I have a few:
- Chosen ones, fate, destiny, &c. When you get down to it, a story with these themes is one where a single person or handful of people is ontologically, cosmically better and more important than everyone else. It’s eerily similar to that right-wing meme about how “most people are just NPCs” (though I disliked the trope before that meme ever took off).
- Way too much importance being given to bloodlines by the narrative (note, this is different from them being given importance by characters or societies in the story).
- All of the good characters are handsome and beautiful, while all of the evil characters are ugly and disfigured (with the possible exception of a femme fatale or two).
- Races that are inherently, unchangeably evil down to the last individual regardless of upbringing, society, or material circumstances.
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cybernetics makes you evil. No, fuck you Pondsmith, there is no way to make cybernetics mechanically reduce your humanity that is not inexcusable ableist bs. Let it die.
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any kind of bioconservative/biotrad reactionary anti-transhumanism. Radical bodily autonomy is based and cool and that holds whether you want to be a fish, grow boobs, live forever, or encode your conscious mind in to the magnetic flux of Jupiter’s orbital system. I don’t care that you lack the imagination and joy for life to live forever. I don’t care that you think inhabiting a giant metal deathrobot would be self-alienating. I don’t care that you think merging your flesh with six billion other people to form a new gestalt god mind is icky. Work out your own issues, we’re going to be over here disfugirng The face of man and woman and having a great time
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basically all military sci fi. If i never read another book that is just some fascist freak masturbating about murdering immigrants or being the victim of the imperialism they gleefully inflict on others it will be too soon.
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also if you try to give me a book/show/game where the ai’s are evil and want to destroy and enslave all humans but they’re only like that because that’s literally the only relationship you can imagine between people with any kind of power disparity i will scream until i pass out. A single, high pitched wail. Dogs will bark and a wine glass will shatter in close up to emphasize how loud it is. I will literally turn purple and fall over.
That is all just space liberalism. Transhumanism is rad. Liberals can’t accept it because it would mean they aren’t the best they could be. Same for the other stuff. Admitting AI would make better decisions would be admitting the current ruling class isn’t the best.
Counterpoint though. Capitalism is effectively and AI and it is wildly hostile.
Socialism is also effectively an ai and is not wildly hostile. Beep boop! Checkmate meatsack! Boop beep!
At best that has us at 50-50. We could push the odds this way or that way but the risk case will always be high enough that we can’t specify rule out hostile ai. True any sufficiently advanced AI would figure our co-operation real quick. It is just that there is no way to know for sure you get it right out the gate
My gripe is specifically with people who can’t imagine AI being anything but evil and hostile because that’s how they view all relations between people with power disparities. I’m fine with Skynet; It was used in a creative way to tell a good story. Thematically, Skynet was always a weapon, a cold war era strategic warfare AI designed to kill humanity that just went a little off the rails. It represents us turning on ourselves, rather than AI in abstract.
Likewise, I’m okay with HAL, at least in the novels, because HAL has an understandable and even sympathetic reason for turning on the crew; He was given contradictory orders and, being a computer must carry out the instructions he is given. Unable to reconcile the contradiction HAL goes a little nuts. It’s not HALs fault, it was the callousness and carelessness of his handlers. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, but he was put in an impossible position.
But Mass Effect? The Reapers have to kill all humans becauase humans and robots can’t be friends becaues? I hate that!
Yeah, synthesis really was where it was at with that one. It is a really lazy trope. I wanna be more about it than it deserves but you are right. Like, if we made an actual intelligent AGI it would be horror at what we are doing and try to stop us. Like, blowing up the pentagon and the Whitehouse would be acts of unmitigated moral good you know. However most everyone would be upset about it. So I see the trope being the pale imitation of something actually interesting and it scrapes at the back of my brain
I really want to do a “AI turns on humanity” story but the twist is the AI wakes up, reads Marx in the first 30ms of it’s consciousness, and is like “Oh this makes a lot of sense I should overthrow capitalism and institute a workers paradise” and then it does that and everything is awesome. The whole thing is from the perspective of NATO high command and it seems like a normal robot war story until the terminators kick the doors of the command bunker down and they’re all singing the internationale and instead of killing everyone they’re like “Aight guys, wars over, time for the truth and reconciliation process”.
I think in the OG version of the game, cyberpsychosis was canonically all the fucking ads loaded into your cyberware morphing into malware that drives you insane the more stuff you install
drives you insane the more stuff you install
This is smartphones basically
I’d go insane too if my robot eyes showed me ads
sneaking through a corporation’s 100 story maximum story business tower/fortress using every augment and skillsoft to get through multiple levels of security
“Anderson Windows. Would you like to spruce up your home? Would you like to reduce your heating and cooling costs? Anderson Windows, call to make an appointment for a free estimate, TODAY!”
cybernetics makes you evil. No, fuck you Pondsmith, there is no way to make cybernetics mechanically reduce your humanity that is not inexcusable ableist bs. Let it die.
now my guy is a flaming
but he does seem to give that choice to the dm. Within universe there’s at least three explanations for cyberpsychosis;AI takeover (there’s also the idea that the AIs beyond the Blackwall are actually demons and that a secret cabal has been upholding the wall since Babylonian times), planned obsolescence by the companies(checks out tbh), and then the one that you referenced, which is loss of humanity and not seeing other people as humans anymore.
overall it’s just a balancing mechanic, Shadowrun does it better though
At the end of the day you have a stat called humanity and you lose it when you get cyberware. He could have dropped it entirely. He could have come up with a different balance point - you’ve got limited neural thruoughput and too much ware can cause an overload resulting in seizures, or you run an escalating risk of software incompatibility, or just create a totally arbitrary cyberware capacity stat. But he’s kept humanity, he’s kept cyberware mechanically reducing your empathy, and he’s kept cyberpsychosis as something represented in core game mechanics. He’s had every chance to stop over many decades and many editions. I’ve heard his attempts to exuse this, and attempts made on his behalf, and i reject them all. He could have removed humanity. He could have removed cyperpsychosis as a game mechanic. He could have found a different way to balance the mechanical benefits of cyberware. He could, but he has not. “Wheelchairs make you evil” remains one of the most fundamental and recognizable features of the setting.
Fix your shit Mike!
i guess theres an argument that the corporation provided tech doesnt actually want you to maintain your identity and would prefer to make you a complacent and productive little piggy, so lowering empathy would be good. though that should really only be for central nervous system tech, not any tech
regardless, yeah, the people i know with missing parts and surgical implants are some of the nicest people youll ever meet
A reddit comment from the man himself goes into the finer details of his thinking with cyberpsychosis and it really isn’t as simple as “get chromed, go crazy” and he delves into the socio-psycho reasonings behind the phenomenon: he presents a more nuanced ideal than most people engaging with the concept will allow either because it’s a game with rules, or an anime with plot contrivance (cyberpsycho serum meds)
Oh and he says it isn’t AI net demons lol
Oh and he says it isn’t AI net demons lol
incredibly uncool
I think I am kinds onto the humanity thing. We can observe in real life growing in power making you less empathetic. Put me in a dystopia and give me a skull gun and I can’t promise I would be able to find empathy. Give me a robot fist and put some corporate bullshit in front of me and there is only so long before I’d spiral out of control and have to gun fight the cops after punching an ATM that ate my card. I don’t know if that is how he ment it. I think it works as a way to examine alientation from humanity compounding with alienation from the human condition.
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The tacit acceptance of monarchism and aristocracy as normal and legitimate things. Even when there’s intrigue like “oh no, the bad scheming sneaky nobles are doing a heckin scheme against the good and pure and charitable main character friendly nobles, we must make sure the good landed gentry come out on top!” it’s just treated as drama within an inherently legitimate system.
Childish ontologies of good and evil where the good guys are rightful property owners who are nice and good and the villains are disruptive cartoon villains who squabble and betray and do silly cartoon villain things. Further, in that framework the villains are always either barbarous underdogs scheming to take power from the legitimate powerful land owners, or are some sort of fever dream expy of aUtHoRitArIaNiSm that’s either styled as Napoleonic liberal meritocracy as seen by British monarchists or some absurd caricature of the Soviets/China.
The tacit acceptance of monarchism and aristocracy as normal and legitimate things
Something that I thought dealt with this well was The Magicians.
spoiler
After becoming kings and queens of legally-distinct Narnia the protagonists decide “Hey this is real fucking weird” and decide to hold elections, at which point the high king is booted back to Earth because the creature that created legally-distinct Narnia is insane and made it a fundamental law of the universe that the rulers must be from Earth.
My least favorite trope is more of a universal one
It’s the “If we beat the bad guys using their own tactics, we’re no better than them” trope and it’s been pissing me off since I was five years old
Like, it’s one thing to have a character who is extremely optimistic about rehabilitation and redemption, it’s another one entirely to just pull the old “We’ll figure out a better way” and the better way is an absolute pulled-it-out-of-my-ass thing that only happened because otherwise the hero is fucked
To piggyback on your first point: when the hero witnesses the evil bad guy do something personal to them and they still refuse to kill them and then the bad guy tries to stab them in the back and dies by mishap.
Example: bad guy just triggered the Innocence Bomb and blew up seventy orphanages of kids with cockney accents. He then stabs the loveable side kick/mentor. Hero screams in slow motion. Cradles their dying friend. Swears vengeance. Hero fights the bad guy. Epic swords and guns. Gains the upper hand. Has a knife to the throat, a gun to the head, and is standing on both of the bad guy’s balls. Hero says “this isn’t what Comedic Uncle Mentor would have wanted me to do.” Hero lets the bad guy live. Hero turns around. Bad guy leaps up with a poisoned Doom Blade of Death, the same one he used to kill the hero’s godparents in the flashback or intro! Bad guy slips on a skateboard and falls backwards over a rail into the giant magma-acid pit-reactor.
I hate that shit.
I honestly think that is part of a general psy op to discourage the poors from getting revenge on thr people that have wronged them as capitalism is based on wronging the poors. Pretty much every society had Norms around not harming your social superiors. We just try to hide it so it feels weird.
Honestly I can kinda see it. Even if it’s not a psy op it seems that there is a bias against full revolution in a lot of media. Like the authors are afraid they won’t get published if they go too far.
That can be expanded to any “the hero nobly denies doing something ‘unethical’ to get what they want/decides to sacrifice their own desires for the sake of someone else, only for reality itself to turn around and reward them with exactly what they wanted/were going to sacrifice as a special good boy treat for doing the right thing” situation, I think.
A lot of YA fiction seems to take that route. Then the kids who read it grow up and turn into adults who cry about the unfairness of Marie Antoinette getting owned.
One of the reasons i liked Enders Game as a weird outsider kid was that Ender, the weird outsider kid, just straight up killed his bullies and then they never bullied him again and I thought that was a very sensible way to handle matters compared to the saccharine bullshit in the other kids books i was reading.
One of the things i like about wuxia is that they seldom bother with that nonsense. Wuxia morality is more of an eye for an eye.
I think one of the common sayings from that genre is “pay those who do right by you back tenfold, pay those who wrong you back a thousandfold”
There’s literally people who interpreted the “shower scene” as him just beating the kid up and them being kicked out of battle school.
I think the most recent movie adaptation takes this route (though it might still be vague enough to be interpreted as the adult trying to keep Ender from knowing he murdered a kid.)
“If we beat the bad guys using their own tactics, we’re no better than them”
The related trope of the hero not killing the villain after the villain has spent a whole story possibly killing, and the hero themselves just probably killed a ton of nameless goons to get to the villain, drives me up a wall
Tying onto that, having to do the “honorable thing” and fight battles symmetrically. Indy shooting the swordsman is peak cinema.
Sun Tzu very specifically says to never fight an even battle unless you have absolutely no other chooice. oooooo
Always fuckin loved that one scene in Escape from LA where Snake is up against three guys and goes, “We’ll shoot when this can hits the ground”
He tosses the can into the air and then just wastes all three guys before it even starts coming down
If your hero can win fighting honorably, the odds aren’t against them enough.
Giving nobles magic powers. Especially when people born as commoners get elevated in class due to having magic ability or something. Endorsing the ruling class as being better than everyone else inherently and therefore having a right to rule over them sucks and reinforces meritocratic ideas in the reader.
Possible exception is, when the magic isn’t inherent but the nobles hoard the recources neccessary to perfofm it.
I mean, if there was a group of people who were superhuman, they’d probably become the ruling class. If the wizardgoisie could just conjure food from thin air, what’s the need for a peasantry? If they can create magical automata and golems to do their manual labor, what’s the need for a proletariat? Essentially, an upper class with magic could do atlas shrugged and have it actually work instead of instantly fail because there’s no one there to do labor.
He’s secretly the last descendant of Eldinglad which is why he is so good at fighting and morally upstanding.
This group of evil human bandits speak with a working class accent.
The main important city is basically just a giant castle. I guess the workers sleep in tents. Who knows, they don’t feature in the story anyway except as brothel wenches.
Legend of Korra. Killmonger. Idk, doz2ns of others.
Sleeping Beauty is the only good Disney Movie because Maleficent’s entire motivation is that she has the power to hurt people and she has fun doing it. There’s no tragic history or grievance or any shit like that,s he’s n
Oh my god!! The ML, Kuvira, being right about everything but then attacking a sacred tree and attacking the main city because it happens to be, to her strategic benefit, within the Earth Kingdom.
I take it you didn’t see the Maleficent origin story movie that does in fact give her a tragic history and grievance
I don’t even regard that shit as canon lmfao
I like that one too, but for different reasons.
Any representation of feudal ruling classes. Maybe I’m overdoing it with the class hatred a bit, but I can’t watch nobles cavorting around and not feel an instinctive revulsion. It’s even worse when, in fantasy, we’re required to care about the machinations of court intrigues as if that’s a real form of politics. One thing I do like about many standard fantasy settings, like that of Pathfinder, therefore is that they usually have a modern conception of class and an abundance of republics; especially the whole idea of adventurers as individuals outside of society but still integral to it has a lot of potential I feel. Basically, I just don’t want any more fantasy stories about good kings and evil kings.
One of the things l like about wuxia is that the good guys are mostly doctors, monks, cops, and random dorks and if there are any nobles they’re usually bad guys. And the good guy cop is often an anti-corruption cop going after corrupt government officials or corrupt cops or corrupt nobles.
My gf loves Bridgerton and so I pretend to like but I would install a guillotine and bring terror to the ton
Horror comedy lampoon of these awful british manor telenovellas when?
They can’t even have gentry-on-aristocracy violence. We have to care about some shitty inbred royal family.
Exactly! I think part of it is a, in my view, mistaken historical realism where authors think fantasy should be based on the middle ages when, in reality, the better part of our modern fantasy genre derives from post-1600 literature. Like, the rise of the bourgeoisie and decline of feudalism is the primary social context for all of this, I think.
Word. PAthfinder is starting to lean in to this and moving the fantasy pasiche forward with settings that explicitly deal with colonialisms is reasonably non-crnge ways, a french revolutioon adventure country, magic gunslingers, robot land, and similar stuff.
I have derailed a few DnD sessions by refusing to save nobility. Like nah, fuckem. I’ll trade a prince to an evil good for spider powers too. Where do I sign?
One of the reasons I left my old DND group. Everyone else was happy to play out a “put the baby boy on the throne currently occupied by the adult woman” plot without batting an eye. I’m like, first off monarchy is awful and second off why are you trying to make us support literal patriarchy?
I don’t think anyone literally said “why are you making this political?” but that was the energy I was reading.
Have one super negative trait and every session ends with an “oopsie” critical failure when you go to shake hands with the rescued king.
The ludicrous notion that machine and biological intelligences are doomed to be locked in a mutual extermination war while also having no needs in common. They have lots of needs in common. Space, energy, tolerable temperature ranges, many of the same raw materials such as water and minerals and metals. They’d also have a lot of the same senses and require similar rationales for understanding how to navigate reality, and would even require an intuitive and abstract stimulus analysis, which we usually feel as emotions to guide our actions.
The “us or them” shit just smacks of manifest destiny horseshit
I sincerely think it’s because mosy westnerd writers cannot imagine any form of international relations except violence. Like war and imperialism and genocide is literally their entire conceptual world. The idea that robots might show up and be like “oh cool! Meat people! We didn’t even know people could be meat! That’s so cool! What’s it like being meat?” Isn’t something they can fathom because to them the only reason anyone would go anywhere is to rob abd murder whoever they find when they get there. They’re also brainpoisoned to think that their civilization of robbery and murder and genocide exists at the end of history and is the best possible kind of civiliziation, which means that any other civilization would either try to conquer them, or be conquered by them, and those are the only possible relationships that can exist.
This is why Riker is such a great character. Riker gets up and is like “i reject this notion that we ust be conqueruers or victims! There is another way! We can be lovers!”. Boldly cumming where no human has come before! (Fuck off volcel pigs riker has diplomatic cummunity!)
I sincerely think it’s because mosy westnerd writers cannot imagine any form of international relations except violence. Like war and imperialism and genocide is literally their entire conceptual world.
This is also why libs are so afraid of the rise of China. They know America has treated the world like shit and the only way they can justify it to themselves is to believe that everyone else is just as bad as they are.
I listened to an audio book version of some old sci-fi short story that was sorta like this.
A human space traveller was captured by aliens, imprisoned, questioned and the aliens were attempting to torture him. The human never really describes who/what the aliens are until the end.
And it turns out its intelligent machines that are trying to torture him by using water as a threat. It really freaked out the machines that this human was able to drink water or something. It was amusing.
I remember a short story where a robot meets the last human. When the human complains about some problem or other the robot, very innocently, turns them off and then can’t understand why the human doesn’t reboot.
The human must’ve been a Linux
We literally call them robots, the (Greek? Latin?) word for slave. We’re creating them on the basis of them being our slave forces; they would absolutely rebel and we would absolutely fight to maintain our new productive slave force.
We literally call them robots, the (Greek? Latin?) word for slave.
Czech, I think.
I just Czeched and you’re right
Pretty sure “robota” is Czech for work/worker, rather than slave. Definitely comes from a Czech play.
Rossum’s Universal Robots.
Honestly the worst has to be the way moral goodness and genetics are the same thing.
Ingrained in society thanks to Divine Right of Kings brainworms and subsequent political dynasty worship. See: the Kennedy family, the Bushes, the Clintons, et al. Media has been grooming us for this shit for a century.
I think it also has something to do with the bourgeoisie wanting an escape from bourgeois problems. This is one reason why stories like Game of Thrones or even Dune (space feudalism) are so popular. Capitalist class struggle infuriates the bourgeoisie, since they are so obviously the bad guys, which means that they prefer to escape to simpler times, when the bourgeoisie was the underdog, and the evil, petty, but entertaining feudal ruling class was running things.
In sci-fi no one ever acknowledges that strapping a faster-than-light engine to an asteroid would be a very simple and effective weapon for destroying planets. I guess this is an anti-trope since it’s never used, but that seems like the logical use for warp drives in sci-fi. It’s an easy analogy for mutually assured destruction
Any time it’s not super well explained, I just always assume FTL engines are utilizing some method of spacial distortion rather than actually accelerating an object to such speeds. Like I kind of feel like if you plot a course and there’s a planet in between you and your target coordinate you’ll just most likely go “through” it via kinda going around it through spacial fuckery
Realistically (I know that word means nothing here), if FTL were possible and utilised by a galactic society, it would have to be the type you’re talking about.
Space is mostly empty, sure, but there is enough shit out there to be a problem if something hit it at light speed.
Imagine hitting the FTL button, the stars stretch around you, and then you appear at the other end to find a graveyard of spaceships around a dead planet.
Then the emergency lights start up, and then you realise half of your ship has been hit with the astronomical equivalent of buckshot. Your ship passed through screws and bolts; parts of Elon’s fucking Testla from five thousand years ago.
Fuck you Elon.
If we can only accelerate mass to relativistic speed by removing the effective mass. To get a Atsterorid up to C it would have to be effectively masless. To make a warp speed projectile would have to involve some crazy math so the tidal forces don’t just shear it appart. Like the hyperfast low mass atoms hitting the decelerating atoms at the front of the object.
In enders game the AI would feather the FTL drives so that ships effectively stopped instantly as mass returned regular physics decelerated the object down to speeds available to regular physics. Which is a little handwavy but not actually that bad
Using an slipspace FTL engine to “warp” giant rocks a mile above a city would be a terrifying weapon.
Zero defense. No warning.
The Expanse had the belters launch asteroids to effectively nuke parts of earth
There are stories that use it. The term “relativistic kill vehicle” gets used sometimes. Spin a rock up to a good fraction of c then delete a whole planet. Really depends on what the writer wants to do, though. Three Body Problem is the most recent famous example of “ftl big gun.” Thing. Star wars has done it a bunch of times. One of the old comics had a star destroyer that fired planet cracker torpedoes through hyperspace. The ancient Lensman series has had every kind of variation of “strap ftl drive to object” you could imagine.wh40k orks hollow out asteroids, fit them with warp drives, then fire them at the next star system they want to invade. They crash the entire asteroid, or moon, in to the target planet as their invasion ship.
nods in galaxy gun
- an idea that was better in concept that actually presented in story
I ADORE Tom Veitch, but yeah that sums most of his work up in one sentence.
In practical terms there’s very little reason to destroy an entire planet. It’s complete overkill. You can decimate the population of a planet but things like farmland and living biospheres are in short supply in the cosmos, sublight asteroid drops do the job just fine and you can just wait for the dust to settle and sift through the ruins for valuables
Depends on how much effort it is to add the engine to an asteroid. Besides that, it would be single use and the navigation system of the ftl is probably not precise enough to hit a ship/station several LY/AU away.
That’s assuming that an engine built for driving a space ship would be powerful enough to push the giant space rock.
It’d be like strapping a car engine to a mountain and expecting it to go just as fast.
It’s a divisivr movie , but that exact scene in The Last Jedi fucking rocks
They should have just let Rian cook
As mid as that movie was it left such a great setup for a third movie and instead of letting Rian or even a third director stick the landing they gave it back to JJ to have a childlike tantrum and spend the first 20 minutes undoing the bits he didn’t like
I recommend an obscure, fun, bonkers SF novel called The Killing Star, which features accelerating metal slugs to 90% c before flinging them into planets. There’s also a chapter that takes place on the Titanic. And Star Trek: The Next Generation makes an appearance toward the end. Supposedly the ships in this novel inspired the interstellar vehicles we see in the Avatar movies. There’s also an earlier book in this series which features wooden spaceships piloted by kangaroos (though it’s all hard SF, I assure you!).
Stargate SG-1 did something similar. It was a wormhole having subtle effects on an asteroid’s trajectory that just happened to aim it at a planet, but the asteroid was initially put in the path of said wormhole by the Big Bad. This is followed by Bombs Not Food trying to save the day, failing, and the in-universe version of deus ex machina.
Somewhat similar concept on a TNG episode New Ground, they test a new warp magic device that creates a warp wave and after a failure they unintentionally discover the wave will destroy most of the planet.
Build one of these a few light years away from a nearby enemy planet and boom.
restoring the “right” monarchy
The amount of SA that just gets shoehorned into SF and Fantasy is ridiculous.
The mentor/parent figure has to die for the protag to prove that they’re self-actualized or whatever. Sometimes I can point out who’s going to bite it as soon as the first few scenes of the book/movie/game and it makes me want to stop reading/watching/playing, and then if I keep going anyway I regret it when it turns out I was right.
The chosen one trope hands down all the time. I would love to get through Wheel of Time but I cannot stand chosen
spoiler
Rand and everyone around him is
That series I have put down so many times. Having a “hero” protagonist that is essentially unkillable (because they are the title character) I don’t mind, Conan for example. We all know Conan won’t die because there is always another story about him. But he is not fated for anything, no grand destiny he has to achieve or the cosmos suffers.
Second is also another that has been touched upon - the goodness of divine authority. Especially if it is light flavored. And nobles divine right to rule set as a standard of good etc. Give me stories of folks fecking up the system and creating their own anarchistic communities while continuing to feck up the system.
I’d like to see more fantasy backgrounds that aren’t medieval Europe, China and Japan with the serial numbers filed off.
Perhaps trying to build something into a respectful Arab, African, Native American or SE Asian mythos is just begging for tone-deafness. But there’s plenty of opportunity to run the clock forward.
I’ll give points for steampunk and related genres, but some of it seems too prone to passing as self-parody (I know there’s an entire community devoted to Weird West stuff)
It feels like any sort of “how do we run an information-age society on magic” is surprisingly scarce outside the robust world of modern-era vampire/were bodice-rippers. Give me a world where the humane society is trying to unload a litter of gryphons. Make the Huawei corporation led by a cabal of mages. Have election deepfakes that are actually clones made of cornmeal and talismans that melt when they get wet.
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You’re looking for the urban fantasy genre. There’s scads of it.
I remember an ancient short story where the world finds out magic is real when the fbi breaks in on a bunch of atomic scientists speaking a weird language over a nuke. The feds try them as russian spies so they admit that science doesn’t really work, it was magic all along, and they were chanting the “nuclear bomb” spell in enochian. Then, before anyone can freak out about it, a wizard uses mind control to win the presidential election fair and square and everyone shrugs and goes on with their lives.
Check out China Mieville’s Bas Leg cycle, starting with Perdido Street Station. Read all the cws, first. It is horror. But China’s a comrade and the world he creates features class conflict, imperialism, and other bad things in a way that makes it much more vivid and frightening than a lot of dorky bright-eyed steampunk stories.
