[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Kuttner and Bradbury were both members of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society in the '40s. Bradbury was going on about these great story ideas he had. Kuttner told him his problem was that he spent all his energy in talking them out. He needed to keep his mouth shut, put them down on paper, and submit them to places that might buy them. All else followed from there...

Well, it's certainly better advice than what L. Ron Hubbard got.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Well, it looks easy. But if you postulate a world where magic works, said magic obeys rules, and you have to think about what the rules are and what the implications are for your story to do it well.

Sad to say, I've run into books where the authors clearly didn't bother, and seemed to have simply transcribed their latest D&D session, on top of that. The Rick Cook Wiz books are some of my favourites, and I almost always recommend them as a Baen Free Library pick to people looking for light comedy/fantasy/free reads. It's a shame his health never let him finish the 6th book in the series, though he's put most of what he'd written online.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Part of the local's problem was that they didn't know the rules. They had simply learned by trial and (sometimes fatal) error that if you stood just so, made these gestures, and said those words in that tone of voice, something would happen. Get it the least bit off and the results were unpredictable but unlikely to be pleasant.

That's part of what made the story work so well, re: bringing in an outsider's perspective to solve their problem.

From the in-universe POV, random experimenting got people killed/worse and was understandably discouraged to the point where only the dangerously stupid among the native population would knowingly try it. And while Wiz was ignorant and naive, he did have relatively limited scope to do damage, and expert tutoring as well as Moira for a failsafe who could probably deal with most minor botches. Not to mention a computer programmer's mindset to begin with, so he wasn't going to try for the grand evil-defeating spell on the first go.

My favourite in the series is actually the 2nd book, where they had to deal with integrating the new magic system into the old social system and having to come up with solutions for the various cultural clashes that ensued. And also the 5th book, where, once settled, the now "establishment" programming wizards had to bring in yet another outsider to give them perspective on their problems.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

You can also make a case that SF took one of two directions: a belief that science and technology could bring about a better world, and postulated possible utopias, and a belief that science and technology could be misused, with a variety of dystopian "If this goes on..." results. You can have more fun if you postulate that the two directions stemmed from underlying beliefs about humanity, with one camp assuming we'd make good use of our new toys and another assuming we wouldn't.

Myself, I think it may not be not necessarily underlying beliefs about humanity, as experience with technological fallout and unintended consequences.

For example, Verne is generally pretty optimistic about exciting adventures and better, brighter results (except perhaps for the posthumously published Paris in the 20th Century, which is apparently one of the bleaker works [have not yet read it myself]). But he's solidly middle-Victorian, if I'm not misremembering my timelines.

Wells, on the other hand, seems to be personally optimistic regarding his main characters, but pessimistic regarding the surroundings and the "others", which may reflect the growing awareness of industrial pollution and the stresses of the sun slowly setting on the British Empire.

By a similar token, 50s-60s SF seems pretty bright and pulpy. Plenty of rocket ships and brave explorers and plucky youths saving the day, and that Dupont future of "Better Living Through Chemistry". All that post-war exuberance and Baby Boom prosperity buoying things up.

But then late 60s-70s SF does this abrupt drop into social/environmental dystopia, and again, that's the era of Silent Spring and and Civil Rights issues coming to the forefront, as well as Nuclear Winter fears.

The direction of the fiction seems to coincide with the widespread awareness of particular background facts. This could possibly explain why this year's Hugo noms for the Novel form mostly seemed so bleak.

It says something, though I'm not sure exactly what, when the second-most optimistic novel of the lot was the frontier steampunk post-apocalyptic dystopia where the zombie invasion was still being fought off.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

The librarians might not care in either case. In the library and in the bookstore, SF and fantasy gets shelved alphabetically by author name in the same section..

Really, it depends on the library and bookstore. The two branches nearest to me within walking distance shelve sf/fantasy a) in the general fiction section for lack of space, b) together in the same section. But the larger branches downtown and the local mega-chain bookstore and the local mini-chain mall bookstore all split sf and fantasy out into their own separate little sections. Same for horror, romance, and erotica. Which makes it amusing to see where they put the more blendy paranormal titles, sometimes.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

One of my examples is Anne McCaffrey's Pern series.

I think I've read somewhere the original core story of Dragonflight, the Weyr Search novella where Lessa is brought to Impress Ramoth, started out as straight fantasy, but the editor of Analog or whichever magazine it was published in asked McCaffrey to give it a more sfnal flavour, and so she ended up writing the little preamble about Rukbat and the colonists and all, and just went with it when she expanded things later.

The other major "mistaken for fantasy, or is it? (dun, dun, dun)" 60s-started woman-written series is Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover books, which very definitely started out as SF, with the Terran/Darkovan conflict from the very beginning before she started exploring the backstory of Darkover's isolated development.

But they later moved into such a "fantasy" mode that Bradley at one point mentioned (in one of the intros to the Darkover fan anthologies she used to edit until the Unfortunate Incident of the Credit in the By-Line, I think) that some of her older readers were disgruntled that she was focusing so much on the laran powers as they were used during the medieval-ish Ages of Chaos and the Free Amazons instead of getting back to what they considered the core of the series.

Myself, I've always favoured the Clarkian notion of "sufficiently advanced technology", so I love it when either tech mimics magic or vice versa; preferably both.

One of my favourite stories is Ted Chiang's short, "Seventy-Two Letters", which is a great "what if Kabbalistic mysticism really could produce consistent golem-making etc. results, and how would the 'scientific' method that arose in such a world through observation and experimentation adjust to fit?"

Unfortunately, such settings tend to be relatively rare, as most writers seem to prefer a solid one or the other, but I suppose it does mean I end up financially rewarding those who do write entertaining examples of what I read, so I guess everything works out?