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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RSKennan" data-source="post: 2265309" data-attributes="member: 8256">You can add to the laws of reality without breaking them. You can suspend them without breaking them. Magic as I define it is a set of laws that exist outside of the laws of reality. Two sets; reality, and magic. They don't have to cancel each other out. This distinction is probably just a nitpick about the use of language from where I stand. To the second question; it depends on how it's explained. Are they computer projections that are able to interact with reality? Just because something looks like magic doesn't mean it is. It's all in the telling.  I can’t argue with that, except to say that I don't see boundaries to the genres the way that some people do.   I left out a few dots. I've got to work on that. I was referring to the loose use of the idea elsewhere in the thread that magic was simply defenestrating reality. It's not; it's as systematic as any other element of a story’s reality. Ultimately, I think that a given story’s system of reality is all that’s important. I can see both sides- for genre, and against it, but for me, thinking in terms of genre in any but the loosest sense (that of trappings alone) is needlessly constraining. As long as the rules of the setting are consistent enough to tell a good story, the rest is pedantic, IMHO. There are fantasy and science fiction critics. They exist. They may have less clout among the shining literati, but they exist, as this thread proves. Regarding publishers, they need to be able to classify the books for catalogs. I didn't say editors, but a publisher as a commercial body needs to decide what to tell buyers.  Regarding the usefulness of genre to everyone else, I was just chiming in with my opinion; I'm not trying to tell anyone how to spend their time. I won't go further into my perspective since I don't have the time, but suffice it to say that I don't see the "rules of genre" as something that need to be rigorously walled off, because that leads to creative cannibalism and imaginative bankruptcy. The boxes are only there if you want them to be. I know how the experts classify these things, and I even see their logic, I just don’t care to box things in.</blockquote>

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