Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
I voted for SF, as I read very little of what's generally considered fantasy. On the other hand, there are so many standard elements in SF that, at this point, I consider to be pure fantasy (such as faster-than-light drives, teleportation and humanoid aliens) that, when I read books that include them, I oftimes consider them "futuristic" fantasy.
|
<chuckle>
The late L. Sprague de Camp decided part way through his career that FTL travel was impossible, and stopped using it in his stories, because he felt what was portrayed in SF should be
possible, even if we didn't know how to do it now.
In the old days, SF writers felt they had to provide explanations of how such things worked (even if it was essentially handwavium) when they used such elements in a story. My favorite was a Brian Aldiss story, where the narrator said "FTL travel? Oh, yeah. Had it for many years. I'd be happy to tell you how it works, but the printer refuses to typeset three pages of the equations required to
give the explanation, so lets just take my word for it and carry on, shall we?"
These days, things like FTL are part of the wallpaper, implicitly assumed, and generally not explained. I
was tickled by the approach David Brin took in the Uplift series: if there was a way to go faster than light at all, there was more than
one way, and different galactic species used different methods. The Tandu, for example, had a "Client" species called Episiarchs. The Episiarchs had been bred for psi abilities. Tandu ships used Episiarchs to travel between the stars. The Episiarch
denied the current state so intensely that reality warped, and the ship disappeared from
here and reappeared
there. It wasn't perfect, and sometimes a ship disappeared from here and
didn't reappear, but the Tandu were willing to accept the trade-off.
Quote:
|
SF and fantasy have become pretty vague labels these days, there's too much overlap on both sides for them to be useful in anything but a very generic level.
|
That's always been the case. I liked the late Damon Knight's definition "SF is what I'm pointing at when I say the words".
______
Dennis