Beyond the Impossible/Literature

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Events in Literature that are not possible. Only list examples that fit the description.

  • The Longing of Shiina Ryo: the battle was over and the good guys had won, but when Shin-tsu saw his best friend falling to an imminent death on the other side of the warehouse there wasn't much he could do. So he defied reality to reach her and take the impact in her place.
  • In Lucian's True Story the people of the Moon are at war with the people of the Sun. The narrator not only survives going to the sun, he doesn't seem impressed by it at all. Of course every word of the story is like that the operates on logic such as "Aristophanes is a wise and truthful man".
  • Mariel of Redwall introduces the Honourable Rosemary, whose laugh is so annoying it can curdle cream from thirty paces away. Yep, a laugh that can accelerate the spoilation of diary products. Though it just might be a rumor.
  • Nora and Maya from Crushed look so good in their swimsuits they can make Nigel, a blind man, have a Nosebleed.
  • Discworld:
    • Later novels in more or less follow the line that a witch's curse works if and only if the target knows they've done it. Unlucky Charlie, the target for the cursing at the Witch Trials, cannot be aware they've done it because he's a scarecrow, so points are given for general inventiveness. Except for the year when Granny Weatherwax made his head explode.
    • Going Postal deconstructs the trope. Moist knows its impossible for the postal service to beat the clacks in a long distance race so instead of trying to beat the laws of physics he works with them to win the race. he implants a Engineered Public Confession into the Clacks' message that gets Glit arrested.
    • Rincewind's mother ran away before he was born!
    • Meta example: It's noted that the Auditors of Reality are the ones who would give you a speeding ticket if you travelled faster than the speed of light.
    • Thud!: A temperance definitely-not-a-vampire has learned how to roll his w's.
  • The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien took a stab at implying Eldritch Abominations by having Gandalf speak of unexplained creatures that were older than Sauron himself. However, creation myth in The Silmarillion indicates that at first only Eru existed, and then, while the world still did not exist, he created the Ainur... of which Sauron is one. So, while not implying this is how Tolkien thought of it, anything being older than Sauron is indeed pretty mind-bendingly Lovecraftian, since they seem to have no possible place in Creation.
  • In Xanth the talent of being immune to magical harm is theorized to be capable of this. The talent includes indirect magical harm in its protections so something like magically hiding the edge of a cliff from him and trying to get him to fall off wouldn't work either. This is where the trope comes in. It's theorized in-universe that when the omnipotent demon that's the source of all magic in Xanth left, shutting all the magic down, it came back very shortly afterward solely because of this talent, as putting him in danger by removing magic could be considered indirect magical harm. That's right, it's so powerful that it can even affect its own omnipotent source.
  • East of the Sun and West of the Moon is the place the The wife has to search for in order to find her husband. Its implied to be an allegory for finding a nonexistent place through The Power of Love.
  • Journey to the West. To destroy Sun Wukong the Celestial Heavens create a fire that is specifically supposed to kill immortals like him. Even after weeks inside it he's still alive. The gods turn to the Buddha who resorts to Sealed Badass in a Can.
  • His Dark Materials devotes a scene to demonstrating how Panserbjørne cannot be lied to, tricked, bluffed, or otherwise deceived in anyway. Lyra does just this to the king of the Panserbjørne. When Iorek hears this he gives her the title "Silver-tongue".
  • Iron Druid Chronicles justifies the trope. A big part of why Atticus is so powerful is because he experiments with the rules of druid magic and was able to find solutions to problems that seemed Impossible to the much older and powerful Tuatha Dé Danann.
  • Subverted in Artemis Fowl book 1. The fairies state repeatedly that escaping a time stop is impossible because they are sure that it is physically impossible to do so. Artemis uses Loophole Abuse to find a way to do it: since the time stop prevents anyone from changing their state of conscious naturally he theorized that by artifically forcing a change he could slip through.
  • Molly Moon has a book that teaches her the rules of hypnotism. During the bank heist, she hypnotises an iris scanner.
  • Mmmeee0 once converted all the adrenaline in his Body into THC. Adrenaline is a Hormone and THC is only produced in Plants. From a Chemical standpoint, the two are nothing alike. The Creepy Teen Years
  • The Wheel of Time: Nynaeve's main passion is Healing, up to and including inventing her own spells for it.: One of them heals severing.