Rabbits On Rocking Horse

I guess it should be weird to me that my first published novel is almost certainly going to be Fantasy.  For every Fantasy book I’ve read there are easily 20 SF books.  I was always attracted to the futurism and the implications of technology and scientific discovery in SF.  

But these days, futurism seems hopeless, or at least beyond my abilities.  Vernor Vinge, Kim Stanley Robinson, Dan Simmons, Neal Stephenson…just a handful of geniuses have the chops to do the kind of SF that still excites my imagination about the future.  Things change too quickly, and the shelf life of a prediction gets ever shorter.

In Fantasy I can do world creation which just has to be internally consistent.  The rules of magic in Erfworld won’t seem quaint in 10 years because all new rules of magic have been invented.  The internet jokes won’t age well, but who cares.  Smiley


Discussion (2) ¬

  1. Stone Raven

    You know… As cool as the sci-fi explanation for the rabbits’ existence is… I think I’ll still always prefer fantasy–in part for exactly the same reason as the first rabbit.

  2. JET73L

    I personally like the inverse of Clarke’s Third Law (that is, Niven’s corollary). “Any sufficiently explained magic is indistinguishable from technology”. Technology that is impossible by our current ability to affect the universe, but nonetheless indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology.

    Of course, there’s also the idea that insufficiently advanced technology is any fictional technology that can be distinguished from magic, but that falls into hard sci-fi. While I like the premise of hard sci-fi, and the occasional hard sci-fi book that I find, it’s rarely handled well and tends toward the dry side of things.

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