AurynHadley
Jan 17, 20173 min
Take steam punk as an example. In recent years, its popularity has skyrocketed. You get the social constrictions of history with the possibilities of the future, all rolled up into an interesting concept that has endless amounts of potential.
For me, I keep falling into a mindset based on Arthur C. Clarke’s third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This naturally leads to my mind working backwards. Things like, “so is ESP magic?” Enter my Rise of the Iliri series. Or, “What makes life?” And that spawned a series I currently have one hold based on the idea of sentient planets. And then there’s the pondering that I can only verbalize as, “Ummm?” that resulted in a nearly finished novel (with series potential) about our human love for chemical energy and an alien species who built their technology on potential energy. On the outside, it looks like science vs. magic, but each species sees the others’ side as the magic.
But I grew up on Fantasy. I lived on dragons, magic, and secret worlds. It’s not just the miraculous possibilities that I loved, but also the language. The stories are told in a more character driven manner (than typical hard-core sci-fi) with a comfort to the descriptions that feels relaxed. The stories aren’t as “serious” in their presentation. As a reader, I liked that these books let my mind wander, helped me escape the trauma of everyday life, and didn’t try to make me feel stupid.
See, in all Fantasy, authors are told to make sure that their magic has rules. Hmm. Doesn’t that mean it’s basically science? If magic is predictable, controllable, and can be studied like that, then basically, it’s just unknown physics. Well, if you keep going down that rabbit hole, then it makes sense to work backwards from any fantasy concept to the “why” of it all. Why can the iliri do the things they do? Because they were derived from the indigenous species who could. Well, why could they? Because they have a different genetic structure. So how does that….
Because science!
And so, I think of all my fantasy work as Science Fantasy. Many people pick up BloodLust and are immediately confused. There’s a strange mix of technology, modern language, and the potential for a standard, fantasy based world – but it’s not European or feudalistic. There’s a reason for that, but I’m not the kind of author who is going to spoon feed you. If you want to know, then figure it out. It’s my challenge to my audience: to give them a framework to find their own fantasies.
And I play the long game. Maybe it’s because I learned from Anne McCaffrey. Her dragons on Pern? I had a love/hate relationship with that series, but I did read it at a formidable time. I always found myself drawn to the stories that explained gods as aliens, showed magic as a virus, or gave the reader something plausible to ponder. Keyword: plausible. The “what-if” that I’m addicted to has shaped my mind as an author, and I love it. I love thinking about the why as much as the what-happens-next. I love building worlds that are deep enough, varied enough, and interesting enough to make my readers want more.
And I’ll keep giving you more so long as I’m able. There have been serious discussions with my publishing group about writing novellas based around the side characters in the Rise of the Iliri series (later. When I’m done with other things). Or showing the enemy’s side of the story. I don’t know if I’ll do that, but it would be interesting. Mostly, I plan to keep writing, keep producing books at some inhuman speed to feed my own need for escapism, and hopefully, some of you will come along for the ride.