As readers of this blog likely know, I'm an anti-purist when it comes to genre (and, frankly, most things - other than, like, the purity of food and medicine, you know). I'm also someone who got into sci-fi before I ever got into fantasy. Indeed, I came to fantasy as someone who was already an avid viewer of Star Trek The Next Generation, who got nearly-exclusively Lego's Space sets (there were some shorter-lived product lines set underwater, but the submarines were pretty analogous to spaceships, so I was still in).
But as I've found myself drawn probably more to fantasy than sci-fi in recent years, what I find really interesting is the way you can consider the two genres as depicting not necessarily different subject matter, but applying a different lens.
Consider this: a human-like alien species with an ancient civilization, older than humanity, is largely built around a mythology about a group of god-like beings known as the Prophets, who send them omens and prophecies about the past and the future. But then, our skeptical hero enters a wormhole and discovers that within the strange extra-dimensional space of the wormhole, these are actually noncorporeal aliens who exist outside of the normal flow of time. A perfectly rational explanation, right?
And yes, this is the premise of the opening of Star Trek Deep Space Nine.
Well, depends on your perspective. After all, aren't things like angels - strange-looking beings (think of all those "biblically correct angels" you've seen or heard about) who are from heaven, a realm that is purported to be beyond our world, but in any spatial relationship to where we are right now. Can we only dismiss the supernatural nature of these things by moving the goalposts for where we'll actually consider something supernatural?
The point is: Edge of Eternities takes Magic the Gathering outside of the very Multiverse in which it has been set for the past 32 years, but only just outside: in a region called The Edge. Multiverse is now a term that doesn't broadly refer to the whole of Magic's cosmos, but instead the planes that compose its high-fantasy region.
Now, cynically, one could imagine that this then makes the "Universes Beyond," in which Magic has made cards set in other IPs (two of which have been Standard legal - though the Dungeons & Dragons set felt somewhat less like an intrusion given that it's A: also a WotC IP, and B: also a high fantasy IP and C: one that saw a crossover the other way first, with sourcebooks for D&D set in Ravnica, Theros, and at Strixhaven), but let's ignore that idea that is probably giving some soulless marketing executive a state of physical arousal and return to the idea of the Magic cosmos' sudden expansion.
One of the things that makes the Edge (our non-plane setting for Edge of Eternities) different is... well, the lack of planes. There are planets here, not planes.
Magic has historically treated planes and planets as somewhat interchangeable, which is a real distinction from, say, D&D's treatment. In D&D, for example, all the relatively mundane worlds (they still have wizards and dragons and such) are simply worlds (usually spherical planets) of the Prime Material Plane. And while the plane isn't quite like how modern science imagines our spatial reality, it's not super-far-off.
Magic is a game filled with monstrous beings like demons and helions and wurms and oozes. But the two that always felt the most disturbingly alien were the Phyrexians and the Eldrazi.
I mentioned in my last post about this that I think cosmic horror elements in a work of fantasy fiction or science fiction often work because they feel like an intrusion of one genre upon the other. In Sci-Fi, the eldritch abominations of cosmic horror threaten our sense of rationality, suggesting that the rational models upon which we built the technology to explore our cosmos are just a recent delusion, and only hubris allowed us to replace awe and terror with intellectual curiosity, and that delusion is now sending us head first into a concrete wall. But in fantasy, it's the opposite realization of the failure of our models of understanding: a cosmic horror entity within a fantasy world doesn't fit into the neat categorizations that a mythic theology grants us - eldritch horrors defy the usual safeguards against evil spirits, and obey no known rules like the way that a vampire must be invited before they can enter your home, or will perish in sunlight.
Oddly enough, this entire post was inspired by one of the leaked cards for Edge of Eternities: Virulent Silencer.
It's an artifact creature with the types robot assassin, and it effectively gives all your nontoken artifact creatures Toxic 2 (though it's not worded this way). But the flavor text is the real shocker:
"Nano-infectant: A category-Phi substance, capable of infecting both organics and artificials. Weaponizing it is a war crime."
Category Phi, you say?
Phi, of course is a letter in the Greek alphabet that is represented somewhat like a P that has the loop on both sides. It's also, you know, the symbol for the Phyrexians.
Now, could this just be a cheeky reference? Sure. Maybe the people of the Edge have never heard of the Phyrexians. The whole Phyrexian project was created by Yawgmoth, who was originally just a human man in the Thran civilization on Dominaria. But everything about the Phyrexians felt like an invasion of science fiction monsters into these fantasy worlds. The card describes this assassin's weapon as a nano-infectant, presumably some kind of substance that has the very sci-fi technology of self-replicating nano-bots that can kill, or perhaps re-structure, anything they infect.
Which is precisely what the Phyrexians' Glistening Oil is.
The March of the Machines actually ought to be the last we ever hear of the Phyrexians. I know that they're such popular monsters and so deeply tied to the three-decade history of Magic that perhaps we'll never be rid of them for good, but they should at the very least not be seen for a long time (I don't recall how long it was between Invasion Block and Scars of Mirrodin). And if there's any longstanding epic-level-threat monsters that are being more explicitly teased in Edge of Eternities, it's the Eldrazi (we're even getting at least one new Eldrazi creature card).
But it'd be really interesting if we find out some connection between the sci-fi world of the Edge and the technologically-advanced Thran civilization that pre-dated even Urza. Was Yawgmoth drawing on the research of the sci-fi world of the Edge?
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