 'many right answers', or 'no wrong answer' to a question, would the answer still be truth?
Therefore I would still tend to disagree when receiving comments like: there's no right answer to this problem; or you can't say absolutely that anything is wrong or right after all. In judging human behavior, everything still boils down to whether something is right or wrong, regardless of circumstances, and cultural aspects. And regarding God, He either exists or He doesn't, there's no such thing as "He exists if you believe Him to be".
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