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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 2270554" data-attributes="member: 6533">Well, I think that the thing to recognize is that while there is some slippage the way you analyze this genre works best if you do set it up as a hierarchy.So to answer one of your original questions:No, I don't think psionics are un-fantasy.  There are a number of reasons I think that, but the most important is that I think fantasy is the larger genre, so once you've achieved the bare bones structure necessary to qualify pretty much anything goes.   There are more specific reasons I think psionics belong, but they don't go to the overall point.On the other hand:Fusangite has, in our perrenial arguments over the grace given to the Monk class, articulated an ethos of fantasy that, although I have numerous large scale objections to it, I find very intriguing in its specifics.  I don't think Fusangite thinks of this as an aesthetic in its own right otherwise I would have expected him to have posted to this thread already.  But the basics of it apply.  And that is that there is an organization to fantasy that relies on some very specific sense of 'cosmology' and that you can mount a critique based on how possible a thing would be within that sense.  Now bear in mind I am freely misrepresenting Fusangite to serve my own argument and observations, but hopefully he will show up and provide his own inimitable thoughts and spin on the issue.Now I find that idea intriguing in this case as that would cover almost all of the complaints without providing a solution, since the idea works on a level below that of genre.   I can't really argue against the fact that works based off a star trek cosmology belong to some sort of coherent group, or at least I can't argue on that level though I certainly would on others, but it seems such an obvious point that it's hard to figure out what to do with it.  What I find fascinating is that if there is a disconnect between this idea of literary or conceptual coherence and the workings of genre, then a great many fans seem to be spending a great deal of labor trying to negotiate away or obliterate that disconnect.  That effort seems to me to be misdirected in that direction, but I'm certain that it accomplishes something or is significant of something I just don't know what.</blockquote>

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