Last night, I was talking to some fellow artists who are decidedly much more accomplished than me and a few of my methods seemed to come off as puzzling. And just because I'm really bored, Imma elaborate on my methods.
First of all it seemed like my almost obsessive researching seemed a little pointless. Let me tell you why I like doing research.
1. I can be that know-it-all who goes "oh this isn't how that works at all!"
2. I mainly use heavy science fiction. Most people tend to associate scifi with space, Star Wars, and things like that. But Star Wars is actually fantasy. The key word of science fiction is "science". A story can take place in any time period and be fantasy or scifi. Where fantasy and science fiction differ is that fantasy is pure imagination. Most people are familiar with "hard fantasy" a sub-genre of fantasy. This is a genre we're all familiar with, thanks to Lord of the Rings. This subgenre is based upon completely creating a new world. It can be easy or difficult depending on the artist. The artist that brought up my researching habit seemed to think that reality is detrimental to the creative process. I disagree. See, there are people who like features of a story portrayed correctly. If you hadn't guessed, it really pisses me off when guns are not portrayed correctly in movies. I'm the asshole who will count off how many shots are fired from each gun and make comments on how many rounds the magazines actually hold, or how it's utterly ludicrous for a Smith & Wesson 500 to fire off a ridiculous nine shots when it's well-known to be a five-shooter.
But there is another reason. Scifi is based on "what-if" scenarios that stem from reality. To come up with those scenarios and explain what the hell is going on I need the knowledge to make the impossible probable. From an article I read in Popular Science I do notice that there is a rivalry between science and art, and to me this simply has to go because it's ridiculous. Science and art are complimentary to each other! In the recent movie Thor, there was supposed to be a sequence where the ice giants fell off a disk-shaped planet, and the scientific consultants were starkly opposed. Why? Well because the flat earth theory is something like 600 years old and if you don't know how gravity works, you probably have problems. The idea wasn't
bad, but it also didn't respect the audience's intelligence at all. Furthermore, a lot of the magic portrayed in fantasy is technically plausible under current laws of physics, specifically the high-energy and Quantum branches. This is where
my creative process is grounded; I take a fantasy concept, say spell-casting. How could that be possible under today's physics? I knew enough to be able to come up with my own plausible explanation; the soul. While that sounds like fantasy, consider this: Dark Energy. Hawking Radiation. Exotic matter. Space and time are more akin to oceans and rivers than straight linear lines. Parallel universes.
Now if you're going to tell me that stuff like this isn't good material, I believe you have problems in the head.
Now back to magic. I said that it came from the soul, but what does that mean?
SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION TIME!
In this series magic goes by a few names. Quantum manipulation being the key term. The soul is what humans are. I based this off of the real-life religious concept and blended it with actual scientific theories. The human body has an electronic frequency, a harmonic frequency, and even a very low intensity plasma field. There are parts of the body that are not physical that are actually documented like this.
The soul is like another creature entirely, and our souls basically use these bodies as vehicles of perception and mobility through this plane of reality. But the body and soul cannot live without each other. Why not? The body can live without the soul, in a coma. But not without life support. When the body dies our perception is freed from this body and we find ourselves in another world, which in my series is a spiritual plane of existence. Spirits in that plane are able to interact and make "impressions" on our reality inn the form of life, if that makes sense.
Most of the time, genetic modification is used to make the magical abilities I mentioned possible. To put it simply, modifying DNA is not enough. Take the vampires from Underworld, for example. They are humans mutated trough retroviruses. The changes in those vampires is plausible. But the lycans and their transforming ability? No. See it's one of those things where you're not supposed to think about it. In that world, the Lycans are able to gain about three feet of height and become absolutely massive. But where does that biomass come from? To sustain that kind of transformation you'd have to ingest something like a year's worth of calories in 20 seconds every time you wanted to change! Now, are you going to tell me that the magic of genetics has that possibility? BULLSHIT!
The question then becomes "how do I make this plausible without changing the concept?"
Going back to my magic, body and soul, the answer is simple. In this series there are two changes made. One, to the body in the familiar form of genetic therapy to rapidly alter the body's genome for military purposes, and then using a modified Die Glocke device to alter the soul since this purportedly real device is able to affect life on the fundamental Quantum level. It reportedly pulled in exotic energies like Hawking Radiation and according to one theory, is able to control human evolution. It's the perfect device for my stories. So this device, when properly tuned, has the ability to modify the sentient energies that constitute the soul with reality-penetrating radiation and give the soul the ability to draw upon power, and the genetic modification gives the subject the physical ability to channel this energy.
But this leaves another question: Where does the magic come from? How can someone blow up a building using nothing but focus and a blast of energy?
The soul is modified to continually draw in energy. Take Samantha as a prime example because of her demonoid abilities. A key feature of her character is being able to absorb energy in any and every form. Her soul acts like an energy black hole. The dimension in this universe on which the soul resides possesses a negative charge saturation. I'll translate this: it has an endless supply of energy. It's an entire reality. A single human powerful enough to reduce a planet to dust won't even make a dent in that universe. So our souls collect and gather this energy, which is then channeled through our bodies in this universe. That's how it works.
And what happens to all that energy when it's release? Well, our reality is "permeable". The energy simply disappears in our reality and is soaked back up by the spiritual plane.
How can we cast different spells? The nature of this energy and the modification is basically unique to every person (unless you're like Levena and literally rolled off an assembly line) is unique. But the raw energy itself is psychoreactive. That means it responds to thought. But keep in mind it's still energy and this is still scifi. It's not like Harry Potter. This energy can com in th form of plasma and fire, but it can't be cast into actual objects.
The only time that happens is when these people heal their bodies. This energy gives them a greater healing capacity.
To give you an idea of how improbable instant healing with energy is use this anaology.
Antimatter is the most reactive type of matter in this universe. Think of the matter that makes up our bodies as positively charged particles and antimatter as negative. What happens when these two opposites meet? Well, the most epic explosion since the big bang. A mass of antimatter with the mass of a paperclip could take out New York. So the energy required to regenerate a gram of human flesh is roughly equivalent to a very large thermonuclear bomb. This should emphasize how powerful Samantha is.
But lo, I ramble. This is how my creative process works. I ask a question and I merely look up the answer.
If you want to know about Die Glocke...I got nothing. Read Black Order by James Rollins for the concept on quantum evolution. He has a bibliography in the back of that book that contains some REEEAAALLY good reading.
But here's a watered down and highly uninteresting version for you:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Gloc…
