The difference between Science-Fiction and Fantasy

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Well, first of all, this is a tautology, with "sufficiently" being the weasel word....

I think you're slightly missing the point.

One way of viewing it is: As a speculative author, don't let your current conceptions of what is possible or impossible limit your work.

If your characters encounter a super-advanced life form, it's better not to explain how the alien tech works. Leave it unexplained and unexplored, and perhaps beyond examination altogether -- e.g. the Monolith in 2001, or "The Zone" in Tarkovsky's film Stalker.

I don't think he's proposing that an ultra-advanced society would in fact toss animal entrails into a hot brazier to power an interstellar spacecraft.


As to the value of the 3rd law, I guess that's up to the writer. I for one dislike pseudo-science, and find it exceptionally irritating; others prefer, expect and/or demand, an explanation for an imagined technology; it can also provide for a handy MacGuffin. At any rate, plenty of sci-fi authors seem to ignore it, so I guess it isn't much of a law after all -- or, of course, if it was established as a fully validated rule, some author would flaunt it and thus "innovate" the genre. It doesn't seem much more useful to me than any other genre borders or restrictions.


By the way, Clarke's 3rd law isn't really a tautology. "All bachelors are married" is a tautology, i.e. a statement that is true in all possible circumstances. It sounds more to me like Clarke is proposing a rule of thumb than a definition.

[unboggling]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

It doesn't seem much more useful to me than any other genre borders or restrictions.

which are forced artificial categories used mostly for marketing, targeting a particular audience. An author producing a work that is difficult to "stereotype-cast" into a popular genre mode has a harder time selling it than an author producing standard "troubled lady falls in love with handsome vampire" fare.

My solution is to lump into one category all fiction that has major elements of science fiction, epic fantasy, urban fantasy, paranormal romance, magic, supernatural, etc. I give all of that the same tag and don't worry about it. That way I don't waste time trying to figure out or reclassify subjective and arbitrary genre decisions.

[gmw]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Yeah, I've always hated these laws.

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.
...

I think you're missing the point. Those things may be considered impossible now, but the future isn't over yet. ("Perpetual motion machine" may indeed be considered impossible almost by definition, unless it is discovered that the Universe will either expand forever or repeat its cycles, in which case the Universe is a perpetual motion machine - whatever the case, it serves as sufficiently perpetual to be going on with .)

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

...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.

Just as your comments on the rule could be rewritten as "perverse observations that refuse to accept the author's intention". Of course Clarke was speaking from the perspective of those who do not understand the technology - this, by the way, includes a significant proportion of the current population, which probably explains the ready acceptance of fiction containing magic, or science fiction that may as well be magic.

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

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.

Isn't it strange, this is the one that I think you'd have some justification as claiming it to be either a tautology or a contradiction in terms. As a philosophical exercise, defining a limit or border implies something with two sides, possible on one side and impossible on the other, hence possibly a tautology. As a physical exercise the impossible is by definition impossible and so cannot be ventured into, hence a contradiction in terms.

[FatDog]

I enjoy both genre's (and both are often grouped together in bookstores).

I liked someones definition: "Science Fiction is a story showing how some aspect of science or technology affects people or society."

It's broad, general but works for me.

Vampire stories tend to be fantasy, but one story defined a blood-disorder that involved a parasite that took-over the host, improved it (by making it extra strong) but made it damaged by suns rays and require more carbon-based blood to sustain itself - a vampire. This was science fiction because it gave a scientific basis.

But vampires who sparkle - ... i got nothing.

[Caltsar]

Vampires that sparkle are firmly in the romance category

I've really found that fantasy is often more easily defined than science fiction. You have adventure fantasy and epic fantasy, but you know both are fantasy. The issue really comes when an author deicides to push the genre and inncorperate elements of another genre into whatever one they're working on. While far from a bad thing, this does cause a problem with clearly identifying where a book belongs. I did learn in high school that science fiction is less about technology being present and more about examining the consequences of human actions on a large scale. Obviously this also doesn't cover every book in the genre, and it also includes books outside the science fiction genre as well.

I guess this comes down to the nature of genre itself... Which is really just a way to sort the books on our shelves and to find an area to focus on.

[starrigger]

Originally Posted by Caltsar

Science Fiction and Fantasy really fall on two opposite ends of a spectrum. In some ways you can think of the individual books falling somewhere between the two sides. Stories like 2001, Rama, Ringworld, and such will fall closer to the "Science Fiction" side of the spectrum while Dragonlance, Lord of the Rings, and other High Fantasy stories fall closer to the Fantasy side. Those are all easily distinguishable. Stuff like the Pern series tends to hover to either side of the middle of the line. A book like Enemy Mine, while clearly sci-fi, isn't focused on technology and actually takes efforts to abandon technology altogether for a significant portion of the story. This might fall a little closer to the middle.

This is one way of thinking about it that I find useful (although I don't consider technology an indicator one way or the other). Pretty much everything I've written is science fiction, some toward the hard SF end (e.g., The Chaos Chronicles), and some more in the middle (the Star Rigger books). I've written two novels that are clearly SF, but have dragons in interstellar hyperspace, and in significant sections feel more like fantasy.

Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman books are another example of SF that looks like fantasy. Diane Duane's Wizardry novels are considered fantasy, but really border on being SF.

But I think an equally valid way to look at it is to say that it's all fantasy--set in worlds that aren't our world, and with rules that may be different--and science fiction is a subset of fantasy in which there's an assumption that science and/or logical extrapolation is an essential part. We can envision these settings and stories being real based on the world and the science we know, with perhaps some bending of the science allowed in the course of the extrapolation.

If you really want to start an argument, ask for a definition of hard SF.

[starrigger]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

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.

We don't know that any of those things is impossible.

EDIT: Oops, someone already pointed that out.

[GreenMonkey]

Originally Posted by starrigger

But I think an equally valid way to look at it is to say that it's all fantasy--set in worlds that aren't our world, and with rules that may be different--and science fiction is a subset of fantasy in which there's an assumption that science and/or logical extrapolation is an essential part. We can envision these settings and stories being real based on the world and the science we know, with perhaps some bending of the science allowed in the course of the extrapolation.

I think this is a good point. A lot of the time it's pretty clearly fantasy simply because it isn't Earth. Makes it easier.

I agree with this. Sci-fi as a subset of fantasy.

[gmw]

Originally Posted by starrigger

... But I think an equally valid way to look at it is to say that it's all fantasy--set in worlds that aren't our world, and with rules that may be different--and science fiction is a subset of fantasy in which there's an assumption that science and/or logical extrapolation is an essential part. We can envision these settings and stories being real based on the world and the science we know, with perhaps some bending of the science allowed in the course of the extrapolation.

If you really want to start an argument, ask for a definition of hard SF.

That'd be SF with really long words, yes?

Some care is needed here, you could argue that all fiction is fantasy. Romance is a really easy to understand example of what I mean, but almost any fiction could come under the heading of being the author's fantasy. Such broadening of the definition doesn't really help much. The more I read here the more I come back to that elusive "feeling" I get when I read a book: either the author has tried hard to have me believe the story is (at least mostly) possible according to what we know now (when the book was written), or whether the author couldn't care how many rules of physics they break as long as it seems reasonable while you read.

[Fastolfe]

For me, the distinction is as follows:

"The Professor looked intensely at he Wall of Commands and said 'let the water flow!' After a tense moment, the power of his voice triggered an incredible event not seen on this planet in living memory: the ancient floodgates creaked open slowly for the first time in centuries, and let the lake drain onto the parched plains below." <-- this is fantasy

"The Professor turned to compoint and said 'let the water flow!' His unique voiceprint finally woke up the Planet Guard put in place long ago to protect the citizens from themselves. The machine took a few second to process the unusual order, then opened the ancient floodgates for the first time in centuries, letting the lake drain onto the parched plains below." <-- this is science fiction.

The difference? science fiction tries to root futuristic- or magical-looking events in a plausible scientific or rational narrative, whereas fantasy just uses them to dazzle or enrich the plot without further explanation.

[unboggling]

@Fastolfe, lol.
If one must differentiate, that seems practical as a most-likely rule of thumb. But there is also fantasy that rationally and scientifically explicates a complex world with complex technology (e.g. "magic" system, species such as fairies from an alternate dimension or alternate universe, etc.) given one or two initial scientifically implausible assumptions. Similar to initial implausible assumptions in a lot of SF. If there is a line between SF and F it is in many cases fuzzy, movable and undulating at author whim.

[BenG]

There's no clear cut line between the two. Some books are obviously one or the other but others are harder to classify. When I was growing up the bookstores put it all on the Science Fiction shelves and a lot of authors wrote both sci-fi and fantasy and both were published in the sci-fi magazines.

Take The Glory Road by Heinlein its a fantasy novel given a scientific framing story. Or MZ Bradley's Darkover novels which were about Terrans rediscovering the lost colony planet where the natives had esp and other psionic talents which often reads as fantasy, especially the stories taking place before re-contact.

[screwballl]

I tend to look at it as 3 separate genres:

pure sci-fi (based mostly on science, with a little fantasy fiction to keep it interesting, without the fantasy part, it would just be fiction based on science, not science fiction)

fantasy sci-fi (combining the two, like using science aspects while talking to 3 legged aliens or dragons from the dark ages type of view)

pure fantasy (based primarily on fantasy, with a touch of science added in)

[saoir]

Contrary to the views of some above I think the distinction is important. Just as important as "Romance" and "Crime" categories. It's not that it's important to pidgin holed a book as an academic exercise at all ... it's about helping people find books they like to read. Many people have clear preferences for fantasy or for SF and don't like the other.

Science Fiction involves a story set in a world that is broadly plausible/logical in the context of the broad science principles that we know, or extended in a logical or reasonable way.

Fantasy involves a story set in a world of pure uncontrolled imagination, where there is no attempt to rationalise or contextualise it or the technology in it.

Are there titles that blur the lines ? Of course. But that does not mean the distinction is not worth maintaining, for the benefit of readers.

[Penforhire]

I like labels and tags as much as anyone but it does get tricky.

Where do you put 'alternate history' novels? I usually say fantasy but sometimes it gets all steampunky. China Mieville tends to ride that edge of definition.

How about John Ringo's 'Council Wars' series? Pure intended fantasy world (elves and dragons too!) all created & driven by advanced technology. The curtain gets pulled back to show the tech but very rarely. Most of the story could have been a modern man's time-travel into a Tolkien novel.