Ted offers a convincing counter-example to my post on metaphor, in the comments to the post:

Suppose you have a story about a kingdom where the king becomes ill, and then there's a series of crop failures. In a mainstream story, the link between these two things has to be metaphorical. In a fantasy story, if the crop failures are explicitly described as being of supernatural origin, the idea of a causal link to the king's illness is not necessarily an unreasonable inference.

And he's right. In this case, there would clearly be a rational causal link between the two cases. The fantasy reader would expect it and find it. However, I don't think that's the only way that the story could have been played.

For example, let us suppose that it was clear in the story that the king's illness was a metaphor for something. Don't know what. Doesn't matter. Then, at the end of the story, we come across a farm where the crops are, miraculously, recovering from some illness, and that is where we leave the story. It should be possible to form that story in such a way that the reader doesn't assume that the two events are rationally, causally linked. They might be, but they need not necessarily be, particularly if no mechanism for a rational causal link is shown. The change in direction of the metaphor should be clear, and the reader should take away from it the idea that the metaphor has now changed. Admittedly, this probably wouldn't be a particularly good story, but it should be a possible story. The challenge for the writer of that story would be to make the reader realise that the link between the events isn't causal in any rational way.

As Ted points out, in speculative fiction, metaphors are often literalised, and we draw from that a specific set of protocols, particularly when we are used to seeing it within a rationalist tradition of storytelling. Nonetheless, it is possible to make metaphor flesh and still keep the rules of metaphor, rather than overlying the rules of rationality.

I find myself extremely uncomfortable with the idea that magic must have a rational cause, with the idea that anything supernatural by necessity should have a causal link to something that has come before in the story (and I should say I don't think that Ted is arguing this). To me that doesn't seem very, well, magical.

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Enough on metaphors.

I've finally finished rewriting The Sleepers. Again. Now that I'm not revising a novel and I'm not writing a novel, I'm not sure what to do with myself. I guess I should start the next novel. Perhaps easier said than done.

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Over the couple of weeks, the house joined to ours has been knocked down. This is a distinctly off-putting experience. It's like being in a small earthquake for 7 hours a day. The walls shake. Things rattle. Rubble is lying around. There are cracks in the outside of our wall. Still, I think the worst is over.

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So, it appears that we are to have identity cards in the UK. The government promised in their election manifesto to introduce voluntary ID cards. Yet now they have passed a law requiring anyone who gets a new passport after 2010 to also get an ID card. Perhaps in the strictest sense this is 'voluntary', but in any practical sense, it is not. If someone could give me a single, convincing reason why we should all carry identity cards I might be less angry, but I've yet to hear one.