[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

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".

You know, in my former life (when I was reviewing books commercially, as something to do recreationally, between building gigs), I came to claim a correspondence-type acquaintance with Anne McCaffrey. As many readers of both sci-fi and fantasy know, if you call her Pern series "fantasy," she'll rip you a new one. And I mean, RIP YOU.

(n.b.: if it's not obvious, I love Anne. She's a bloody hoot.)

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.

Dennis, my voracious reader sweetie, do you happen to remember where you read that? I'd be interested in reading that myself. It's an interesting construct argument.

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.

To me, in many ways, this is what's great about sci-fi. Someday, Blade Runner (DADOES) will be looked on in large part as not-sci-fi. (Okay...I don't necessarily mean the humanoid robots. I mean the sort of dismal, over-crowded megacity with a true melting pot with various sorts of patois spoken).

<snippage>

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.

Hmmm. Do you think that's really so? That just because time wipes out the possibility, it's regaled to fantasy? Isn't the general idea of sci-fi that the basis of whatever "magical" thing happens has to have some (some) basis in a scientific explanation? That someone built something from someone who engineered it, rather than waving the ubiquitous magic wand and saying "Abracadabraliamus!" No? I mean...Shannara is patently fantasy, like LOTR, its...inspiration. They have magical critters (elves) dwarves, Trolls, wizards/druids (who cast spells), and so on. Pern, on the other hand, has "magical" dragons that can teleport...but the earliest settlers genetically created them, from indigent flying lizards. Genetic engineering=Sci Fi, rather than fantasy (as in, "oh, yeah, where did them teleporting flying fire-breathing lizards come from in the first damn place?")

Just because we now KNOW that the scenario on Venus is impossible, does that make it 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

As does Shannara, as it happens. So, you can argue that Shannara has magic-but the past of same comes from a destroyed world. At one point, one of the bands of questers runs across a ruined city of skyscrapers. The planet is inarguably a post-apocalyptic Earth. Nonetheless, the elves and the Druid/wizards have "powers" of a sort. (At one point, a tree is communicating with an elf, telepathically. Call me a cynic, but to me, that's pure old magical fantasy, not some scientific experiment run amok and gone awry.)

To what category, then, belongs steampunk? (One of my faves, fwiw). We are largely talking science fiction, of course; that's a fundamental part of steampunk, are the creative devices and inventions and weaponry--but it's set in an alternate reality, which is always (pretty much) fantasy.

It's an interesting discussion! (Albeit, not very ranty.)

Hitch