Thank you.
It occurs to me that we may have a few authors here. Maybe we might think about establishing some sort of informal writers’ workshop? Not necessarily on this exact forum… TBD?
Anyone interested?
I think I could act as a science editor to catch technical mistakes. But writing believable characters is harder. My wife sometimes catches tone mistakes with that. I have some strong female characters in my work… but I’m lucky to be married to a bright woman who shares my sense of humour…
But that’s realism. “Realism” and “escapism” are not on the same continuum. You can have meticulously researched hard scifi that’s also a light comedy where there’s no heavy stakes for anyone involved, and you can have a book that’s a brutal exploration of labor exploitation and societal level prejudice that does so through the use of dream logic and diegetic metaphor.
I’m up for it but I’m kind of between projects at the moment. I’ve been messing around with discovery writing trying to figure out what to do next. But I’m happy to provide feedback. I happen to be pretty good at writing characters and dialogue, so I could definitely give that kind of feedback.
I don’t have the technical knowledge to write hard science fiction, so my own work is gonna lean more toward fantasy. I’m trying to flesh out a story right now about a shapeshifter and a clone. It’s all about character for me. If I can’t figure out who these people are, it’s a non-starter.
I’ve enjoyed this conversation immensely, so I thank you all for your thoughtful answers.
Here’s a question: would you count C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy as science fiction or fantasy? I would argue that Out of the Silent Planet is the most science fiction of the three and even there Lewis writes from the peculiar standpoint of presuming that Christianity is literally true. The second and third books have science fiction settings but imho count as fantasy because key plot elements are based on the supernatural.
In SF, physics and math should mostly disappear into the background, I think.
Watching people write on whiteboards is about as interesting as watching paint dry.
Though if you want some really serious humanity-wipeout threats, astrophysics beats Cthulhu any day!
For me, it’s fantasy with just a bit of SF window dressing. I’ve always had a bit of a nasty taste in the mouth about C S Lewis, both that and Narnia. I feel they are both slightly disguised Proselytism.
Do you feel the same way about Madeleine L’Engle’s Time stories?
Been quite a while since I read them; I can’t remember if there was much religious subtext.
I seem to remember they are the sort of thing that a wannabe litererary writer produces when they get the idea : hey, I’ll write one of those “science fiction” stories? How hard can it be, I just need to throw in a few science-y words like ‘tesseract’…?
It’s definitely there. Far more noticeable to an adult than a tween, which is when I first encountered it (I actually met L’Engle in the 1970’s during a 6th grade field trip to hear a talk she was giving to kids during one of her re-publishing events). I remember reading the book again as a young man and being surprised how much religious shading there was that I had never picked up on, exactly as with Narnia.
It didn’t hold up well for me as an adult, but I sure loved it as a kid.
I haven’t read either! Sorry I cannot answer the question.
Space fantasy.
At the time he wrote it, I’m not sure there was a clear distinction between science fiction and fantasy, or at least not the same clear distinction as today’s. Are E.R. Burroughs’s John Carter books science fiction or fantasy?
Okay then, in which genre should they not disappear into the background?
Some people find the physics, math, etc.interesting and don’t want it to disappear. I’m certainly not saying it should feature prominently in all SF, but there’s a place in this world for stories with overt discussion of the scientific principles and details, for people who do like that sort of thing.
Shades of it are in The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster in 1928. Yes, the Room With A view/Maurice/Passage To India author.
Certainly: I’m one of those people. But it has to be a story, not a dissertation…
Yes, that is a very early and very important SF work, and a cautionary tale against too much reliance on automation and AI. Not that anyone is going to listen to his message.
An article by Francis Spufford about fantasy.
Frankly I get irrationally enraged by people who ask what a form of art or entertainment is supposed to do. It’s an end in itself. If you get something out of it, that’s all that matters. If you don’t, just walk away and marvel at different tastes people have in this big crowded world. If you want a message, write a pamphlet.
Thanks for the link.
In this thread, I’ve explained my interest as a writer of fantasy myself, and someone who really strives to learn about the recurring themes and unique capabilities of various genres. I think it’s important to understand literature in order to create it. That’s why I asked the question - to better understand this thing that I haven’t quite been able to wrap my head around. Lots of great insight from lots of people and it has inspired multiple conversations with my friends and family.
For those following earlier posts, I did ask the biggest fantasy geeks I know if LOTR has magic rules. They said not so much, but it’s not really relevant because magic is so uncommon in the world it doesn’t really show up all that often. The idea that magic must have rules developed later on as people created more magic-heavy stories and the lack of internal consistency confused readers.
And last night a couple of my friends pointed out that science fiction and fantasy used to be indistinguishable as genres and it really only branched off with the increased accessibility and variety of stories with readers finding their niche.
Which makes sense. Romance used to be one thing, but with the advent of self-publishing, consumers developed their own unique preferences and there are entire subgenres which bear little resemblance to mainstream romance. (What even is mainstream romance? The most popular romance series right now is high fantasy.) These subgenres really only exist for consumers to find the content they most want. At this point, if you want to read werewolf romance, there’s a whole cottage industry for that. Unfortunately (in my opinion) there is not much good science fiction romance these days. The themes and premises are repetitive (the only flavor seems to be Kidnapped by an Alien Warlord), and rarely do the books raise meaty existential questions. There’s certainly a market for these books, but they ain’t doing it for me.
I’m trying to do something different.
I think a big part of the idea that “magic must have rules” came from the proliferation of RPGs.
I’m not sure about that. RPGs have a lot of rules about how magic works, but most of them aren’t diegetic. They’re all about how to make the game itself balanced, without a lot of regard for how this stuff works in the setting. D&D, for example, breaks spells down into levels based on how powerful they are, which serves as a game-balancing mechanic, and it’s not really clear if wizards in the game understand their own magic as having “levels,” or if this is purely a mechanical abstraction, the way a fighter’s skill with a sword is presented on paper as “+8 to hit.” These magic systems are based on game-logic, not plot-logic. A first level spell is a first level spell not because of something inherent to the way magic works in-universe, but because it deals 1d6 damage, and that’s the appropriate amount of damage for a first level spell to deal.
My favorite example of this comes from Pathfinder, where there’s a spell whose effect is to give you a +5 on a skill check, which is a fairly minor bonus, about what you’d expect from a first level spell. But the description of how the spell works is, you reach into a parallel reality and pull over a spectral copy of yourself who gives you advice on how to accomplish the task. Which should be a crazy powerful act of magic. But nobody’s going to waste a 9th level spell slot on a +5 to a single skill check, so instead it’s something a wizard fresh out of Magical Boarding School could pull off.
“Rules of magic” stuff mostly comes, I think, from modern conceptions about how knowledge works. If magic is a fundamental part of reality, it probably works more-or-less like those other fundamental parts of reality, like gravity and electromagnetism. And if we can learn more about gravity and electromagnetism through experimentation and replication, we can learn more about magic using the same techniques. So, magic just becomes another scientific discipline.
This is coupled with the requirements of writing a good suspense scene, where a character is in peril and needs to rescue themselves. To be satisfying, the solution needs to rise organically from the elements already present in the story. If you have a protagonist who can use magic, and you haven’t delineated how magic works in your setting, it turns into Batman’s Utility Belt, which always has a perfect counter to whatever threat he’s facing. “Sharks? Luckily I have my Shark Repellent Spray Incantation of Shark Repelling handy!” By establishing what magic can and can’t do, you can use it resolve situations in ways that don’t feel cheap or cheating.
I still say that the defining feature of fantasy is depicting a world where spiritual reality is a thing. Space opera might be grand, might involve conspiracies older and wider than the universe, but ultimately it’s mundane: ultimately there’s no one keeping score, nothing after the end of physical existence.