[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

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.

The problem is that while Pern is SF - it's a "lost colony", whose human inhabitants got there by starship, and the telepathic dragons are products of genetic engineering on the indigenous fire lizards - it got more popular and acquired greater readership as it went on. People coming in mid-series don't know the back story, see a medieval social structure and fire breathing dragons, and say "Aha! Fantasy!" because it has the fantasy tropes.

The confusion is understandable.

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

Well, was a hoot. She died in November 2011.

I knew her, back when. She lived on the East Coast and attended East Coast SF conventions before emigrating to Ireland.

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.

The notion that mainstream fiction was a subset of fantastic fiction was proposed by the late John W. Campbell, SF writer and long time editor of Astounding/Analog magazine.

But John loved to argue, and was known to make outrageous statements that would provoke an argument. That was one of them.

I'll have to poke around and see if I can find the original statement.

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).

The latter is a very common trope in SF.

Bill Gibson's "Sprawl" series (Neouromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive), is set is set in the Sprawl, a term applied to the result when Boston through Washington DC expanded to become one huge metropolis covering a good bit of the East Coast.

Robert Silverberg's "The Tower of Glass" shares a concept with Bladerunner - androids created to be slaves who are unhappy about their status. And his The World Inside (a collection of related novellas) takes place in a world where population growth was encouraged, and most people live in titanic megascrapers holding millions of inhabitants in each to leave maximum available land on which to grow food.

Alfred Bester had the notion of a common vernacular called Black Spanglish in a later novel (The Computer Connection, I believe) where you get dialogue like "gemmum, ah gone esplain any pagunta you ax"

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?

See my earlier comments. As I said, the essence of SF is that you can speculate all you want about what we don't know, but must get what we do know right. SF must be at least possible.

As our knowledge increases and what we do know expands, a lot of what was considered possible when written we know to be impossible now. The general descriptor for stories we know aren't possible but enjoy anyway is fantasy.

Science Fiction (might be possible) becomes Science Fantasy (known to be impossible, but still a fun story.)

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.)[/quote
Which is why I might call Shannara Scoence Fantasy.

Which makes Shanarra an example of stuff moving the other way, starting as outright fantasy but moving into the grey area where the sub-genres intersect. Because they do intersect, such movement is possible.

And the notion of such changes is another common trope. Fred Saberhagen's "Empire of the East" trilogy is is in a post apocalyptic world where the cause of the apocalypse was an event that altered natural law and permitted both science and magic to operate.

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.

Actually, alternate realities are SF staples, and the sub-genre of "alternate history" has arguably become an independent genre of it's own. You get things like Robert Harris's Fatherland, published as a mystery, where a German police inspector investigating a murder in contemporary Berlin gets unexpected interference from another government agency that wishes to take over the case.

But the contemporary Germany in which it is set is in an alternate time line where the Third Reich won in Europe, Germany dominates the continent, and the interfering agency is the Gestapo.

Steampunk is also becoming established as an independent genre. The underlying premise is that mechanical computing via descendants of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine and Analytical engine mix with steam power to fuel a highly developed technological society that developed on rather different lines than our own. It's all over the map, too, with things like Jay Lake's Escapement, set in a world where out solar system is (and is known to be by the inhabitants) an immense clockwork Orrery.

So you can now find Steampunk SF and Steampunk Fantasy, with steam power and mechanical calculating devices the common elements.
______
Dennis