Are you ready to go on the ultimate geek Easter Egg hunt? One nearly two centuries in the making?
Then gird your loins, get down to the local library, and get ready to start.
If it is possible to pin such a concept down to one author, than the English speaking world owes the birth of much of modern science fantasy to the singular Scottish author George MacDonald.
LOTR, NARNIA, STAR WARS, THE HUNGER GAMES, STAR TREK, SUPERNATURAL; each of these universes owes critical building blocks to the works of MacDonald.
An ancient race, their world changing around them, gather in procession to sail west across the great sea to a better world. They play their eerie instruments as they leave behind a world that advances in knowledge but not perhaps wisdom.
Strange beasts, similar to those of our Earth but smaller and more clever, capable even of speech, boil out of the dirt of a strange world.
A wrinkled, odd speaking old sage, urges the hero to stay in a distant and desolate place in meditation rather than go rescue his friends through battle. The hero ignores him and girds his loins to disastrous results.
A dystopian world, rich in resources and poor in freedoms, is ruled with an iron fist. Colonies of children with odd, uneducated, language patterns and courageous as young lions survive on their own on its fringes. Their hero, a courageous young woman who serves as their battle queen.
Courageous travelers extend their love and care to beings of other worlds out in the cosmos as they search for truth and knowledge.
Bare is the back without a brother behind it and as brothers the heroes face off with dark powers that lurk in the city that might be dark powers cloaking themselves as science, or mad sciences masquerading itself as arcane arts.
Go back and read his works. It is the ultimate geek Easter Egg hunt. Over a century ago these images, these scenes, can be found in one form or another in the fairy tales, romances, and adventures of George MacDonald.
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