Problems with fantasy fiction

Or you know... makes Miles do one man performances of Shakespeare plays.

edit: Awesome Page topper

edited 20th Dec '16 12:04:38 PM by KnightofLsama

Good point, Golden and Hodor. It was just an example though obviously far from the best one.

So reading through this thread, it sounds like the problem is less fantasy literature itself, and more holes in internal logical consistency, which fantasy literature tends to be more prone to than other genres due to the presence of magic.

I don't know whether it's mostly due to magic, but yeah. Fantasy seems to be an excuse for lazy writing sometimes. People ask why it isn't viewed seriously in literature circles then.

edited 12th Apr '17 8:42:14 PM by Fireblood

that and because fantasy relies more on nrarrative rules with more convencional styles.

sometimes I would like if fantasy create thought experiment like sci fi did with their concepts, it would be pretty damn cool.

A thought experiment such as what?

for example in sci fiction sometimes you have thoug experiment like "what happen in robot dosent follow their programing" or "if we can change times", hell most of asmiov stories are thought experiment about is tree law of robotic covering almost every damn angle

most of the time you dont see that in fantasy seen magic or other fantasy element are saw as plot fixer rather than a element could led to intersting things.

Do you by any chance mean something like Brandon Sandersons Mistborn? Especially the Era 2 books. There you can see how a society would (i believe) realistily evolve into the Wild West Era when some people have magic powers (in nearly all cases it´s only a single power and only 32 different powers in total). Those who can fly make for very fast (if expensive) telegrams, people how can calm emotions work in a kind of massage house, those who can highten emotions you can rent to make sure your party is a hit, it´s a giant scandal when it comes out a political figure can manipulate the emotions of his people, etc.

I think the problem with these though experiments is, that in most cases fantasy settings are set in the equivalent to the middle ages and at least i just don´t know enough about these time to determine what would be a thought experiment and what was actually like that then. Sci Fi and fantasy in a more modern setting on the other hand is similiar enough to our time to have an idea of what is normal.

In addition, science fiction makes for a more "plausible" thought experiment, if you will. It's easier to believe a story about a machine that can, I don't know, create infinite amounts of food than a wizard that can do the same thing.

Larry Niven did some fantasy "thought experiments" in his Warlock/Magic Goes Away stories.

He shows societies that have been profoundly affected by magic, and then changed again when it starts to run out.

Of course, that would be a primarily hard science fiction writer working in fantasy, and one who likes to think about how a technology would affect a society, so of course he does the same when he writes fantasy.

I think the wizard is more plausible.

Let me revise. I wasn't talking about the plausibility of the final outcome, but rather the way we got there. We're never going to have wizards or anyone who can make food appear by themselves, but someday we might have a machine that can process whatever matter we throw into it into something edible. Hopefully not Soylent Green.

Most of the time concepts in science fiction are based on real world advances, concepts, theories, and research, so they have a foundation of sound science to build their extrapolations and unsound science on. Scifi thought experiments can also be extrapolated from historical data and real world examples of similar events and occurrences. Magic, on the other hand, doesn't exist in any measurable form in reality, and therefore its effects, uses, nature, and rules are created out of whole cloth by each writer. Hence why fantasy thought experiments are less plausible than scifi thought experiments, and also a contributing factor to why fantasy fiction is more prone to plot and logical inconsistencies than scifi.

edited 14th Apr '17 8:48:08 AM by danime91

I strongly disagree with the assumption that just because of the genre a story is more or less prone to inconsistencies, it depends on the author. A bad author can make everythig inconsistent, a good one can do the opposite.

I might be missing something here, but aren't those the same thing? I'm simply pointing out that fantasy fiction has more ways logical inconsistencies might be introduced, due to the limitless ways magic may portrayed and used, so a writer is more likely to slip up somewhere in fantasy fiction than in scifi. It does come down to the quality of the writer in the end, since a bad writer will make plot holes and logical inconsistencies regardless of the genre of the work.

Couple of things I've read that I thought were relevant/interesting:

I may have mentioned this previously in the thread, but a lot of the basis for Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence is a take-off on the idea of Sufficiently Advanced Technology to the effect that a lot of modern technology is effectively magical, because for example, "everyone" uses smart phones but most people wouldn't tell you how they work, let alone reverse engineer one. So with that idea in mind, you have a society that in a lot of ways is basically our world but with magic in place of technology- and a magic that can be commonly used (i.e. people paying for things with "soulstuff"), but is only harnessed in its most powerful forms by a small group of people.

The Grace of Kings and the subsequent books in the series is identified by the author, Ken Liu, as being "silkpunk", and its so called because all of the technologies present in the series are derived from material culture that existed in Ancient China. More broadly though, the idea is that Liu takes various lost technologies that existed in the ancient world but were never developed, and then develops them. This sometimes also has a magic competent. For instance, there are lighter-than-air airships, and rather than using hydrogen or helium, they work because a type of falcon in the setting can fly because it takes in some kind of (magical?) gas and so by taking the falcon's bladder, the airships can float.

On the other side of things, I was thinking of The Goblin Emperor in terms of the idea that when magic plays a minor role in the story and is just an aspect of the worldbuilding, there isn't really a need to explain to the audience how it works- because not every fantasy novel has to be written with a Hard Science Fiction mindset to be good (and I'd go as far as to say that they are usually better without such a mindset). So, in the novel, there are some priests who are able to briefly speak with the recently dead and the practice is for the emperor to be guarded by two types of guards, one a warrior and the other a cleric with some magic abilities. At one point, we see the latter perform a death spell, but we don't get the mechanics of it. It does seem like the guy is at least briefly weakened from doing it and either cut himself as a means of performing the spell or else as a side effect, so it could involve Cast from Hit Points.

Also, there is one mention of a mechanic who is part of a guild starting an airship engine through what is apparently magic (so yeah, a stock fire spell).

But I think it works to have magic unexplained to the audience, because the characters seem to get how it works or at least understand it in the same way we understand cell phones. More importantly, having magic limited to a small subset of the population who live a life of spiritual training, or in the case of mechanics, some other kind of training kind of answers the question of why magic isn't more common nor being used in destructive ways. Because if magic is only effective through training, an untrained person with magical abilities is just going to be weak, not destructive.

edited 14th Apr '17 9:26:29 AM by Hodor2

I prefer hard, explained, scientific magic (take Mistborn for example, since it's been used a lot on this thread) over more nebulous, not explicitly explained magic (Harry Potter, for instance), but that's just my personal preference. In either case, I think it's important to communicate to the audience, somehow, on what your magic can do and what it can't, or at least some reason the characters can't use it to immediately solve their problems. That could be a character casually mentioning that magic can't cause time travel, or the narration giving the reader a chapter-long lecture explaining pentacle design. Also consistency, but that's important in any story, not just fantasy.

I would say that science fiction is just as prone to logical inconsistencies as any fantasy work. In fact, it can even be easier to catch them in sci-fi, since that genre is supposed to be grounded in reality.

I would also say that logical consistency is not always better in a work. It depends mostly on the type of story you are trying to tell. Alice in Wonderland, for example. Or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for science fiction, where the Rule of Funny always trumps logic.

It seems the current trends in the two genres are both towards more logically consistent backgrounds, but that's just a current trend. It could be upended tomorrow if a new work starts a new trend. It has nothing to do with the quality of a work in either genre.

What do people here familiar with the Dungeons and Dragons magic think actual effects of this would be in a world that had it? I know there is the Tippyverse which tries to imagine some of it, but doesn't touch on some areas. For instance, priests in D%D can (when sufficiently powerful) raise the dead. Now that is not just very religiously relevant, but also has practical implications. One imagines that any person who's powerful enough to retain such a priest could keep them on hand so they have a means of coming back. Imagine where the kings or other rulers can actually cheat death. Of course, one can always put limits on this (perhaps the gods don't allow it except for great heroes, and priests that abuse this lose their powers, etc.) but it could have all kinds of effects on the medieval world this depicts. Among them could be, as I've mentioned before, not being "medieval" any more for long.

edited 16th Apr '17 1:59:54 PM by Fireblood

Scientific magic seems to me an oxymoron; magic, after all, doesn't operate on scientific principles.

Magic using science, however, is something different, and would easily work. If you're writing a fantasy set in the modern day I would find it hard to believe that you put a wizard in it and he doesn't use science. (Most modern wizards, I believe, would probably have some Dr. Pretorius in them.)

edited 16th Apr '17 3:40:27 PM by Aldo930

It is a bit of an oxymoron, now that I think about it . But I say "scientific magic" as a catch-all term to describe a magic system with very specific, explicit, and defined rules (and usually a lot of them), principles, or abilities. So much so that it becomes kind of like that world's version of our science. Basically Magic A Is Magic A, taken Up To Eleven.

I don't think "scientific magic" is by itself an oxymoron. When you have magic that can be understood with science, that's scientific. If your magic isn't completely random and such, I don't see why that wouldn't be the case. Yes, it would be operate by different properties in another world, but that's just a given.

No really, magic is just a force in the setting, it is a bit weird because we are looking from a external world who dosent have it, is kinda like gods who are misterious becasue so far we dont have a way to mesure, after that people will see other way.

Also, not all thought experiment have to be explain in detail, sometimes all that you need is a premise and them run with it, to give a example there is a sci fi romatic comedy call Timer, the timer is just a wristband that can tell you the exact moment you will met your soulmate IF the other one have one too.

how the timer works? the fuck if I know and it dosent even mater since is just the red string of fate and how it will work if such a thing exist in reallity and the movie make some observation: the protagonist dosent really know much of the guys she dates since she presure them to implant the timer and when it dosent work she broke up with them, her sister have the timer and it said she will find her soulmate in 79 YEARS! not surprising she have adopt a live of casual sex and dates since there isnt any point in waiting, or how a young man who get is timer only to get her soulmate a week later...with the cleaning woman daughter who is latina, making this a sci fi version of arrange marriages and I can go on as the movie really explore the concept.

How it would be the world with Dn D magic?....well, pretty fucking weird I must said, something closer to planescape than forgotten realms since the setting is always returning to the status quo over and over.

edited 16th Apr '17 6:41:22 PM by unknowing

Scientific magic isn't, I think, an oxymoron, but supernatural science would be. If magic is treated as another force of nature that obeys laws of some kind then it is no longer supernatural in the strictest sense. You could continue to call the new force you discovered "magic", but it would act like any other natural force in that the results you get from a given action can be accurately predicted. Likewise if you write a story where the laws of physics are routinely upended with no consistency between action and result, then you've created a world where scientific principles would be impossible to apply. A truly supernatural world, for the specific sense of "supernatural" as "violating natural law."

The Eberron campaign setting for D&D took a world where magic is widely available and worked out some of its implications.. As a result, Eberron isn't a medieval-fantasy setting, it's a renaissance/borderline Victorian setting where magic is the dominant force. Sort of steampunk with magic in place of steam. You have commercialized magic in the form of the Dragonmarked houses, who dominate transportation, finance, communication, hospitality, and health care in the world. You have mass-produced golems and zombies used as soldiers for warfare. You even have the equivalent of a magical nuke, used to destroy one country in the last war, though the destruction was so complete that no one knows how exactly they did it. There was some interesting thought put into creating that setting.

edited 17th Apr '17 7:22:34 AM by Bense

Approaching the super-natural in a scientific way is indeed an interesting way of looking at the problem. It would assume, of course, that there were rules by which magic operate and would be simply predicated on discovering what those rules were ("Okay...I need to draw a pentagram on the floor in salt and silver dust, and burn an incense of wolfsbane, holly, and powedered newts eyes...why does this work, exactly?")

The spiritualist movement in the 1800's tried to do just that, approach the idea of ghosts and psychic phenomenon using some permutation of the scientific method. The idea of ectoplasm, for instance, arose out of the notion that, if you can see a spirit, it must have some kind of substance. Now, that doesn't take into account ideas like light manipulation or even thought manipulation, but you can see they were trying.

edited 17th Apr '17 8:51:21 AM by Robbery