I never find it helpful when people say they aren't that different from each other.
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.
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.