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Okay, so I’ve been in this discussion with a few friends lately, and I was wondering what all of you guys on here thought of this.
Is it a good idea to take our world (planet earth, our solar system, our universe, etc.) and fantasize it? Even add other planets inhabited by extraterrestrial life? Is it a good idea to take something we know is fantastical and does not exist and place it in our world for a story?
I’ve read so many books that do this, and loved them to pieces as stories (Tolkien and Lewis do it, to name a couple). It doesn’t bother me in the least to read that kind of stuff, but write it? What do you guys think?
Does a reader pick up a book knowing that whatever is in it is fictitious? Does that make writing this kind of thing perfectly safe?I especially don’t know about historical stuff. Like if someone takes a Biblical story and adds fantastical elements to it— that’s bad, in my book, completely bad, and since the Bible is history, it follows that it’s bad to mess with history, especially as pertains to God.
I’m not saying that historical fiction is prohibited, or that you can’t write stories about Biblical characters. But is it permissible to add fantastical elements that are not physically or logically possible according to the laws God set down for our world to such a story? I don’t think so.But I would love your opinions.
How about this, in speculative fiction, you can maybe tweak some of the story, while still keeping the main idea. The one thing you must do though, is stay true to God’s character.
Bryan Davis does this very well and I believe he may had a couple of blog posts on it.
Future? Sure. Past? Probably not. History is important. There might be a way though, I just think it is perilous in general.
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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’?
I’m not really sure; I’ve messed with the idea of some fantasy elements in our world…like time travel and book characters coming alive and yelling at their author (two different ideas). I’m not very comfortable with aliens, though I wouldn’t mind having a sifi space story that just takes place somewhere with no mention of earth… Perhaps part of that is there are people would would think aliens are real, whereas if you write a story with time travel, everyone who reads it should recognize it as fiction.
So…yes. I don’t mind adding some things to this world, though I wouldn’t be comfortable with adding magic. I probably wouldn’t add aliens either, or other things that some people now days think are real but which aren’t really Biblical. If I’m going to add fantasy to this world, it would need to clearly be fantasy…not some sort of dark magic or stuff like that.
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Here’s a question. How would adding fantasy to the real world be any better than just creating your own fantasy world? And might it not actually be worse?
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I suppose it would depend on what you are adding and what is considered fantasy. I mean, you could have dragons in our world easily…there were dragons and such in ancient times; that’s not really fantasy. Having things like telepathic communication with dragons; well, if you go that far it might be better to created a fantasy world. Same with magic and powers since if people are getting them here on earth, it’s probably from Satan. Time travel would be considered sifi, I suppose. I think any type of fantasy added to this world would have to be something which doesn’t go against a Biblical doctrine…which could be hard. I’m not sure how much could be added, but that brings me to another question.
Why are fantasy worlds almost always medieval? Has anyone ever done a space type fantasy world, or a fantasy/modern type world? Actually, I did come up with something similar to the latter category awhile ago, but haven’t done anything with it so far.
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@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?
Is it a good idea to take our world (planet earth, our solar system, our universe, etc.) and fantasize it? Even add other planets inhabited by extraterrestrial life? Is it a good idea to take something we know is fantastical and does not exist and place it in our world for a story?
Are you asking if it is morally okay to add fantasy elements to a story that takes place in our world? If you are concerned about this morally, may I ask why? What are your concerns?
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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.
This is about the Bible. I’m with you in the camp of the Bible. I don’t like Bible jokes, Bible skits, or writing stories about the Bible…don’t see it as good.
But…as for the rest…I think it’s a moot point. Jesus told many parables in which stuff happened that doesn’t happen the way it does in our world, and contrary to the history of our world, and for /all/ of them (I believe) he starts by saying, “There was a…”
There actually /wasn’t/ a *add thing*. But that’s the way He told the story. I’m willing to follow that example.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. 😛
I believe in extraterrestrials. There’s all sorts of non intelligent matter that is outside (extra) the earth (terra). There are extraterrestrial stars, planets, beams of light, gas clouds, cool stuff … Hey, I’m just having fun with loopholes.
This really has nothing to do with what you just asked. But I do find it interesting. Aliens. How do you write good aliens if they don’t exist? Personally I don’t write or plan to write aliens, but who knows? Anyways, it would be fun to think about and might broaden my perception in other areas. Just a moment. I’m off to create another topic.
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