On Magic

Fiction writing is based on 'What-Ifs'. the what if I've been working with a lot lately has been, "What if limitless power was granted to a limited individual - would the limits of the individual then limit the power? And could an individual overcome human limitations if granted godly power. In short: would a human make a God's power human, or would the power make the human a God?"

Now, the point of this post is not to examine that question, but rather to examine the questions our works ask, in general, and ask some questions of our work in turn.

Recently I've been asked for school to examine the differences between Science Fiction and Fantasy, and I've come to a very simple realization: Science Fiction seems to be any work that was created with a 'what-if' in mind that seems very plausible, or likely to happen in the near or even far distant future. Fantasy novels work with an entirely different set of 'what-ifs' that seem not to be able to be played out in our reality. For this reason I've had to look at my own work in a very harsh light, especially while attempting to enter the publishing scene: Is my story fantasy, or sci-fi? Its certainly steampunk, but does that tell us anything? Not really. And it certainly has elements that could easily be attributed to either sci-fi or fantasy - I call the magic wielded in the story 'Chemical Magic' and personally feel that my work appeals more easily to the sci-fi audience, from a purely marketing standpoint. The problem is the threshold at which you give credibility to a novel as 'based in science'. While the magic in my novel is derived from a chemical source, the source is not explained in depth and was developed along the lines of pseudo-science, rather than cold hard fact, and in that manner has taken on many of the aspects of magic. Though I intend to eventually more carefuly explain the magic of The Mad Element Saga, I find myself wondering whether I should market this to a fantasy audience, or a sci-fi audience.

And so I leave this blog post with two questions: Where is the line drawn between Sci-fi and Fantasy? And if I have to pick one, when my work so clearly rides astride that boundary, on which side should I let my novel fall? It can't be both! I can't try to wedge it into two markets, it simply won't work!

A free download of my first work is: here. So you can read for yourself if you wish.