(no subject)

So, that'll teach me not to post 1,000 word essays and just toss off thoughts.

I kind of feel like I need to clarify my last post about Clarke's Law. Before I even start on that, I want to say that it is my firm belief that every writer ought to write whatever sort of story she feels the desire or need to write, and that there is no genre or sub-genre that is automatically bad or inferior to any other. By and large, it's not what kind of story you're writing that matters--it's the execution of it. I even think this is the case for ideas and subgenres that I don't personally like or that I have nitpicky philosophical issues with.

That said. Some ideas are so profoundly foolish that it takes an unusual amount of work--handwaving, scaffolding, whatever--to make them work. And one of those is the idea that, assuming we're in a universe where "magic" works, science and technology are something different in nature from "magic."

( Read more... )

(no subject)

So, that'll teach me not to post 1,000 word essays and just toss off thoughts.

I kind of feel like I need to clarify my last post about Clarke's Law. Before I even start on that, I want to say that it is my firm belief that every writer ought to write whatever sort of story she feels the desire or need to write, and that there is no genre or sub-genre that is automatically bad or inferior to any other. By and large, it's not what kind of story you're writing that matters--it's the execution of it. I even think this is the case for ideas and subgenres that I don't personally like or that I have nitpicky philosophical issues with.

That said. Some ideas are so profoundly foolish that it takes an unusual amount of work--handwaving, scaffolding, whatever--to make them work. And one of those is the idea that, assuming we're in a universe where "magic" works, science and technology are something different in nature from "magic."

( Read more... )