I don't have anything to add to this, I'm just annoyed I can only click 'like' on this post once when I feel like I should click it at least 10 times.
Strange New Worlds' showrunners advise fans to write to Skydance and Paramount if they're interested in a "Year One" Kirk sequel series
You can say this about the bulk of fantasy settings where magic is explained via consistent in-universe laws.
Trelane being able to change his appearance, freeze people, and move the planet to chase the ship because he has a special mirror isn't functionally different from a mage being able to cast illusion spells because they have a special amulet that channels ley energy. Similarly, Apollo isn't meaningfully different from the gods and goddesses in, say, Xena or The Elder Scrolls, in that both are advanced lifeforms with superhuman powers with in-universe metaphysical explanations, and who nevertheless have human-like flaws and biological weaknesses (up to and including death), and whom characters in-universe may or may not choose to regard as divine. Aliens with the technology to travel across time and space aren't different from MtG's Planeswalkers.
Even space travel itself - the Enterprise and its (inconsistently-portrayed) warp drive aren't any more scientifically grounded than a Spelljammer in any way I can see, beyond that the aesthetics of Spelljammers are obviously meant to look more fanciful.
In more recent fantasy especially, you'd probably have a harder time finding a fantasy setting that doesn't ground itself in fictitious physics.
I have a hard time thinking of many fantasy settings that portray religious belief as objectively true; "gods" being killed, corrupted, or destroyed through physical means - thus proving them to be essentially advanced non-human lifeforms - is an extremely common trope, as is the ability for normal people to undergo apotheosis with the correct technology.
According to Memory Alpha, this was one of his pitches:
The script could obviously say "well, these ghosts are lifeforms with material explanations", but again, a great many fantasy settings already do exactly that.
Last edited:
Soul Cairn baby!! 
As I understand it, in Elder Scrolls it is not unheard of for mortals to sometimes become gods, but generally speaking the gods do not fit into the description of advanced lifeforms with biological weaknesses.
Last edited:
Except in those settings, it's supposed to be actual magic, something based in the supernatural or divine. Star Trek, again, is a Clarke's Third Law setting: anything indistinguishable from magic is merely sufficiently advanced technology, or physics we don't yet understand.
That's conflating in-universe and metatextual analysis. Metatextually, yes, they essentially work the same as narrative devices. But in-universe, there is a fundamental difference between a universe that says real magic and divinity exist and one that says there is only advanced science and technology that humans can eventually understand.
Gene Roddenberry was a humanist. He wanted Star Trek's message to be that there was nothing that the human mind could not understand or achieve with sufficient knowledge and persistence. So one of the basic rules of Trek is that everything has a scientific explanation, that any pretense of magic or divinity is merely alien roleplaying.
For that matter, the censorship of the era means that even creators who wanted their universes to be more magical or divine weren't always able to. Battlestar Galactica was a space-opera interpretation of the Book of Mormon, but it had to handwave its equivalent of angels and demons as highly evolved aliens with seemingly godlike powers. In the same way, Doctor Who traditionally has the Doctor insist that anything that appears to be magic is merely science humans haven't learned yet, although the modern shows have sometimes ignored that.
Incorrect. Apollo has an in-universe physical explanation, i.e. he's an advanced alien with a special energy-channeling organ, and his people were space travelers who settled on Earth and only pretended to be gods. He also had physical limitations that divine beings did not. The gods in Hercules/Xena could only be killed by special divine weapons. Apollo was weakened by a phaser barrage.
Hardly. The very term "warp" comes directly from the General Theory of Relativity. Einstein himself and his collaborators theorized ways that the topography of spacetime could be altered, i.e. "warped," to allow cosmic shortcuts that were effectively faster than light, such as an Einstein-Rosen bridge (wormhole). The concept of space warp propulsion based on this principle was featured in science fiction from the 1930s onward, and is seriously studied by theoretical physicists today.
Most SFTV of the '50s-'70s assumed that you could travel between star systems or "galaxies" with conventional rockets. Lost in Space paid lip service to hyperdrive once or twice but mostly showed the ship drifting between planets through conventional space. Space: 1999 had the Moon drifting from star system to star system without explanation, with occasional handwave references to space warps. Battlestar Galactica claimed that the ragtag fugitive fleet was able to traverse multiple "galaxies" within a year while traveling at a maximum of the speed of light (and depicted adjacent "galaxies" as having no separation between them, like crossing a state line). Just acknowledging that warp drive would be necessary at all, and understanding what a galaxy even is, put TOS far ahead of the competition in scientific literacy.
And it goes beyond that, since Roddenberry's scientific consultants informed him that a warp drive would require matter-antimatter annihilation, the only power source strong enough, and that a fast-moving starship would require a navigational deflector dish to repel space debris. They didn't just make up a bunch of empty nonsense.
That doesn't follow at all. Different religions around the world have many ways of defining divinity, and they don't all require immortality. I mean, look at Set killing Osiris in Egyptian mythology, or the Japanese goddess of creation Izanami dying in childbirth. Or, heck, Christ being killed and resurrected. The death of a god, often followed by resurrection, is often an important part of their mythology.
If a story postulates a scientific explanation, then by definition it isn't fantasy. Yes, there are fantasy universes whose magic can be studied and understood, but it's still magic power that doesn't exist in our universe. The pretense of science fiction stories is that their phenomena do exist in our universe even if we haven't discovered them yet.
It does seem to me that technically, fantasy of that sort — where it’s really a kind of science, based on a different set of laws but still demonstrated through experimentation and operating on learnable principles — maybe really ought to be called science fiction, even if sorcerers and elves and whatnot are involved. Or rather science fantasy, since it’s literally a fantasy about science being different from what we know it actually is, yet still effectively being science.
That’s as opposed to fantasy that has no such thing, and things work/happen because they just do.
(Which admittedly is true in much nominal “science fiction” too — but usually there’s at least the implied understanding that you may not comprehend the scientific principles allowing Q to snap his fingers and change cosmological constants, but there are some.)
I think we may be talking at slight semantic cross-purposes; I'd have to ask what works you'd point to as being part of the fantasy genre. Many of the major ones I can think of in the past few decades (sticking to what might be termed "high fantasy" rather than the deliberately more "grounded" settings) - things like The Elder Scrolls, most D&D settings, some aspects of Magic: the Gathering, even the likes of RuneScape - wouldn't easily meet this definition of fantasy.
Several of these do ostensibly take place in our universe - Forgotten Realms, for example, takes place in the present and sometimes has people traveling to and from modern-day Earth (and Greyhawk famously has a crashed alien starship full of energy weapons and security turrets, reinforcing interplanetary travel and the idea of other worlds with different natural properties and technology levels). The idea that these are other worlds with properties that seem inexplicable to us at first glance, but which do exist within our universe and can ultimately be understood, is common in a fair bit of fantasy fiction.
I can't quite see the difference between "there's a planet far from Earth called Toril where people are able to channel a type of energy to create illusions or harness elements" and "there's a planet far from Earth where an individual named Apollo is able to project a giant hand into orbit", especially when both effects are shown to be countered with either physical force or the correct counter-technology.
I think if we're being honest, "sci-fi" and "fantasy" in the popular conception have calcified into two broad but recognisable genres which are more about aesthetics and conventions than perceived connection to real-world science or lack thereof.
A lot of the videogames and TTRPGs I grew up on didn't seem to make the distinction - the first Ultima ends with you getting in a spaceship and killing TIE fighter knockoffs, and Might & Magic games used to end by having the party attain laser weapons to besiege alien ships. Stuff like 1995's Albion and 1998's Unreal did it from the other direction, starting out as sci-fi and taking place in our reality, but quickly turning into surreal dreamlike adventures on lush alien worlds with totally inverted laws of physics. Then there's stuff like Space: 1889 - where does that fit? It's science fiction, but it invokes the science of the late Victorian era as its basis, and then pushes that into pure imagination.
I think the original Star Trek (and TAS) is in that same kind of area in that it doesn't really neatly fit into modern definitions of sci-fi or fantasy - it's clearly sci-fi, but things like Space Lincoln are deep into the realms of the purely fantastical, and the show's explanations for these phenomena don't feel functionally different to equivalent explanations offered in D&D to me, in that both are said to be possible and understandable in-universe but are also occurring under fictional laws of reality.
I mean, stories often depict belief as "true" in the sense that the entities that people worship as "gods" actually exist - exactly as Apollo does in Star Trek - but they're still material lifeforms who often have physical limitations and whose biology and nature can be understood (and, often, consequently destroyed).
You mentioned videogames, and off the top of my head:
TES - Aedra and especially Daedra are, especially in the Daggerfall/Battlespire-era games, pretty explicitly just non-humanoid life that live throughout non-Nirn planets in the solar system. Aedra are gone, but Daedra can and do get their asses kicked by regular people. Worshipping them, especially the latter, is often suggested to be pretty stupid.
Heretic/Hexen - the "gods" are Serpent Riders, who get their power from a mixture of their strange biology and powerful devices. At the end of both games, you kill one of them, and in Hexen's case, you take the device for yourself and attain non-human powers. Again, worshipping them is considered to be absurd, since they're just non-human (and very much mortal) tyrants.
Dragon Age - from what I remember (and don't quote me on this, it's been ages), the Maker is not suggested to be real in-universe, and the "Old Gods" were dragons. I've only played Origins and DA2 so I might be mangling this.
Last edited:
Aedra sound to me more like the Ainur in Tolkien. No idea what there is in Daggerfall or Battlespire to say otherwise.
As with most things in TES, the way that many in-universe characters talk about the Aedra is not confirmed to be representative of the truth. The Aedra's role in the games is largely political, and is mythic rather than factual (and some pantheons/creation myths don't refer to them at all). Various races claim a unique connection to them for reasons of political convenience and racial supremacy, and different groups make wildly different assertions about them, but actual confirmed details about them as individuals are vague.
What you do encounter in unambiguous, first-hand terms is the Daedra, who are said (though again, by dubious sources) to have been one with the Aedra before a schism occurred, and who are worshipped as gods by a number of people on Nirn. Daedra are pretty unambiguously just non-human lifeforms, and ones who are pretty easily outwitted and outmatched at that.
The entire plot of Battlespire is about someone (the player) becoming trapped on various Daedric worlds, and their escape involves a lot of negotiation with Daedra, as well as hurling hilariously 1990s-ish insults at them, and frequently just beating the shit out of them. Mehrunes Dagon (a Daedric "prince", one of the individuals worshipped as divine) gets his physical form destroyed by the player and a Daedric ally at the end.
I knew it was a non-starter (What would Year One accomplish that TOS, TAS, six feature films, the Kelvin films, and SNW haven't already done?)
Last edited:
not quite the 60th anniversary i wanted. Sets for SNW and SFA being torn down, and nothing in production at all.
Year One wasn't my first choice, but of course i still would have watched it. Now we have nothing at all
Year One wasn't my first choice, but of course i still would have watched it. Now we have nothing at all
The general term for it is "logical fantasy." It's fantasy where magic and the supernatural exist, but are governed by consistent rules, including the laws of physics -- for instance, Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away universe where "mana," the energy source of magic, follows conservation laws and is depleted by the use of magic. (The use of "mana" as a magic energy source in D&D, and in fantasy anime/manga borrowing its tropes, was borrowed in turn from Niven, who borrowed the term from Polynesian religion.)
Semantics is exactly the point I was going to raise, using the terminology I learned from an old online friend, the late media scholar Ina Rae Hark. In her terms, fiction can be broken down into syntax -- the narrative structure of a story -- and semantics -- the vocabulary and ideas it uses. For instance, Outland has the semantics of science fiction but the syntax of a Western (specifically High Noon), while Blade Runner has the semantics of cyberpunk (more or less) and the syntax of film noir.
What you're talking about is specifically semantics -- that a work of fantasy and a work of soft science fiction can have the same semantics even if one uses the syntax of magic and the other uses the syntax of technology, e.g. in that there's no narrative difference in how one uses a teleportation spell vs. how the other uses a teleportation device. But what you're saying is that the difference in syntax is irrelevant, and that's not true. They're both important and integral parts of defining a work of fiction, just as vocabulary is as important as grammar.
And of course, it only applies to soft science fiction, not all science fiction. There can be fundamental differences in semantics between fantasy and science fiction, because only some fantasy works follow logical or consistent rules, and only some SF works approach their science and technology fancifully instead of grounding them in plausible science. For instance, none of my original science fiction universes could be mistaken for fantasy, since I'm a hard-SF writer and I often derive my plot ideas from the laws of physics and the ramifications of technology. Conversely, my Thayara fantasy universe is the kind of logical fantasy that overlaps with science fiction, because its magic system is bound by physical laws and limitations that often drive the narratives.
Obviously there are some individual works that blend different genres, but that doesn't make it legitimate to say there's no difference between genres in any case, ever. The existence of Neapolitan ice cream does not disprove the separate existence of chocolate and vanilla ice cream.
I don't think that's the least bit honest. The two genres have had clearly defined differences for generations; it's hardly a recent development. And yes, there have always been some works that blended the two, but as I said, that does not mean the distinction never exists anywhere. It just means that genre, like gender, is a spectrum.
It is ethnocentric to assume that a biological entity cannot be divine. That kind of Cartesian dualism is an eccentricity of Western thought that isn't shared by most other faiths around the world. For instance, Shintoism teaches that spirits can exist in both living beings and inanimate objects, so Japanese fantasy fiction includes works in which animals, people, and even giant robots can be literal gods. It's not that they "pretend" to be gods but are "really" material; it's that they're material beings that are also genuinely divine, because divinity can be inherent in anything.
The difference in Star Trek's semantics is that beings like Apollo or Q or the Prophets are not actual gods, just advanced aliens that either adopt the persona of gods or are believed to be gods by certain communities. If the semantics of a fantasy story say that gods are real even if they have mortal existence, then they are really gods within that story.
Those poor brave beautiful sets. Requiescat in pace.
On such a spectrum, Star Trek surely often finds itself drifting around the middle, even without having to invoke "The Magicks of Megas-Tu" ("use the magic you know, captain! Believe!").
Which was the source of my original confusion at fireproof's post - the fact that Star Trek is unashamedly (and, I'd argue, very unambiguously) soft sci-fi that allows the laws of in-universe physics to shift into whatever form they need for any given plot is a huge strength of the show, I'd say.
It's not ethnocentric, it's me-centric - I don't believe in gods as a concept. In a work of fiction, what's the narrative or functional difference between an "actual" god and an entity claiming to be/regarded as a god?
Again I think a great many fantasy stories are aware of this, and present gods as individuals who can be embarrassed, tricked, seduced, overthrown, or killed, even when the ontological claims their in-universe worshippers make of them are stated to be factually true. An entity can be stated in a story to have literally created the universe and you (and the story's characters) can still reasonably reject the idea that it's a god, or assert that it should still be expected to adhere to moral codes, and many fantasy stories do exactly that.
Pathfinder, a setting replete with endless gods, even lets you play as an atheist, which it defines as a person who acknowledges the unambiguously true existence of gods but rejects the notion that they deserve worship. This doesn't strike me as different from DS9's portrayal of the Prophets - everyone in-universe agrees they exist, but some people consider them divine while others don't.
Last edited:
Science fiction is a subgenre of fantasy, not the other way around.
Similar threads
