Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
It's been this way with science, ever since about 10 minutes after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. 40 years ago, people thought they'd just reached the point at which we could no longer keep up with technology... they called it "future shock." Around the turn of the (20th) century, a patent clerk proclaimed that everything that could be invented had been invented.
Science is always two steps ahead of the public consciousness, and the public has always had a hard time envisioning what the future would be like. But that's okay, because we had SF to show them what it might be like, or what about the future would be most important (or troubling) to them.
This may be too simple a comparison. Fantasy has a logic to it, even if it involves elves and dragons; and inconsistency can be as bad for a fantasy story as it is for an SF story. It's easy to say fantasy authors can just make it up as they go, but to an extent, so do many SF authors for the simple reason of expediting storylines (and just as Gene Roddenberry invented the Transporter for Star Trek, not out of an understanding of technology, but out of a need to save his production and SFX budget by removing landing craft).
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Touche Steven and as Arthur C. Clarke said technology when sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. I imagine some of the people back in the early industrial age thought things like the steam engine were feats of magic. I didn't mean earlier to indicate that a pushbutton vs. magic spell was the only difference between Sci Fi and Fantasy, just that such is often a difference between the two, though I imagine with things like Urban Fantasy even that isn't a certainty. These days there are so many sub-genre's of both Sci Fi and Fantasy that they do seem to blend together a bit more than in the past though I think. And some authors have always blended the two together to a degree. Ray Bradbury did so (IMO) in his Martian Chronicles stories at least. Going to Mars via spaceship is Sci Fi but the interactions with the Martians themselves seems more like Fantasy in a way. Granted we hadn't yet sent probes to Mars back when Mr. Bradbury wrote the stories so at the time they might have seemed more akin to a possible situation rather than pure Fantasy. Either way it's still a well written collection of short stories I think.