Ten Novels That Follow Daytime Logic
(Kelly Link, following the lead of Howard Waldrop, distinguishes between three kinds of story logic: dream logic, daytime logic, and nighttime logic. The idea is that a sequence of events has dream logic when at the end you say, “This happened, and then this happened, and it doesn’t make any sense.” With daytime logic, you say, “This happened, and then this happened, and it makes sense, and I can explain why.” And with nighttime logic, you say, “This happened, and then this happened, and it makes sense, and I can’t explain why.” In other words, daytime logic produces a logical, causal kind of sense, while nighttime logic produces a more mysterious, emotional kind of sense. Dream logic produces motion but not sense. This list of novels (and a story collection) that follow daytime logic is by request, and arranged in something like their order of popularity, from the most widely read to the least. Most realist fiction exists in the daytime, so I’m confining myself here to daytime works of fantasy and SF—all of them books whose rules, however unusual, make sense and remain consistent once you understand them.)
Blindness by José Saramago
The His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin
The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem
The City and the City by China Miéville
Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls
Under the Skin by Michel Faber
The Inverted World by Christopher Priest
— March 10, 2022