Today when people think of science fiction and fantasy,
chances are, they think of two separate genres. Science fiction, the genre of
starships and computers and technology. Fantasy, the genre of knights and
dragons and castles. Two distinct genres, and never the twain shall meet. The meeting
of the two, science fantasy, was the exception, the red-headed stepchild, never
part of the mainstream.
This wasn’t always the case.
The pulp era made no such distinction between science
fiction and fantasy. Indeed, they cared little for what we would call genres
today. The pulp grandmasters simply chose the aesthetics, setting, and tropes
that best served the story.
Leigh Douglass Brackett is the queen of space opera. Through
her Eric John Stark stories, she popularized the sword and planet story, a
genre that combines advanced technology and fantastic futuristic locations with
heroic adventures and melee combat.
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars combined sword and
planet and portal fantasy fiction. Captain John Carter, once a soldier
for the Confederate States of America, is mysteriously whisked away to a Mars
teeming with life. Despite the high technology of the setting, swordfighting
remains a critical element of conflict.
The Lensman series was a seminal space opera series. It
features interstellar travel, warring alien races, and mental powers weaponized
for mass warfare. The first two are sci-fi staples, but the last should—by
today’s standards—fall under fantasy fiction.
The pulp era is filled with stories that, seen in a modern
light, straddle the line between science fiction and fantasy. Even today, the
split between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ SF and fantasy is an illusionary one.
Hard science fiction is defined by its commitment to
scientific accuracy and logic. One of the leading hard SF franchises today is The
Expanse. A space opera series, it has nuclear fusion-powered torchships
burning across the solar system at extreme accelerations, spacesuits that
function as powered armor, societies rising from micro- and low-gravity
environments.
These are all speculative technologies. Many of them can be
calculated on paper. Atomic Rockets investigated the Epstein Drive and
determined that it is within the realm of possibility. They may even exist
someday in one form or another. But they do not exist today. They are
products of the authors’ imagination.
They are fantasy.
Dune is held up as an example of soft science fiction. A
saga set in a distant planet, it features a faster-than-light warp drive, a
desert planet that is the sole source of the spice that enhances mental powers
and facilitates space travel, gigantic sandworms that protect the spice, and
more.
None of these story elements exist. They are all made up,
created out of whole cloth to facilitate a sweeping saga about the genetic
destiny of man. Why is it SF and not fantasy? Because of the aesthetics?
Because it has shields and lasers, even though people prefer to fight with cold
steel? Because it has space travel and house wars, never mind that space travel
takes up only a small fraction of the story?
If the genre of a story is defined simply by its aesthetics,
by the existence of tropes and items that arbitrarily fall into one category or
another, then why is magitech not treated as science fiction?
In magitech stories, magic is indistinguishable from
technology. Magic runs along rules, has predictable outcomes, and otherwise
functions as an exact analogue to modern and future technology.
The Laundry Files is set in a world where applied
mathematics is the basis of magic. Yet it is treated primarily as horror and
urban fantasy, because the titular Laundry protects the world from eldritch
abominations. Harry Potter is fantasy, even though in the world of wizards, magic
takes the place of much modern technology. The World at War series is billed as
a fantasy story, even though it is basically World War II set in a world that
experienced a magical revolution instead of an industrial revolution, with
magic tools that obey understandable laws.
The divide between science fiction and fantasy is a false
divide. It is useful only as a marketing tool, a means of branding a book in a
post-pulp world. PulpRev keeps with the traditions of those who came before us
and reject this divide.
Science fiction is fantasy. The counterfactual elements in
science fiction are by and large products of the author’s imagination. They may
exist as prototypes or as speculative ideas, or they may simply be made up from
whole cloth, but they are counterfactual because they do not exist now.
They are born from the writer’s creative process.
The perceived difference between science fiction and fantasy
lies in the mileu, tropes, props, and, where relevant, whether something may or
may not exist in the future. It is not a significant difference.
If I say a story has palaces, monsters and swords, you’d
think epic fantasy. If I say it has spaceships, lasers, and planets you’d think
science fiction. But I am referring to Star Wars, which has all of them.
Which, incidentally, was written by Leigh Breckett.
Instead of the imaginary split between science fiction and
fantasy, I propose a different kind of divide. The mythical and the mechanical.
This is not meant to compare different kinds of stories and create
make-believe genres from thin air. Rather, it is meant as a framework to help
writers clarify what kind of stories they wish to write.
The mythical represents the wild, untamed, and unknown. It
points to stranger realms that exist beyond human comprehension. Mythical
beings and items are capable of seemingly-impossible feats, at least in the
context of the story world. These feats are unique, as individual as the actor
or the object, impossible for others to reproduce.
Limitless and undefinable, the mythical overwhelms the
mundane and the mortal with the sheer immensity of its presence and power. Every
contact with the mythical leaves an indelible mark, a searing realisation that
there is more to heaven and earth than dreamt of in the philosophies of men. Mythic
fiction echoes the bygone days when the world was a dim place and the horns of
elfland sound in the distant forests just beyond mortal sight. The mythic is a
realm of wonder and adventure and transcendence—but also a realm of chaos and
danger and deception.
The mechanical reflects the principles of contemporary science:
rules, repeatability, falsifiability. Rules govern the workings of mechanical
objects, rules that are well-understood by the experts of the story world.
These rules are consistent across space and time, leading to repeatability.
Thus, under the same circumstances, Input A always leads to output B. Should a
mechanical object fail to work, the cause should be traceable to a rule
violation—or it is a sign that not enough is known about the true workings of
the world.
These rules sharply define the limits and capabilities of
mechanical objects. Input A will forever produce Input B, until or unless
something about the object or environment changes. Because they are well-known
and well-defined, these mechanical objects are totally unremarkable to the
characters of the setting, as mundane as their food and drink.
A highly mechanical universe operates by the principles of
naturalism. Naturalism holds that the entire universe consists only of natural
elements with spatio-temporal physical substance, meaning mass-energy. The
non-physical or quasi-physical can be reduced to a physical account, or is
related to something physical. The entire universe operates only by understandable
and discoverable laws, and thus the supernatural, that which exists outside the
laws of nature, cannot exist.
If we look at the mythical and mechanical divide, we can see
various stories through a different light.
A LitRPG story featuring adventurers who explore dungeons and
fight monsters in search of gold, and use a magic and stat similar to
contemporary RPGs, is primarily a Mechanical story. In such a setting, the
stats govern all. They represent the laws of the universe. Characters achieve
effects—casting a spell, damaging a monster for 999 HP, summoning a friendly
spirit—by working with these laws and stats. The stat system is well-understood,
characters understand that higher stats equals higher power, and there are no deviances
from the stat system.
A Sword and Sorcery story starring a barbarian mercenary who
must battle through a mountain range ruled by a cabal of evil wizards and their
slave army is primarily a Mythical story. The setting is wild and strange and
unknown. Magic is scarce and unpredictable, the domain of people who have
dedicated themselves to the occult. Anything can happen when a wizard appears.
There is unlimited adventure here, but also unlimited danger.
A story featuring awesome lost technology is Mythical, with
a dose of Mechanical. it is Mythical in that the technology is unique, unknown,
and unbound by rules. It can be Mechanical once the characters study the
technology and understand what it can and cannot do, but if that technology
remains a black box, unable to be reproduced by anyone, it remains Mythical.
The divide between the mythical and the mechanical stems from
the portrayal of key tropes and devices, and the characters’ attitudes towards
them. It is not about whether the story has spaceships or flying carpets, but how
they are portrayed to the reader.
The mythical-mechanical framework erases the arbitrary
distinctions between science fiction and fantasy, while opening avenues to weird
and wonderful stories that capture the spirit of the pulps. Consider these examples:
The mythical-mechanical framework, it must be remembered, is
not about creating genre divisions. It is simply a framework to
apprehend fiction, and to help writers better conceptualise and craft their own
stories. Some of the best stories I’ve read where stories that deliberately
mashed up the mythic and the mechanical.
In the JRPG series Legend of Heroes: Trails in the
Sky, the Orbal Revolution catalyzed an exciting era of magitech. Every playable
character carries an orbment, a mechanical device the size of a wristwatch,
allowing them to use magic. The magic they can use is determined by their
orbment configuration: a general-purpose magic user will have a setup that lets
them use many weak spells from various elements, while a specialist will have a
setup that lets them use the most powerful spells of a single element but few
or none of the others.
As an RPG, the combat system is mechanical. Stats define
everything. For a given stat value, you can predict a character’s actions and
consequences in battle. If you know a character’s arts attack stat and the
enemy’s weaknesses and arts defense stat, you can predict the outcome of an
arts attack.
However, the story itself has powerful mythical elements. The
antagonist faction is a secret society that seeks to create a superhuman, and
its members all possess unique and world-shaking powers. Lost technology is a
critical part of the worldbuilding. Monsters serve as mobs and cannon fodder,
but some may just take you by surprise.
Having mythical elements in a story does not exclude the
mechanical, and vice versa. We live in a world so wide and strange that it can
easily accommodate the mythic and the mechanical side by side. Thus, stories
can be mythical, mechanical, or both. The mythic and the mechanical by co-exist
in peace, or they may be pitted in bitter conflict against each other. There
are no proscriptions save for this: craft excellent stories.
I do not expect the mythical-mechanical framework to be popular.
It runs against the spirit of the age and trends in Current Year fiction.
Many Japanese fantasy stories, especially isekai stories,
revel in portraying overpowered human protagonists. Such an approach violates
the rules of mythic storytelling. A mythic story shows that there will always
be something greater than mere men; if an overpowered human protagonist is the
most powerful being in the setting, he becomes the myth – but only to other
characters, not to the reader. To the reader, he is simply a reflection of an
idle wish to be all-powerful.
Mythic stories cannot have all-powerful wizards as the
protagonist. Magic without limits is magic that can never be countered or
neutralized. It eliminates all possibilities for meaningful conflict.
The protagonist is the measure of all things in the story,
and if the protagonist is the most powerful being then there is nothing greater
than him. Without the realization of the existence of things and beings greater
and stranger than mere men, you cannot have the mythic.
Mythic is the antithesis of the spectacle. Modern stories
revel in showing spectacular fight scenes with jaw-dropping special effects and
signature moves. But the more often something is seen, the better it is
understood. Without scarcity and secrecy—and therefore, without mystery—something
ceases to be mythic and passes into mere mundanity. Mythical magic is powerful,
incredible, decisive—but also scarce. It shows up once and forever vanishes.
It stays in the reader’s consciousness long enough to make an impact, and when
it goes the mystery of its existence remains, like a brand burned into the brain.
The mechanical side of the equation may seem easier to handle.
In a sense it is, but only if you know how to craft the rules of the universe,
and assiduously enforce them.
The mechanical approach requires writers to think through
the rules for the mechanical tropes they create. More than just saying burning
X MP on Spell Y will create Effect Z, the writer must think through the
worldbuilding implications.
In the case of the Grimnoir Chronicles, magic is understood
sufficiently well in the universe that it is integrated into everyday life.
People who can control lightning and fire serve as damage control and safety
specialists in hydrogen airships, those with superstrength and gravity control gravitate
towards hard physical labour, and so on. The more pervasive a mechanical
object, the greater its importance to the story universe, the more its influence
must be felt across the setting–and the rules must be applied consistently and
logically in every single manifestation.
Any violation of the rules must be deliberate. It must point
to something greater, something powerful, something that exists beyond the
rules of the world or beyond the understanding of Man. It can be something as
awesome as an eldritch abomination that rules a distant court beyond space-time,
or it could be a revelation that the experts of the setting are but children grasping
at straws, ignorant of the truth of the wider world. It must hint at the unexplained,
the unknown, the deeper truth that underpins reality. It must point to the mythic.
If a rule violation doesn’t point to the mythic, then it threatens
the foundation of the story world. Left unaddressed, it feels like the writer
made a mistake, shaking the reader’s suspension of disbelief. If the rule
violation has some mundane cause, this should first be treated as a mystery,
and its resolution should uphold the mechanical nature of the world.
Consider this example. A magic knight in a LitRPG setting makes
his reputation through his skilful swordplay and incredible magic skills. One
day he discovers that his magic is getting weaker. This is a rules violation,
and he finds no easy explanation to this.
A mechanical solution to this problem reveals that he has
been struck by an invisible curse, one that robs him of his magic-related stats,
but the curse nonetheless obeys the rules of the setting. A mythic solution points
to the existence of a cosmic entity, one that exists outside the realm of the
litRPG mechanics but possesses the power to meddle with the system.
The mythical-mechanical framework is only this: a framework.
It is a tool for story analysis and for story writing. That is all. There will
be many kinds of stories that fall outside this framework, where this framework
cannot possibly apply.
Recognize its limitations and its intended use. It is not
for a knife to divide a genre, but a springboard to catalyze your own works. It
is an approach that hearkens to the spirit of the pulps, and is the approach I
am using and refining into the future.
Want to see a cyberpunk story that blends the mythic and the mechanical? Check out BABYLON BLUES here!
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