(So, not having internet at home for two more weeks just might be driving me a little crazier than I’d expected. Aside from being deprived of my favorite webcomics, I’m forced to post to this blog only during work. -That- is already getting old. Sigh.)
In any case! Good time-of-day to everyone who chances across these words. I do hope life’s going well for everyone; my karma got rear-ended yesterday, so here’s hoping that none of you are also in the boat of Those With A Scratched Bumper. (The other car looked totaled. Dinky little sportscar.)
Probably due to the fact that this place is brand-new and so still largely undiscovered by the voraciously reading populace of the internet, my questions last post went unanswered. So, if anyone happens across this blog and wants to share some of their favorite sci-fantasy books, shows, movies, and/or video games, feel free! That’s what the comment section is for, after all. ^_^
Here’s a theory of origins for you: Sci-fantasy is born of a fantasy world that evolves. This is definitely -not- true for all sources of sci-fantasy (looking at you, Final Fantasy X!), but it could be used to explain plenty of others. Let’s take World of Warcraft as an example. Much like my own world, Ykinde, WoW has a very lore-rich history, explaining how individual races and creatures came to be, and all of it is rife with magic. In the earliest stages of its history, WoW was a purely fantasy world. However, Azeroth (the world of… well, warcraft… itself) is an evolving, living world. It isn’t static. Races moved around, geographically. Empires rose and crumbled. History was forged in the fires of strife and steel– okay, so I’m getting carried away. The -point- here is, Azeroth is a dynamic world.
Dynamic worlds evolve. Evolution, as on Earth, leads to more sophisticated tools. Sharp sticks give way to stone-tipped sticks. Fantasy worlds, if they have any sort of race on them that can A) mine, B) forge, and C) be innovative, will tend to evolve into sci-fantasy. Once you perfect the art of making a fine sword – once your crossbow quarrels are honed and balanced – where do you go? If you figure out how to make things explode, which is pretty likely if you have magic blasting all over the place, then the inventors of the time wonder how they can use it. In a war-torn or otherwise dangerous world, defense and battle are primary concerns – so you might try to blow other people up.
In come cannons… primitive hand-grenades… very primitive firearms. Engineers go nuts with their new trinkets and fine-tune the sciences that make them work, expanding their store of metal firepower and/or useful gadgets. Assuming that the world is both challenging enough to make inventions a necessity, and also not so bare-bones hostile that people don’t have time to study and invent things… then fantasy worlds will eventually evolve towards a sci-fantasy state of existence. Guns and fireballs, hand-grenades and hexes.
That theory possibly explains the existence of part of the sci-fantasy collective… but what about places like Final Fantasy X? Does science ever come -before- magic? I’m thinking of Dragonriders of Pern (by Anne McCaffrey) here, where an entirely technological society devolved on a pastoral world to a point where they were more of a fantasy lifestyle than sci-fi anymore. Give me some more examples, if you have them!
