I have an arcane personal system for reading. It’s basically a hierarchy of dog-earing: big folds at the top corners of the page when I put a book down, and precise little tucks on the bottom corners when a passage strikes my interest. Later, when I have a pen, I trace back through the dog-eared pages and underline specific lines–although I don’t often remember what moved me at first reading. A casual observer can tell immediately which books did it for me: they are peppered at the edges with accordion folds, and shed tiny triangles of old paper when handled. I read Patternmaster, Octavia Butler’s first published novel, in an afternoon and it contains precisely one dog-ear: a poor rating.

The essential premise is that eons from now, the human race has split into three distinct evolutionary categories: Patternists, mutes, and Clayarks. Patternists are psychic knights who are all tenuously linked to one another through the “Pattern,” a sparkling web of power and consciousness. They control the world; to them, the non-psychic are little more than animals. Clayarks, on the other hand, are a proud tribal race of creatures who look like lions and lack the ability to read and control minds. These two groups are sworn enemies, so mortally separate that they scarcely ever come within a mile of each other without flinging arrows, psychic and material.

Patternists and Clayaks stared at each other across a gulf of disease and physical difference and comfortably told themselves the same lie about each other: “Not people.”

Mutes, humans like you and me, aren’t even part of the equation. There are rumors that the mute race once built a mechanized society, traveled to the stars, and that this somehow led to the present situation, but they’re dispelled as myths. Patternmaster is a future epic that, without its glimmer of temporal premise, would be a fantasy novel. There are Lords, horse-riding and fiefdoms. It only hints at the themes which later developed over the course of Butler’s significant oeuvre: gender issues, empathy, class struggle, and racial anxiety.

What I’d like to discuss here is not the plot of Patternmaster, nor the merits of Butler’s later career, but a trope within science fiction that this book perfectly expresses. Imagine a future so distant that our present has become mythological, and all the things we associate with science fiction–viz. technology, space travel, modernity–have become inward experiences. Instead of zap guns, we have telepathic warfare. Instead of travel to the stars, we have a starlike map of consciousness. It’s a distinctly unfuturistic future, one where society functions like juiced-up medieval history, and monarchy and the mind are the only forms of power.

The implication, presumably, is that our current epoch is a folly, an outlier, and that once we shake our obsession with gadgetry, we’ll understand the full force of the focused human mind, and replace theories and ideas with myths and stories. It relegates the entire span of the industrialized world into a chronological blip, rendered irrelevant by time. This genre deserves a name, and I propose Mythological Futurism.

Mythological Futurism has a strong lineage. We see elements of it in the entheogenic space travel and interstellar feudalism of Dune; all over the work of Samuel Delany, particularly in the Einstein Intersection, which takes place in a future so remote that the Beatles are half-remembered as gods; and in the broad chronological strokes of Olaf Stapledon, of course. Clifford Simak’s A Choice of Gods goes there beautifully, too, as does much of the canon of Jack Vance (undoubtedly there are scores more, and I look to my readers to fill me in). These are post-historical narratives, stories that have mutated far beyond us and somehow returned full-circle to the slow dreamtime of early human history.

At its worst, placing a narrative in such a remote future can turn science fiction into fantasy, absolving the writer of the responsibility of operating within real-world, or extrapolated real-world, physics. At its best, it zooms the human struggle out to a poetic and universal whole. I can’t say exactly where Patternmaster falls on that spectrum; in a sense it’s too grounded to be fantasy, but it’s also too concise to thrill as an ambitious work of science fiction (only one dog-ear, after all). That said, the difference between science fiction and fantasy, in this case, is essentially semantic; here is a world where technologies are so advanced as to be invisible, and its effects could be classified as magical if Butler chose to describe them as such.

Perhaps the distinction, then, lies in the gradients of myth. If, in the culture of its telling, a myth is regarded as a true account of the remote past, then a writer who scries forward through the same ahistorical fog–who tucks technology back into a magical space, building fables for remote aeons–is building a kind of sacred narrative for the future.

Arthur C. Clarke, among other things, is famous for a set of axioms known as “Clarke’s Laws.” The most quoted of these is undoubtedly Clarke’s Third Law, which states that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This idea has been roundly exploited throughout the history of science fiction, but never quite as creatively as in Waldo, the novella by Robert A. Heinlein. Waldo’s premise is essentially an inversion of Clarke’s Third Law; it’s as though Heinlein sat down to answer the question, “what if sufficiently advanced magic were indistinguishable from technology?”

Waldo takes place in a near future where wireless radioactive power runs everything from cars to telephone networks, a bright future of limitless and faultless energy. Inconveniently, however, major systems are failing: airplanes crash, cars self-destruct, power grids go down, all for no apparent reason. Scientists practically lose their minds over it; by definition, the power should be mathematically faultless, as unerring as the laws of physics. The problem is brought to the era’s de-facto savant, a technical genius who suffers from myasthenia gravis and lives in a weightless dome in space — our titular Waldo.

I’ll save you the machinations of Waldo’s technical details and subplots, and give you this: Waldo determines, after much head-scratching, that the issue at hand is mental, not physical. The machines are failing not because of any fault of their own, but because the people operating the machines no longer believe they work. The only way to fix them, which he does, is simply to think them back into functionality. To believe that they work.

Waldo finds, much to his surprise, that magic is real, and that it has been “set loose on the world.” The things which scientists call “energy fields,” “radiation,” and “mathematical dimensions” are actually qualities of magical reality; after all, Heinlein asks, what is the difference between a quantum-physical “other” dimension and what adepts of the arcane might refer to as “another world”? Might the distinction merely be semantic? Indeed, Waldo was written during the early years of quantum theory, and it’s clear that Heinlein saw something mystical in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

Suppose…that the human race were blind, had never developed eyes. No matter how civilized, enlightened, and scientific the race might have become, it is difficult to see how such a race could ever have developed the concepts of astronomy. They might know of the Sun as a cyclic source of energy having a changing, directional character, for the Sun is so overpowering that it may be “seen” with the skin. They would notice it and invent instruments to trap it and examine it.

But the pale stars, would they ever notice them? It seem[s] most unlikely. The very notion of the celestial universe, its silent depths of starlit grandeur, would be beyond them. Even if one of their scientists should have the concept forced on him in such a manner that he was obliged to accept the fantastic, incredible thesis as fact, how then would he go about investigating its details?

— Waldo, on thinking outside the box.

The machines in Waldo’s world function because science, like magic, is iterative: it dictates reality rather than describing it. And, conversely, they break down because people have ceased to believe as resolutely in the infallibility of scientific progress. From the Englightenment onwards, humanity had simply sublimated its dependence on magic, sorcery, and witch-doctors onto the new illuminated discipline of Science; everything, from the laws of physics to the mad whirling of electrons, was incanted into existence by collective belief.

Heinlein’s story is about a crisis of the spirit, a moment in human history where the confidence of our scientific men and women can no longer hold the physical world in place. In order to resolve this crisis, people must accept the magical, bringing it back together with science in the mutually functional relationship where it has always belonged, and from which it has long been alienated. In Waldo’s thesis, magic was aborted by the rational world before it had time to become science.

Dealing with magic is slippery business for sci-fi, even for a master like Heinlein (in fact, the second story in my edition, “Magic, Inc.” tackles similar themes but is essentially worthless), because magic and fantasy operate in a different conceptual framework. Science-fiction generally needs to take place in a rationally continuous world, one in which even a radical future can be reasonably extrapolated from our current existence — that’s what makes sci-fi political, among other things. Fantasy, on the other hand, has free reign to invent the laws of physics from scratch, often taking place in a different sphere entirely, and incompatible aspects of reality can always be explained away. This, in my mind, makes it a genre that is relatively incapable of being critical.

Waldo manages to escape this pitfall by finding a way to make magic (and hence the irrational) coexist peacefully, even naturally, with science (and hence the rational). I find this consolidation of left and right brains, of ancient and modern, of left-hand and right-hand paths, to be a monumental achievement. It’s maybe even the Shangri-la of science fiction, which is, at its core, art about reason — magic about science.