I have spent most of my adult life as a writer of fantasy and science fiction; I see the story, of course, in that light.
In this re-creation, I have of necessity used many sources. I have, of course, read commentaries about the "Masonic" symbolism of the opera—Mozart and Shikaneder were both Masons—and seen the Ingmar Bergman film which made a superstar of Haakon Hagegaard as Papageno. I might as well say at once that I adopted from Bergman only one idea: that Pamina was the daughter of the Queen of the Night by Sar-astro. This makes good sense of the whole tangle of relationships, even to the rivalry between the Priest-King and the Lady, otherwise inexplicable.
Other influences on my version include the persistent legend that an ancient civilization before our own was destroyed by its misuse of certain sciences, and that one of these was a blasphemous attempt to interbreed man and animal. In the light of current research into recombinant DNA that is not nearly as fantastic as it sounded when I first read about it.
I mentioned science fiction fandom above; there is a commonplace, facetious remark that "reality is a crutch for people unable to handle science fiction." Some people, desperate for their preferred reading to be treated as "respectable"—that is, on a par with popular fiction about adultery in the suburbs—grow very angry when it's quoted at them. But my favored reader is one who can read with his full awareness and does not need to be pacified by familiar settings or such characters as can be found on the street corner or in the soap opera of the mundane world.
So I like to go one step further and say that science fiction is itself a crutch for people unable to handle fantasy. As science fiction forces people to imagine the technology and cultures of the ftiture, without the crutch of the here and now—tales of adultery in the suburbs, the familiar "hairdryer novel"—so fantasy forces the reader to confront his or her own archetypes, the images which move within the human subconscious, without even the "imagined future" binding us to our own mundane world. Here we move directly among our own psychological archetypes, the inward needs of our minds and spirit. In the words of Michael Straight, commenting on J. R. R. Tolkien, "Fantasy does not obscure, but illuminates, the inner nature of reality." Such creatures of eternal imagination as the bird-man Papageno, or the Queen of the Night, do not need to be explained by such commonplace imaginings of mundane life as recombinant DNA; like the Cheshire Cat and the Wicked Stepmother, they exist within the collective imagination, if not of the human race, at least of the English-speaking universe.
Is this, then, fantasy, science fiction, parable, allegory, or simply a fairy tale to feed the child within us all?
That answer is for the reader. As a writer I only stand here with my magic flute and play you a magical tune.
—Marion Zimmer Bradley,
Berkeley, California,
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE