I think what's telling about genre discourse is that the Nerd Genres, fantasy and science fiction, act like the definition of a "genre" is having "rules" about what's "allowed to happen" in the setting, and nerds think all genres work this way when mostly they don't
-
Show this thread
-
SF and fantasy don't even actually really work this way The distinction between these two genres is just the superficial chrome, what it looks like - "psionic powers" aren't actually less impossible than "magic" in any sense, they just look and feel different
9 replies 16 retweets 157 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @arthur_affect
The difference between sci-fi and fantasy is whether or not the reality-bending wonders ostensibly have explanations for how they work, regardless of whether the reader (or writer) cares to figure out what it is.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @StickmanSouza
I don't even think this is true, cf. Brandon Sanderson's elaborate "magic systems" Most characters in "high fantasy" settings DO understand how "magic" works about as well as we understand how technology works, it's just that the explanations are "fantasy-themed"
4 replies 2 retweets 19 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @StickmanSouza
The character who keeps explaining the inner details of the magic system in long exposition is basically the fantasy version of me, then?
1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes -
Replying to @bazzalisk @StickmanSouza
I still remember that old viral LJ post "If the world was science fiction" Where the wife is like "Honey did you remember to book the plane tickets?" and he's like "As you know, heavier-than-air flight was first achieved by the Wright Brothers in 1903"
1 reply 3 retweets 26 likes -
The thing being, that guy does obviously exist in the real world, and that guy is me
2 replies 1 retweet 16 likes -
"Why the hell is Netflix spending so much time buffering? What's wrong with my connection today?" "For many years the problem of a true 'internetworking protocol', from which the term 'Internet' was derived, was considered intractable before the invention of a 'packet-based'
1 reply 1 retweet 19 likes -
Anyway they should explicitly solve the exposition problem in a thing someday by having a guy where doing this is his whole personality and everyone loathes him and tries to avoid letting him talk
4 replies 3 retweets 17 likes -
What'd be even better is to do exposition by having TWO guys like this and having them argue with each other all the time "Excuse me, but the concept of a literal 'hyperspace' is a mathematical abstraction that has been taken far too literally by popularizers"
2 replies 2 retweets 19 likes
"A ship that is undergoing superluminal translation, or, in lay terms, 'jumping to lightspeed', is not genuinely passing through a different 'space' or 'dimension' of some kind but has instead been converted from tardyonic to tachyonic particles"
-
-
"Well I consider that a pedantic objection, the reason the construct of a 'hyperspace' persists is that undergoing this conversion process causes an object's interactions with its surrounding space to be altered to a sufficient degree that for all practical purposes"
1 reply 1 retweet 9 likes -
I could write a scene that goes on like this for pages, it's so much fun
1 reply 1 retweet 13 likes - Show replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.