marzo 2015


In a previous article I wrote about what makes fantasy different from science-fiction.  Fantasy is limitless, it is magical, science-fiction has restrictions, limits and constraints just as real life.

However, a novel later developed into a series comes to my mind, The Magic Goes Away by Larry Niven. Though it is still quite unrealistic, it does have one important feature of a science-fiction novel, magic is becoming scarce because it has been overused. This restriction places this novel just a little bit away from pure fantasy, not anything can just happen on a whim, there are rules and limits, in this case a limited quantity.  Then you avoid  issues like the omnipotence paradox: can an omnipotent being create a wall it cannot break through?

Browsing through a bunch of old papers I found a few notes on a technology which I meant to use in some novel but dropped it because it wasn’t feasible.  Now, you might be wondering, we are talking fantasy, right?  What could possibly not be feasible? Well, the point is, we are not talking fantasy, we are talking science-fiction and though it is fiction, it is not magic, it still has to be possible. (más…)