Fantasy. In. Spaaaaaaaaaaaaace. Or perhaps science in space? We’re still trying to figure out the difference between space fantasy and science fantasy. Either way, there’s sure to be a mix of swords and magic with technology and ships, so who are we to complain? Just kidding! Of course we’re going to complain, that’s our whole thing! But we might just find something useful along the way.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[music]Chris: This is the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: … and…
Bunny: Bunny.
Chris: This episode is coming to you from 10,000 years in the future. Or the past. May be hard to say. Uh… humanity has spread across countless galaxies, if you can even call us human anymore. But we have decided that monarchy is the best form of government after all.
Oren: Hang on. Are we still conventionally hot? Like, have we moved beyond humanity in every way except for being way hot? ’cause that’s important to me.
Bunny: Hotness is just the next stage in evolution.
Chris: Yes, that’s exactly what it is for all life forms. It turns out that there are universal rules of hotness.
Oren: Just everyone evolving to be hotter. It’s good. I’m a fan. I like this idea. This is the optimistic future that sci-fi needs.
Bunny: So yeah, this time we’re going to talk about space fantasy, what it is, and also: is it the same as science fantasy? First question.
Oren: Chris had an interesting definition, but I do think that to most people, yes, it is. Most…
Chris: No!
Oren: Most people think it’s the same thing.
Chris: I think it’s at least similar, what I thought about it, but my association with science fantasy is basically you have something that looks a lot closer to a regular fantasy, but it has a science explanation that is partly in the background, comes out usually as the book unfolds, like The Dragonriders of Pern being a classic one.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Another one I thought of is the Dark Angel trilogy, which again, looks just like a fantasy at first, but then you kind of realize that they’re on the moon. And this is technically a space colony. That book makes some interesting choices, let me just say that.
Oren: There are books, like Red Sister is a book I read recently that’s like that, where it seems like they’re in a weird fantasy world, but actually it’s an alien planet, and this terrifying magic orb in the sky is a space station, and you know, whatever. Right?
Chris: Right. But as I think of space fantasy as something where there’s specifically a setting that’s spread over multiple planets, so the setting involves… and civilization has space travel.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: And it often includes a lot more emphasis on space and spaceships. But of course, to make it fantasy, there has to be fantasy aesthetics in there. So usually kingdoms or empires, and almost always some kind of magic or magic-like abilities. It could just be telepathy or other things that are typically found in science fiction.
Oren: Right. And if it is telepathy, they will flavor it more magical, right?
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Oren: Because, like, Star Trek has telepathy, but they flavor it sciencey, ’cause it comes from like the “tele” version of your brain, right? There’s like a special part of your brain that does this. Whereas space fantasy is more likely to be like, “Yes, we harness the ether wave to transmit our thoughts,” that sort of thing.
Chris: Yeah. So, honestly, when the fantasy world just takes place on one planet, one former space colony that you can… that part is… kind of space travel is kind of distant and in the distant past, I tend to think of that as science fantasy, and when there’s a lot more emphasis on a multi-planetary civilization, I tend to call it space fantasy.
Oren: Well, those definitions make sense, but they do not seem to exist outside of this podcast.
Chris: What?
Oren: Every… it’s like everywhere else uses these terms interchangeably. Like Wikipedia: if you search for “space fantasy,” it just redirects you to “science fantasy.” You know, people on Goodreads. Goodreads has both of them, but almost all the books that have one are also listed as the other.
Chris: But there has to be a niche for fantasy that has science but doesn’t have Spice.
Oren: I mean, I’m not saying there’s not. I’m just saying most people don’t make that distinction, from what I can tell. I love some of these definitions, though. Like this one here. I’m going to read… I’m just going to read one from Wikipedia. This is for science fantasy: “In the 1950s, British journalist Walter Gillings considered science fantasy as a part of science fiction that was not plausible from the point of view of the science of the time. For example…”
Chris: Oh my gosh. So all science fiction is science fantasy, huh?
Oren: Yeah. “For example, the use of nuclear weapons in H. G. Wells’ novel The World Set Free was science fantasy from the point of view of Newtonian physics and a work of science fiction from the point of view of Einstein’s theory.”
Chris: Oh my goodness.
Bunny: Okay, Walter.
Oren: Walter’s very proud of this.
Chris: Also, that just sounds so like kind of pejorative, right? Like, you know, “Oh, well, that’s not realistic science. So it’s science fantasy.”
Oren: Yeah, well, you know, it’s this… Look, this is the place where the genre for cool nerds who like science meets the genre for uncultured swine who like magic. So, you know, it’s all coming together.
Bunny: I think maybe the confusion… a lot of the confusion comes from the fact that science fiction and fantasy are often kind of, you know, rightly or not, presented as like a kind of dichotomy. But at their core, a lot of the stuff is just kind of aesthetic, whether we’ve got robots or whether we’ve got witches. Are you casting something that looks like a spell and quacks like a spell but it’s actually an atomic rearrangement ray that’s turning you into a duck through nanomachines or something?
Chris: Yeah. I mean, there are around the edges, there are a few things that actually suggest different rules for the world based on whether it’s technology or not. Like technology, one of the properties it has is that, generally, that means anybody can use it, right?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Which… not always, I mean, it’s not like you couldn’t build in exceptions, but that does have an effect on your setting, because if you have a technology, the idea is that you could replicate that technology. Anyone could use it, right? And that has its own impact. So there are reasons why they differ a little bit inherently, but again, that’s just around the edges. In a lot of cases, you would just flavor something as magic or flavor it as technology, and plotwise, it’s like the same thing.
Oren: I also just love the Goodreads listing for space fantasy, ’cause it has some wild examples, right? It has stuff you would expect, like Warhammer 40K, and Dune, and Star Wars tie-in novels, and Gideon the Ninth. That all makes sense. It’s also got A Memory Called Empire, which is just a pretty standard space opera, and it’s got Skyward, which is like Brandon Sanderson’s space fighter novel, and Red Rising. Like, what’s going on? Who is tagging these things?
Bunny: Somebody who doesn’t like soft sci-fi or whatever.
Chris: I saw someone on Quora call Red Rising fantasy in sci-fi clothes.
Oren: Ugh.
Chris: Yeah, this just sounds like kind of a hard sci-fi elitist there.
Bunny: It seems like it’s science fiction enough that we can’t just say, “No, no, it’s secret fantasy.”
Oren: Look, if we’re going to say that Red Rising is space fantasy or is some kind of fantasy, we also have to put Star Trek there, because all that happens in Red Rising that is at all fantasy-ish is that they all have to do a game of murder/capture the flag in a place where they have castles, right? Because when they go to murder school, the main event at murder school is capture the flag, but with murder. And they do it in a big arena that has castles and stuff. So that’s it. That’s the extent of the fantasy element, and I don’t think most people would consider that genre-defining.
Bunny: Castles. That’s the answer, actually.
Oren: Castles.
Bunny: It’s just castles.
Chris: There can be, when you combine science fiction/fantasy elements, there can be clashes. There’s not necessarily clashes, but just as an example of the way that science can also just bring a little bit more realism into the picture, going back to this Dark Angel trilogy, which are really unique books, there’s a lot of things I like about them, but this is the books we’re having. It has both fairy tale logic and the kind of like science history, so there’s certain events where the protagonist spins cloth out of emotion, you know? And it’s like, “Oh, pity makes the cloth too heavy,” right? And so we have like this metaphorical “cloth is heavier or lighter depending on what emotion you’re spitting.” And then, it’s a really notable event, she does, like, impromptu heart surgery on both her and the love interest.
Oren: Oops!
Chris: Where she wants to… she’s trying to save him and he’s evil. She needs to make him good again. So she… his heart has a ball of lead, right? But it’s just like lead around his heart. And so she gives him her heart instead. And, like, that’s not a thing you could do unless the setting is like super low realism, right? Because we all know that a person can’t actually just, “Hey, now it’s cool, I’ll do this myself, take out my heart, install it in somebody else, it’ll be fine.” And then somebody else…
Bunny: It’s called organ donation, Chris, come on.
Chris: And then the character comes along and is like, “What are you doing? You just need to take the lead wrap off of his heart.” And then takes the lead wrap off of his heart and puts it back in her. And so they have, you know, exchanged hearts, which of course is used later to be like, “Oh, his heart isn’t his own because you literally took his heart out and put yours in there.” So the point is that…
Oren: Are we sure this isn’t, like, body horror?
Chris: So the point is that we basically have a metaphorical logic that the plot actually uses, that, you know, would feel in place in a fairy tale, but once you make it so that world is like, “Okay, they live on the moon and it was terraformed,” then that starts to become very strange.
Oren: Right.
Chris: Because they have different levels of realism associated with them.
Oren: There’s also just the question of things that seem more in theme with one explanation than another, right? Like, because if you’re doing the fantasy side and you can be like, “This staff is carved of hardwood and it bonds with your etheric image in the shadow world,” it’s like, “Okay, sure, uh, that could happen.” But you could try to do the same thing with sci-fi and it would just sound awkward. You’d be like, “This staff was grown from bio-engineered nano-wood and it links to your genetic signature,” and you’d have to… you’d be sitting there wondering like, “Why on Earth did someone make this?” You know, it just doesn’t seem right, even though it’s basically the same thing as the fantasy staff, functionally speaking; it just doesn’t fit thematically anymore.
Bunny: I do think a good example, because there are some books where they’re like, “Here it looks like a fantasy world. Oh, I revealed it was really science all along.” A better example where things fit and they’re clearly designed to fit is in Joan D. Vinge’s Snow Queen.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Bunny: And that one basically… you know, these chosen people on this planet get these powers where they can kind of answer a question and knowledge comes to their head, and then later you learn that there’s a big supercomputer in the planet that they’re connected to, that they’re getting that knowledge from.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: But also, even the language that Vinge puts in there, where people will say, like, “input” or something when they’re summoning this magical—supposedly magical knowledge just sets it up really well to be like, “Okay, yeah, I see how that would really be science,” which is very different from impromptu heart surgery.
Chris: That’s not an element I’ve seen in literally any other book. So I guess points for the novelty. It kind of makes… again, in a very low-realism fairy tale, it does actually sort of make sense, right? When somebody’s been spinning cloth out of emotion and doing other things like that, you can set up a context, because you could absolutely read a Brothers Grimm story where that happens, for instance. Lots of unrealistic things happen in there, because we’re setting expectations that you can do things like that.
Oren: Yeah. Maybe this might just be me: I just… when I’m reading a fantasy story and I can tell that there’s going to be a reveal that this is all really science, most of the time I just start rolling my eyes. I don’t know, it’s probably unfair of me. I’m sure there are ways to do that, that work or add something to the story, but to me it just… I’m just like left with this concept of, “Hey, we have all this technology and we decided to use it to recreate Middle Earth.” It’s like, “I guess. I can’t say you didn’t do that.”
Chris: It’s the Ernest Klein school of thought, right?
Oren: You occasionally have some space fantasies that are like one part or the other is kind of vestigial, and I kind of feel like they should have just, you know, gone full fantasy or full sci-fi. Like the first Gideon the Ninth book is like that, where theoretically this is space fantasy, but the space part barely matters and it just kind of raises some questions that are hard to answer for no real benefit.
Chris: Yeah. So, planetary logistics are hard.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: And I think that’s the thing that, honestly, probably makes space fantasy harder to write in a lot of times than regular fantasy or epic fantasy.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Which would be similar, ’cause a lot of times it’s at epic scale. So first of all, you know, travel is harder, and so having important plot stuff happen on another planet is a lot of times going to be tougher to deal with than something that’s happening in the next town over.
Oren: This is true.
Chris: You have to figure out how people get there and back. If you want to be realistic about your worldbuilding, there’s a question of: How is a huge space empire maintained? And the fact that, if it takes so long to get to the capital of the empire, are they actually capable of administering an empire that large?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: But at least with that one, if you’re not trying to be too realistic, I think a lot of people wouldn’t realize that.
Oren: Yeah, just fall back on space opera rules, okay? Like we all want space to work roughly equivalent to the ocean. That’s like the… that’s the parallel we want, even though most of these space operas just don’t really know how to grapple with how big a planet is. I still love… there are multiple Star Trek episodes where two towns of like 600 people each refuse to share a planet. It’s like, “No, if those people move onto this planet, they’ll be too close to us.”
Chris: Right. This is scale just being too big for what you’re prepared for. Or, like in Rebel Moon, where it’s like, “We need the wheat harvest from this one village on this one planet.” It’s like, “Do you, though?”
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Because you have an entire space military. I don’t think that this one village… I don’t think their wheat harvest is significant compared to the scale that this military would have to be.
Oren: Right. And like with that, even if that wasn’t interplanetary, even if this was literally just the World War II scene where that’s copied from, it’s still like the wheat output of this one town is not going to be critical to the Nazi war machines, like, you know, entire campaign, right? So just the scale of it is just bizarre.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Then there’s the issue of fighting and: Why not just bomb people from space? Why send ground troops? My favorite for that one is Cinder, which is the first book in a series, and the idea is that the villain…
Bunny: Lunar Chronicles!
Chris: … is going to invade another planet by sending her, like, werewolves, a werewolf army. And it’s just…
Bunny: That’s definitely… this is science fantasy, I think. Or space fantasy or whatever term we want to use, ‘cause I think this is the prime example, maybe even more so than Star Wars.
Chris: And it’s just, “Okay, so we have a technology level available where soldiers being werewolves is just not as significant as it would be in a fantasy setting, ’cause you know what matters, how big our guns are generally, and then why is she sending an army of werewolves instead of just bombarding Her enemies from space?
Bunny: Pretty gosh, Chris.
Oren: Yeah. It’s not sporting.
Chris: Or, like, if you want your ground troops to have swords, right? Like, Dune has the whole… apparently the shields are not there to justify why people use swords.
Oren: No, they’re not!
Chris: Everybody has personal shields and apparently in the book, it’s not to justify everybody using swords.
Oren: No. You would think it is, but it’s not, because in the book, swords can’t get through shields either, unless they’re moving really slowly. And not like slowly as in the speed of a sword blade slow, but like, you know, “I’m not touching you” slowly.
Chris: Oh, and just to clarify, in case somebody’s just really not familiar with Dune, the shields we’re talking about are sci-fi energy shields, not physical shields. They have sci-fi energy shields, but metal swords in Dune. And apparently you can’t really pierce the shields with swords either.
Oren: No, the only way to do it is basically to grapple your opponent and slowly push the knife through their shield.
Bunny: So then they all use like daggers?
Oren: No, they… because it doesn’t make any sense. It’s just… it’s very silly. I think the explanation…
Bunny: There’s an army full of people with daggers because they have to all grapple each other and solely stab.
Oren: So the explanation that they give in the opening of the book is that you are supposed to slow your strike down right before you make contact. But that obviously doesn’t work, because if you did that, your opponent would move out of the way. And I know that this doesn’t work because I have seen them try to choreograph it now, because in actual Dune, they immediately go to Arrakis, where shields don’t work in some places, and so they don’t have to worry about shields anymore, and they primarily just forget that shields exist.
Bunny: But then do they use guns?
Oren: No, because, again, that is not the purpose of the shields, even though it really seems like it is. But in Dune Prophecy now we have fights that take place off of Arrakis, and you notice that they immediately abandon the “slow knife penetrates the shield” thing, because how on Earth would you choreograph that?
Chris: Yeah, so they have fights and they make it so the shields glow red, or, I think, is it blue? Depending on whether something is managing to pierce it. And a lot of times they seem to move pretty fast and the shield’s just red. It’s like, “Okay, I guess the shield just didn’t work that time and I’m not sure why.”
Oren: Yeah, because it’s silly, ’cause it’s just… it’s a very weird thing. And it’s so weird that Herbert came up with what is probably the best explanation you’re ever going to get for swords in a sci-fi setting, and then chose not to use it! I can’t believe it. I feel like I’m losing my mind sometimes when I have to tell people about this part.
Bunny: Look, for Dune Prophecy, they just retune the miles-per-hour toggle gauge on the shield.
Oren: Yeah. They set their swords to a different frequency, so it’ll go through the shield.
Chris: I mean, there is definitely something interesting about… there is a critical threshold, and your goal when you’re fighting is to get your blade just under the threshold so that it can get through the shield, but you only want it to be barely under, because if you’re slower than necessary, that gives you a disadvantage during fighting. So maybe that’s what they’re doing in Dune Prophecy.
Oren: Maybe.
Bunny: That’s also really hard to show, though.
Chris: It would also be interesting if you had to slice at somebody really fast and then suddenly stop right before you get to their shield, and then move slowly, because, again, normally moving fast would still give you an advantage, so there could be some really interesting strategy there, and maybe that’s what they’re trying to do. But yeah.
Bunny: On the flip side though, that would look really goofy.
Oren: I mean, it would look silly and, like, I mean, I don’t know. I’m not a combat expert, right? I took fencing for a few years, and in that particular context, if my opponent had to slow down before they could get a touch on me, they would never get a touch on me, right? Like, I’m not a great fencer. I’m at best a mediocre fencer when I’m actively practicing, but I can parry a slow attack. Anybody can, and it’s not that hard.
Bunny: I can step backwards.
Oren: Yeah. You know, you’re constantly in motion when you’re fencing, and you are always doing something, so this idea that you’re going to slow down right before you hit them is like, “Well, what are they doing while you’re doing that?” At this point, it’s just like the only logical extension is that it’s just all grappling. You just grapple ’em and you hold ’em down like, “Okay, great. That’s where we’ve arrived at.”
Chris: Yeah, I mean… Probably not what people want when they imagine a big army fighting.
Oren: Right. And it’s not what Herbert wanted either, because he immediately stopped doing it. It’s just the strangest bit of worldbuilding I’ve seen in a long time.
Chris: So yeah, planetary logistics? Not the easiest. And they certainly make space fantasy more complicated. Another one is, you know, the enemy is always on a big warship out in space and, like, how do you sneak up on them?
Oren: Turtles.
Chris: It’s not… It’s not impossible, but there’s just a lot of hard things in there to get through if you’re going to put everything with really high technology that could overpower things like swords and make it really far away. And also, you cannot see a planet blowing up in another galaxy, just FYI. Abrams, you cannot see that. That is not visible.
Oren: If you believe in it in your heart, though…
Chris: You could have maybe a small group of scientists at their equipment like 20 minutes later, because light travels across the distance in a non-instantaneous amount of time, being like, “Whoa, the spectrometer just made a weird noise.”
Oren: The uh, sort of flip side of “the sci-fi part is so vestigial you could probably remove it” is when you start trying to explain the fantasy parts as sciencey and, you know, I’m not just talking about…
Bunny: The midichlorians?
Oren: Yeah, that’s the obvious example, right? It’s like, this didn’t need an explanation. It’s not a good one, right? Or, like, Star Trek occasionally does this. They have the one episode where they meet Satan. This is in the animated series.
Bunny: Oh, yeah.
Oren: And they try to scientifically explain Satan and it’s like, “Okay, sure, Star Trek.”
Chris: Yeah. I mean, I won’t say that you can never give a scientific explanation if you’ve set up well for it, but usually it’s unnecessary and it’s so likely to go wrong that simply leaving it out is better, ’cause the risks of it going wrong are high and the benefits are questionable.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: And it’s also like if you’re… especially if you’re trying to go for science fantasy or space fantasy or whatever we’re going to call it (let’s just call it science fantasy, I think), then presumably you’re not really trying to distance yourself from the fantasy part, right? We can just have the Force, you guys. You don’t need to make it, oh, perfect-rational-headed-whatever science. No fantasy.
Chris: Just call it something other than magic and you’re good.
Bunny: Really! [24:55]
Oren: I also have noticed, and this isn’t going to be a problem for every author, but if the author already has a tendency to make their technology or their magic really complicated or just very hard to follow, adding the two together can make it worse, ’cause I’ve seen some books that have all the problems of a hard sci-fi novel that overexplains everything, and also all the problems of a nonsense fantasy world where the magic doesn’t make any sense. And Ninefox Gambit is one of the perfect examples where they have this bizarre calendrical magic system that makes their technology work. So if you go into an area operating on the Jewish calendar and you’re using the Gregorian calendar, your ships all just fall apart. And they just spend so long explaining this, and it does not make any sense from any context.
Chris: Yeah, that book was actually really hard to follow. I was listening to it in audio, and so, I guess, if I had been reading it visually, I might have, you know, stopped more and tried to read certain portions again, but it was just… there was so much exposition and it was just like, “I don’t know what’s happening,” so I just let it flow over me, like, “Okay, whatever. I’m just going to…” I mean, the thing is that at that point, even if you do that, you at some level don’t understand what’s happening and things are not going to be as riveting anymore.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, the final battle is basically just a blur of technobabble in my imagination, right? There’s something about threshold winnowers, which do something.
Chris: I’m impressed that you even remember any of these terms.
Oren: I remember… I mean, the calendar thing really stuck out to me because it’s basically the consensus reality thing that you see in a lot of roleplaying games like Mage: the Ascension, but for some reason with calendars only.
Chris: And, like, your guns depend on the calendar. It’s like, “Why does your gun depend on the calendar?”
Oren: It’s… look, it’s because everything is an app now, and it’s like Y2K. The whole setting is tied to Y2K.
Bunny: We all know that if the Lunar New Year ever happens on January 1st, the world explodes.
Oren: That’s just how it works, okay? God help you if you run into some place using the Julian calendar. You are just… your day is ruind forever.
Bunny: Time is a construct! And that’s why guns are constructs too, and that’s why one equals the other.
Oren: So, like…
Chris: My gun shoots January.
Oren: This is not a guaranteed… it’s not like this is an automatic problem that every space fantasy is going to have. It’s just that if you are inclined towards one or the other of those issues, putting them together can make them worse. So just be aware, ’cause you’re opening up new avenues for things to get confusing.
Bunny: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Chris: Do you want to talk about the Dune show? Have we just finished the first season?
Oren: Yeah, well, you know…
Bunny: Don’t sound so excited about it.
Chris: It’s complicated because it actually ended better than I expected.
Oren: Yeah!
Chris: The end of the season was actually pretty good, but it definitely has a rough start, partly because they’re trying to fit a Game of Thrones-level intrigue into… how many episodes? Not very many.
Oren: Six.
Chris: Six. And they do the thing that I have to tell my clients not to do, where you can’t just have your stakes be, “Oh, we need to avoid The Reckoning!”
Oren: The Reckoning!
Chris: Because you have to tell people what is The Reckoning, what practical effect will it have, or else the stakes are just not very powerful. And so it just does tons of vaguery, where it’s like we don’t have any reason to root for anybody, like we’re supposed to root for the women who are doing eugenics. Like that’s who we’re supposed to root for?
Oren: Or maybe we’re not, right? I mean…
Chris: Or maybe we’re not.
Oren: I’m sure if we asked the showrunner, they would say, “No, you’re not supposed to root for anyone. It’s not so simplistic.” It’s like, “Okay, sure. But what do I care about, then? What is happening that makes me care about the next series of events?”
Chris: Right. It’s like, “Why should we root for any of the characters? What are they fighting over? What are the stakes of this situation?” Like those foundational storytelling things are just absent.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: And especially in the beginning, and… I mean, if you could tell… for me, I’ve gotten more attached to the characters, the Bene Gesserit characters, as the show went, and that gave me a reason to care, and then when there’s a clear threat to them, then it’s like, “Okay, now there’s some stakes.” But it was… you know, not everybody would have that experience, and it was definitely very shaky to start.
Oren: Yeah. So, most of that show’s problems are not really derived from the fact that it is space fantasy, right? It’s just too complicated and they don’t give you any reason to care what’s happening or explain what’s happening. But there is one element that is a very common space fantasy problem, which is that they don’t really know what to do with the magic. Because, spoilers, one of the characters has fire powers and they all want to act like this is really impressive. But it’s not really because like, sure, he can burn people, but most of the time it seems like he can only do it to people who are in the same room as him.
Chris: We spend several episodes debating whether he could do it across the galaxy or not, which is a huge difference. Like, one of those powers is overpowered and one of them is underpowered.
Oren: Right. And the show doesn’t really seem to know which one it is.
Chris: And then is it like only somebody that who’s right in front of him that he’s staring at, because he could just stab or shoot so much easier, and there’s also a cost to him when he does it; he actually injures himself. So it’s like, “You really should stab that person. You really should stop using those fire powers. Those are not good for you.” And we weren’t sure if he could do it long-distance, but it seems like he can’t actually.
Oren: Right. And then we get… we actually explain it, which is that he apparently gives people a virus and that somehow makes them set themselves on fire. Like, not as an action. It just… they start burning, ’cause that’s a thing viruses can do. And maybe it’s a tech virus, I don’t know. It is like… this is the… you know, we are trying to scientifically explain a magical power, and we are just creating more questions every time we try to answer one.
Chris: There is one interesting thing in there that I do think fits the setting, which is there is some… they had a previous war against intelligent programs, machines, and now they won that war, but now there’s definitely conflict over people wanting to keep some intelligent machines around for their capabilities, even though they’re very much illegal, right? And some conflict over whether they should be keeping any or destroying them all.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: But that’s kind of like in the background, like it appears, but that’s something that I think would be easier to explain and understand if we wanted to do a gray conflict, right? Over when is it justified to keep these dangerous machines around and when is it not? And people, you know, could fight over that.
Oren: Well, I agree. And with that, I think we will go ahead and end this podcast, which is both scientific and magical, you should know.
Chris: And if you would like to tell me that I’m wrong about space fantasy versus science fantasy, you can do so by becoming a Patreon at patreon.com/mythcreants, and then you can yell at me in the comments section.
Oren: I mean, come on. The thing they want to yell at us about is me saying the shields don’t make sense. I already know there are essays being written about that. But before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[music]Outro: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.