Quote:
Originally Posted by Caltsar
Science Fiction and Fantasy really fall on two opposite ends of a spectrum. In some ways you can think of the individual books falling somewhere between the two sides. Stories like 2001, Rama, Ringworld, and such will fall closer to the "Science Fiction" side of the spectrum while Dragonlance, Lord of the Rings, and other High Fantasy stories fall closer to the Fantasy side. Those are all easily distinguishable. Stuff like the Pern series tends to hover to either side of the middle of the line. A book like Enemy Mine, while clearly sci-fi, isn't focused on technology and actually takes efforts to abandon technology altogether for a significant portion of the story. This might fall a little closer to the middle.
|
This is one way of thinking about it that I find useful (although I don't consider technology an indicator one way or the other). Pretty much everything I've written is science fiction, some toward the hard SF end (e.g., The Chaos Chronicles), and some more in the middle (the Star Rigger books). I've written two novels that are clearly SF, but have dragons in interstellar hyperspace, and in significant sections feel more like fantasy.
Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman books are another example of SF that looks like fantasy. Diane Duane's Wizardry novels are considered fantasy, but really border on being SF.
But I think an equally valid way to look at it is to say that it's
all fantasy--set in worlds that aren't our world, and with rules that may be different--and science fiction is a subset of fantasy in which there's an assumption that science and/or logical extrapolation is an essential part. We can envision these settings and stories being real based on the world and the science we know, with perhaps some bending of the science allowed in the course of the extrapolation.
If you really want to start an argument, ask for a definition of hard SF.
