Small dilema

I love fantasy, always have, always will and I love to imagine worlds that inhabit a place both alien and strangely familiar to our own. But in wondering I have come across something of a dilemma that I just wanted some opinions on. Recently I have been working on a world that resembles our own at about the turn of the century (about 1900).

And though things like colonial empires exist I also want there to be something of that classical monsters or spirits that live in the woodlands that brave heroes would go and slay. But in a world were relatively powerful personal firearms are the norm I just can;t reasonably imagine that say, a dragon could be living in a cave at the top of a mountain or that there are a large amount of things that "go bump in the night".

I say this because in looking at our own history you see things like massive herds of buffalo or predators like wolves basically being nonexistent in many places at the turn of the century due to them either being incompatible with humans or being a lucrative food or fur animal for civilization.

This is what I have been thinking about lately in short and again, all I want is someone else opinion(s) on the topic and possible ways which it could either be averted or even explored, as currently I am drawing a blank...

Rapid healing factor, then. It's possible for humans to survive small-arms fire, and though regaining full use of the wounded area is always iffy it's possible to recover from it with medical care. Now make that healing work much faster for certain animals, and suddenly firearms aren't as effective.

Even in our world, there are a few animals that can shrug off getting shot far better than humans can. And it's worth keeping in mind - most firearms/related tactics are built around the intent of stopping other humans. Getting shot in a leg also means different kinds of disability depending on whether you a biped or a quadroped, etc.

There's also the fact that firearms are primarily a mid- to long-range weapon. At short-range, shooting a bear (for example) is no guarantee that it still won't maul you to death. At a longer distance, you might get a kill shot in before it figures out what's going on and runs... towards you and mauls you to death.

Terrain, too, and the need for more powerful firearms to be physically stabilized in order to fire accurately (let alone maintained properly). If any of the above applies, spraying the forest with bullets may not be enough to keep that bear from mauling you to death if it ambushes you before you have a chance to set up.

Intelligence as well. It's said by people who have been shot at, and endlessly repeated by those who have never been, that the human brain is the most powerful weapon on the planet. An enemy that is intelligent enough to see through human tactics (say, a dragon) would be able to neutralize overwhelming firepower - and then you have a bunch of bears parachuting into your camp and mauling you to death.

One of the weird things about weapons is, they're only as effective as the gap between the user's and the opponent's relative situational advantages and disadvantages (skill included). ..and I'll stop there.

The thing about the late 1900s is that by that point, almost the entire Earth had been explored and mapped out. If dragons and giants and monsters existed in your world, they'd likely have either been discovered by now, or be right on the brink of being discovered, unless they had some special means of keeping themselves hidden. And the days of lone heroes fighting monsters would be long gone by this point. Any threat that might once have called for a hero, would now be dealt with by heavily-armed and highly organised state militaries.

If you want to tell a story about the mountains over yonder being full of giants, you have picked the absolute worst era to do it in.

edited 17th Jul '16 7:37:45 AM by Tungsten74

I was having a similar problem with a present day setting with magic and monsters. I settled for a Lovecraft ultra-lite where there's no inherent supernatural aspect in the various ancient mutants and strange substances the world is peppered with, even if a lot of them are the subject of myths and legends. Kinda like how something like the Kraken is perfectly viable scientifically, while half of modern medicine would be considered miracle cures in ages past.

Moreover, modern day Earth may be well charted, but that doesn't make it entirely explored. Hidden caves and overgrown remnants of ancient civilizations still hide enough secrets to go around, while alien lifeforms may yet be confirmed to exist in frozen craters in Antarctica... if not elsewhere as well. The only problem I see is if you want to keep the overall existence of such things hidden from the general public. Otherwise, it's like the alligators in the New York sewers - everyone knows they exist, nobody is rushing to deal with them without good reason.

(For that matter, slaying sewer gators in order to retrieve some mobster's hidden gold cache or save a damsel in distress is the perfect modern take on your average fantasy quest. Food for thought.)

Well the monsters are entirely up to you. This includes their weaknesses and strengths. If your monsters come in a lot of crazy varieties and require something rather specific to kill them easily (silver, fire, magic?) then you're going to need a professional to kill them or an army. I basically just described the Witcher, but there's no reason that premise can't work in your setting too.

There's also the question of civilization. There may not be a lot of monsters near the really developed and modern areas. to the point where people might not even believe in them, but the fringes and frontiers could realistically be full of them. It all comes down to what you want your world to be like. There's no real reason the 1900s can't be full of monsters as long as you can think of a reason they can be, if you catch my meaning.

Just make the monsters ridiculously hard to kill. There's no reason why you couldn't write them like that. Or do what The Legend Of Korra did and make them really rare and mysterious. Also, there's nothing that says the world is fully explored. Then again, I'm the guy who wrote a fantasy world without the monsters, so take my advice if you want.

What's interesting is that fantasy was partly influenced by Tolkien's desire to escape the rise of technology, which is the main reason you're having this problem.

It depends on how densely populated you choose to make your world. Humanity may only have settled in certain areas (say, around the coasts) and become pretty advanced in that time, leaving large tracts of inland mostly unexplored, with monsters and whatnot free to roam around in the interior. Even looking at the world in the late 1800's and early 1900's not every place had equal access to advanced technology (heck, not everyplace has equal access to advanced technology now—large sections of the world don't have running water or reliable electricity).

You could as well, for instance, make dragons largely immune to small arms fire, needing say anti-aircraft weaponry to bring them down in flight; this would be far from an easy task, as a dragon in likely to be more maneuverable than an airplane.

Just to be clear, the worlds technology is set at the turn of the century 20th not during the 20th per say.

And in regards to escaping technology with fantasy, I think Tolkien got it all wrong. Majorly because far more good than bad was brought about by the rise of technology and industrialization, especially for the common man. But that's a subject for a different thread I suppose....

Well, I mean his idyllic England was turned into a soot covered bronchitis festival from all the factories. It's where he got the imagery to describe Mordor, and at least Mordor had arable land. I think it's because he didn't come from a world of high tech stuff like we do. Someone from the Industrial Revolution would feel the same way we do, but Tolkien is a little later than that.

You could try doing what Dishonored did and make a world where magic and fantastical creatures are considered a relic of past superstition and are hated and feared because they are not fully understood

edited 15th Aug '16 1:40:43 PM by SephirotAero

To be honest, what I'm doing is more the opposite of that.... The fact that there are monsters, mutants, and phantoms roaming about is an internalized fact of society to the point where there are entire universities that teach theorem and courses on the "eradication of extra-normal forces".

Hmm, I see....

You could try what The Order: 1886 did, with monsters hiding as a part of our society, with science on the forefront and magic just below the surface.

The monsters are yours to command. If they're hard to kill, then that's your decision. If they want political rights, that's on them too.

edited 15th Aug '16 5:47:22 PM by SephirotAero

If the existence of mutants, monsters and phantoms is an internalised fact of society, why would they be regarded as "extra-normal"? If people have internalised a concept, that means it's just a fact of life to them.

You know what we call supernatural phenomena that we actually understand? Science.

edited 17th Aug '16 3:18:18 PM by Tungsten74

Because there is still a pretty clear line between say a pig, or, a horse, than say, an acid spitting genetically engineered monstrosity or a sentient cloud of inorganic and intangible material that can take possession another living thing.....

That, and also because things such as what I have just described are not nearly as understood as more mundane creatures......

Supernatural phenomena are, by definition, phenomena that are apart from nature and either exist apart from or do not adhere to it's laws. Science only describes things that exist in nature and adhere to natural laws. I once had an anthropology teacher who, at the start of every semester, told his class he wouldn't discuss God or religion in class because, he said, anthropology is a science and thus can't deal with the supernatural. He also taught Sunday school.

However, if you're going to have your eldritch abominations studied, you'll have to come up with some rules (or at least the appearance of them) for your magicky stuff to adhere to. Spiritualists in the 1800's, you'll recall, actually had all kinds of rules by which spirits were supposed to be bound (like they needed ectoplasm to be seen or to touch anything, because a pure spirit is invisible and intangible, and while inhabiting the ecotoplasm they could be effected by physical stimuli, etc,)

You know what we call natural phenomena that we don't fully understand?

The Preternatural

Try not to sound so blunt next time.

edited 18th Aug '16 7:18:07 PM by SephirotAero

Actually, "preternatural" is a term used in theology to describe regular ol' magic or trickery as differentiated from "actual" divine miracles. Something neither mundane nor miraculous. In classical terms, if God did it, it was supernatural. If somebody or something else did something that couldn't be explained by natural means, then it was preternatural. In common usage, though, it's come to be pretty much a synonym of supernatural. Phenomena that appear to defy explanation, or for which we simply haven't found an explanation, but to which we aren't trying to attribute more-than-natural causes are simply called unexplained phenomena.

edited 18th Aug '16 10:43:50 PM by Robbery

Interesting, I always thought supernatural meant "above natural" which meant "straight up unnatural" and preternatural meant "beyond natural" which just meant "really weird"

That's where you get into technical definitions versus how the words are actually used. Supernatural does, literally, mean "above nature" and Preternatural (or preaternatural) literally means "outside nature" or "beside nature." Classic theologians, however, chose to use the words to describe the definitions I mentioned above. We tend to use the words now, both of them (with supernatural more often used than preternatural), to describe anything to which we're attributing non-natural causes. or that appears to violate natural laws.

Actually, to a biologist, chemist or physicist, there is no "pretty clear line" between a pig and an "acid spitting genetically engineered monstrosity". Hell, there's barely a line between a pig and a horse.

If the monster is genetically-engineered, then that means it has genes, and is readily explainable within a biological framework. Genes are built on the four bases adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, making this monster readily explainable within a chemistry framework, too. And if it's explainable by a chemist, then it follows that it's explainable by a physicist as well, since it must be made of the same mundane atoms as everything else, and thus follow the same laws of physics.

As for the sentient cloud of intangible material... well, first of all, "sentient" just means "has senses and can percieve the world around it". Rats are sentient. Plants are sentient. The word you're probably looking for is "sapient", which roughly equates to intelligence and self-awareness.

Second, there's no reason a sapient entity made of intangible material would lie outside the realms of science, because science is not a big book of rules dictating How Things Work. Science is a process of questioning, investigation, experimentation and reasoning, meant to help us look past our limited and fallible perception, and figure out what's actually going on. The whole point of being a scientist is being willing to accept, when presented with sufficiently strong evidence, that your understanding of reality is erroneous, and adjusting your worldview to accomodate this new information.

A scientist might start out believing that no living creature could be composed of inorganic material, nor could there be such a thing as "intangible matter". They would likely react to the knowledge of this intangible entity with great skepticism, and investigate it thoroughly to make sure the entity couldn't be explained away by existing theories. But once they felt reasonably confident that they weren't being decieved, then they would absolutely change their worldview to accomodate this new entity. The old ideas wouldn't be thrown out - merely expanded. What it means to be "alive" would change. The nature of matter would be revised. The supernatural would become natural.

Because that is how science works.

edited 19th Aug '16 3:24:27 AM by Tungsten74

Well, I mean who's to say that those courses on killing monsters are fully accurate, and that every part of those monsters can be fully explained in full detail? It's entirely possible those "extra-normal" institutions are run by the religious

Yeah, I ran into the whole natural/supernatural divide as well. It just seemed arbitrary, so I didn't bother all that with it, and instead went for broke with pulp-style antediluvian monsters. I mean, our world was inhabited by bus-sized thunder lizards, and maybe a few of them have survived in some form. And that's not even going into whatever ancient squid may have once lived, given how it's rather difficult to find fossil records of something with no bones living five miles under the ocean surface. Food for thought.

However, if you want things more exotic, a good ole dimension rift ought to do the trick. Simply put, eldritch monsters have a habit of bumping into our world through means unknown (to early 20th century science at least), but also rarely survive under our conditions, and their bodies decompose into unrecognizable sludge shortly afterward. Science works, but with that sort of timescale, there's not much that can be learned, and no guarantee the next visitor won't be of an entirely different species.

And it's not like any remains that could be found would always be terribly well understood. Scientists used to misread fossil evidence all the time. That's how the Piltdown Man hoax happened.

For that matter, here's a pretty realistic way to have your cake and eat it too. Various meteorites hit our planet on a daily basis. Some of them are strongly radioactive, enough to affect whatever place they hit, creating all sorts of monstrous mutants. Naturally, most of them end up in the ocean, so the vast majority of such creatures are waterborne. However, the strange radioactive isotopes themselves last only a short while, and soon decay into familiar elements, leaving no recognizable trace, while the mutants are free to do whatever radioactive mutants do... so, mostly attack Tokyo or the American Midwest.

Yeah, it's a bit of a "duh" moment that a modern day mythical monster would basically amount to Godzilla, or that B-movies have long been exploring similar ideas, but hey, if it works, it works. I Love Nuclear Power.