on imaginary magic
Exclusive: Lynn D. Jung, author of MOTHSBLOOD
It is not often that one is able to find writers in which criticism is not a fantasy. In which the world they ideate, the world they inspire to create through their imagery, through their characters, is a tangible one.
Science fiction and fantasy (SFF) are not realist genres. The intricate act of creating fictional worlds with creative physical properties, of developing languages, systems, cultures that could never exist within ours is self-contradictory. Lynn D. Jung, author of Bloomsbury’s upcoming SFF novel Mothsblood, is not a realist by this definition as well.
And yet, nothing in Mothsblood feels imaginary.
The thread that runs through Jung’s work is not about a fantasy. It is about the world working exactly how it was supposed to. It is about the rumors of alchemy that swirled throughout the Middle Ages in Europe coming to light as knowledge. It is about science as life, and life as science.
After then-up-and-coming novelist Italo Calvino submitted his second short story collection, The Crow, to his publisher, he wrote about his conflicting desires towards the genres he desired:
“My problem today is how to escape from the limits of these books, from this definition of me as a writer of adventures, fairy-tales, and fun, in which I can’t express myself or realize myself to the full.”
It is simple to see that Calvino’s classical frustration was not with fantasy itself, but with how quickly imagination is mistaken for excess. A persistent cultural logic: the further a work strays from realism, the less seriously it should be taken. Speculation is framed as indulgence, while realism is granted authority — as if the world, as it exists, were already coherent enough to explain itself.
Jung’s worlds, by contrast, are constructed from a careful observation of what actually exists: the hierarchies, the inequities. The small, subconscious contingencies that can make a system function or fail. The worlds of SFF writing can only feel tangible when it is built from the same textures and rules that govern our own: the way education gates opportunity, the weight of tradition, the legacies that shape what a student can see or touch.
Knowledge is not neutral, and cannot be flattened into aesthetics. In Mothsblood, magic and science are not opposites but strata. Folk magic, considered informal and illegitimate, occupies the low ground; alchemy and institutionalized knowledge, credentialed and expensive, sits above it. Both originate from the same impulse to understand the world, yet only one is allowed to call itself serious. This hierarchy is not incidental; it is simply her infrastructure.
Jung might insist on science when you speak to her. She may insist that her work is about knowledge, about the gatekeeping of society. She may discuss the inequities we are plagued with when she discusses her upcoming novel or her often sporadic writing process.
And yet, it might just be magic.
Whenever I think about the limitations (and judgments) placed on Science Fiction and Fantasy stories, I go back to C.S. Lewis: “Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
I also love to revisit the idea that “artists use lies to tell the truth.”