Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
It's probably because for many sites, it's the same category: science fiction/fantasy. As if they're interchangeable. I don't read a lot of science fiction, to be honest. If I read it, it's mostly fantasy with science fiction elements (such as the later Shannara books, for example), or science fiction with strong fantasy elements.
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There have been lots of discussions here and elsewhere about what the definitions of SF and fantasy are and where you draw the line between them. I don't believe you
can, and can name half a dozen series offhand where the answer to "Is this SF or fantasy?" is "Yes".
Personally, I read both, and consider them to be subsets of an overall field of "fantastic fiction". But then, I recall seeing a case made years back that "mainstream" fiction was a subset of fantastic fiction, with a particular set of constraints applied to what made it the subset it was.
And whether something is SF or fantasy can change. The usual restriction placed on SF is that you can speculate on things we don't know, but are expected to get what we
do know right. So Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books qualified as SF when he wrote them. Even then, his notions of Barsoom, and a Martian civilization of humanoids existing in a period when the seas had long since dried up and water was the scarce resource was seen as unlikely, but we hadn't
been to Mars, and couldn't categorically
state it wasn't possible. Now we
have been to Mars through robot explorers, and know Barsoom
is impossible, so the Mars books change from Science Fiction to Science Fantasy.
Another example is Henry Kuttner's Fury (and prequel novelette "Clash by Night".) Kuttner's story is set on Venus in one of the popular speculations when it was written - that under the cloud cover was a tropical environment. Kuttner's protagonists live in domed cities under the Venusian seas, because the surface is uninhabitable. Higher solar radiation has triggered extremes in evolution, and every surface life form on Venus is at all times actively attempting to kill and eat every other surface life form. The limited surface habitations belong to military mercenary companies, who are hired by cities having disputes to fight it out in naval engagements, with the winner in position to attack the loser's city, forcing settlement to occur on the winning city's terms.
Earth was destroyed in a nuclear accident, humanity on Venus is all that's left, use of atomic power is the one thing everyone agrees is unacceptable, and anyone who tries will live only as long as no one else discovers that they are trying.
The biology is nonsense, even by the standards of the period, but the story is affecting. But like Barsoom, we've been to Venus through machine intermediaries, and know the tropical climate and planet wide oceans aren't possible, so it, too, is now science fantasy.
I've never been a Shannara fan. I read the first book and passed on further volumes, but another case like that might be Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. It's normally considered pure fantasy. But the premise postulates that the Age in which WoT is set in one of an ongoing cycle, there are scattered memories of the Golden Age that preceded the one WoT is set in, and dim legends of one
before that in which the nations of Merk and Mosc fought it out with lances of fire.
In the Age in which WoT is set, there are legends that in the previous Age, man had traveled to other worlds, and the mystical One Power that is a critical element was the power source used to do it. So it's another candidate for "Is this fantasy or SF?" "Yes".
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Dennis