Fantasy can be central. (Destiny)

by General Battuta, Monday, May 05, 2014, 10:14 (3864 days ago) @ Cody Miller

There's nothing Fantastical about life on a world that isn't Earth. Science tells us that this is not only possible, but in fact pretty likely.

Fabricating another world to set your story in is an act of fantasy. Building the demographic, geopolitical, and ideological systems that govern that world - even the ecologies and biomes that populate it - is an act of fantasy. The physical plausibility thereof is almost irrelevant.

Cosmology right now favors a flat, open, infinite, isotropic universe, which means all physically plausible worlds exist (in infinite permutations) in Hubble volumes well past our universe's event horizon. But that doesn't change the fact that this is an act of imagination.

Let's refocus this conversation on the central question: whether fantasy is inherently regressive. I've pointed out that it doesn't have to be.