: Re: 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

@Sarah872

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I think you are giving into the temptation of explaining. Sometimes you don't need to know how - or at least not for sure how - just to make it believable in your world.

Take your real life laptop as an example. It has thousands of microchips compacted into a single CPU but, what is a microchip? What is a diode? What is an integrated circuit? People generally don't know... A few may, but the vast majority don't care as long it works.

Many have heard that a laptop has a CPU and decided that the vague notions they have are enough to not care at all. If real life people are not interested in details, why over-detail a fictional world?

Same thing goes for books or movies. In Back to the future you have a "flux capacitor" but you have no idea what it is, you just know it allows time traveling. It's magical but also scientific because nobody ever tried to explain what it is.

It wouldn't be hard to create Back to the Future IV and say that some mystical being taught some weird magical ways to Doc, allowing him to create a magical device that could be inserted into a DeLorean. After all, nobody actually explained what the flux capacitor is and how it works.

The same goes in your book. The flying carpet or hovercraft works based on magic or science (why not both together?) At the start, will anyone actually care? Will it make any difference to specify? If people already know it is science, they will assume some weird scientific means make it work; if people know it is magic, they will assume it's magical without asking for more explanations.

Like I said in my previous answers, if you are not an expert in a field, just stay on the surface. It works here also. Don't try to explain what can't be explained, because that will close doors that could stay opened.

For example, if you leave the way a hovercraft works open, you can in the future (maybe your next book) decide that in fact it works based on science, even being in a magical world. That may lead to new histories like one where the guy finds out that science exists and wants to uncover more about it and become the most powerful engineer of the world.

If you already defined that the hovercraft is scientific, you won't be able to change that in the future.

The exception is the history itself. If it's vital for your plot to have the way the hovercraft works, than you should define it. But if it's not vital, just leave it unexplained until some idea comes up.

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