Why Do We Talk About "Realistic" in Fantasy and Sci-Fi?
There's a conversation I've had a number of times in one form or another. It tends to go something like this:
Person 1: It was mostly a good book, but it was unrealistic when the hero sailed safely down the river despite knowing nothing about boats.
Person 2: Wait! You're reading a book full of dragons and wizards, and you think the unrealistic part was the sailing???
Person 1: <awkwardly> Well, um, it's hard to explain, but it just doesn't feel right...
I have found this conversation frustrating because I tend to be person 1. I think I'm right, but I'm not quite able to articulate what I meant in order to counter Person 2's snappy 1-liner. So now it's time to fix that.
Fantasy vs. Nonsense
If you were truly to write a story that abandoned reality, it would probably go something like this. "Bob teleported to the kitchen to destroy the universe again, now that it had started complaining. How else could the flower chickens grow?" If you're not concerned about making your story realistic, then you're writing nonsense.
Good fantasy and sci-fi, on the other hand, stays very close to reality, deviating only according to the special characteristics of the setting. The fundamental behaviors of objects and life tend to remain mostly intact.
Concrete Example:
In Jim Butcher's "The Dresden Files", one of the major criticisms he got after the first few books was that Harry Dresden would basically be a cripple with the amount of physical punishment he was taking. The books had already indicated to the reader that this was a world of magic, demons, vampires, and all that stuff, so it was all accepted as just part of the rules of this new setting. However, the books hadn't mentioned or even implied anything about Harry receiving magical healing or such, so the readers criticized a deviation from the alternate world that Jim Butcher had created. His response was to add a subplot into a later book where a medical researcher was investigating some of his injuries and figured out that wizards' bodies were able to recreate damaged tissue much better than normal people's. Now that his superior healing was part of the rules of the new setting, the readers were satisfied.
It doesn't need to even be that specific, though. Even something minor like another character saying "You seem to recover from injuries far better than most people" might have been enough. After all, we certainly don't understand the rules of our own world, so our readers don't need (or expect) to understand all the rules of the worlds we write. That brief focus on the deviation from our world's rules will imply to the reader that this is part of the world we created, rather than simple carelessness as a writer.
Conclusion:
Now, when someone mocks you for complaining about something being unrealistic in a fictional setting, you have a good answer.
Person 1: It was mostly a good book, but it was unrealistic when the hero sailed safely down the river despite knowing nothing about boats.
Person 2: Wait! You're reading a book full of dragons and wizards, and you think the unrealistic part was the sailing???
Person 1: <awkwardly> Well, um, it's hard to explain, but it just doesn't feel right...
I have found this conversation frustrating because I tend to be person 1. I think I'm right, but I'm not quite able to articulate what I meant in order to counter Person 2's snappy 1-liner. So now it's time to fix that.
Fantasy vs. Nonsense
If you were truly to write a story that abandoned reality, it would probably go something like this. "Bob teleported to the kitchen to destroy the universe again, now that it had started complaining. How else could the flower chickens grow?" If you're not concerned about making your story realistic, then you're writing nonsense.
Good fantasy and sci-fi, on the other hand, stays very close to reality, deviating only according to the special characteristics of the setting. The fundamental behaviors of objects and life tend to remain mostly intact.
Concrete Example:
In Jim Butcher's "The Dresden Files", one of the major criticisms he got after the first few books was that Harry Dresden would basically be a cripple with the amount of physical punishment he was taking. The books had already indicated to the reader that this was a world of magic, demons, vampires, and all that stuff, so it was all accepted as just part of the rules of this new setting. However, the books hadn't mentioned or even implied anything about Harry receiving magical healing or such, so the readers criticized a deviation from the alternate world that Jim Butcher had created. His response was to add a subplot into a later book where a medical researcher was investigating some of his injuries and figured out that wizards' bodies were able to recreate damaged tissue much better than normal people's. Now that his superior healing was part of the rules of the new setting, the readers were satisfied.
It doesn't need to even be that specific, though. Even something minor like another character saying "You seem to recover from injuries far better than most people" might have been enough. After all, we certainly don't understand the rules of our own world, so our readers don't need (or expect) to understand all the rules of the worlds we write. That brief focus on the deviation from our world's rules will imply to the reader that this is part of the world we created, rather than simple carelessness as a writer.
Conclusion:
Now, when someone mocks you for complaining about something being unrealistic in a fictional setting, you have a good answer.
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