Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
They're two sides of the same coin. Spacemen fly in spaceships while the being of Fantasy ride dragons or have wooden ships that fly through the air. ... It's more that the props are different than anything else (IMO).
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No.
Consider the SciFi classic
Dune. I consider it to be just barely SciFi, because there
is a little science involved (just a little). The reality of living on a desert planet with little water, evaporator farming, suits that collect and reuse water are kind of science. But a giant sandworm is little different from a dragon--no science involved. The endearing quality of Dune is not it's science, but it's soap opera--it's interaction between people.
Now consider one of my all-time favorites:
Encounter with Tiber. This also contains a soap opera (to be all things to all people, I guess) but it's much more. It's a tour de force of bunches of real technologies and schemes that have been dreamed up over the years that might be used in
real interstellar travel. I don't think anyone has ever made a huge hoop of superconducting wire to ionize free hydrogen in space and use it to propel a spacecraft--but the system has been designed and is presented in the book. Excellent! Real science. Real engineering. Monsters are optional.