Criteria for Belief
When I was fourteen years old I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars novels. The Chessmen of Mars inspired dreams, and those dreams inspired my own writing. But when I discussed the Mars books with my father, he told me that he preferred Burroughs’ Tarzan books.
“Swinging through the trees is something I could do,” he gave me by way of explanation.
My brother, Corey, a Broadway producer, has this to say about fantasy: “… of the forty shows that are playing on Broadway, fully nine of them are based in fantasy and … the most popular movies in the United States for at least two decades now are superhero movies and so they keep making them. But my problem with superhero movies is that there has never been a superhero and there never will be a superhero …. I am much more inspired by true stories and in fact right now there are five true stories on Broadway. There are five that are based on the truth, but with liberal dramatic flourishes incorporated and there are three that are realish, if that is a word I can use here, meaning they were inspired by real events and then woven into a basically fictional plot from there. … Fantasy has its place … but I personally am more inspired by stories that I believe could happen or did happen.”
So my father and brother agree that stories they can relate to are more meaningful than stories they can’t imagine being real. I’m sure I’m the same way. But I have different criteria for believing. If I see a story based on real events, I must rush to research the facts, and if I find some small discrepancy, I feel disappointed. A large enough deviation from known facts, and I lose my appreciation for the story.
In the same way, when I receive Abyss & Apex historical fantasy or historical science fiction submissions, I look up facts. If I discover a mistake, unless the story explains the discrepancy as due to a world-line, or some other phenomenon, I can’t get drawn in.
But I find that I can imagine myself in almost any science fiction or fantasy story so long as it is self-consistent. The more I can stretch my mind and picture myself living in a world in some distant time or place or unknown dimension, the more enjoyable it becomes. The more unexpected details giving full-sensory experience of this alien world, the more I can immerse myself.
As a teen, I didn’t believe in magic, so I refused to write fantasy. My science fiction characters had the equivalent of cell phones—zip-zip radios—in the 60’s. They also had spaceships that could land and take off from a planetary surface. (Where are our spaceships?) As the years passed, and I learned about cosmology, particle physics, and quantum mechanics, I became convinced that anything is potentially possible. For instance, the Reeh-Schlieder theorem suggests that an event in one region of space may result in changes in distant regions, and those changes could be anything. The chance of this happening is infinitesimal, and the possibility of achieving a desired change even less; but still, I’m willing to believe that anything is possible.
— Bonnie Brunish