james_davis_nicoll | Five SFF Stories Involving Secretly Supernatural Beings

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james_davis_nicoll

Five SFF Stories Involving Secretly Supernatural Beings

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From:

bolindbergh

The "currently a finalist for the 2020 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award" part of your tor.com profile could stand some adjustment.

From:

chrysostom

He always will have been!

From:

connactic

It's a somewhat pointless distinction.

From:

dragoness_e

Nothing supernatural about the Wolfen--they're just human-intelligent wolves. Which is terrifying if you know anything about wolves. Unless you already suspect that they are pretty smart, and you also know that humans are intelligent pack hunters who make and use tools.

Edited Date: 2020-08-06 03:13 am (UTC)

From:

ba_munronoe

There's an SF story whose name I can't remember in which humans are struggling to avoid being conquered by a humanoid race whose "combat an alien intelligence" skills have been sharpened by millennia of struggle with the wolf-like intelligent species they shared their planet with (they confess they really only won in the end due to the whole "hands" advantage)

From:

ba_munronoe

It's the "reported but not confirmed by SCIENCE" thing that makes it a cryptid: the Sea Serpent is a cryptid regardless of whether it's "actually" a big eel or a sea-going dragon. (Of course, if you inhabit a universe where magic is ruled out, a cryptid must be non-supernatural to exist at all).

From:

connactic

Basically, Wolfen just sounds like straight-up SF. I haven't read it, though, so there might be supernatural elements as well.

"The Hunger" by the same author also had a species that were the basis for a supernatural creature- Vampires. That made the book mostly SF, although the main character's current companion did have some possibly supernatural experiences. He experienced something like the ghosts of the people he killed at one point, although that may have just been a hallucination.