Rune Blade

I don't know what you mean by "sci-fantasy." I assume you mean "science fiction and fantasy," which are sometimes regarded as a single genre, "speculative fiction."

It's a huge genre. Hopefully you've done your due diligence and read several of the prominent authors, both those who sell a lot of books and those who are highly regarded by the critics. If you regard all of this as "worthless," you're trashing everything that everyone likes to read. How are you going to appeal to them and attract readers, if your taste is so much different from theirs???

The key to SF and fantasy is that it's about ideas, not individual characters. We enjoy being immersed in a world (or universe) that is different from ours, either slightly or vastly, and seeing how it works, what kinds of institutions have evolved, how people get along in it, etc. Characters are often not developed very deeply, but the politics, technology, economics, religion, etc. of the speculative world (or universe) are.

You might check out the genre that's been taking over the world for the past few decades, magic realism. Virtually all of the authors are Latin-American so the books are translations from Spanish. This is Serious Literature; my wife got her master's degree by studying it. Gabriel García Márquez (the author she wrote her thesis on) won a Nobel Prize. Jorge Luís Borges, Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes are also luminaries in the field but there are several others.

Magic realism is a form of fantasy but somewhat minimalist. The author tries to change only one thing about the real world and leave everything else scrupulously the same, and show us how people and society would turn out differently. Characters are therefore very well-developed.

I confess that this stuff is way over my head and I could not understand the book my wife wrote about, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Perhaps you will find it worthy of your erudite intellect. It certainly does not qualify as "worthless."

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That's because: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." If a future or extraterrestrial civilization in a novel has powers which, if they were encountered in our present-day reality on earth, would pass as magic, we just write it off as technology we haven't discovered yet.

"Dune" and "Star Wars" postulate a distant extraterrestrial future in which supernatural forces are accepted by their far more scientifically advanced populations as truly supernatural. To accept this in literature requires suspension of disbelief. In reality we would deploy a team of scientists to discover the mistakes we've made in our formulation of the laws of nature.

Science fiction and fantasy don't coexist peacefully. They can do so in movies and on TV where the drama and suspense carry us along breathlessly without stopping to ask questions, but in print I think the technique falls flat. I can't stand stories about advanced civilizations that still practice religion, which is an artifact of the Stone Age. It's one thing to admit that there are things we haven't figured out yet. It's quite another to say that a supernatural universe exists, a contradiction of the fundamental premise that underlies all science. To say so in the context of science fiction, which is all about science, is a contradiction that turns me off.

It's not just about the money. Art is a form of communication. If no one reads your novels, listens to your music, ponders your sculptures, or attends your plays, you're not communicating. Your art becomes nothing more than a therapeutic exercise.

You don't have to ask for payment. My current band only plays at parties and we always play for free, since we all have day jobs that put us in a higher income bracket than many of the people we play for. But still our purpose is to bring some pleasure into these people's lives. We don't sit around in our basement playing for our own amusement. That's a garage band.

Then it's not really magic. Your characters have learned to harness natural forces they don't yet understand. Their engineering has advanced beyond their science. It happens.

They may discover one day that they've been ignorantly exhausting a resource. That's always a good plot element. Even Star Fleet finally learned that "warp drive" was using up an energy source they didn't understand, and making life miserable for the creatures they discovered who live in "subspace." (An episode of Star Trek: TNG.)

As I said, it's easier to stomach in theater because you don't have time to stop and think, and also because good writing excites you and makes you less critical. Even action-adventure series that are not sci-fi, like "24" and "NCIS," run roughshod over reality because we're too excited to think about it.

Certainly everyone who strives to be a good writer of any kind should have a copy of Strunk & White's ubiquitous little book, but it's more of a help in business, technical and academic writing. It won't help you take the next step into creative writing. Many of the issues we deal with contantly in non-fiction, e.g., the serial comma or parallel construction, aren't likely to come up very often in fiction because you usually strive to avoid that level of structural intricacy.

Homo sapiens is indeed a pack-social species. We have transcended nature and achieved greatness through multigenerational collaboration. We have evolved into the super-organism we call civilization, in which we are the cells.

The post-industrial era requires us to devote an astoundingly small portion of our time to our day jobs--compared to, say, the 72-hour work week of the 1840s. This gives us plenty of time to devote to our avocations without having to worry about using them to earn wealth.

"Acclaim", on the other hand--well that may be too strong a word. But "appreciation"? Certainly. You want at least a handful of people to read your poem, look at your photographs, listen to your song, or try your home-brew.

You are a member of a pack-social species. Despite the isolation of civilized life--or more likely, because of it--the caveman inside you yearns for the comfort of communicating with his pack-mates, caring for them, and relying on them.

You no longer go out on foraging treks with your clan, looking for the food that will help them survive the winter and protecting them from cave bears...

So you write stories to entertain them.

 

Back in the Stone Age, before the economies of scale and division of labor of civilization made specialization possible in occupations not directly related to survival, there were no professional artists. But there was still good art.