I read sci-fi but not fantasy, why do people insist on lumping these together?
And even then, that can swap between the genres. Scifi often contains FTL tech, which from what we know is almost certainly impossible so it's actually more like fantastical magic. Meanwhile, fantasy can have hard rules for its magic, in which case it acts more like technology that we haven't discovered yet. I haven't read it yet myself, but I've heard of Wizard's Bane, where a programmer is transported to a magical land and becomes really powerful because he treats the magic system like a new programming language.
Other things I've noticed is that scifi tends to involve spaceships and is more mystery oriented, whereas fantasy tends to take place on the ground and is more hero's journey oriented. But even these aren't defining traits. Plenty of scifi books involve investigating alien planets and many contain the hero's journey (including the original Star Wars if you count that as scifi). Meanwhile plenty of fantasy books are on some sort of ship (Narnia - Voyage of the Dawn Treader) and many are more mystery oriented (Harry Potter for example).
Personally, I think a better line of division is hard vs soft. Was the world created first with actual rules and the characters molded to fit the world (Dune, Lord of the Rings)? Or were the characters created first and the rules are bent to create the story that is being desired to tell (Star Trek with its technobabble, Star Wars's prequels and sequels, the entire universe of Harry Potter)?
By the numbers, Star Wars is far more grounded as science fiction that Star Trek, but people will insist the former is at best merely "science fantasy." It's really all just vibes.
The best rage bait I've seen in years.
Sure, the Jedi are "magic." But that's one magic element in a universe that's otherwise grounded in science fiction elements. Aliens. Spaceships. Robots. I'll see you the Jedi and raise you Trelane, the Q, the Douwd, the Traveller and a dozen other aliens that are no less "magic." Or in the case of the Q, far more magic than the Jedi.
The Jedi are telepaths (which Trek also has) and telekinetics (which Trek also has) and can predict the future (which exists in Trek.)
And they connect to a mystical all-encompassing energy force... which, ok. Trek doesn't have that. Oh wait they do, it's called "subspace."
And the entire Trek universe runs on fantastical nonsense. None of the physics is actual physics, it's subspace and technobabble. The galaxy is surrounded by a mystical barrier and God lives in the middle of it. There are wild magic fields in space that can do literally anything, and one has a face. You can travel back in time if you go around the sun fast enough like Superman. If Star Trek is science fiction, where is the science?
To say one is fantasy and the other isn't is simply a matter of taste.
>and the heroes are fighting an Emperor who is very little different from someone like Sauron
If your complaint is that Star Trek doesn't feature a single, universal villain... fair, but that isn't a fantasy only thing, science fiction has plenty of Big Bad Evil Guys. If it's that Star Wars' villains are just broad caricatures MF the Klingons are literally Space Mongols. Romulans are Space Romans. Cardassians are Space Nazis. Ferengi are Space Jews. The Borg Queen is basically Sexy Sauron.
You could take the spaceships away from Star Trek and map many Star Trek races to a common fantasy race archetype. Vulcans are elves, Romulans are Dark Elves, Klingons are Orcs, Ferengi are Dwarves or Goblins, Cardassians are snake people from the desert and the Borg are insect people.
Sure there may be some similarities if you want to take an analytical view of the genres, but there's an awful lot of people who like one but not the other.
I do agree it would be impossible to provide an entirely objective division that everyone would go along with.
Even so, I'd love it if all the "medieval dragon witch ghost magic spirit quest" stories could be placed on a different shelf of the bookshop to the "black hole generation ship dark forest faster than light" ones :)
"Inversions" by Banks is "just" a medieval quest story with magic unless you know The Culture stories, in which case is a interstellar politics story with high tech.
So even those categorisations aren't that straightforward (I would put both in the SF category, but Inversions is tricky - someone unfamiliar with Banks could read it as a straight-up fantasy novel, and if you don't like fantasy it might feel tedious)
In the UK at least, fantasy and sci fi occupy the same shelving. Takes me ages pulling books out of the shelf, and immediately rejecting because they are fantasy.
The majority of the books are fantasy, not sci fi. Fantasy seems to have a much bigger audience in the UK anyway.
You could argue a lot of semantics but the majority of fantasy and sci fi books are not blending the two.
"Its roots go much deeper into history, and its concerns are more archetypal" [1]
There can be a lot of cross-over of course. Right now, "fantasy" (perhaps of the "romantic" variety) seems to be a juggernaut and is taking over.
[1]https://sf-encyclopedia.com/fe/introduction
(edit: spelling)
(The lines get blurrier when talking about imagined historical fiction, or even things like alternative fiction.)
Even things like Tau Zero are using relativistic time dilation as the plot driver.
I agree, and sometimes the line is drawn between SF being "things that are theoretically possible" vs. Fantasy where things are impossible. But then you have things like Egan's Clockwork Trilogy, which is "what if the laws of physics actually worked a bit differently in this specific way" but which I assume anyone would consider SF. As opposed to Brandon Sanderson's books, which could be described in a similar way, but are usually categorized Fantasy.
At the end, it's mostly a marketing and feeling thing. As one of my favorite authors put it, the different between SF and Fantasy sometimes comes down to - are you putting a tree or a spaceship on the cover of your book?
What would you say is the reason for categorising works differently? Can you see differences there or do you also think it's mostly marketing?
An author once wrote an intro to some short story. The story is part of a much larger futuristic scifi universe in which people have developed telepathy and other things through genetic means. And the specific short story was the first one he wanted to publish, and it was about a specific planet in that world, in which the whole story is basically a telepath coming into town and interacting with the population.
And the publisher returned the note that this wasn't scifi, it was fantasy. Because of course he did - stripped of the broader futuristic setting that the story takes place in, it's just a story of a wizard coming into town. Never mind that there are solid science fiction explanations for the "magic" - you don't get that in the short story.
While Tau Zero that was mentioned elsewhere is believed to not match the laws of nature now, the science the entire plot rests on was considered scientifically plausible at the time it was written.
It was speculative, but it explicitly did not set out to make up a world in which some scientific law is different.
In other words, that isn't a defining factor of SF.
The speculative nature of it is closer to it - hence the shared label of speculative fiction often used to group SF and fantasy.
Even the "hard" sci-fi tends to comprise of the author's one area of expertise or hyperfixation while everything else is nonsense. You'll have descriptions in intricate detail of how the spacecraft are engineered down to the self-sealing stembolts, but biology is basically magic.
A common sf theme is "here is this change to the laws of physics, what would our universe then look like". Eg Arrival (and the story it's based on), tons of books by Egan, any book with FTL.
> I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.
This is how I think about both science fiction and fantasy. Elements of world building are different, even within each sub-genre, but this element of incorporating elements that are inconsistent with our world to tell stories is common to both. It's also why the term "speculative fiction" persists: a category that subsumes sci-fi and fantasy.
[1] Read that full preface here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/342990/the-left-hand...
and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That’s the truth!"
The preface is as valuable as the book that follows.
1. Many people who like one genre also like the other.
2. Many authors write in both genres.
3. There's a lot of similarity in the genres, and lots of things that are hard to categorize. More true lately btw.
Just as an aside though, I personally was an avid almost-only-SF reader for the first 30-ish years of my life, but lately have been reading a lot of fantasy as well. I highly recommend trying, especially more modern fantasy - I feel like the lines are even blurrier between them today, and a lot of the best work today has shifted from SF to fantasy. (I still love SF and there's a lot of great SF as well, to be clear.)
*urban fantasy has entered the chat*
While that may have been true historically, fantasy has a new, blossoming, largely female readership, although you could consider this to be overloading the term 'fantasy' as these new BookTok books seem to have little in common with the old school sword and sorcery.
Especially given how some of the "science fiction" elements of it read 100+ years later.
On a more serious note, yeah scifi and fantasy can usually be distinguished, I get why it so often gets lumped in together as speculative fiction, even though it annoys me when I'm looking for one and have to sift through the other.
The distiction isn't clear anyway. Some "fantasy" book are more scientific than some "sci-fi" books - if they have a system of magic then is that any difference to FTL travel, or Vinge's Region's of Thought?
In particular, SF plots often mix in significant fantasy themes to the point that they are sometimes a majority of the book.
Banks' Inversions is a Culture novel (SF) that intentionally reads as fantasy if you don't know the Culture setting, while leaving the reader to infer the SF setting if you do.
"Grass" by Sheri Tepper, or "Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula Le Guin are other examples. Both happen on other planets, but while both have SF settings, most of the stories fits better into fantasy tropes.
Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep is very explicit SF at "top level", but a significant part of the plot is closer to fantasy, happening on a planet in a pseudo-medieval setting.
Others like Stanisław Lem's The Cyberiad, while more explicit SF, also intentionally mix the two - being written as fantasy in a mock-medieval inspired proto-feudal society, where the characters engage in typical fantasy-inspired quests, with dragons, princes and princesses, with medieval weaponry, but with most characters being robots and with access to space travel...
There's a lot of overlap where authors toys with the distinctions, or outright mocks them.
A Canticle for Liebowitz for example mostly feels like some kind of fantasy but for the fact that the reader knows it's set in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland.
Big chunks of the Peter F. Hamilton Void series is basically more or less set in a slightly magical Early Modern Venice.
The Laundry Files is strongly and deliberately in the middle ground of technology and magic, despite being ostensibly set in the present-day.
Stone Spring is an alternate history set in the Stone Age, but is not substantially more ahistorical than a non-fantasy historical novel about a person who didn't exist in reality doing things that never actually happened. Perhaps there's more focus on the engineering rather than fighting, romance, politics, murder and whatever else historical novels often revolve around, but building is as valid a human thing to do as plotting a regicide, say.
Generally, the concepts in both are the same: construct an "unreal" world and set a story in there, often with a projection of real-world issues onto the hypothetical substrate. Often the only real difference is if the unreal element is driven by magic, technology or a small change in a historical event. Sometimes it's a mixture. Sometimes the technology is treated as magic because the users don't understand it. Sometimes the magic is treated as a technology. Sometimes the historical divergence was thousands of years ago, sometimes it has only just happened in the story.
It would probably be more accurate to lump the whole lot under something generic like "speculative fiction" but that's not really a well-known term and has a slightly different meaning that blends into things like historical settings which may not be generally considered fantasy.
You might compare The Sword of Shannara, which is a character-for-character, scene-for-scene copy of Lord of the Rings, but which is technically set in the postapocalyptic future (it's easy to read the book without noticing this) rather than the legendary past.
I used to be the same. Ask yourself why.
Harumi Marukami and Han Kang count as fantasy. (I’d argue so does Ian Banks.) Read Tolkien with a hard eye towards rules, meanwhile, and you find a universe that is largely consistent in the Unseen over the Seen, which pretty neatly maps to invisible physics guiding visible phenomena.
Why? Because there’s technology somewhere? Why doesn’t magical realism through a cell phone, for example, count?
The line between sci-if and fantasy is often arbitrary, with a lot of it coming down to readers’ self-perceived identities than anything having to do with the text. What counts as tech or magic, moreover, comes down to priors and perspective. (Harry Potter and Star Trek are on similar levels of technobabble, for instance.)
Both fit in the category of speculative fiction and as the many commenters have pointed out, speciation is difficult.
One definition I saw that sort of kind of worked is:
One puts an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances, the other puts an extraordinary person in ordinary circumstances.
I’m with you though.
Characters are all interchangeable and quirky because he says so. The science is tacked on like a chemistry teacher putting their kids to bed.
SciFi: Read Larry Niven and James Blish if you like feats of engineering, read Ann Leckie and Nancy Kress if you like characters defined by their actions.
Don’t tell me to be excited Andy just because you wrote “THAT’S SOO COOL!” after revealing some tidbit. I’m not a fucking child.
I can see that you wouldn't like him if you're more into characters than plot, but that's not what everyone wants.
I had the same vitriol you do for Weir toward Ernest Klein. Absolute shit author in my opinion...but my opinion doesn't matter. His first book was still a wild success with a movie adaptation despite having one of the weakest plots and and some of the flattest characters I have ever seen in print, dressed up in a patchwork coat of nostalgia, which is the only reason it had the mass appeal that it did. But the book was not written for me, was it?
I think we forget, sometimes, that authors don't really owe us anything, that they're trying to pay the bills doing what they do, so our approval means little and only makes us look like self-rightious jerks so I had to learn to let that go and just not read those books that weren't jiving with my tastes or demands. In the end, let people have their books they like because, well, at least they're still reading and not watching TikTok or whatever.
> Whats red and green and goes around and around and around? A frog in a cuisinart.
Just one small example...
Always annoys me having to wade through fantasy to find the sci fi on bookshop shelves. At least you can filter to just sci fi for ebooks mostly.
* Sci-Fi
* Fantasy
* Sci-Fi & Fantasy