Science and Fantasy

*New Blog Feature! Since I've been drowning in good music this summer, I'm going to start putting quotes from whatever song I happen to be gorging myself on at the top of my blog posts. We'll see if it sticks, but I'm hoping it will be a good addition. :-)*

Quote of the day: "We live on front porches and swing life away, we get by just fine here on minimum wage. If love is a labor I'll slave 'til the end. I won't cross these streets until you hold my hand." -Rise Against, Swing Life Away

This is something that has been dawning slowly on me this summer, as I read through a few different fantasy novels and ponder what makes them good.

One thing I've realized is that while science isn't the focus of fantasy the way it is in science fiction (especially hard science fiction), leaving it out of a fantasy world is being inexcusably negligent as an author. It can add so much to a world.

I first got an inkling of this while finally getting started on The Golden Compass, which isn't high fantasy, but still---the pseudo-science it mixes in with its magic is just very cool. So that got me thinking about science and fantasy, and I realized there are some very cool instances of it in more fantastic works (Final Fantasy Tactics, actually, is what sprang to mind), and that it would fit much better in my world than I had imagined.

I had sort of left science out of my world completely, but as I got thinking about it and adding more layers of depth to my characters (though depth is an interesting word to use, because the layers I'm thinking of adding are fairly shallow--easy, interesting bits of characterization that readers will be quick to pick up on and say, 'Hmm...' about. More on this in a later post), I realized that it would make perfect sense for my main character to be a tinker of sorts---someone who enjoys looking behind the scenes and seeing how gadgets work, because a big part of him is analyzing the world around him, and the one sort of naturally lends itself to the other.

And that meant adding science into my world, which meant addressing the question of exactly how far along technologically they were. I had sort of just gone with the stock fantasy thing---knights and armor, wood and stone, etc. etc., but I realized as I contemplated it that that was very limiting. There was no reason behind it, it had just been an easy choice as I started to build my world.

Damn those initial easy choices. Someday I'll write down a list of all the ones I made and had to go back and revisit later, for the benefit of anyone else who's going about building a world of their own.