Atheist/Anti-theist/Agnostic Troper Group

That's entirely your prerogative, but what you feel defines fantasy doesn't have much to do with where the books get stuck in the bookstore, or how they're marketed, or how other people perceive them.

If you think about it, there's no real reason vampire fiction (or most horror fiction that involves monsters of any kind) shouldn't be categorized under either fantasy or sci-fi depending on how the monster came about, but that's just not how it works.

Genre tends to be more about the tone of a work, its "feel", rather than the hard nuts and bolts of its universe. Having magic doesn't automatically make a work fantasy, just as lacking magic doesn't make it not fantasy.

Also this.

edited 10th May '16 1:27:11 PM by SolipSchism

Well according to Wikipedia, Rod Serling defined science fiction as "the improbable made possible" and fantasy as "the impossible made probable".

Science fiction could happen, but it would be unlikely. Fantasy has no chance of happening. Not in this universe anyway.

Though I have to wonder if there exist any non-fictional universes that have a different system of physics then ours that allow for such magic.

I'm not entirely sure Rod Serling is the end-all be-all of what defines fictional genres, but it is a half-decent way to look at it. KJ Parker's books are impossible, after all—considering that they take place in nonexistent settings, during fabricated hitorical periods inspired by real ones, using totally made-up cultures and geography, and historical events that never actually happened.

But even then it's stretching that definition.

Yes, that quote is comparing sci-fi phlebotinum to fantasy magic. It does not apply to a "mundane" constructed world.

Worldbuilding is fun, writing is a chore

Vampires, werewolves and dragons are magical creatures. In the sense that the former have access to polymorph and the latter has access to fire breath. The super speed they sometimes get would be another magical property.

Fantasy is a setting trope more than a genre trope. You can set nearly any type of story, and nearly any mood in a fantasy setting.

Having magic is required for fantasy, but magic alone does not automatically make something fantasy.

I think the split is fairly artificial, anyway. I agree with George RR Martin that Science Fiction is a specific type of fantasy literature.

The core of fantasy, IMO (and of course I'm not the only one to say this - Pratchett had a very similar view) is that you come up with some concept that doesn't exist in our world - usually it'll be a kind of magic or super-advanced technology or something along those lines - and you place it in a world that is sufficiently similar to ours that we'll understand it, and you basically just see how that concept plays in that universe.

Obviously there's still the matter of coming up with a plot and characters and so on, but those are not fundamentally different from other genres. The things that makes fantasy (including sci-fi) stand out is specifically that notion of establishing a setting and allowing your story to take place in it. That setting, of course, includes that magic/technology/whatever that you've invented. The best writers can really think through the implications of that thing and portray how it would settle into their universe, and how characters would cope with it or exploit it.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

So wait Solip Schism, the monks don't believe in gods, or just not magic?

Both fantasy and science fiction are forms of "speculative fiction" anyway. I don't think fantasy requires magic or gods, they just seem common features. Let's face it as well-a lot of science fiction has these too, but just gives them another name ("psychic powers" and "superhuman aliens").

"I agree with George RR Martin that Science Fiction is a specific type of fantasy literature."

That would be what we call Speculative Fiction then, of which fantasy is another subset.

Worldbuilding is fun, writing is a chore

That works.

I think people get a little bit too caught up on genres and other such categories, anyway. It can be helpful for context to recognise roughly what tradition a given work represents, but usually its intertextuality will reach beyond a given era or tradition of literature or any other form of culture.

Still, to the extent that we want to recognise genres, there certainly is a broader category of which both fantasy and science fiction are part.

edited 11th May '16 5:32:35 AM by BestOf

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

Fireblood, magic in this world only happens when sorcerers use it, and since there are no sorcerers among these highly isolated monks, they've never seen it and don't believe it exists. They're also all atheists, which is more reasonable since there's no hard evidence that gods exist. But they're also incredibly intelligent, so when a couple of them venture out into the world and encounter incontrovertible evidence of sorcery, they quickly reevaluate their understanding of the world to understand (and use, and manipulate) magic.

edited 11th May '16 7:17:25 AM by SolipSchism

It is odd, because monk usually refers to a group of religious devotees.

Yeah, well, that's just like your opinion man.

I personally can't see anything positive that they add. Romance is something I can relate to. It's a feeling I have. Wanting to suck up to a supernatural being, isn't something I can relate to.

Well, they are pretty much religiously devoted to what they call the Logos, the principle of cause and effect being the single definitive characteristic of all that happens in the universe.

Are they celibate and so on, like real monks? Is this Logos a religion?

Logos is essentially the greek word for logic. It makes sense that that word is associated with atheism. The ancient greek philosophers are romantically associated with the idea of atheism.

So they worship logic? It has also been used for Jesus.

>Are they celibate

I have to speculate, because their day-to-day lives aren't shown in any detail. But knowing what is shown of them in the books, and knowing that they are descended from ordinary humans and the sect has been utterly isolated for 2,000 years, I'm guessing they have sex for procreation only. Otherwise they'd have died out early on. But they really have no interest in pleasure for its own sake, so I don't imagine they'd engage in recreational sex. One of them does seem to (you can never quite be sure if you're dealing with an Unreliable Narrator in these books) fall in love with an ordinary woman after going out into the world, but that's only after he's been away from the fortress for a very long time.

>Is this Logos a religion

Yes and no. You could consider it logic as a religion. Cause and effect. Point 1 leads to point 2 leads to point 3, inexorably, and that is the force in the universe that drives everything else.

Quote from one of the chapter openings: "If it is only after that we understand what has come before, then we understand nothing. Thus we shall define the soul as follows: That which precedes everything."

They believe that because cause and effect drives everything, most men are a slave to "the darkness that comes before", i.e., the unknowable sequence of events that led up to your life and your experiences. They believe that if you don't devote yourself to understanding the circumstances that drive your actions, then you really have no free will at all and are just responding to stimuli with no real thought or animation; that you're just an animal like any other. They strive to break that cycle—to stand above, or outside of, cause-and-effect—by understanding as much as possible, understanding how events lead to other events, extrapolating the past from that to understand how the present situation came about, and ultimately, understanding enough to become a "self-moving soul", i.e., one that is not beholden (or at least, less beholden) to cause-and-effect and can truly make its own choices and decisions.

In other words, it's almost a Reconstruction of religion. They're atheists because they're so committed to science and logic and how things work and proof and tests and knowledge and understanding things... but they are also so fanatically committed to those concepts that they meditate on them for days at a time, are extremely ascetic, call themselves "monks", and perhaps most importantly, believe that their worldview is the only correct and reasonable one, and look down on anyone who isn't one of them.

edited 12th May '16 8:43:35 AM by SolipSchism

That is so cool. They are trying to break out of the Epiphanic Prison of their own circumstances. This is very close to my own belief system.

You might consider reading the Second Apocalypse then. The first trilogy is brilliant. The third book of the second trilogy is due out sometime this year, but I haven't found the second trilogy to be as engaging as the first. Still going to read it, though.

Cool, so it's an atheistic religion. Neat idea. I may have to check that out.

Not that it doesn't exist in Real Life.

Worldbuilding is fun, writing is a chore

What?

Buddhism.

Worldbuilding is fun, writing is a chore

Buddhism might be technically atheist since it doesn't involve deities, but it still includes a lot of unverifiable metaphysical stuff.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I love the ethical side of Buddhism, meditation, etc., but I don't buy into reincarnation, Nirvana, devas and whatnot. That's just as magical and mystical as the transubstantiation and coming back from the dead after 3 days and expelliarmus if you ask me.

I think there's a different word for you than "atheist". That just means no gods. You're more like "no supernatural stuff, ever".

To be fair, so am I.

edited 13th May '16 8:15:06 AM by Elfive