Alternate Reality

When it comes to fantasy or science fiction often or not new worlds are created and you can be creative with how you work with reality - science fiction can offer amazing technologies that would be impossible today or in the case of fantasy, magic, with each there's the danger of using 'magic' or 'technology' to fix any plot holes, but you put a clamp on your own realities, you could argue it's an enhanced reality so its still limited by physics of some kind. I've had people sit down and analyze a piece of fantasy and say 'well, why didn't he just use magic?' and I think, 'because their system or magic either: doesn't allow it or because he's not skilled enough', for example, "why don't they just use magic to revive Dumbledore?" and the palm immediately reaches the face. I am kind of reminded of the anime and manga of 'Fullmetal Alchemist' here, two young boys with the power of alchemy try to raise their dead mum but it goes horribly wrong as a human transmutation is not simple and there is a price to pay for attempting one. It's not all a click of the fingers, a wish and a bit of faerie dust (even then, faerie dust can't do everything) and everything is okay, if a piece of fantasy were to do that, or a piece of science fiction allows anything to be possible with the power of SCIENCE! then it wouldn't make for a very interesting or believable plot.

I think one of the difficulties I've been having is to have this alternative reality and to connect the reader, I want the reader to feel a part of this world, to feel some level of familiarity with it as they need to relate with the characters and their situation without using the real world to do it. How do you drive something close to home when you've place it so far away. But I suppose what people don't understand is that fantasy and science fiction deal very heavily with the human condition but in vast and imaginative ways you might say in cases it's a hyperbole. They deal with things that can be very close to us, at least, for my that can be a great hook. It's more than 'lets go defeat the shadow lord', because a 'shadow lord' is so much of a cliche that everybody's defeated one, in fact, there was a shadow lord tearing up my village the other day, oh those shadow lords get around! It's about a lot more than that. You might turn to the video game world and see a world of diversity between video games that do have a shadow lord as a bad guy, for example: Nier, Final Fantasy XI and Fable III. Nier is very much about the love between a concerned father and his sick child, Final Fantasy XI is about war and conquest and Fable III is about making hard decisions for the better of the people and learning that Real Estate is the answer to everything! I think if you are taking a cliche you can try to be original with them, but even then not every reads something because it's original, new or innovating, but because it's familiar - Mills and Boon's business thrives on this and as much as it pains me to read a Mills and Boon book (thank you for the lovely Mills and Boon books you got me for my birthday last year Ceri) it is very successful.

One of the things I am trying to do is represent how indoctrination is a bad thing for any society, I think by being in a fictional reality with a fictional religion within a fictional society it allows enough distance to remove prior judgment, I am hoping somebody isn't going to read it and feel it misrepresents their beliefs or the beliefs of others or even saying anything about the direction of our own governments either, but rather a certain mindset which can exist in any culture, society or belief system. In that way I feel the ability to create a world is beneficial, but in know-way is it going to magic anything, although in draft one of The Delusion Wing kind of does happen as parts of the plot happen because they're convenient.