Myth Against the Machine: A Telos for Fantasy in the Modern Age

What is the point of fantasy, anyway?

To answer that question, I’d like to share with you the story of how I, a lifelong epic fantasy fan and an independent author, rediscovered my love for the genre after encountering one of the best fantasy stories ever.

And then I’d like to tell you about another, very different story, a mesmerizing, beautiful story that deserves to be heralded as one of the greatest achievements of our age and indeed in the history of English literature.

And along the way, I’d like to suggest a telos, an end or purpose, of the fantasy genre.

But before we go any farther, I have a very simple question for you: assuming you’re a reader, are you generally happy with the state of epic fantasy in the current year of 2025?

Yes? Then by all means put this article aside and go dive into whatever you’re reading (or do literally anything else). I don’t wish to waste your time.

But if you answered no, allow me to plant the seeds for a crazy idea: the problem with modern fantasy is… modernity itself.

If you’ll be so kind as to indulge me, I’ll be happy to explain.

What’s the Matter With Modernity?

You don’t have to be Nostradamus to see that the civilization formerly known as the West is in trouble. All you really need to do is look around.

Nor do you need me to tell you that our civilization is drowning in various overlapping and compounding problems.

Again… look around.

We Westmen have fallen far indeed from our heyday, whenever that may have been (I’m tempted to point to the fin de siècle, but I’m sure there are other compelling answers).

There are many worthwhile approaches to making sense of what has gone wrong, and I have neither the will nor the ability to do justice to them here without massively inflating this article.  Suffice it to say that I think there is a great deal of merit in Dr. Kaczynski’s thesis of the “power process” and its application to industrial civilization, which I will paraphrase as follows: when things become too easy, people develop psychological problems unless they can formulate and pursue a worthwhile goal that entails some effort.

(I’ll add that as reprehensible as Kaczynski’s actions were, he was an insightful theorist and critic of modernity). 

But because the modern post-West is part dopamine techno-cornucopia and part bureaucratic longhouse as a consequence of the Managerial Revolution (itself a response to 20th-century capitalism, as per Sam Francis’s updating of Burnham’s thesis), we find ourselves atomized and managed to death.

Thus, the problem, greatly summarized, is that we are deracinated: we have no consciousness of our roots, or of ourselves as anything more than consumers in a depersonalized marketplace.

This ethos is the animating spirit of the twenty-first century, or at least it has been until very recently.

It is the fundamental reason we are besieged by “deconstruction”: nations, for example, are reduced to marketplaces and chunks of real estate precisely because we reduce ourselves to nothing more than consumers and residents.

What is missing, of course, is the spirit, the sense of the transcendent. And this, I submit, is the missing ingredient from a great deal of modern fantasy, and the telos or end/purpose we need to bring back to it.

And to tell you how I came to that conclusion, I’ll tell you the story of how I discovered that epic fantasy story that helped me fall in love with the genre all over again.

The Original Ring-Lord

Two years ago, in the summer of 2023, my wife was pregnant with our daughter, and I was frantically trying to publish as many books as I could before our little bundle of joy arrived to change our lives forever.

(As it turned out, I managed three).

But as the fate-spinning Norns would have it, that summer I had another experience that also changed my life forever: I finally sat down and watched the entirety of Opera North’s performance of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle (it’s technically called Der Ring des Nibelungen, The Nibelung’s Ring, but this has long been abbreviated to Ring Cycle).

Even if you have yet to sit down and watch the entirety of Wagner’s monumental fifteen-hour cycle of four operas, there’s a good chance that you’re familiar with one particular piece: the Ride of the Valkyries, which famously featured in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now.

I was mesmerized first of all by the music, which is magisterial, and secondly by the mythological and heroic themes.

The Ring Cycle, greatly summarized, is a story of gods, heroes, one particularly heroic valkyrie, and a Nibelung (essentially a dark elf or dwarf-like being), and the whole thing centers around a quest to possess a cursed magic ring.

Not only does the element of the ring obviously evoke Tolkien, there are also numerous aspects of the characterization, plot, and motifs that present powerful comparisons to Lord of the Rings.

Indeed, in many respects watching the Ring Cycle allowed me to see Lord of the Rings as a commentary on, and inversion and/or amplification of, certain key themes within the Ring Cycle.  It’s a beautiful, tragic story, and although we are not accustomed to thinking of 19th-century opera as epic fantasy, the Ring Cycle is proof that we should: it is a story that pulses with the power of myth.

And as a proud scion of Germanic ancestors, I can say quite honestly that for me, watching the Ring Cycle was a profoundly transcendent, supernatural experience.

While this was not my first encounter with the gods of my ancestors, it was one that left a deep and lasting imprint on me: I awoke from my fatigue with modern fantasy, with its diagrammatic magic systems and post-modern grimdark cynicism (as the case may be), and rediscovered a vital world that hummed with creative anima.

Here, I saw, was a vision of what epic fantasy could be—or rather, could again become: a world of myth and mystery, where gods and fae-like beings walk among mortals, a world where the numinous, the wondrous, is real.

If the machine of modernity atomizes us, sundering us from our roots, myths like Wagner’s Ring Cycle restore us.

For my own part, I can say that the Ring Cycle reconnected me to my ancestral roots at the precise moment I most desperately needed them.

Here, I saw, was a myth against modernity, a myth against the machine: Wagner’s operas evoke the legended prehistory of forested Germania, of the land that ate Roman legions, the land where Wotan walked (and who can say, perhaps still walks).

To evoke the myths of a particular place in so powerful and intentional a fashion necessarily speaks to the power of place, to the roots of a particular folk in a particular homeland.  This speaks to a truth that has been all but forgotten (or rather, purposefully sabotaged and erased) in our own cosmopolitan, atomized civilization: if one wishes to conjure by the myths of a particular land, one must necessarily speak to a particular folk audience.

Great art may well carry universal appeal, but its power lies in its authentic, organic connection to the collective mythic consciousness of a particular people, a particular folk.

Creatively, my encounter with the Ring Cycle propelled me toward the creation of my novel Augury of Blood (Legacy of Urmanghor, book one), which synthesizes influences from Wagner along with The Odyssey and Bronze Age European history and comparative Indo-European mythology.

Naturally, I had to dedicate it to the immortal memory of Richard Wagner.

I adore the Ring Cycle, and believe passionately in its power as a myth articulated against the atomization and dehumanization of modernity.

But there is another story I want to share with you, a story that deserves to be hailed as one of the greatest achievements in English literature in our own age (and indeed, across the ages), a story of almost incomprehensible beauty and profound thematic depth.

Heaven and Hell Against the Machine

Now and then, once in a very great while, I encounter a book that profoundly changes my reading experience and upends everything I thought I knew.

One such book is Virtue’s End, by independent fantasy/horror writer Joseph Sale.

(Here a full disclosure: after reading some of Sale’s work and corresponding with him, I have come to see him as a very dear friend, and he has also reviewed my novel Augury of Blood).

Virtue’s End is epic poetry, and the comparison I find myself reaching for is Paradise Lost, a work that is also near and dear to me. If this sounds like hyperbole, it is not: for reasons both thematic and poetic, Virtue’s End deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Milton’s epic.

The story itself is narrated by a character who quite fittingly calls himself Horus (though he has many names, and seems to be a form of the author himself). His quest is to use the powers of heaven and hell to save Ethismos, the realm of imagination, from the looming threat of a megalomaniacal villain named Silicor.

What follows is a fantasy epic of unparalleled adventure and imagination, replete with esoteric themes and symbolism.

And here I would be remiss if I did not give you a taste of Sale’s writing:

“I am my master, magic my reed, my rod the unbowed majesty of mind that quickens tumorous to shadow’s dance. I see that which the Labyrinth Path conceals, and show that which others fear to reveal. I am a cloak, and dagger also, wending a Crooked Way through corridors of unseen light that spell the alphabet of gods. I’ve many names, but you may call me One, I am Horus, the Avenging Son.”

Soon enough, it becomes clear that Horus’s great foe Silicor is the embodiment of technological modernity itself, and more fundamentally, of human vice, arrogance, and greed:

“The city’s name is Brighterling, the king is Silicor The Gold, and he bewitches all with his dull Looking Glass, showing his ‘future’ in its hollow pane: a cosmos cleaned of magic and of life. Thus beguiled, his serfs are bound to him, and work in never-ending labour, penniless, to make the iron soldiers of his army’s ranks: metal golems, forged from wires and ore, and each one graven with the face of Silicor— for he would make the stars in his own image if the gods allowed.”

The alliance of the powers of heaven and hell may seem paradoxical (never mind heterodox), but though I am no theologian, I enjoyed it immensely: it underscores the gravity of the conflict between imagination and techno-modernity. Horus and his demon familiar Melmoth undertake a series of adventures through the realms of myth and literature, allying with a series of famous authors along the way.

What I loved the most about this aspect of the story was the sense that each of these resurrected authors added something new to the story: a perspective, an approach, wisdom, encouragement, and yes, martial skills. It is no small thing to bring the ghosts of famous authors to life in a creative work, but Sale uses each of them to breathe fresh inspiration into the story at every turn.

And oh, what a story it is! Virtue’s End combines epic battles against villains and monsters with beautiful character moments that explore a dizzying array of facets of the human experience: love, loss, betrayal, redemption, and so much more.

As the story unfolded, I found myself increasingly impressed with both the breadth and depth of Sale’s vision. Virtue’s End maps the contours of the human soul even as it explores the quest to free Ethismos, the realm of imagination (with a dragon queen, no less!), from the essentially mechanistic, dehumanizing forces that threaten it.

Reading Virtue’s End helped to create within me the awareness that there is nothing more vital to the transcendent than the experience of beauty: it is the aesthetic experience of transcendent wonder that gives us our souls back, and this, I believe, is the gods’ greatest gift to mortalkind.

In short, Virtue’s End is nothing less than a paradigm-shattering, metaphysical bolt of power fired at the soulless entropy and atomization of modernity. There is simply no book that better deserves to be called a myth against the machine, and I am absolutely convinced that it is one of the most important accomplishments in English literature.

No doubt we’ve all been tempted to despair by the state of our civilization, but with authors like Joseph Sale as our guiding stars, the machine doesn’t stand a chance.

So, go listen to Wagner, go read Virtue’s End, and, if you feel so moved, go create something beautiful.

After all, only the power of myth can smash the machine.