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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 6936796" data-attributes="member: 6683613">Okay, got it. And setting aside my own opinion of solipsistic and consensus-reality premises (that it would be a real shame if reality were limited to what we can imagine, because encountering that which we couldn't have imagined is so much more interesting), what you're describing is still a set of rules governing how reality works. They're different rules than the ones currently understood by science, but science isn't exactly a stranger to the notion of overturning the going theories. If you tell a scientist, "You don't actually need electricity to turn on a lightbulb, you need enough people to believe it will turn on", do they stop being a scientist? Or do they just start doing science on this new and powerful phenomenon you've shown them -- how many people do you need to turn on the lightbulb? are more distant people less effective? and so on. It's a profound paradigm shift, to be sure, but is it really so different in kind from the paradigm shift between Newton and Einstein? We don't feel any need to call relativistic physics "magic" just because they represent a deeper understanding of reality than Newtonian "science". It's science all the way down, Mr. Russell.A consensus-reality setting also underscores my other issue about the equivalence between magic and psionics. The world hinges on the interaction between the mind and the world, after all. You could scratch out the words "magic" and "mage", pencil in the words "psionics" and "psion", and have a setting a lot of people would consider pure SF -- some of that trippy and conceptual SF, to be sure, but still SF.So I suppose what I'm asking in a roundabout way is: what elements actually put the "fantasy" in "science fantasy"? What distinguishes it from science fiction?</blockquote>

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