[Torg] Fiction and Reality (Genre and Being Real, 2 of 6)

[Jones Jasyn]

Some part of me wants to begin this with a metaphysical discourse, so I can “prove” my answer before I give it, but I’m not going to do that. I’m going to give my answer first so we’re all on the same page, then explain why it works.


Here’s the question:

Q: Why do other realities reflect the fictional genres of Core Earth?

Here’s the answer:

A: They don’t. Our fiction reflects their reality.


Why does Earth have legends of Atlantis? Because on some other Earth in some other cosm, Atlantis (or something much like it) really existed. Our fiction doesn’t determine their reality, their realities have molded our fiction.

Here’s the explanation:

Possibility Energy is a weird beast. It limits reality, vis a vis axioms and the Everlaw  of One. It also empowers individuals to break the limits, via the Everlaw of Two. When drained of it, people who transform die. But their Possibility Energy can be refilled before that happens.

Telling stories, glorious tales of victory, inspires people and refills them with Possibility Energy. Possibility Energy responds to, is affected by, inspiration and imagination.

It seems almost inevitable that Possibility Energy not only responds to imagination, but that it affects imagination itself. It not only is molded by inspiration, but it can inspire.

Possibility Energy inspires inventors and philosophers, prophets and mystics, artists and writers. It inspires them to dream of the impossible, to imagine things not yet real- because their axioms don’t allow for them- and drives them to make their visions real.

Possibility Energy not only enforces the limitations of axioms, not only allows those axioms to be bent, but actually inspires people with visions of what is possible at higher axioms. It drives them to challenge the axiom and eventually to raise the axiom.

Higher Tech and Social is science fiction. Higher Magic and Spirit is fantasy. Genres emerge, in part, from visions of what could be if the Axioms were higher.

So, in part, Core Earth genres are a result of the nature of Possibility Energy itself. But this isn’t the whole story.

Core Earth’s genres are more specific than visions of a higher Axiom would allow for. Weird Science, for example, isn’t part of any axiom but part of a specific reality. Why would Earth have hints about that reality?

Because Core Earth, of course, is different.

--
Jasyn Jones
jasynj (at) gmail (dot) com

"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson

Check out my Torg webpage, Storm Knights:
web.me.com/stormknights/