The Genre That Refuses to Choose: Science-Fantasy and the Literature of Wonder

There's a question that haunts a certain kind of science fiction, one that the genre's harder practitioners tend to dismiss but that some of its greatest works have embraced.

What if we don't have to explain everything?

I've been chewing on that question for years. Science-fantasy is the name we give to fiction that lives in that space. It wears the gear of science fiction: starships, alien worlds, advanced technology. But it refuses to evacuate mystery. It leaves room for the numinous and the transcendent, for things that won't sit still long enough to be reduced to equations and engineering diagrams. And far from being a compromise or a failure of rigor, that blend has produced some of the most enduring works in speculative fiction.

Take Frank Herbert's Dune. Yes, there are spacecraft and shields and stillsuits, and Herbert clearly understood the mechanics of his setting. But the story's real current runs through prescience, ancestral memory, and a messiah whose power cannot be separated from the religious framework that surrounds him. Herbert wasn't confused about what kind of book he was writing. He knew that some truths arrive wearing myth.

Gene Wolfe took the idea even further with The Book of the New Sun. It's set in a far future where technology has become indistinguishable from magic, not because it's advanced, but because understanding has been broken and scattered. Wolfe builds a world where the reader can never be fully certain what's miraculous and what's mechanical. That uncertainty isn't a flaw to be corrected; it's the point. Wolfe was a deeply Catholic writer, and his fiction reflects a universe where mystery is not a temporary problem; it's part of the architecture. I still think about that book at odd moments. It left splinters.

Then there's Warhammer 40,000, which pushes the fusion to operatic extremes. Gothic cathedrals drift through space. A corpse-god powers an empire through psychic sacrifice. Demons pour through holes in reality. If plausibility is your only yardstick, it's the wrong tool for the job. What 40K delivers, when it's at its best, is scale you can feel in your ribs, awe welded to horror, the sense that the universe is vast and terrible and stranger than the human mind can fully metabolize.

Even Star Wars belongs to this lineage, popcorn reputation and all. The Force isn't a gadget. It isn't a system diagram. It's a spiritual dimension that hyperdrives and blasters exist alongside rather than replace. And every attempt to explain it too neatly, to pin it down with pseudo-biology or procedural lore, tends to shrink it. The Force works because it remains larger than the characters, and larger than us.

What connects these works isn't laziness or a failure to think things through. Yes, "handwave" writing exists, and it's often thin. But science-fantasy isn't handwaving; it's a deliberate aesthetic. It's the recognition that certain kinds of stories—stories about transcendence, about the limits of human understanding, about encounters with the truly alien—require space for the irreducible. Hard science fiction can do many things beautifully, but it often struggles to evoke the sacred without turning it into a mechanism. Science-fantasy doesn't have that limitation.

This is the tradition I write in. Or try to, anyway.

When I started The Veiled Core Chronicles, I knew I wanted to explore what happens when humanity encounters intelligences so old and so vast that fully understanding them might be impossible. Not because they're poorly conceived, but because some things genuinely exceed our cognitive bandwidth. The ancient AIs in those books aren't puzzles with a tidy solution. They're presences to be confronted, and surviving that confrontation changes you in ways you can't entirely predict or control.

The Shepherd Descends asks similar questions from a different angle. What does transcendence actually cost? When you become something more than human, what do you leave behind, and what follows you? These aren't questions with clean answers, and I didn't want to write books that pretended otherwise. The science-fantasy mode gave me permission to let the mystery breathe, to let the most important things stay partially out of frame, the way they do in real life.

Even The Sporefall Saga, which starts in more familiar apocalyptic territory, operates on the same principle. The alien spores that arrive on Earth aren't just a biological threat. They heal before they erase. They offer something that looks like salvation before revealing its true cost. The horror isn't simply physical; it's existential. Spiritual, even. It's about what consciousness is, and whether it can survive transformation without becoming something unrecognizable.

I didn't arrive at this approach by accident. I came to it because the books that shaped me as a reader lived in this borderland. I wanted the wonder I felt reading Dune for the first time, the unease Wolfe leaves in your mind, the sense of cosmic scale that the best space opera achieves when it stops trying to make the universe comforting. And I found, over and over, that I couldn't get there while staying safely inside fiction that insists on explaining everything.

Science-fantasy isn't a lesser form. It's a recognition that the universe is stranger than our models, that some truths live between knowing and not-knowing, and that great fiction doesn't always owe us answers.

If that's the kind of story you're hungry for, I'd be honored to have you explore my work. If you want mythic scope, ancient intelligences, and mysteries that don't collapse into tidy explanations, start with The Veiled Core Chronicles. If you want first contact filtered through questions of transcendence and cost, The Shepherd Descends is a good doorway. And if you want something intimate and apocalyptic, where salvation and annihilation wear the same face, The Sporefall Saga is waiting.

Not to be explained, but to be felt.