SF/Fantasy Poll

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

"Loosely tie"?

Let's see: Discworld is a flat disk, supported on the back of giant elephants, who are standing on the shell of great A'Tuan, a giant turtle swimming through the see of space. It has magic, wizards, barbarians, various non-human inhabitants like the Nac Mac Feegle...

If Discworld isn't straight up fantasy, I'd have a hard time saying what is.
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Dennis

It's clearly "alternate universe" SF .

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by =X=

I've always been interested in why SF/Fantasy have always been bunched together. In my experience most people only read 1 genre either mostly SF or mostly Fantasy.

The current poll results would appear to disagree with your assertion; 78% of the current respondees have indicated that they read both.

[NatCh]

Actually, if there had been a "mostly SciFi" option, I would have chosen that. I do read some Fantasy, but it's very much mostly SciFi for me these days.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by babyd

I completely agree, but I have come across many who call it humour or even fiction.........I guess they don't wish to be tarred with the fantasy fan brush, but me, I love it LOL

Discworld is certainly humour, and it had better be fiction.

But I think I can see people not identifying it as fantasy, if they use a restrictive definition. Pratchett is an enormous best seller in the UK, for example, and some folks might read Discworld who wouldn't read any other fantasy. They might just see it as a satirical take on society and mores, which it also is.

Along those lines, I had a friend years back who read a lot of SF, but didn't like fantasy. I lent him a copy of the late John Bellairs' _The Face In the Frost_. He was a huge baseball fan, and when he got to the bit where the wizard's incantation included "S is for Smead Jolley, the only major league player ever to make four errors off of a single batted ball..." he said "Omigod! Smead Jolley! You don't know..." and was hooked.

Afterward, he said "I still don't like fantasy. But I like John Bellairs!"

A similar dynamic may be at work.
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Dennis

[HarryT]

Likewise, Dennis, I know people who like Douglas Adams' "Hitchiker's Guide" books, but would probably claim not to like SF, although I don't think anyone could really classify HHG as anything other than SF.

[etitameh]

i'm another one who would have voted differently for a 'mostly one, some of t other' option -- i tend to be about 70% fantasy, 30% sci fi.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Likewise, Dennis, I know people who like Douglas Adams' "Hitchiker's Guide" books, but would probably claim not to like SF, although I don't think anyone could really classify HHG as anything other than SF.

I concur. I think when something becomes popular enough, it transcends categories in the minds of readers. "Oh, this isn't SF. It's a best seller!"

And there have been things over the years arguably SF, but published as "literary", with authors carefully not using the SF word to avoid being categorized as writing "that crazy Buck Rogers stuff".
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Dennis

[NatCh]

I've felt for a long time that SF and Fantasy aren't really very good genre distinctions (I know: all the genres are arbitrary at some level). I read SF that's mystery, adventure, occasionally even romance. I think Fantasy tends mostly to the Quest sub-genre, but it branches a bit as well.

But at the same time, if they put all the mysteries that had SF elements in with the mysteries, I'd have a harder time finding them -- for instance, Michael Creighton's books are in Fiction & Literature half the time, and I would mostly consider them to be SF, but they've gotten popular, so they must be F&L, right?

Man I'm in a cynical mood today: I just realized I've used the eyeroller smilie in almost every post!

[wayrad]

I read both too, with a slight bias toward fantasy. But as Dennis says, the genres aren't always clearly separated. My favorite example of atypical fantasy is Jo Walton's Tooth and Claw. It's an examination of Victorian social mores, with a plot lifted straight from Framley Parsonage and not a shred of magic. But all the characters are dragons...

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

I voted for SF, as I read very little of what's generally considered fantasy. On the other hand, there are so many standard elements in SF that, at this point, I consider to be pure fantasy (such as faster-than-light drives, teleportation and humanoid aliens) that, when I read books that include them, I oftimes consider them "futuristic" fantasy.

SF and fantasy have become pretty vague labels these days, there's too much overlap on both sides for them to be useful in anything but a very generic level.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

I voted for SF, as I read very little of what's generally considered fantasy. On the other hand, there are so many standard elements in SF that, at this point, I consider to be pure fantasy (such as faster-than-light drives, teleportation and humanoid aliens) that, when I read books that include them, I oftimes consider them "futuristic" fantasy.

<chuckle>

The late L. Sprague de Camp decided part way through his career that FTL travel was impossible, and stopped using it in his stories, because he felt what was portrayed in SF should be possible, even if we didn't know how to do it now.

In the old days, SF writers felt they had to provide explanations of how such things worked (even if it was essentially handwavium) when they used such elements in a story. My favorite was a Brian Aldiss story, where the narrator said "FTL travel? Oh, yeah. Had it for many years. I'd be happy to tell you how it works, but the printer refuses to typeset three pages of the equations required to give the explanation, so lets just take my word for it and carry on, shall we?"

These days, things like FTL are part of the wallpaper, implicitly assumed, and generally not explained. I was tickled by the approach David Brin took in the Uplift series: if there was a way to go faster than light at all, there was more than one way, and different galactic species used different methods. The Tandu, for example, had a "Client" species called Episiarchs. The Episiarchs had been bred for psi abilities. Tandu ships used Episiarchs to travel between the stars. The Episiarch denied the current state so intensely that reality warped, and the ship disappeared from here and reappeared there. It wasn't perfect, and sometimes a ship disappeared from here and didn't reappear, but the Tandu were willing to accept the trade-off.

SF and fantasy have become pretty vague labels these days, there's too much overlap on both sides for them to be useful in anything but a very generic level.

That's always been the case. I liked the late Damon Knight's definition "SF is what I'm pointing at when I say the words".
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Dennis

[BenG]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

They are worth reading, though they eventually ran out of steam for me. While they are SF, Anne has never been strong on science, and tends to substitute handwavium in her macguffins. She is a lot closer to a romance writer in terms of plots and characters. (And she did a romance at one point featuring a couple of gay trapeze artists.)

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Dennis

That would be "Catch Trap" by Marion Zimmer Bradley, not Anne McCaffrey.

After reading Tolkien, I was really into fantasy for awhile. I didn't abandon Sci-Fi, though. But there isn't as much of a difference between the genres as people seem to believe. . Bradley's Darkover books are fantasy novels set in a science fiction universe. Andre Norton's Witch World series has a Science Fiction set-up, as does Robert Heinlein's "Glory Road."
I'm mostly turned off by the Fat Fantasy Trilogies turned out today. They owe more to Dungeons and Dragons than to Tolkien. I do like fantasy from authors like Jonathan Carroll and John Crowley, Guy Gavriel Kay and even Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Donnageddon

I am stubborn in that I am still an SF Book Club member, even though I (for various reasons) do not want dead tree hardback, or paperback books.

I still buy dead tree editions. For me, ebooks are an additional format for books, not a replacement for paper.

I have some in one format, some in the other, and some in both.

I haven't been an SFBC member for years, but I like SFBC editions, and often buy them at conventions. For me, the best part of the SFBC was the practice of creating hardcover anthology editions of things that had been a series in paperback I happily acquired them to replace the PBs and free shelf space. I also have a few SFBC editions where the SFBC version was the only hardcover edition of a title.

I still enjoy the monthly mails that let me know what is new, and the reviews and commentary.

I have said this before, but I wish SFBC would find a way to adopt an ebook alternative. They have a captive audience to hopefully sway publishers for a "bulk" sale.

I hope they (and other book clubs) will use this formula to get into the ebook world. It might help getting older neglected works into the mix.

addendum: I have many anthologies and classic SF hardbacks from SFBC that I would love to have transformed into ebooks. And SFBC would be just the outlet for that opportunity.

It's a lovely idea, but implementation will be a bear. The book clubs aren't the original publisher. They license the rights to produce a book club edition. (Some years back, the late Judy Lynn Del Rey had a problem: she was editor at Ballantine/DelRey. The Book of the Month Club was interested in producing an edition of a Ballantine title as an alternate selection for a month. But BotMC required a hardcover edition to reproduce, and Ballantime was a PB house. Judy Lynn's boss said "Poof! You're a hardcover publisher!" )

For the SFBC to make ebook editions available, they would have to go back and negotiate rights to do it for all the titles they wanted to issue.

And the status of the SFBC and associated clubs is in question. Bertelsmann, AG, acquired Doubleday and the book club operations to add to their portfolio of publishing assets, since they were already big in that area in Europe and wanted to expand to the US. But the book clubs are under the same sort of pressure as the rest of publishing. Back in May 07 they laid off long time editor Ellen Asher and her assistant, Andrew Wheeler, and replaced them with a chap named Rome Quezada. (Ellen took an early retirement buyout and is fine. Not sure of Andrew's status.) More recently, thre have been rumors they were looking to unload the book clubs, though it isn't clear who would buy them.

I do not like having them kept in storage.

I have a fair number of books in storage, too, Which is where is a matter of "How likely am I to want to grab and re-read this?"
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by BenG

That would be "Catch Trap" by Marion Zimmer Bradley, not Anne McCaffrey.

Ah, thank you. you're quite right. Memory failed me.

After reading Tolkien, I was really into fantasy for awhile. I didn't abandon Sci-Fi, though. But there isn't as much of a difference between the genres as people seem to believe. . Bradley's Darkover books are fantasy novels set in a science fiction universe. Andre Norton's Witch World series has a Science Fiction set-up, as does Robert Heinlein's "Glory Road."

Yep. The fact that the dividing line is blurred or non-existent was my original point.

I'm mostly turned off by the Fat Fantasy Trilogies turned out today. They owe more to Dungeons and Dragons than to Tolkien. I do like fantasy from authors like Jonathan Carroll and John Crowley, Guy Gavriel Kay and even Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman.

Agreed. I haven't read Barker, but like the others you mention. Kay's most recent works are fantasy only in a theoretical sense. In _The Lions of Al-Rassan_, for example, the only fantastic element was the ability of one character to always know what his father was doing, regradless of where Dad happened to be at the time. The rest of it was an alternate world history of the Iberian peninsula, recasting the struggle between the Franks and the Moors, with the Jews caught between.
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Dennis

[=X=]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The current poll results would appear to disagree with your assertion; 78% of the current respondees have indicated that they read both.

Right you are, a bit of a V8 moment for me. That further shows that regional/personal experience don't constitute facts.


@ DMcCunney: I did a search on some of the books you mentioned. It seems they are only sold in pBook form. It's too bad, I guess I'll swing by the Bookstore to get the copies

=X=