Just interested on people’s opinions on this.
Your standard superhero comics, tv series, and movies: do you consider them a form of science fiction? Why or why not?
Back when I was reading comics, around 1960, there was a DC book about space adventures around Alpha Centauri, and some Marvel books with sf-like short stories. If these count as science fiction, I suppose the less magically oriented strips do too - and the rest count as fantasy.
Whether they are respectable sf is another matter.
Same as Star Wars, science fantasy.
It depends on the setting; usually it’s science fantasy as said. A few are soft sci-fi, most are science fantasy, there’s probably some that are outright fantasy.
A dry description of the Superman premise sounds plenty science-fictiony (last survivor of a highly advanced alien race has superhuman abilities in Earth’s environment) but the treatment is (or at least was until very recently) at best par with the “juvenile” end of the genre.
I’d say one could make arbitrary decisions over where comic-book characters fall on the “hard-ish sci-fi” to “pure fantasy” spectrum with, offhand, Iron Man and Doctor Strange representing arguable extremes.
Marvel is nearly 100% sci fi with a few exceptions (Dr. Strange, Juggernaut.) DC is nearly all fantasy with a few exceptions (Superman, Batman, Watchmen.) If you are talking about movie labels, the movie industry is notoriously lazy and slow with coming up with innovations, so it’s not unusual for them to lump all superhero movies into the scifi category.
Amazon files the books under the “fantasy” branch of fantasy and “science fiction.”
Fantastic Fiction.
A quick thought listing them from science fiction to sci-fi to fantasy they go
Batman
Iron Man
Fantastic Four
Spider-Man
X-Men
Green Lantern
Hulk
Superman
Wonder Woman
Hellboy
Doctor Fate
I’m not sure if Thor is tied with Superman or Wonder Woman.
As with every argument on Earth, you have the lumpers and the splitters.
The lumpers say that science fiction includes everything: basic spaceships and robots, superheroes, alternate history, paranormal romance, urban fantasy, magical realism, horror, anything and everything that breaks the bounds of reality. Real lumpers say that science fiction is a subset of fantasy. Extreme lumpers say that all fiction is fantasy, some is just more mundane than others.
Splitters like to break things down into categories like the ones above and a hundred others, insisting that the differences are too extreme and too meaningful to be dumped into one stewpot.
My secret shame is that I go back and forth between lumper and splitter depending on the context of the argument. For some discussions putting superheroes (all of them, including the magic-driven ones and the ones with no extra powers) under science fiction makes lots of sense. You can’t really talk about superhero movies outside of an sf context. Superhero comics have a history that is mostly parallel to that of prose science fiction. Putting them together would just cause endless confusion and doubling back in time to tell separate stories.
Depends on the hero. Superman, for example, would probably be science fiction (especially a story like Man of Steel, which has plenty of spaceships, an alien invasion, etc.) The first Captain America movie, set in the 1940s? Not so much.
The Thor I remember reading in the early 1970’s was fantasy: Doctor what’s-his-name had a car accident in the middle of nowhere and woke up in a cave with a messed-up leg. He grabbed an innocuous looking stick to use as a cane and tried to climb up the steep (but not vertical) hole. He slipped and accidentally rapped the end of the stick on the ground – suddenly transforming himself into The Mighty Thor and he’s aware of both personalities. The stick has transformed into the hammer Mjolnir. He gets himself out of the hole as Thor and – well, I dunno. that’s the only issue I ever saw; they were hand-me-downs that my brother was going to discard and the next issue wasn’t in his collection.
The Thor I’ve seen in the recent (201X C.E.) movies has been science fiction: The alien races have always been there, it’s just that they stopped dealing with earthlings (i.e. northwestern europeans) and turned their attention to other matters – but now they’re paying attention to us again.
[I know, I know. My summaries are really loose.]
–G!
The first Captain America movie is far more science fiction than any version of Superman. The fact that it’s set in the past and doesn’t involve space is completely irrelevant. What’s important is that there’s a significant advance in technology, and society is reacting to it. That’s at the core of science fiction.
Superman, meanwhile, has the tidbit that Kal-El is an alien, but there’s not even any attempt to explain anything. How can he fly? He’s an alien. Well, yes, but how can an alien fly? If one is making the divide between science fiction and fantasy, Superman is closer to the fantasy side.
Personally, I’m going to throw superheroes in with science fiction. I figure it’s got stuff like aliens, mutants, high-tech, cyborgs - it’s pulpy but it’s science fiction. Even the magic stuff works for me - I figure superhero stories show how magic would work in a generally technological setting.
In Exapno’s terms, I’m a lumper. I also include alternate history in science fiction even though many AH works have no SF elements in them. In alternate history, I figure the underlying premise makes the genre science fiction.
I think of the genre as pulp-era SF. My first intro to Capt. America was from a cheaply-made set of cartoons in the 70’s, centered around Marvel heroes.
The second time I encountered him was in a paperback novel that was very science-fictiony (and almost a perfect match for the plot, 40 years later, of the first Captain America movie).
I actually want to straight up call superhero a genre in and of itself.
Certainly there are superhero canons that are very fantasy, or very science fiction. To me that gets second billing. It’s Superhero fantasy or Superhero realistic or Superhero sci-fi rather than anything else.
I think this is reflected in the language. In my experience we tend to call Marvel and DC movies “superhero movies”. This doesn’t reflect how we talk about Star Wars or Star Trek where we very clearly call them “sci-fi” (despite the obvious quibbles about space fantasy and space opera and such).
As the guy said, “Your ancestors called it magic but you call it science. I come from a land where they are one and the same.”
My definition of science fiction includes the ideas of repeatability, predictability, and some basis in science fact as we know it. If somebody has powers because of some chain of circumstances that seems to follow this (Batman, Spiderman, some low-powered mutants), it’s science fiction. If it’s just “well, he’s a mutant, so he has powers”, then it’s fantasy.
Superhero is a motif. You can dress something else up as superhero.
Superman is a pulp detective who has it too easy.
The Flash and Spider-Man are speculative fiction detectives with antagonists to match.
The X-Men are partly horror in superhero drag. Or superheroes in horror drag.
The Punisher is fantasy vigilanteism.
Batman is juvenile crime/horror.
Legion of Super-Heroes was teen romance in space opera drag, I think.
(Marvel’s) Daredevil is a grim pulp hero.
Avengers and Justice League are pretty much straight-up superheroes as superheroes. Sometimes with more humor elements.
Series like Aquaman play with fantastical settings.
The Hulk is…the Hulk. He’s kind of his own thing.
Of course, since these are all long runners, they can vary.
The beauty of superhero settings is that you can throw anything in. But that’s a double-edged sword. I remember fans whinging that Oracle shouldn’t have had to stay in a wheelchair because she was in the same universe as Wonder Woman.
Personally, nope.
It’s all very well to say “Superman’s an alien …” but if you then go on to say he’s vulnerable to magic…
That’s a problem with shared superhero universes. If you put Superman in a title all by himself, then “vulnerable to magic” never comes up, because there is no magic. If you put him in the same universe as Zatanna, though, things get complicated.