Why don’t Elves do Calculus?

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been a creature of two worlds, genre wise: both Science Fiction and Fantasy have been my loves. I would read Asimov’s Foundation series and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings with equal, delirious abandon; when I read Le Guin, it was as likely to be A Wizard of Earthsea as The Dispossessed or The Left Hand of Darkness.

To say my tastes are broad is to engage in an audacious act of understatement. I happily lap up all kinds of Science Fiction, from the “Hard” (Asimov, Heinlein, Brin, Benford) to the “soft” (Robinson, Le Guin, Willis) to the Fantasy in Science Fiction Drag. I am a purist, when it comes to Genre, only in my love of all the endless permutations to which a genre can give birth.

Which is why I wonder, somewhat wistfully, why Elves don’t do Calculus.

Science Fiction has a broad range. There are so many varieties, so many world views, expressed, Hard-nosed Materialism to Froo-froo Mysticism, it’s all there. But Fantasy seems, more often, to collapse in on a smaller set of tendencies. Consider, by way of example, the Elf.

Almost always, an Elf is going to be something like this: Magical. Luddite: won’t use technology, especially the advanced kind. I was thinking about this because of the new Bordertown collection coming out, which I’m rather fanboying over. Bordertown, that city on the border between our world and the Fairy, is a bad place for technology. A lot of it doesn’t work. You can thank the Truebloods for that, or rather their magical world.

You think Elf, and you see a pretty humanoid in simple, homespun garb, dancing in a forest. Living in nifty houses built into trees. Weeping, like a stereotyped Native American in an anti-litter ad, over how the Dwarves are cutting down all the trees to fuel their forges. At night, the Elves dance under the stars, maybe hold mystical communion with them.

If it’s the World of Warcraft, the Elves speak like they are on a heavy dose of Valium, or maybe like they are just really, really stoned;  they fight off the Horde’s war machines with bows and arrows (no wonder you’re losing Ashenvale, you knobs).

But when, when, I ask, do we ever see an Elf pause in their dancing to do some science? They love Nature but never learn her language, Mathematics. They never whip out some Calculus to better understand the World they so love, never seek that vocabulary of Science that will undercover Nature’s hidden beauties.

I’ve long had this story kicking around in my head — the King of Elfland’s daughter runs away to our world because she saw, just once, the night sky in this world, and fell in love with the stars. She runs away so she can learn that scientific and mathematical vocabulary, so she can hear the World’s beauty in a new, and deeper, way. I can see her, eye pressed to a telescope (or maybe, modern like, sitting at a computer screen), in love with the technology that brings her beloved stars closer.

Someday I’m going to get that sucker written, because damn it, we need more Elves doing Calculus.