shutsumon (shutsumon) wrote in specficwriters, @ 2007-08-24 10:20:00 |
|
|||
Current mood: | thoughtful |
Entry tags: | genre discussion, genre: fantasy, genre: futuristic fantasy, genre: science fantasy, genre: science fiction |
I'm Writing Futuristic Fantasy (I Think)
When I started work on my current WIP (then called "Gatekeeper" now retitled as "The Sundered Light") during Nanowrimo 2005 (I won btw) I envisioned it was meant to be a fun to write joke not a serious, publishable work. It was a contemporary fantasy about a girl who gains magical powers to fight evil entities from another world. Kind of a western version of the Japanese Magical Girl manga/anime genre. There was even a talking, shapeshifting fox who helped her.
By the end of the 30 days I had the first 55k of a far more serious contemporary fantasy that was definately moving away from its inception. Throughout 2006 I worked on it sporadically but didn't make much progress because I kept changing things. The fox became a fire creature, the situation became far more complex than it first appeared, I pruned down the number of characters to the minima and then realised the NONE of the characters were what they seemed (to some extent) and put characters back in simply so there'd actually be characters who were what they seemed to keep the reader guessing on who was who. It was during 2006 I finally made the outline and I was happy. In May and June 2007 I finally finished the long hand of the first draft and realised that beyond it being bad writing (hey it's the first draft, of course it's bad) there was something niggling me about it. It didn't seem to work as I wanted.
At the begining of this month I finally worked out that the problem was the setting not the plot. My plot didn't work in the contemporary setting. Now the thought of reworking it into a more traditional fantasy did not fill me with joy. Too many things in the plot relied on a relatively high tech level (cars, phones etc). And there'd still be the stretched timeline that was the one plot point giving me pain. So I bit the bullet - I worked out a futuristic setting and started to rewrite it from the start as a "futuristic fantasy".
Once I moved it to a future were soceity is recovering from a mysterious incident known as "the forgetting" the timeline closed, the plot tightened up immensly and it developed a whole new level that had been lacking before.
Well I say 'the future' but there's nothing to say it's Earth. It could as easily be a futuristic setting which is about as closely related to Earth as most high fantasy is to medieval Earth. I suppose it's a moderately high tech fantasy world, but I imagine most people will assume its Earth.
In referring to it as "futuristic fantasy" I'm rather edging my bets. I think it's fantasy but I think some people will think it's science fantasy or even soft scifi. There's quite a bit of 'magic indistinguishable from technology' (or more accurately mystical stuff indistinguishable from science) and similar. Looked at from one angle the non-human characters could be elementals with magical powers from the other they could be extradimensional aliens with psionic powers. I tend to think of them as the latter and I never use the word 'magic' or 'elemental'. It's certainly not Science Fiction but I'm begining to wonder if "Science Fantasy" is a better designation than "Futuristic Fantasy".
What do other people think?