Next to a big-breasted cleavage-baring female, of course. Who also happens to be a virgin, since it’s a unicorn story.
But seriously. If aliens make a story fantasy because you have to make guesses, then all fiction, not just SF, is fantasy. I mean, the writer of a pulp romance has to guess “How would a wealthy daughter of a plantation owner react to a studly, hard-working new farmhand?”. OK, so that’s a different sort of guess, but who’s to say which guesses are fantastical?
In fact, in fantasy, you’re guessing a lot less than in other genres, in the sense that “guess” implies that there’s a right answer you’re shooting for. For example: In the hard SF story “The Hole Man”, Larry Niven guesses what would happen if a tiny black hole were let loose in a planet. As it happens, he guessed wrong: That was before Hawking radiation was known, which makes the story obsolete. But if, instead of a black hole eating a planet, he had written about a demon eating a planet, he wouldn’t have needed to guess: What the demon does is whatever he says it does, and nobody can say that he’s wrong.
It’s been a while since I’ve read Ender’s Game but I always thought it was a science fiction. Since it includes aliens then I guess that would make it fantasy though.
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Is Ender’s Game hard sci-fi or is it fantasy? Is it science fiction at all?
prisoner6655321, looking at your quote from Card in the previous thread, his test for SF appears to be “could be” vs. “couldn’t be”.
Aliens “could be”. Various scientists as well as respected SF authors have tried to calculate out the probabilities based on our one extant example of an inhabited planet. From memory, Asimov’s calculation came out at around 1/2 million in our galaxy. From this perspective, if your hard SF story postulates FTL travel and galactic exploration, but no aliens then I think the author needs to explain why there aren’t any.
“Could be” doesn’t dictate shape of aliens (though it could preclude some with fantasy chemistry or abilities).
So… Aliens? (“could be” = SF). Vaguely equine-like aliens? (still SF). That can talk (still SF).
Talking horses? (“couldn’t be”, wrong brains, wrong vocals = Fantasy). Unless you’re then going to describe (or even have undescribed in the background) some form of uplift like Brin’s chimps and dolphins.
Fantasy and science fiction as genres of popular literature are distinguished by the conventions employed in each class of book. The mighty-thewed hero with the elfin companion and the sword who goes in quest of the magic talisman is a fantasy convention; the spaceship which uses Doubletalk Drive to get to Tau Ceti III where strange aliens live, a SF one.
However, the true distinction is whether assumptions contrary or not contrary to known fact are introduced. Heinlein and Niven both wrote “fantasy with rivets” – things using the fantasy conventions that had explanations within the realm of plausible undiscovered facts. Glory Road and Not Long Before the End start as apparent fantasy stories and then structure a SF explanation for what happens.
For what it’s worth, I’d say that movies like Star Wars occupy a middle ground between science fiction and fantasy, one that can perhaps best be called “science fantasy”.
Science fiction extrapolates from what is currently known and deals with what is possible (even if highly unlikely).
Fantasy is not an effort to extrapolate from the known and instead creates a new world with physical properties that explicitly differ from known physical laws.
Science Fantasy is fantasy that is clothed in the language of science (robots and space ships instead of elves and dragons), but still creates a new world with physical properties that explicitly differ from known physical laws (“The Force,” audible explosions in the vacuum of space, and – perhaps – even such time honored staples as faster than light travel and aliens that all speak English).
Ok, then to further muddy the waters, I present you with Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series.
This is a Terran (Earth) population colonizing a planet called Pern after their world was devastated by an interstellar war. They have a very highly advanced technology in the beginning of the timeline (i.e. the Colonization) and an indiginous lifeform they call “fire-lizards” are found, being very similiar to minature dragons. A hostile situation develops after “Thread” begins to fall from the sky, and they use genetic science to bio-engineer “dragons” from the original stock of the fire-lizards that bear a telepathically bonded rider and sear it from the sky with fire produced by chewing “fire-stone”. It is a physiologically explained process of the dragons, there’s zero magic involved. There is zero magic in the society, period. At most, the society loses alot of technology over the years and resorts to an agarian society not unlike the Middle Ages. This would normally clearly be considered science fiction and by most people’s definition is.
Yet because it has dragons, she’s usually called a fantasy author, and most people think of The Dragonriders of Pern as a fantasy series.
In the end, the experts can argue till the cows come home about what makes sci-fi sci-fi, and what makes fantasy fantasy, but to most fans of the genres, sci-fi has aliens, fantasy has dragons and unicorns.
There’s been cross-overs of the two genres before, such as Star Wars and The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (another sci-fi work with fantastical elements), and there will be again.
Or is it that Fantasy is a sub-genre of SF which uses magic and mysticism to rationalize the fantastic elements?
That’s the problem with most such distinctions… if reversed, they make as much sense.
Myself, I primarily stick with a “I know it when I see it” philosophy. Event Horizon is sci-fi, Willow is fantasy. Sci-fi explores how advancement shapes and influences people and society, whereas fantasy explores how society once was and how it might’ve been with certain new elements or conditions (not necessarily supernatural… look at The Princess Bride) introduced.
Not that this isn’t a mere “future vs. past” delineation, as Star Wars (technically sci-fi, in my opinion… though I tend to call it “space opera”, as the science aspect is almost nonexistent) takes place a long time ago…
So, Prisoner etc., etc.
Would you say that the real world we live in is Sci-Fi or Fantasy?
I’m getting to your point about the Force in Star Wars.
I’m just guessing here, but I bet I’m close, when I say that probably 95% of the world’s population is spiritual.
Don’t know your own inclination but just because the Force doesn’t fit into your own view of the cosmos it doesn’t make it fantasy.
That would be like saying Luther is a fantasy film.
I’ve actually spent some time thinking about a scientific magic world. Rather then magic be pulled out of thin air, they come from background energy present everywhere, accessed by humans via some kind of machinery.
Prisoner:
The odd disconnect you are getting from the “aliens” at the end of A.I. has nothing to do with the distinction between Fantasy and SF. It’s a phenomenon known as “deus ex machina” - suddenly suddenly pop out of nowhere and the story takes a completely unexpected twist with no logic or explanation behind it. Consider:
<sad stuff about david praying to the blue fairy forever>
You: “Aww. What a sad movie.”
…2000 years later…
Aliens: “It’s not over yet, buddy boy! David, we can bring back your mom. But, uh, just for one day. Because of the… cosmic… time… thingies. Yeah. Anyway, it’ll make the ending all sentimental and bittersweet. Not what Kubrick was going for, but Spielberg says so.”
David: “Yipee!”
…Credits…
You: “Where the fuck did that come from?”
For the record, though, they are SF, because it COULD happen. If you replace the aliens with a cluster of benevolent warlocks, it’d be fantasy. It wouldn’t be any better, just a different genre.
And if you replace the Warlocks with a squad of G-men with radios and guns, you’d have an X-files episode. And if you replace the G-men with the hero’s best friends, you’d have a teen angst flick. And if you replaced the friends with giant piles of mutant man-eating cotton candy, you’d have the best goddamned movie ever made.
It seems that everyone is forgetting that the operative word here is FICTION. If you like it, read it. If you don’t like it, don’t read it. None of it is real… I can’t live in the heart of a star because I’ve been genetically engineered to grow faster than other humans and then be downloaded into a probe to live in the sun… (Stephen Baxter’s Ring) but it’s just as likely that 70 billion years in the future a benevolent warlock could do just that.
Discuss it by all means. If it hadn’t been for this thread, I never would have picked up The Dragonriders of Pern, because I don’t like “fantasy” (whatever that means) as much as I like “hard sci-fi” (think Greg Bear and Stephen Baxter). A lot of Bear’s work has fantastical elements, as does Baxter’s. But after that description, I will check it out.
On the contrary; I can’t see how anyone could consider Pern to be SF. OK, we’ve got aliens. That’s fine, most SF has them. They’re approximately reptilian. No problem, they could be approximately anything. They’re called dragons. But what’s in a name? They’re intelligent, I can live with that. They can fly, and are large enough to carry riders. Well, either of those is fine, separately. They breath fire… We’re stretching it here. They’re telepathic and can teleport… Now we’re irredeemably in fantasy territory. As for “zero magic involved”, what do you think what’s-her-name is using to ruin the Aruthra Holding? Just because you call it “the power” doesn’t make it any less magical.
As a point of information, the first Pern story was published in Analog, the purest science fction magazine, when it was edited by John Campbell. I rather suspect he was having fun publishing a science fiction story with dragons. There were lots of telepathy stories in Analog also. I haven’t read many of the Pern books, but I’ve read the first couple, and I’d say their science fiction.
The distinction between any two fictional genres is basically a matter of general consensus, heavily biased by the label the publisher chooses to slap on it, or the reputation of the author.
For example, Dean Koontz has written much more about time travel and genetic engineering than about horrible undead things that suck the souls of the living, but he’s still stocked under “horror”.
Asimov’s collection of George and Azrael stories, which doesn’t even PRETEND to be sci-fi, is in the sci-fi section, along with Gaiman and Pratchett’s “Good Omens”, which is about angels and demons and such.
We can all draw lines wherever it suits our reading tastes, but there are no right or wrong answers here.
If you could replace the aliens with some fantasy creature and the story would not really lose anything, then they are more a fantasy creation. If the scientific realities of the creature are part of what make it interesting, such as an alien with an unusual nature due to evolving in very different conditions, or one with an unusual but well-thought-out biology, it’s going to lean more towards SF.
For instance… (minor 'The Legacy of Heorot" spoilers)
One of the most important elements of the storyline is that the unusual grendel biology, though certainly believable, confuses the colonists and prevents them from realizing what a threat they are.
You could definitely do a story about isolated people dealing with a fantasy monster with mysterious powers, but the mysteriousness of it’s powers would be undercut by the fact that it is not expected to follow real-world science. If the mysterious monster makes perfect biological sense (as in ‘The Legacy of Heorot’), but in a very unusual way, that makes it easier to relate to the characters, and makes the revelation of why the monster is what it is more interesting.
I also believe that the Pern series is Sci-Fi, even if the publisher calls it fantasy and even if it has a sort of fantasy flavor, and even if the general public calls it fantasy. The “dragons” are biological beings. They are explored and explained pretty well by McCaffrey. The entire Pern universe is very well organized and there isn’t really anything supernatural about it, except for the dragons’ capabilities to travel in the blink of an eye. Of course that is pretty important, especially in the first story, where it is used for a spin. So maybe it works as fantasy too. Oh well. Fantasy… Sci-Fi… still a good story. Though I’ve only read the first book.
My point was that Dragonriders of Pern, by all definitions IS sci-fi…and that hasn’t stopped her from being considered a fantasy author by many of the people who read and publish the genre. Which, as I said, furthered (imo) muddied the waters regarding the OP’s question.
As for Lessa ruining Ruatha Hold, it was always alluded to be more of a telepathic (possibly mixed with a sort of empathic sense in the “power” of the Ruathan bloodline) sense than any true magic, and it was also what allowed her to hear all dragons. Sixth sense does not mean true magic. There was never ANY true magic alluded to, or even hinted at in Pern, imo. The only thing even approaching “magical” in nature was the telepathic powers, and I thought she took plenty of steps to infer a scientific explanation for those.
And FWIW, telepathic abilities, telekinesis, precognition, premonition etc. are all considered paranormal sciences. There’s not really considered to be magic to them at all, by classic definitions of High Magic.
The dragons of Pern didn’t teleport as most people think of it, they used telekinesis to move themselves, their passengers, and anything they carried, which isn’t the same thing. It was how Aivas explained the dragons’ ability to lift “as much as they think they can” to Jaxom in of All the Weyrs of Pern, IIRC.
