In OUR World? Are you JOKING?

Okay. I agree. But why? What makes it that way? After all, there is no verse in the Bible that forbids it, is there?

Or is there?

Hm… this comes pretty close. ‘Every word of God is pure; He is a shield to those who put their trust in Him. Do not add to His words, lest He rebuke you, and you be found a liar.’ And that’s… in Proverbs, somewhere. Chapter thirty, I think.

That’s pretty serious if you ask me.

And as for tweaking the future, couldn’t you accomplish some almost fantastical stuff using only advanced technology? Why would you even need to add something ‘otherworldly’?

@Hope— but I would consider time travel a technological achievement, not magic.
And with the characters coming alive and yelling at their author… take it from an expert… that stuff really happens. Believe me. I know what I’m talking about. 😛
A story like that could just be told from the perspective of the crazy author whose characters are truly alive to him. I mean, I could almost write a book about that. A book about writing a book! That would be cool…

And even if I’m going into the future, I still don’t want to go with extraterrestrials. You’re right— there are people who believe in them, and to place them in a story would be to pander to that belief. Maybe that’s not how you would mean it, but that’s what would happen.
And yes, dragons did exist in our world, but they were not intelligent beings beyond mere bestial intelligence. They were dinosaurs. So if you’re going for the full magical effect of a dragon, I would not suggest putting it in our world because the dragon would have to be demon possessed to speak at all.

@Daeus— do you mean is it better from an aesthetic and literary standpoint to make your own world and make it fantastical? If that was your question, goodness gracious yes! There is absolutely no comparison. For those readers for whom story is an escape, what escape is more complete than out of the bounds of everything one has known?
For readers like myself, who are in it for the adventure of new places and dangers and things they have not known before, what better way to experience that than in a land whose very existence was unknown until they opened the book?

AND… *blinks owlishly, sniffs, hangs head and flushes in embarrassment, whispers* you don’t have to remember a ton of ridiculous little numeric sequences called ‘DATES’ if you do your own world. You get to make the rules.

So I definitely think there’s no comparison.

Was that your question?

That’s an excellent question, Reagan. I like questions that make me think.

So, is it morally wrong to add fantastical elements into our world? No. I don’t think so. But I do think we need to understand that it certainly has the potential to harm.
And, as with so many other things, it depends heavily on how you go about doing it. I started this topic on the assumption that every writer out there is writing very serious, intense stuff— my mistake. I do think it would be fine to do a ‘silly’ story that had, say, extraterrestrials in it. But it needs to be clear that this stuff did not and could not actually happen. So make a story based around the assumption that your kitchen microwave was a portal into an alien world, where pink and purple aliens bearing a remarkable resemblance to mutated elephants sat around all day in electric-blue bubbles and ate bong-bong berries.
That’s fine— that’s all well and good, because the reader is not going to go peering into microwaves looking for pink and purple mutated elephants with an affinity for electric-blue bubbles and bong-bong berries. They understand it’s not serious.

Now yes, I did exaggerate that. Permit me to take a more serious example. Take Spiderman and Captain America. (Disclaimer: I have not watched either of these movies. Everything I know about them I got from talking with my Dad. Bear with me if I make some mistakes, and please correct me if I’m wrong).
So… Spiderman. Everyone knows that simply being bitten by a mutated spider will not give you supernatural spiderpowers. They will not go looking to be bitten by mutated spiders. But it’s cool to think about, and provides a plausible, amusing excuse for Spiderman’s super spider powers.
Captain America, on the other hand… we can easily imagine some governmental project which seeks to make a supersoldier using technology and weird gene manipulation, or whatever. That, to our minds, is both physically and scientifically logical, even though no one has done it. Because it sounds… well… real. We could actually see that happening.

Hopefully that made some sort of sense.

@Ezra— you’re right. I agree that those verses apply to the Bible. My point in quoting that verse (which in retrospect I should have clarified— my apologies) was against taking history, especially Biblical history, and messing with it. That’s what we had been discussing.

And also, I don’t remember any parables like that. Which parables were you talking about?

And I suppose this is a really stupid question— but does anyone on this topic actually believe in extraterrestrials? Because if you do… we need to talk before we go any further with this. 😛

Well if that’s how you’re defining it…

🙂 😀 😛