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The fantastic appeal of fantasy

The fantasy genre starts where science ends

 

    Few things can brighten up a dark morning in a Scottish seaside resort during an Atlantic storm. Yet while sheltering in a bookshop from the rain, I had a moment of sunny revelation. Stacked almost as high as my 11-year-old self were copies of The Lord of the Rings, with a cover illustration that promised mystery and magic. That chance discovery started a lifelong love of the fantasy genre¹, both as reader and writer.

    The fantasy genre has had more and more success, but today we’re in the middle of an unprecedented fantasy boom. Sales continue to rise and it is now the biggest genre in publishing. The more rational the world gets, with super-science all around us, the more we demand the irrational in our fiction.

    Fantasy is not simply a case of swords² and sorcery³. Yes, there is that by the shelf. But the genre is as broad as the imagination. The genre starts where science ends.

    “In these modern times, where most of us sit at computers, fantasy books offer a chance to break out of mundane moments,” says Mark Newton, an editor with the genre. “People like to explore themes that go beyond the limited palette that literary fiction claims to offer.”

    A search for the origins of fantasy will usually have academics muttering about Beowulf or Homer’s The Iliad, but they come from a time when all stories were fantasy: gods and monsters and supernatural artefacts with humanity caught in the middle. The first modern fantasy writer is usually considered to be William Morris, in the late 19th Century. But it was the early 20th Century where fantasy really started to gain status.

    Fantasy fiction has always been about visionary ideas. You can get artful words in plenty of literary fiction, but being able to see beyond the boundaries⁴ of the world around us — now that’s a special skill.

    I don’t write fantasy fiction simply to provide a trapdoor⁵ from the real world. For me, the genre is about the reality. But instead of coming up against it, fantasy maps the unconscious aspirations of our modern society through allegory in story- -forms as old as humanity. It’s about turning off the mobile phone and the computer and remembering who we are in the deepest parts of ourselves.

(Mark Chadbourn. www.telegraph.co.uk, 12.04.2008. Adaptado.)

 

¹genre: gênero. Categoria distintiva de composição literária, como romance, poesia etc.
²sword: espada.
³sorcery: feitiçaria.
⁴boundary: fronteira.
⁵trapdoor: alçapão.

According to the first paragraph, the author reveals that he first got interested in the literary fantasy genre

THE FLAT EARTH CRUISE: SERIOUSLY, PEOPLE?

 

Organizers of an annual conference that brings together people who believe that our planet is not
round are planning a cruise to the supposed edge of the Earth. They’re looking for the ice wall that
holds back the oceans.
The journey will take place in 2020, the Flat Earth International Conference (FEIC) recently
[5] announced on its website. The goal? To test so-called flat-Earthers’ assertion that the Earth is a
flattened disk surrounded at its edge by a towering wall of ice.
Details about the event, including the dates, are forthcoming, according to the FEIC, which calls
the cruise “the biggest, boldest adventure yet”. However, it’s worth noting that nautical maps and
navigation technologies such as global positioning systems (GPS) work as they do because the
[10] Earth is … a globe.
Believers in a flat Earth argue that images showing a curved horizon are fake and that photos of a
round Earth from space are part of a vast conspiracy perpetrated by NASA and other space agencies
to hide Earth’s flatness. “This likely began during the cold war”, the Flat Earth Society (FES) says.
“The U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. were obsessed with beating each other into space to the point that each
[15] faked their accomplishments in an attempt to keep pace with the other’s supposed achievements.”
These and other flat-Earth assertions appear on the website of the FES, allegedly the world’s oldest
official flat Earth organization, dating to the early 1800s.
However, the ancient Greeks demonstrated that Earth was a sphere more than 2.000 years ago,
and the gravity that keeps everything on the planet from flying off into space could exist only on a
[20] spherical world.
But in diagrams shared on the FES website, the planet appears as a pancake-like disk with the
North Pole smacked in the center and an edge “surrounded on all sides by an ice wall that holds
the oceans back”. This ice wall – thought by some flat-Earthers to be Antarctica – is the destination
of the promised FEIC cruise.
[25] There’s just one catch: navigational charts and systems that guide cruise ships and other vessels
around the Earth’s oceans are all based on the principle of a round Earth, says Henk Keijer, a
former cruise ship captain with 23 years of experience.
GPS relies on a network of dozens of satellites orbiting thousands of miles above Earth; signals
from the satellites beam down to the receiver inside of a GPS device, and at least three satellites are
[30] required to pinpoint a precise position because of Earth’s curvature, Keijer explained. “Had the
Earth been flat, a total of three satellites would have been enough to provide this information to
everyone on Earth”. He adds: “But it is not enough, because the Earth is round”.
Whether or not, the FEIC cruise will rely on GPS or deploy an entirely new flat-Earth-based
navigation system for finding the end of the world remains to be seen.

Adaptado de livescience.com, 30/05/2017.

Had the Earth been flat, a total of three satellites would have been enough to provide this information (l. 30-31)

In relation to the rest of the statement, the underlined fragment has the objective of:

THE FLAT EARTH CRUISE: SERIOUSLY, PEOPLE?

 

Organizers of an annual conference that brings together people who believe that our planet is not
round are planning a cruise to the supposed edge of the Earth. They’re looking for the ice wall that
holds back the oceans.
The journey will take place in 2020, the Flat Earth International Conference (FEIC) recently
[5] announced on its website. The goal? To test so-called flat-Earthers’ assertion that the Earth is a
flattened disk surrounded at its edge by a towering wall of ice.
Details about the event, including the dates, are forthcoming, according to the FEIC, which calls
the cruise “the biggest, boldest adventure yet”. However, it’s worth noting that nautical maps and
navigation technologies such as global positioning systems (GPS) work as they do because the
[10] Earth is … a globe.
Believers in a flat Earth argue that images showing a curved horizon are fake and that photos of a
round Earth from space are part of a vast conspiracy perpetrated by NASA and other space agencies
to hide Earth’s flatness. “This likely began during the cold war”, the Flat Earth Society (FES) says.
“The U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. were obsessed with beating each other into space to the point that each
[15] faked their accomplishments in an attempt to keep pace with the other’s supposed achievements.”
These and other flat-Earth assertions appear on the website of the FES, allegedly the world’s oldest
official flat Earth organization, dating to the early 1800s.
However, the ancient Greeks demonstrated that Earth was a sphere more than 2.000 years ago,
and the gravity that keeps everything on the planet from flying off into space could exist only on a
[20] spherical world.
But in diagrams shared on the FES website, the planet appears as a pancake-like disk with the
North Pole smacked in the center and an edge “surrounded on all sides by an ice wall that holds
the oceans back”. This ice wall – thought by some flat-Earthers to be Antarctica – is the destination
of the promised FEIC cruise.
[25] There’s just one catch: navigational charts and systems that guide cruise ships and other vessels
around the Earth’s oceans are all based on the principle of a round Earth, says Henk Keijer, a
former cruise ship captain with 23 years of experience.
GPS relies on a network of dozens of satellites orbiting thousands of miles above Earth; signals
from the satellites beam down to the receiver inside of a GPS device, and at least three satellites are
[30] required to pinpoint a precise position because of Earth’s curvature, Keijer explained. “Had the
Earth been flat, a total of three satellites would have been enough to provide this information to
everyone on Earth”. He adds: “But it is not enough, because the Earth is round”.
Whether or not, the FEIC cruise will rely on GPS or deploy an entirely new flat-Earth-based
navigation system for finding the end of the world remains to be seen.

Adaptado de livescience.com, 30/05/2017.

These and other flat-Earth assertions appear on the website of the FES, allegedly the world’s oldest official flat Earth organization, dating to the early 1800s. (l. 16-17)

In relation to the fragment above, the pieces of information introduced in the fifth paragraph (l. 18-20) serve the following purpose:

THE FLAT EARTH CRUISE: SERIOUSLY, PEOPLE?

 

Organizers of an annual conference that brings together people who believe that our planet is not
round are planning a cruise to the supposed edge of the Earth. They’re looking for the ice wall that
holds back the oceans.
The journey will take place in 2020, the Flat Earth International Conference (FEIC) recently
[5] announced on its website. The goal? To test so-called flat-Earthers’ assertion that the Earth is a
flattened disk surrounded at its edge by a towering wall of ice.
Details about the event, including the dates, are forthcoming, according to the FEIC, which calls
the cruise “the biggest, boldest adventure yet”. However, it’s worth noting that nautical maps and
navigation technologies such as global positioning systems (GPS) work as they do because the
[10] Earth is … a globe.
Believers in a flat Earth argue that images showing a curved horizon are fake and that photos of a
round Earth from space are part of a vast conspiracy perpetrated by NASA and other space agencies
to hide Earth’s flatness. “This likely began during the cold war”, the Flat Earth Society (FES) says.
“The U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. were obsessed with beating each other into space to the point that each
[15] faked their accomplishments in an attempt to keep pace with the other’s supposed achievements.”
These and other flat-Earth assertions appear on the website of the FES, allegedly the world’s oldest
official flat Earth organization, dating to the early 1800s.
However, the ancient Greeks demonstrated that Earth was a sphere more than 2.000 years ago,
and the gravity that keeps everything on the planet from flying off into space could exist only on a
[20] spherical world.
But in diagrams shared on the FES website, the planet appears as a pancake-like disk with the
North Pole smacked in the center and an edge “surrounded on all sides by an ice wall that holds
the oceans back”. This ice wall – thought by some flat-Earthers to be Antarctica – is the destination
of the promised FEIC cruise.
[25] There’s just one catch: navigational charts and systems that guide cruise ships and other vessels
around the Earth’s oceans are all based on the principle of a round Earth, says Henk Keijer, a
former cruise ship captain with 23 years of experience.
GPS relies on a network of dozens of satellites orbiting thousands of miles above Earth; signals
from the satellites beam down to the receiver inside of a GPS device, and at least three satellites are
[30] required to pinpoint a precise position because of Earth’s curvature, Keijer explained. “Had the
Earth been flat, a total of three satellites would have been enough to provide this information to
everyone on Earth”. He adds: “But it is not enough, because the Earth is round”.
Whether or not, the FEIC cruise will rely on GPS or deploy an entirely new flat-Earth-based
navigation system for finding the end of the world remains to be seen.

Adaptado de livescience.com, 30/05/2017.

In order to support his point of view, the writer of the text quotes an authoritative source in the fragment below:

THE FLAT EARTH CRUISE: SERIOUSLY, PEOPLE?

 

Organizers of an annual conference that brings together people who believe that our planet is not
round are planning a cruise to the supposed edge of the Earth. They’re looking for the ice wall that
holds back the oceans.
The journey will take place in 2020, the Flat Earth International Conference (FEIC) recently
[5] announced on its website. The goal? To test so-called flat-Earthers’ assertion that the Earth is a
flattened disk surrounded at its edge by a towering wall of ice.
Details about the event, including the dates, are forthcoming, according to the FEIC, which calls
the cruise “the biggest, boldest adventure yet”. However, it’s worth noting that nautical maps and
navigation technologies such as global positioning systems (GPS) work as they do because the
[10] Earth is … a globe.
Believers in a flat Earth argue that images showing a curved horizon are fake and that photos of a
round Earth from space are part of a vast conspiracy perpetrated by NASA and other space agencies
to hide Earth’s flatness. “This likely began during the cold war”, the Flat Earth Society (FES) says.
“The U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. were obsessed with beating each other into space to the point that each
[15] faked their accomplishments in an attempt to keep pace with the other’s supposed achievements.”
These and other flat-Earth assertions appear on the website of the FES, allegedly the world’s oldest
official flat Earth organization, dating to the early 1800s.
However, the ancient Greeks demonstrated that Earth was a sphere more than 2.000 years ago,
and the gravity that keeps everything on the planet from flying off into space could exist only on a
[20] spherical world.
But in diagrams shared on the FES website, the planet appears as a pancake-like disk with the
North Pole smacked in the center and an edge “surrounded on all sides by an ice wall that holds
the oceans back”. This ice wall – thought by some flat-Earthers to be Antarctica – is the destination
of the promised FEIC cruise.
[25] There’s just one catch: navigational charts and systems that guide cruise ships and other vessels
around the Earth’s oceans are all based on the principle of a round Earth, says Henk Keijer, a
former cruise ship captain with 23 years of experience.
GPS relies on a network of dozens of satellites orbiting thousands of miles above Earth; signals
from the satellites beam down to the receiver inside of a GPS device, and at least three satellites are
[30] required to pinpoint a precise position because of Earth’s curvature, Keijer explained. “Had the
Earth been flat, a total of three satellites would have been enough to provide this information to
everyone on Earth”. He adds: “But it is not enough, because the Earth is round”.
Whether or not, the FEIC cruise will rely on GPS or deploy an entirely new flat-Earth-based
navigation system for finding the end of the world remains to be seen.

Adaptado de livescience.com, 30/05/2017.

SOBREVIVEREMOS NA TERRA?

 

Tenho interesse pessoal no tempo. Primeiro, meu best-seller chama-se Uma breve história do
tempo. Segundo, por ser alguém que, aos 21 anos, foi informado pelos médicos de que teria apenas
mais cinco anos de vida e que completou 76 anos em 2018. Tenho uma aguda e desconfortável
consciência da passagem do tempo. Durante a maior parte da minha vida, convivi com a sensação
[5] de que estava fazendo hora extra.
Parece que nosso mundo enfrenta uma instabilidade política maior do que em qualquer outro
momento. Uma grande quantidade de pessoas sente ter ficado para trás. Como resultado, temos
nos voltado para políticos populistas, com experiência de governo limitada e cuja capacidade para
tomar decisões ponderadas em uma crise ainda está para ser testada. A Terra sofre ameaças em
[10] tantas frentes que é difícil permanecer otimista. Os perigos são grandes e numerosos demais. O
planeta está ficando pequeno para nós. Nossos recursos físicos estão se esgotando a uma velocidade
alarmante. A mudança climática foi uma trágica dádiva humana ao planeta. Temperaturas cada vez
mais elevadas, redução da calota polar, desmatamento, superpopulação, doenças, guerras, fome,
escassez de água e extermínio de espécies; todos esses problemas poderiam ser resolvidos, mas
[15] até hoje não foram. O aquecimento global está sendo causado por todos nós. Queremos andar de
carro, viajar e desfrutar um padrão de vida melhor. Mas quando as pessoas se derem conta do que
está acontecendo, pode ser tarde demais.
Estamos no limiar de um período de mudança climática sem precedentes. No entanto, muitos políticos
negam a mudança climática provocada pelo homem, ou a capacidade do homem de revertê-la.
[20] O derretimento das calotas polares ártica e antártica reduz a fração de energia solar refletida de volta
no espaço e aumenta ainda mais a temperatura. A mudança climática pode destruir a Amazônia e
outras florestas tropicais, eliminando uma das principais ferramentas para a remoção do dióxido
de carbono da atmosfera. A elevação da temperatura dos oceanos pode provocar a liberação de
grandes quantidades de dióxido de carbono. Ambos os fenômenos aumentariam o efeito estufa e
[25] exacerbariam o aquecimento global, tornando o clima em nosso planeta parecido com o de Vênus:
atmosfera escaldante e chuva ácida a uma temperatura de 250 ºC. A vida humana seria impossível.
Precisamos ir além do Protocolo de Kyoto – o acordo internacional adotado em 1997 – e cortar
imediatamente as emissões de carbono. Temos a tecnologia. Só precisamos de vontade política.
Quando enfrentamos crises parecidas no passado, havia algum outro lugar para colonizar. Estamos
[30] ficando sem espaço, e o único lugar para ir são outros mundos. Tenho esperança e fé de que nossa
engenhosa raça encontrará uma maneira de escapar dos sombrios grilhões do planeta e, deste
modo, sobreviver ao desastre. A mesma providência talvez não seja possível para os milhões de
outras espécies que vivem na Terra, e isso pesará em nossa consciência.
Mas somos, por natureza, exploradores. Somos motivados pela curiosidade, essa qualidade
[35] humana única. Foi a curiosidade obstinada que levou os exploradores a provar que a Terra não era
plana, e é esse mesmo impulso que nos leva a viajar para as estrelas na velocidade do pensamento,
instigando-nos a realmente chegar lá. E sempre que realizamos um grande salto, como nos pousos
lunares, exaltamos a humanidade, unimos povos e nações, introduzimos novas descobertas e novas
tecnologias. Deixar a Terra exige uma abordagem global combinada – todos devem participar.

STEPHEN HAWKING (1942-2018)
Adaptado de Breves respostas para grandes questões. Rio de Janeiro: Intrínseca, 2018.

 

The texts Sobreviveremos na Terra? and The flat Earth cruise: seriously, people? share one issue.

The issue mentioned in both texts is the following one:

(Disponível em: https://www.bing.com/images/. Acesso em: 15 jul. 2018.)

 

Na tirinha, o humor é evidenciado por meio