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McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: Dom on March 01, 2007, 04:23:41 AM
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So, I'm thinking of worlds today. And I was thinking, of all the worlds I've read about in books, the ones I like the most are science fantasy. Such as Anne McCaffrey's Pern, and Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover. I've read urban fantasy, I've read high/epic fantasy, and I have some dearly-loved characters from those stories, but the worlds I like best are Pern and Darkover, and those sorts of settings.
It's possible that I'm overly attached to these two because I read those books when I was 12--basically at the very start of my SFF-reading career. There might be some...heh...Impression going on. ;)
But I was wondering if this special liking of mine for science fantasy worlds (you can toss Robert Silverburg's Majipoor in there as well!) where I like the world even more then the characters in it is more then personal...I'm wondering if such worlds have any sort of broad appeal? Look at Joan D. Vinge's Snow Queen and Summer Queen...science fantasy. Dune...science fantasy. Lots of the best damn books in SFF are set on compelling science fantasy worlds. C. S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy. There's more I'm not listing.
What do you guys think? Am I on to something, or biased by my own preferences?
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Well, I gotta tell ya, this post made me realize i've never actually read a story set in a science fantasy world.
I know of the Pern books, and they sound friggin awesome, but I'm just not sure where to start. I always enjoyed the Dinotopia world, though that was more a world built through art and later turned into a movie.
Outside of LOTR and Dresden, I guess I'm kind of a noob at SFF reading. I grew up reading Crichton, and that's all I read. Crichton is borderline, but not really the kind of SciFi we're talking about here. The first fantasy I read was...A Ripple in Time...anyone remember that? Cause i don't...lol. I'm not even sure if that's the correct title, or if it counts as SFF. I remember we read it in elementary school, but that's about all I remember.
"The Hobbit" was my official first fantasy book I guess, but other than that I didn't really read much fantasy.
But, I can kind of see where you're coming from. A good world can indeed be a character all in itself. I've got sort of a vague idea for the world in my trilogy I'm gonna write next, but I need to do a lot more developing I think, cause I want it to be one of those memorable worlds.
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You know, I just realized I never quite defined how I'm using the word "science fantasy". To me, a science fantasy is a novel set on a world that technically has sci-fi origins (ie, colonized by a ship from earth), but said people on the world have forgotten everything about that past, and usually have regressed to a mediaeval level of technology, so the story itself generally plays out more like a fantasy, with ancient complex machines sometimes taking place of ancient complex magic.
Anyway--blgarver...If you do ever read Pern, the order they were written in I think is the best way. Anne McCaffrey is an excellent writer for the first few books in any given series, but she has a tendancy to retcon things from old books (or maybe she just forgets they're there) to fit newer books. So a fact from one book can be contradicted by a fact in a new book, and if you read them out of order an older book can have some things that just don't make sense if you read a newer book first. Drives us fans crazy! So yeah, if you read newer books first, such as The MasterHarper of Pern, earlier books don't always make sense. So I reccomend reading them in this order...Dragonflight (used to have the green cover), Dragonquest (used to have the purple cover), The Harper Hall Trilogy (Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, Dragondrums), The White Dragon, The Renegades of Pern, Dragonsdawn, All the Weyrs of Pern. (Then there's some more books which are scattered around after All the Weyrs of Pern).
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A good example of a world you might like Dom, is Kundala from The Pearl by Eric V. Lustbader. It is a world that had low tech and the people who lived there had access to sorcory provided by thier goddess Mina and her dragon followers. The world was invaded by a Ultra-tech society of aliens and colonized. There is a great contrast with the interaction between the sci/fi and fantasy elements.
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You know, I just realized I never quite defined how I'm using the word "science fantasy". To me, a science fantasy is a novel set on a world that technically has sci-fi origins (ie, colonized by a ship from earth), but said people on the world have forgotten everything about that past, and usually have regressed to a mediaeval level of technology, so the story itself generally plays out more like a fantasy, with ancient complex machines sometimes taking place of ancient complex magic.
That actually makes me think of the Samaria books by Sharon Shinn, which initially look like religious fantasy about angels but are actually about a group of people brought from a dying world in a spaceship that they think is their god. There's a solid romance angle but to me, the most fascinating part is reading about the various human peoples and the angels slowly coming to realise their origins, about the few scraps of technology they still have, and why creating new technology is frowned upon.
So while I can't compare to the books you've listed, as I haven't read them, I think you're on to something about science fantasy worlds being intriguing.
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Outside of LOTR and Dresden, I guess I'm kind of a noob at SFF reading. I grew up reading Crichton, and that's all I read. Crichton is borderline, but not really the kind of SciFi we're talking about here. The first fantasy I read was...A Ripple in Time...anyone remember that? Cause i don't...lol. I'm not even sure if that's the correct title, or if it counts as SFF. I remember we read it in elementary school, but that's about all I remember.
Did you mean A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle? It has my favorite book opening ever: "It was a dark and stormy night". I love it because it's the same phrase that Snoopy always starts his stories with. ;D
But, I can kind of see where you're coming from. A good world can indeed be a character all in itself. I've got sort of a vague idea for the world in my trilogy I'm gonna write next, but I need to do a lot more developing I think, cause I want it to be one of those memorable worlds.
I have to agree here. I think the best SFF I've read -- and I'll add the Riftwar Saga by Raymond E. Feist to those already mentioned -- are so compelling in part because you have a feeling that the world setting works and is real.
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You know, I just realized I never quite defined how I'm using the word "science fantasy". To me, a science fantasy is a novel set on a world that technically has sci-fi origins (ie, colonized by a ship from earth), but said people on the world have forgotten everything about that past, and usually have regressed to a mediaeval level of technology, so the story itself generally plays out more like a fantasy, with ancient complex machines sometimes taking place of ancient complex magic.
Thanks for clarifying, because there's more than one borderland between SF and fantasy and I was not sure which you meant. That particular genre I tend to think of as "fantasy with SF underwear".
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Crichton is borderline, but not really the kind of SciFi we're talking about here.
Crichton writes technothriller/horror, not SF. It's a question of attitude. SF is about thinking about and playing with the implications of ideas; Crichton just wants the cool new stuff to be scary and kill people so that shutting it down at the end is a win. This is a form of plotting that gets me very angry indeed, because it encourages assumptions that are hostile to actual science.
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Crichton writes technothriller/horror, not SF. It's a question of attitude. SF is about thinking about and playing with the implications of ideas; Crichton just wants the cool new stuff to be scary and kill people so that shutting it down at the end is a win. This is a form of plotting that gets me very angry indeed, because it encourages assumptions that are hostile to actual science.
Okay that makes sense. I've always called his stuff "science not-so-fiction" just because it's not entirely outside the realms of reality. But technothriller/horror is more accurate.
What do you mean by "hostile to actual science"?
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What do you mean by "hostile to actual science"?
Science, done in the real world, has as an absolute fundamental axiom the assumption that new things are worth knowing, be that because they are fun or cool or interesting or are going to let you build more stuff or whatever.
The basic assumptions of Crichton's work are that new things are scary and dangerous and have to be stamped out because otherwise they will have inevitable terrible consequences, and that people who work to find out new things are at best irresponsible and more likely malevolent. (I do not think this assumption is absolutely essential for making a technothriller work, though I'm having a hard time seeing where the technothriller values of preserving the status quo could fit with a geniune SFnal attitude to new ideas; horror seems pretty much defined by the Other being horrible and dangerous and scary, but I don't think the question of whether something is horror or not is in the same direction as whether it's SF or fantasy or mainstream, it's possible to be horror or not-horror in any of those spaces.)
As somebody who works in real-world science, I take major umbrage at Crichton's assumption.
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Okay that makes sense. I've always called his stuff "science not-so-fiction" just because it's not entirely outside the realms of reality.
Also, there's a non-trivial amount of day-after-tomorrow SF in the world that's pretty close to the realms of reality but not with the obnoxious anti-science attitude. Though by definition day-after-tomorrow settings age rapidly, and there's less of it this past five years or so than there used to be because it's a harder world to be short-term optimistic in than it was five-years-plus-time-to-write-a-novel ago.
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Actually, I think Crighton's stuff is more of a morality tale. It doesn't seem to be about knowledge itself but about the misuse and abuse of it. It's more about the old saying we have in IT, "Just because you can doesn't mean you should".
Eaters of the Dead - made into the movie the 13th Warrior - a retelling of the Beowulf saga but also about a collision of cultures. The technologically superior vikings wiping out the older tribal inhabitants. Moral of the story - Just because you can pitch your tent somewhere doesn't mean you should.
Congo - humans are punished for attempting to exploit both nature and an ape. Moral of the story - Just because you have a sat phone, you are not invincible.
Sphere - human techology from the future causes one of the men who discovers it to go insane and start killing his crewmates Moral of the story - Just because you can peek behind door #3 doesn't mean you really want to know what's in there.
Jurassic Park - overweening scientists re-create dinosaurs and they drive the humans off the island Moral of the story - Just because you can clone dinosaurs doesn't mean you should.
Airframe - all about trying to cover up the actual facts of a mid air incident that involves several fatalties. Moral of the story - Just because you think you can cover it up doesn't mean you can or should.
They're all like that. You folks need to learn to write a critical analysis of a piece.
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Actually, I think Crighton's stuff is more of a morality tale. It doesn't seem to be about knowledge itself but about the misuse and abuse of it. It's more about the old saying we have in IT, "Just because you can doesn't mean you should".
There's only so many different variations you can read on "exploring new and interesting knowledge always has terrible consequences" before it starts to convince you it's a theme; point me at any Crichton story where something new is a force for good, otr any sympathetic character who believes in exploring the new, if you want to convince me he's not either a Luddite himself, or someone who consciously chooses to write from a Luddite perspective.
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Not all of his stuff is about technology - so I can't call him a Luddite. I will agree with you that a *lot* of it revolves around technology, but not all. I will say this, the more I learn about some of the things that we're doing now, the more of a Luddite I find myself becoming. We insist on tinkering with things we do not fully understand and it's only a matter of time until the consequences catch up to us.
2 cents....
RecentCoin
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We insist on tinkering with things we do not fully understand and it's only a matter of time until the consequences catch up to us.
Being responsibly aware of consequences is one thing, but we won't get the ability to handle consequences well without understanding things well in the first place; at this point in the history of a technological civilisation, there's not really any way we can go back to living in caves and hope the problems will go away, whereas there are real possibilities for bringing the consequences of our industrialisation, for example, under control by working smarter.
If we don't tinker with anything until we fully understand it, how are we supposed to learn ?
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Just to throw this into the pot... L.E. Modesitt's Order/Chaos series. The first few were excellent, but he's into the double digits now and it is getting old.
There's actually one whole book where you find out that the basis for much of the O/C world's civilization is from a ship that jumped dimensions... from one of his other series'. Amusing... (that one was the best book, btw).
And I know it was already mentioned, but the Coldfire trilogy was a personal favorite of mine.
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I don't know if this qualifies but all the Books of Swords by Fred Saberhagen (has a good Dracula series as well) but you have to read the prequels, which are all together in the book, Empire of the East. It shows how this fantasy world is actually post apocalyptic - sort of.
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You know, the Wheel of Time books indicate pretty strongly throughout them that they are set in a far future of our world.
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I've always enjoyed the Dune universe. Herbert had such a terrific way of showing exactly the inner connectedness of all the planets involved, even the minor ones. You knew who was with who and everything in between
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Science, done in the real world, has as an absolute fundamental axiom the assumption that new things are worth knowing, be that because they are fun or cool or interesting or are going to let you build more stuff or whatever.
The basic assumptions of Crichton's work are that new things are scary and dangerous and have to be stamped out because otherwise they will have inevitable terrible consequences, and that people who work to find out new things are at best irresponsible and more likely malevolent. (I do not think this assumption is absolutely essential for making a technothriller work, though I'm having a hard time seeing where the technothriller values of preserving the status quo could fit with a geniune SFnal attitude to new ideas; horror seems pretty much defined by the Other being horrible and dangerous and scary, but I don't think the question of whether something is horror or not is in the same direction as whether it's SF or fantasy or mainstream, it's possible to be horror or not-horror in any of those spaces.)
As somebody who works in real-world science, I take major umbrage at Crichton's assumption.
As a fan of Crichton, I take umbrage to your assumption that that is the point that he's trying to get across. Crichton has no hidden agenda. There's nothing to read between the lines. His books are meant to tell a story. That is all.
Think of it this way, when someone makes a movie and they depict the villain as being a Russian radical, are they condemning ALL of Russia? Hell no. What about movies about the American revolution and the bad guys are British? Are they condemning England and the other British countries? Again, no. Except for State of Fear (and possibly Next), Crichton had no hidden agenda in his telling of his story. That was all he was trying to do. Tell a story. He finds something cool and writes about it. If anything, I think he's making the public aware that we might have these capabilities or something similar. Nothing more.
Okay, what about an example from his work? Ever read Sphere? Sphere has nothing to do with technology malfunctioning. The underwater habitat never malfunctioned until it was hit by a squid several times and had an electrical surge. That one, Crichton exploits the human race and their minds being dangerous given the power of manifestation combined with fear. So is he condemning us? No.
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As a fan of Crichton, I take umbrage to your assumption that that is the point that he's trying to get across. Crichton has no hidden agenda. There's nothing to read between the lines.
I'll agree this far. This isn't subtext; this is text.
Think of it this way, when someone makes a movie and they depict the villain as being a Russian radical, are they condemning ALL of Russia? Hell no.
If that was the only thing they ever made movies about, it would start to suggest an underlying agenda.
Ever read Sphere? Sphere has nothing to do with technology malfunctioning. The underwater habitat never malfunctioned until it was hit by a squid several times and had an electrical surge. That one, Crichton exploits the human race and their minds being dangerous given the power of manifestation combined with fear. So is he condemning us? No.
Sphere; humans find a mysterious artifact of unknown advanced technological origin which provides great power. This provides horrible danger and what is presented as a happy and satisfying ending is to get rid of it.
Jurassic Park: humans learn to clone dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are horribly dangerous and the
happy and satisfying ending is to get the humans way from them and get rid of them.
Prey: humans learn how to make active nanotech. It turns out to be horribly dangerous, and, for a change, the ending is not quite sure whether it's been got rid of, but again, that's where the sympathies are going.
The possibilities for positive outcomes to technological progress or change of any sort are not in these books. The status quo is good and change is bad. This is Luddism plain and simple.
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I think you're taking the wrong thing from it and I believe I have a quote from the Jurassic Park movie that helps:
John Hammond: When we have control—
Ellie Sattler: You never had control — that's the illusion! I was overwhelmed by the power of this place. But I made a mistake, too. I didn't have enough respect for that power, and it's out now.
The point here is that it's more about knowing what you're doing rather than condemning new technology. What was the single biggest mistake they made in the Jurassic Park novel? Hiring a guy who was untrustworthy and then paying him little. He was the one that sabotaged the park. The dinosaurs running amok are the same as opening the cage to the big predators at a zoo. If they want to eat humans, they will try.
The whole reason they destroyed the island at the end was to prevent the dinosaurs from going to other islands like they had managed to do. But they lacked control because they made more than they could keep track of and they didn't know much about the dinosaurs at all. You have to know about the creature you're holding captive to be able to keep it captive.
See, in Jurassic Park it was more of people taking short cuts than the new technology. The fencing system is pretty standard. I'll admit that he did make the dinosaurs a bit TOO aggressive at times, but that was for conflict reason. I honestly can't see how this would be cloning failing, but more or less a zoo that was poorly ran. Think about it: Hammond was more obsessed with making money than showing off his creation. Okay, I could see a greed thing about this, but that's about it.
Also, I think part of the reason they were killed was for a conclusive ending. Closure. I mean, reasoning was to prevent the dinosaurs from spreading to other islands seeing as Costa Rica was having a problem with compies attacking their young.
Let's look at Sphere:
Like I said, Sphere has nothing to do with technology malfunctioning. The Sphere worked perfectly. It did was it was built to do. The problem here was that those that got the power didn't know how to use it. Harry was the first one to get it and he didn't have control over it because no one had had that power before him. He didn't know what it could do. He didn't know he was doing anything.
Beth was emotionally and mentally unstable. She had no control there and it effected how she used her powers.
Norman, on the other hand, having observed both Beth and Harry, had known what to do. He had control over it. Truth be told, Norman is a perfect example of what I'm getting at. The technology works for him. Nothing bad happens when he gets it. He doesn't manifest a giant squid or anything of that nature. Why? He has control of both the powers and of his own emotions.
At the end, the Sphere was thought to have been destroyed because the three didn't think that humans could handle the power. I think it's the same as not going around town handing out guns and doing background checks on people who do have guns. Can you imagine a whole lot of people like Beth with that power?
In Prey:
I can't really say much about this one. I read it once back in 2004 (or whenever it was new) and haven't reread it since. But I will say this: the methods in which they made nanobots was unknown to them. They got out and ran amok because they were unaware of their capabilities. I don't recall the nanobots being taken care of in this one, either. I thought the threat was still rampant.
I still think it's the arrogance of thinking you have control and really not having it. There's no way Crichton COULD write technology in a positive light without writing essays, but he'd rather write fiction, which means he needs conflict. Rather than having this impressive technology in the background of a novel, he opts to portray it in a "negative light" so as to have conflict.
I'm going to have to pull out more examples for my point:
In Crichton's book Next, there was nothing NEGATIVE about bioengineering. In fact, I recall a happy ending with a talking parrot and an ape kid. The good guys were trying to save them both from people who wanted them for selfish reasons. If nothing else, I think Next is a perfect example of when he doesn't follow the formula.
Steve Alten wrote several books about Megalodon sharks. The sharks attack humans and large sea mammals. Does that mean he hates sharks? Probably not. In fact, I'm pretty sure he likes them. In fact, a lot of people write about what they like. I've written dragons in a negative light before, but I really like dragons. I added them because I liked dragons. I just thought it more sensible to put them in a negative light.
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My idea on any well-written, compelling world is one that can keep expanding, imagining and thinking about even after you've finished all the books available to read. I started out with a basic concept of my own "world" as it were.
As time went on, I became fascinated-obsessed with the cultures and races and even the climate in each city. The way things were governed on one continent to the next, how each city and it's boundaries interacted with one another. Trade and commerce, clothing styles, cultural hairstyles, architecture. Even the variants of food and travel. For example, one of my continents has to import horses, and they are very expensive both to transport and to care for.
A truly captivating world is "alive" and convincingly "real".
~N.W.
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I think you're taking the wrong thing from it and I believe I have a quote from the Jurassic Park movie that helps:
John Hammond: When we have control—
Ellie Sattler: You never had control — that's the illusion! I was overwhelmed by the power of this place. But I made a mistake, too. I didn't have enough respect for that power, and it's out now.
The point here is that it's more about knowing what you're doing rather than condemning new technology.
That's the point exactly.
If you know what you are doing, it isn't research. The scientific method is about finding new things and figuring them out. You don't and can't know what you're doing when it's something new; the value system here is asking for something that is by definition incompatible with actual science.
I'll believe Crichton gets this when he writes one novel in which research finds something new and useful with a net-positive effect.
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There's no way Crichton COULD write technology in a positive light without writing essays, but he'd rather write fiction, which means he needs conflict.
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There is a truly amazing amount of SF out there that presents technology in a positive light, much of it a more nuanced light allowing for the positive and the negative, without being lacking in conflict. To some ways of looking at it that's kind of core to the genre.
In Crichton's book Next, there was nothing NEGATIVE about bioengineering. In fact, I recall a happy ending with a talking parrot and an ape kid. The good guys were trying to save them both from people who wanted them for selfish reasons. If nothing else, I think Next is a perfect example of when he doesn't follow the formula.
I've not read that one, and that response to it does make me feel somewhat better. Though it's unlikely to get into my readpile anytime soon.
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Far be it from me to detract from the fascinating Michael Crichton debate (not being sarcastic), but I'm going to anyway.
I read C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet after much prodding from my best friend, and I was completely in awe of the world (and universe) he created. The man had an amazing imagination. It was beautiful in parts, and some places not so beautiful, but it was always very original.
I, too, enjoyed the world of Sharon Shinn's Angel quintet. Samaria was totally believable and really interesting.
--Sarah
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Some really deep interesting discussion in here. I do consider quite a bit of Crichton sci fi. I suppose it depends on what book you read first. As to created worlds... Dune, Ringworld and I'll toss in Andre Norton's worlds McCaffrey certainly, although her not so distant in the future "The Ship that Sang" is still one of my all time favorite reads.My very first sci fi was read by a teacher in 3rd grade, Twenty-One Balloons, by DuBois. Do you remember that one? Talk about a fun world he made out of Kracatoa (spelling..) and all those wonderfully fun machines they used in everyday life. Wow, it was great! That took you to Jules Verne etc Back then the writing styles could be several pages of delightful exposition, and we could even enjoy passive voice for what it was telling us, which most editors today wouldn't allow in the door from what I can tell. *Posted same time as peas, had forgotten the CS Lewis trilogy which also included Prelandria, never cared for Narnia, but that adult trilogy was super.
What fascinates me is the width and variety of the sci fi genre, which helps and hurts us. It is SO varied and we are all so individually attuned to certain types of sci fi that it amazes me that publishers put up with us. This was posted on another thread and I've kept it because it's so true. Our tastes are so narrow in what parts of sci fi we enjoy. Some books, like the Dresden Files, seem to cross the majority of those lines and bring us together. Enjoy if you haven't run across this one.
How many fantasy characters does it take to change a light bulb?
Epic Fantasy Writer: How many you got?
Traditional Fantasy Writer: One. There can be only one Chosen One.
Quest Fantasy Writer: One, but he must form a party of adventurers to
retrieve the magic pliers first.
Romantic Fantasy Writer: Two, but they must do it while sharing a
passionate kiss
Erotic Fantasy Writer: Three, but they must do it naked while sharing a
passionate kiss
Horror Fantasy Writer: One, as long as it's a tentacle slivering from
the bottomless pit.
Urban fantasy writer: Three. A werewolf, a vampire, and a chic in
leather with a gun.
Literary Fantasy Writer: One, but it will take four pages to describe
it.
Slipstream Fantasy Writer: Is the light bulb an allegory for birth or
death?
Tech Sci-Fi Writer: Who uses light bulbs? Honestly...
I suspect that most of us would only chose three or four of the above breakdowns to read--yet here we are sharing the sci-fi genre.
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How many fantasy characters does it take to change a light bulb?
Horror Fantasy Writer: One, as long as it's a tentacle slivering from
the bottomless pit.
Unless it's Lovecraftian horror, in which case the answer is "All of them. Never split the party."