Avoid blending Fantasy and Sci Fi
In the world I'm writing, there's a decent amount of magic - mages, spells, healing, etc. There's also a few aspects - hoverboards, strength/speed enhancing experiments - that don't quite fit into the realm of magic, but I'm not ready to commit to basing them in science. For one thing, that would mean the world is advanced enough to have guns, which I don't want. For another thing, that would basically be blending sci-fi and fantasy, which seems unwieldy and difficult to pull off.
Does anyone have any suggestions how I can keep those science-based aspects in the fantasy but avoid blending the two genres?
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Sci fi and fantasy get shelved together in the bookstore because they are such interchangeable sub-genres of the one umbrella genre: speculative fiction. What would life be like if X happened or existed? You get one cool thing that doesn't exist for free; the rest you have to earn by telling a good story.
Around 2003, I discovered D&D. D&D isn't so much a game as a TOOLBOX for playing games of the adventure type. They have stories, and you can draw on so many inspirations, both those mentioned in the published rulebooks, and those that aren't. D&D is a game, and is one part dice rolling, one part statistics, and about a million parts storytelling. The setting is typically of the fantasy variety, but that definition is to writers what an arts degree is to a Starbucks employee.
Telling a speculative fiction story is to pick and choose which elements to use, and which not to. What monsters, spells, hero types, gods, landscapes, types of societies, tech levels, etc do you WANT to use? Answer that and then go ahead and USE them. Stuff what the naysayers say - you can use ANY story or setting element you want, as long as you tell an engaging story. A painter chooses which colours, types of paints, brushes, surface, size, easel, and so on to use to create his or her painting. There are methods to achieving success, and there's a lot of art knowledge to help you understand what you're doing, but ultimately, it comes down to what you WANT to paint. It's the same with writing speculative fiction.
Anyone who says you CAN'T have science in your fantasy fails to understand fantasy. Those who demand that all fantasy follow the same formula is missing the whole point of fantasy to begin with - anything goes!
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Sci-fi and fantasy don't NEED to be fundamentally different. If the people in your fantasy world approach the magic that exists in their world in a "scientific" way, then your fantasy elements become soft sci-fi. That is, you are proposing a made-up world in which there are laws of magic that operate exactly like laws of science in our world. Then the only thing to decide is how advanced the magic and technology are in your world. You just have to keep both of them reasonable. For example, if teleporting and/or antigravity devices are commodity items, then people aren't going to have the same kind of transportation infrastructure that we have.
Also, your world's history will influence the levels of magic and technology. They will tend to stunt one another's growth. If certain areas of magic were discovered early in history, then nobody would bother developing technologies in areas already covered by that magic (and vice versa for areas of technology discovered early in history). For all we know, our own real world IS magical, but our technology is so advanced that few people want to bother with magic in its primitive and unreliable state of development.
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Blending sci-fi and fantasy is actually quite easy, and can produce some excellent results; consider Steampunk for instance.
There are definitely plenty of great examples out there of sci-fi/fantasy blending (across many media): Final Fantasy (particularity FF XII), Dishonoured, China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, The Scar and The Iron Council, Neil Gaiman's Stardust…
Also, there's no reason why having advanced tech should allow guns, guns came to be because of particular discoveries, and it's easy enough for those to have not occurred.
It's also worth remembering what Arthur C. Clarke said; "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I have several stories where the science is closely guarded, so people see the tech as magic.
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Why does apparent technology have to actually be technology? Can't it be either mundane or magical instead, even if in our world we would call it science or tech?
Strength and speed can be enhanced through medicine (and its cousin, magical potions). Hoverboards with mechanical motors/propellors/jet-packs/whatever aren't the only way to fly on a device; magic carpets are also available (if perhaps cliche). Separate the effect you're looking for from the means, and then look for means that fit within your fantasy world, whether they be mundane (fantasy worlds have medicine too) or magical (potions, flying carpets).
Or, you might be able to combine them if that's important to you. Anne McCaffery's dragon-rider books looked like fantasy initially, until the spaceships showed up. I think you will probably fare better if you don't try to combine elements like that, but if you decide to try, you won't be the first.
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