The difference between Science-Fiction and Fantasy

[SensualPoet]

It's been a LOOOOONG time since I read scifi or fantasy; my recent exposure is mainly TV and movies. The world of Star Wars strikes me as fantasy; the world of Star Trek: The Next Generation strikes me as science fiction.

I do find it jarring when time travel is invoked which seems completely fantasy based. But I have no problem with a transporter device which smashes someone to bits in a chamber and somehow reconstructs them in the open air on other planet ... that's credible science fiction. LOL. Right!

[Belle2Be]

So, couldn't you say that it is all science fiction? Who can really say that time travel/space ships/ aliens/ magic will NEVER happen? Even goblins or unicorns could develop from some virus or something that scientists develop.

[natasha_fawn]

Originally Posted by Belle2Be

So, couldn't you say that it is all science fiction? Who can really say that time travel/space ships/ aliens/ magic will NEVER happen? Even goblins or unicorns could develop from some virus or something that scientists develop.

And what about parallel universes? There are cosmologists who take the possibility seriously, so the relevant hypotheses would seem to fit with the more stringent definitions of science fiction. (In Heroes Die much of the story takes place in an accessible parallel universe that has a typical fantasy bent, though the frame is dystopian science fiction.)

[elcreative]

Which moves from genre being insulting to genre readers being insulted As the former manager of a specialist SF/F retailer, The Sparrow was a best-selling title well appreciated by hardcore SF/F fans...

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

FWIW, I think that "The Sparrow" is better categorized as literary fiction than as SF. It's not about genre being insulting; it's about who would enjoy it.

[Crowl]

I don't mind which term they use as long as the author doesn't try and dodge out of either of them to try and avoid being in a genre with less mainstream critical appeal.

[Steven Lake]

To me science fiction is anything dealing with actual or theoretical science and/or physics, whereas fantasy is anything dealing with natural or magical elements, such as elves, deer, etc. For example, i have one book in my collection which is classified both as science fiction, and as fantasy. It's sci-fi due to the high technology used by the aliens overseeing the race course the heroes are on, and fantasy because of the environment and trials the heroes have to go through in battling nature and her incredible power.

[Lemurion]

Science fiction is based on the premise the Universe is fundamentally rational. In a science fiction book everything is supposed to make sense if one is just able to dig deep enough.

In fantasy, while the rules should be internally self-consistent they don't need to make any kind of external sense, they just are.

The mindset of mystery is closer to science fiction, just as horror is closer to fantasy.

[elcreative]

The definition we generally suggested was Science Fiction is what I call Science Fiction and Fantasy is what I call Fantasy... of course your definitions are the same... which seems to be the general consensus here...

[Bricorn]

Originally Posted by jgaiser

Write me a story with a spaceship, a undiscovered planet and unicorns and I'll agree.

Try Anne McCaffrey's Acorna books. They have all of the above.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by elcreative

Which moves from genre being insulting to genre readers being insulted As the former manager of a specialist SF/F retailer, The Sparrow was a best-selling title well appreciated by hardcore SF/F fans...

Interesting; the only people I know who read it (other than me) were people who didn't generally read any sf at all.

[ctol]

This link might also be very relevant to the present discussion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws

[thrawn_aj]

Originally Posted by Belle2Be

So, couldn't you say that it is all science fiction? Who can really say that time travel/space ships/ aliens/ magic will NEVER happen? Even goblins or unicorns could develop from some virus or something that scientists develop.

I tend to agree . In fact, the last interesting fantasy work I ... experienced ... was as a kid. Experienced because it was an adventure game - Deathgate. It didn't make any effort to add an SF flavor to the thing but I felt one anyway - spellcasting was explained as the art of pulling an alternate reality into this one so that all the parts meshed together except for the thing you wanted changed.

Compare this to a very crucial plot device in Clarke's Against the Fall of Night (you may have read it as The city and the stars) - an ancient robot is found by the last child on Earth. It is locked in some way so it cannot be interrogated. The advanced computer of the city duplicates the robot with the offending piece of code removed during the duplication. Sounds like magic .

But anyway, to get back to Deathgate - it is a teeny tiny step from this description of magic to Crichton's Timeline, where a very similar process is used to initiate time-travel. The movie doesn't make this clear, but the novel's detailed description (with Crichton, how can it not be detailed ) is quite clear on the speculative physics used. In passing, that novel's significance was that it was the first time that specific gimmick had been used for time travel in the literature.

[GlenBarrington]

One thing I learned in my years of reading both Science Fiction AND Fantasy is to never trust what's on the covers too much!

[elcreative]

All too true... and often not the artists fault but the the publisher... a two line description and - make picture for the cover as instructions... still, there's some great SF/F artwork out there...

Originally Posted by GlenBarrington

One thing I learned in my years of reading both Science Fiction AND Fantasy is to never trust what's on the covers too much!

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by ctol

This link might also be very relevant to the present discussion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws

Yeah, I've always hated these laws.

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.

Maybe in fiction, but not in the real world (where I'm not sure you can find many scientists saying that something is impossible, as far as that goes). There are countless examples of distinguished but elderly scientists quite correctly saying that something is impossible and being quite right. FTL travel, for example. Or cold fusion. Intelligent design. Perpetual motion machines. Etc.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Well, first of all, this is a tautology, with "sufficiently" being the weasel word. Making the sentence read "Any technology sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic is indistinguishable from magic."

But even if we reformulate it to say something like "A really really advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," it's still not true. It's not true because rationalist, technological societies fundamentally understand how technology works and will consider very advanced technology to be...very advanced technology. Something that can be explained by science, not by magic, even though they might not understand the science.

Of course, if you show a more superstitious society a piece of advanced technology, they may well believe that it is magic. Although they may also believe that magic makes the rain come, or keeps a dragon from eating the sun during a total eclipse, since they don't understand those mechanisms, either.

So maybe it should be rewritten as "People who are inclined to explain things that they don't understand as magic will explain tech that they don't understand as magic." Not as exciting a quote, of course.

I suppose I don't have a particular issue with

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Although I think it's also much less known than the other rules.