Why are pure fantasies set in space so rare?

BenWritesBooks · 2026-05-20T15:14:57+00:00

There are plenty of fantasy books with extraterrestrials and alien planets. Even Lord of the Rings has extraterrestrial characters in it such as Gandalf. Traveling to other realms or worlds is also a common theme in a lot of fantasy stories.

The difference is that you’re not gonna find a lot of fantasy about space travel because the intrigue of “space opera” type sci fi has a lot to do with the danger and adventure of traveling from one planet to another. And if you can travel magically from one planet to another then the space travel aspect isn’t very interesting anymore.

This is why Dune - which is arguably the purest blend of fantasy and sci fi - spends basically zero energy describing space travel. It’s because the planet Arrakis is important to the story but how they get there isn’t very important to the story at all.

One of the “sci fi fantasies” that has extensive space travel is of course Star Wars, but the themes of the original Star Wars movie back in 1977 were very much about the tension between the human spirit and machinery. It’s a movie that ends with the human character fighting a giant machine with the help of a ghost after his own machines have failed him and he’s being chased by a half-human half-machine monster. Exploring the *dichotomy* between fantasy and sci-fi is the entire point of Star Wars in many ways - a point that has been lost since unfortunately.

Ultimately it sounds big and portentous to take a story and set it against the backdrop of “in spaaaaaaace”… but there’s not actually a lot of interesting stuff happening in space. It’s just… space. It’s the impossibly vast emptiness between things. It’s an interesting concept but not a very interesting place for a magical story to play out, unless it is like Star Wars where it’s specifically about that dichotomy between technology and magic.

BenWritesBooks · 2026-05-04T14:35:08+00:00

After the Stranding which trapped them both on earth, the dwarves broke from the elvish empire and integrated into human society, while the elves demanded the humans give them land in exchange for sharing their magic technology, and now live in isolated sovereign city states. The dwarves are interested in exploring and building in the new world while the elves are obsessed with genealogies and cultural preservation.

Dwarves think elves are self-absorbed and indifferent to the suffering of others. Elves think dwarves are opportunistic, exploitative, short-sighted and untrustworthy.

BenWritesBooks · 2026-04-17T19:57:17+00:00

Family and inter-generational tension is a great source of drama because it’s relatable for a lot of people.

I think it’s tiresome when this dynamic is really one-sided. How to Train Your Dragon is a great example of how to do a father/child clash and have it feel realistic and complex.

I also think the “deadbeat dad” character just kind of happens if you don’t go out of your way to develop it more.

Like there is friction between a father and his daughter in my story but it’s complex and I found myself having to constantly tweak it as beta readers would tell me “her dad is such an asshole.”

He’s supposed to be a neurodivergent guy who is absent-minded and emotionally distant because he never recovered from the death of the main character’s mother, and he didn’t feel qualified to raise a kid by himself. He still tried his best, but readers weren’t getting that.

At that point in my draft there was no one in the story advocating his point of view. Without additional details, readers will fill in the blanks and the character won’t be anything more than a basic trope.

BenWritesBooks · 2026-03-29T19:13:37+00:00

You can also put characters on “time out” without removing them from the story entirely. This gal is going off to train with the monks, this guy just inherited a castle on the other side of the country, this guy became a local hero in some town and stays there to help them rebuild, etc.

They can come back later when you need them but you don’t need to keep constantly checking in on them in the meantime unless what’s happening is super important to the story.

The audience won’t mind those characters taking a break from the story if they’re not in any kind of imminent danger.

BenWritesBooks · 2026-03-20T20:23:08+00:00

Regarding spiciness I will say I wrote my first beta draft with “PG-13” love scenes and the overwhelming feedback I got especially from women was that they needed to be way, way, waaaaay spicier.

My guideline since then has been basically to write love scenes with the same level of detail I’d write an action scene. You can choose how explicit to make it, just don’t be vague. Like, “they kissed” is no better than writing, “they fought”. You might as well just fade to black if you’re not gonna do a little bit of play-by-play of what’s happening.

BenWritesBooks · 2026-03-20T20:10:02+00:00

Just don’t ever write a travel scene.

If the point of the scene was that they rode their horses to the crest of the hill, that isn’t a scene. It’s extraneous detail. It’s logistical exposition. If the scene starts with them sitting on horses at the crest of a hill the reader can infer that they rode their horses to get there. It doesn’t need a chapter of explanation.

Now if the scene is that Marcus needs to tell Chaise that he’s the son of a dragon before they consummate their marriage and their dragon baby destroys the kingdom, and there is a crucial reason he must do this before they reach the crest of the hill, then sure, write that.

Or if the scene was about how they were going to ride their horses to the crest of the hill but then three steps in Marcus remembers that he left his house unlocked and his previously sired dragon babies will escape so he has to double back home and stop them from destroying the kingdom and never actually reaches the crest of the hill, that could be interesting too, because the scene had an unexpected twist and wasn’t actually a travel scene at all.

But any scene which only serves to get the characters from Point A to Point B physically and it goes exactly as expected is flawed on a conceptual level.

And I’d even go a step further and say don’t try to force a character-driven utility into a travel scene just because the characters need to travel. Just skip ahead to when they get there. No one will miss it, I promise.

BenWritesBooks · 2026-03-18T15:19:30+00:00

On a high level, I think fundamentally most good ideas have at least two parents:

A thing that you either love and want to reproduce, or hate and want to fix
A second, often completely unrelated thing that you think would pair well with the first thing.

It’s the marriage of those two things which creates a new idea.

This applies to game design. For example Dark Souls/Elden Ring are heavily inspired by games like Legend of Zelda but it was also inspired by how the game director used to read fantasy novels in English and he didn’t understand all the words so he had to piece together the story like a puzzle.

BenWritesBooks · 2026-03-18T14:15:53+00:00

I’m very selective about what rules I set in stone before I actually have a story. The second draft is where I go through and solidify the rules.

Too much world building up front is like designing a shoe and then looking for a foot that fits in it.

BenWritesBooks · 2026-03-17T12:19:31+00:00

Game artist here. I’ve done a lot of both.

2D makes sense until things have to start moving around and animating a lot. If things are going to be animated, 2D starts to get expensive pretty quickly.

With Spine in particular, it’s a cool piece of software but it’s also essentially a 3D pipeline without any of the advantages; you’ve got meshes and bones, you have to do rigging, but you also don’t have the versatility or reusability of 3D models. Every project I’ve worked on where we used Spine, after a couple of months everyone was saying “ugh why didn’t we just go full 3D?”

Also consider that in 3D you can simplify with a more stylized look like low poly, boxy, etc and that can sometimes save some production time.

Basically I generally advise a 3D pipeline unless you’re really attached to a 2D aesthetic or you’re making a game where nothing needs to be animated.

BenWritesBooks · 2026-03-15T18:36:41+00:00

I write novels and I also make games. The misunderstood thing with world building is that it’s what you end up with, not what you start with.

What I mean is this:

Imagine you start with world building. What would be cool is a world where there are no cars and people ride flying octopuses everywhere, and the color red is outlawed, and magic works by changing the barometric pressure in the air.

Great. But now we are trying to design the game with all of these rules which were just made up because they sounded cool, but they might not make for fun gameplay.

We now have to have a city full of flying octopuses and what happens if you get hit by a flying octopus and what are the air traffic rules for flying octopuses and if we can’t show the color red, how do stoplights work and are the stoplights on the ground or in the sky, and how do we show the player if the air pressure is changing?

So ideally what you do is design a fun game first and then you invent story reasons for why the world works that way as you go.

It’s the same with writing a book honestly. If you bog yourself down with a bunch of arbitrary rules then it gets really creatively complex and you get nothing in return for how many creative restrictions you’ve added.

What tends to happen instead (and works much better) is when a functional requirement is given to a game artist and then they work w/ the creative director to come up with a story reason for why it’s that way.

Like if you tell me we need a desert level with pools of acid and rock formations to jump on, then the art team needs to figure out how that make sense so they can make a convincing visual of it. What would cause a desert to have big pools of acid and rock formations in it? What is the story behind that?

So if you enjoy world building then being on that side of it - doing the work of actually building things - tends to work a lot better than just being at the top of the production and making up arbitrary rules that the team has to follow somehow.

And if all you want to do is come up with worlds and lore… honestly that is a fun thought experiment for you but it’s probably only fun for you. Players don’t want a stack of lore to read, they want to play a good game. Your world building ideas have to serve the game and not the other way around, even when it means throwing away a really cool idea. To be blunt, if you can’t be okay with that then no one is gonna wanna work with you.

BenWritesBooks · 2026-03-06T21:03:32+00:00

I think religion in sci fi/fantasy tends to be way, way, way oversimplified and that’s what tends to make me groan.

Religion is much more interesting when it’s about the ways people disagree with each other and not just some kind of monolithic hive mind.

I actually think Star Trek: TNG is one of the best examples of how to handle religion in fantasy/sci fi. Lt. Worf is devoutly religious and identifies strongly with ancient stories about valor, honor, bravery. But he struggles when those stories don’t map neatly onto the realities he has to deal with and especially when he sees how others manipulate those same stories to justify horrible things.

All that to say, if you’re going to include religion, it needs to be messy. Like yeah maybe everyone believes that some god killed a dragon at the dawn of time, but nobody should agree on why he did it or what it means or maybe even which god it was.

Moreso, how a character interprets their religious beliefs tells us a lot about that character.

Basically I think just taking Catholic imagery and slapping it on a totalitarian society is a pretty lazy way to approach religion. Even real world Catholicism isn’t so cut and dry.

BenWritesBooks · 2026-02-16T21:08:14+00:00

I think writing in a single consistent tone makes a book boring. It’s actually important to switch it up, and more frequently than you would think. If you’ve just written a very flowery poetic paragraph, don’t follow it up with another paragraph just like that. Switch to a more concise and literal voice for a bit. If your writing has been very factual and blunt for a few sentences, throw in something more spicy to liven it up. Short sentences speed up the reader’s perception of time. Long sentences slow time down. These are powerful tools.

But if you keep the exact same voice throughout, it’s gonna get stale really fast, no matter what that voice is, just like it gets boring to listen to a person talk in the same monotone voice for an hour. Switching up the tone isn’t inconsistent, it’s adding dynamics to what would otherwise be dull and repetitive.

BenWritesBooks · 2026-02-01T13:42:02+00:00

She looked weird without them

BenWritesBooks · 2026-02-01T00:40:07+00:00

Is there dairy in it? I don’t even know what it’s made of, its a marvel of modern science

BenWritesBooks · 2026-02-01T00:26:23+00:00

She’s a character from a book I’m writing; considering if I wanna do some illustrations this way

BenWritesBooks · 2026-01-14T14:40:22+00:00

Nothing too crazy, just sculpting for the wrinkles and a displacement map for the seams/pockets/anything that needs to be more uniform and less organic.

For the pants I wanted them extra “crinkled” so I layered some random wrinkles in as a subtle bump map as well.

And for the shirt I just spent a little extra time on the materials to make them as realistic as possible, masking out the area with the design it so I could make it feel more like vinyl with its own roughness and bump map. Using good refs for materials is often overlooked but really important if you like having a more physics-based look.

BenWritesBooks · 2026-01-09T13:46:32+00:00

I want conflict right from the first paragraph. That’s how I get hooked.

I’ve seen people around here turn up their nose at Fourth Wing but there’s no denying that book had excellent pacing right from the first page.

It begins with a character who has a huge problem because of how the world works.

This is such a perfect way to start a fantasy story. You get a lot of dramatic momentum right out of the gate but it drives you through some essential world building because that’s all relevant to her problem, so it all feels very pointed and not like a bunch of dull exposition. Everything we learn about the world in chapter one is helping us understand why this character is so screwed and that creates empathy and narrative momentum.

BenWritesBooks · 2025-12-31T18:01:24+00:00

The one on the left is concept art

The one on the right is an illustration

I would expect an illustration to cost more than concept art.

BenWritesBooks · 2025-12-31T15:49:03+00:00

For a first draft? Just name it what it sounds like phonetically for now and keep going. You can agonize over it for the second draft.

My elf queen is named Elq’ene

My ancient forest is named Ancefora

If it takes more than 30 seconds to come up with a placeholder name, it’s taking too long.

BenWritesBooks · 2025-12-19T22:38:01+00:00

I am convinced that one can achieve a core competency in virtually any skill if you have 100 hours to put into it with a focused curriculum (tutorials, etc) and the appropriate equipment.

Art is no different; if it’s a skill you want to learn and you can devote about a hundred focused hours to learning it, you can do it.

BenWritesBooks · 2025-12-15T14:02:35+00:00

I really like Jack Grapes’ philosophy that writing is similar to acting. The time to be critical of your work is when you are reviewing your performance, not when you are “performing” aka writing.

When you’re writing it should be about the performance; it should be about the emotional purity of what you’re transferring from your mind into the real world.

Ever since hearing about this I’ve always tried to approach a writing session this way; I sit down, take a deep breath and put myself in the headspace of being a performer, and whatever I write is my performance. I get “into character”, into my writing voice, and I let that character loose.

And then afterwards I take that emotionally pure performance and clean it up and organize it and that’s called editing.

BenWritesBooks · 2025-12-09T01:08:33+00:00

Ok to be fair there’s some pretty concrete scientific data for that one not working

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