I started re-reading my paper-book version of "Songmaster" by Orson Scott Card and on the front cover was the quote, "Card has joined the front rank of SF writers" (Publishers Weekly); I'd been thinking it was a fantasy novel. Before that I'd read an early Terry Pratchett, "Strata", that I'd classified to myself as science fiction rather than fantasy. On a separate thread here began a discussion of whether Orson Scott Card's "Speaker for the Dead" and/or "Xenocide" where science fiction or not. This all made me start wonder, not for the first time, exactly what the difference really was.
Disclaimer: My examples of science fiction authors are a little dated, the truth is that I've read very little recent science fiction. My tastes have turned more to fantasy.
Someone like Arthur C. Clarke was almost always what I consider to be real/true science fiction. The majority of his work was based on specific scientific theory and/or discovery; he'd take an actual theory or concept and try to follow where it might lead. There may be a few leaps of faith and flights of fancy taken in order to fill out the story but, with a few exceptions, most of it was usually about a particular idea or set of ideas. Sagan, Niven, Pournelle, Brin, as other examples, mostly seem to try very hard to give even their most ambitious works a level of scientific veracity, as if to try and convince you that it really could happen exactly like they say.
Someone like Isaac Asimov did not always (or not so predictably) produce such pure science fiction. Even his most famous books, Foundation and Robot series, are based less on scientific fact and more on flight of imagination - or so it seems to me, feel free to disagree
. Authors like Frank Herbert and Robert Heinlein sometimes blurred the lines even more. I think H.G.Wells fits in here somewhere too, a preference for the support of science but not overly constrained by it.
Other authors write books classified as science fiction but you get the distinct impression that the "science" part is not all that important to them. It's more "in the style of" science fiction rather than anything else. Here I'm thinking of some of the books (the ones usually categorised as science fiction) by Anne McCaffrey, Piers Anthony, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and even C.S.Lewis (Out of the Silent Planet etc).
So where does that leave us? Can we classify science fiction as simply an absence of magic? That's not very effective if you remember the most famous of Arthur C. Clarke's three laws: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." By such an observation almost any fantasy tale could be construed as science fiction. And anyway, I don't think that magic is a necessary ingredient of fantasy.
The best I can come up with is:
Science fiction is where the author expects the reader to believe, in any dispassionate assessment made looking back at the story, that the story and the world in which it takes place really is something that could happen in the future. (We need to further clarify this to indicate the "reader" in this instance is someone from the time that the book was written; someone that has only a general/common knowledge of science. A subcategory of "credible science fiction" could be extended to cover books that are believable even to those with a greater than average knowledge of science.)
Which leaves us with fantasy as those works that the author never expects us to (dispassionately) believe are truly possible, however much we may become involved in the story while reading.
A category by author's intention is not ideal but does get us past some difficult situations. With something like Michael Moorcock's wonderful "The Dancers at the End of Time" trilogy my instinct is always to place it as fantasy, where I put most of his work, but there's not a lot of reason why it couldn't be considered science fiction. Set so far in the future it would seem just as believable as Clarke's "Against the Fall of Night" or Asimov's short story "The Last Question". But I doubt if Moorcock truly intends his readers to believe that his dancers are seriously possible, I think he was just having fun, whereas I think Clarke and Asimov treat their creations much more seriously.
I've rambled long enough (at least
). What do you think?