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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2274051" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yes, I can, but my answer isn't going to make you happy because you are going to think I'm dodging the question.Keep in mind that as I defined it traditional magic is to me all about making abstract concepts tangible.  For example, werewolves are about the dual capacity of people for both good and evil, sanity and insanity, the bestial and the sublime, and the fact that evil can lurk underneath a skin which does not betray the evil that lies underneath.  So so long as we tie into those mythic themes, we aren't going to escape telling stories that are in some fashion about good and evil - even if we want to (as for example White Wolf did) change to some extent exactly what it means to be 'bestial' because we live in an age were people are toying with post-modern ideas like maybe that civilization is worse than the natural.   So, in order to create a fantasy which can explore new themes without being dragged into the old themes, we have to sanitize the magic and remove from all its old baggage.  Hense, it won't look on the surface like 'magic' anymore.You probably see where I'm going with this, and I'm going to guess you are not going to like it.   An example of a magical non-morality tale story that fits the trappings of fantasy but is not classified as fantasy by me would be (in part) Iain M. Bank's 'Culture' stories.   I say in part, because clearly Iain M. Banks is writing about morality at least in part and if you want to argue that the 'Culture' stories are at least in part fantasy, I won't begrudge it.  But, at some point it is also clear to me that our area of interest is beginning to shift, and that Iain M. Banks has stepped over a line that seperates him from fantasy.  He's begin looking more deeply at the idea of 'The Other' and at what it means to be human in a way that is transcendent of morality questions.  In a fantasy, typically you have the notion of a universal system of morality and you have 'The Other' serving only as an embodiment of the not good.   In science fiction, as it matured, you increasingly see 'The Other' used as a contrasting value system even among authors that believe in something like a universal and absolute system of morality for mankind.   The purpose of the other is not to show what man shouldn't become, because man is stuck being himself and can't be the other, but rather to hold up a mirror and say that our nature as who we are arrises because of this character of ourselves, and if we changed this character in some fashion we wouldn't get 'evil non-humans' but rather a different system of virtues reflecting the needs of that different character of existance.  Step a little further away from fantasy, and you get something like David Brin's 'Uplift' stories - which are equally fantastic and contain a great many things which we have good reason to believe are unrealistic and probably impossible, but which are even less interested in traditional questions about morality and less interested in making any of its fantastic elements allegories for abstract ideas.  Step back the other way towards fantasy, and you run into people like Chine Meiville, who is writing fantasy but arguably beginning to invent a genera of science fiction which has little at all to do with science, suggesting that maybe you could be inventive enough with your magic to eventually divest yourself of the old mythic obligations and write stories which don't even attempt to handwave away the magic but which aren't fantasies in any traditional sense.  On that, I'm not yet certain, and I don't think we've had enough time to digest his work.Except that alot of what started this thread was asking the question, "How is science fiction different from fantasy?", and teh above definition doesn't provide any really clear guidance.By the way, I would say that for me Science Fiction begins with 'Frankenstein'.   Frankenstein is the first other in which the author is capable of using science as a tool to pry off the old things like necromancy and say to the audience, "What I really want to talk about here is not just the morality of playing God, but the relationship of man to his not self.  And I don't want to use this character of the not-self merely as a metaphor for something that is not good, but for something completely different.   And in fact, I'm not even going to have a hero which is a heroic example, but instead I'm going to have a deeply flawed and troubled protagonist."</blockquote>

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