this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2026
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Science Fiction

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Lemmy World Rules

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Mini, spoiler free review of Dungeon Crawler Carl, by Matt Dinniman (lemmy.ca)
submitted 1 week ago by AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.ca to c/sciencefiction@lemmy.world
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Carl is outside in his boxers trying to get his girlfriend's cat out of a tree when everything with a roof on the planet is destroyed and the smaller number of survivors are made to compete in an intergalactic dungeon game similar to D&D. If this sounds kind of dumb, I described it correctly; it's kind of dumb. It’s also fairly entertaining and has a good amount of heart. People who have played any sort of role playing game, like World Of Warcraft, will probably be extra amused.

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[–] plantfanatic@sh.itjust.works 0 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I thought of a way to dumb it down. I’ll give you two excerpts, one is how fantasy would explain something, and the other scifi. I’m going out of my way to do this, so I would appreciate some sources okay?

Fantasy.

Alberto woke up, he turned the light on and started his coffee, the news came on the vidscreen.

Scifi.

Alberto woke up and stretched his arm, in doing so it activated the electromagnetism in his arm, his species has this unique trait. As he gets up and walks through the door, the coffee machine had already gotten the wake up from the lights being turned on and was pouring itself. As he stared out through the panoramic window, it suddenly shifted to a breaking news bulletin.

Please tell me you can tell how one is hand waving, and the other isn’t. The first one, the technology isn’t there, maybe it might pop up later as an explanation. The second, the technology is being explained to build the story and flesh it out. Because that’s what the story is going to be mainly about.

Scifi has a hard time, because they need to waste a lot of words describing how mundane things aren’t so mundane. Fantasy gets this pass.

StarTrek literally has a term for its handwaving, technobabble. If you’re using technobabble, it’s not scifi, that’s textbook handwaving.