Okay, how about this for an argument: Stan Lee did for superheros what John W. Campbell did for science fiction.
I reject the notion of this as a category. Star Wars is fantasy, pure and simple, with a double helping of techno-toys. That seems to be true for most stuff tagged with this term - categorizers are loath to just call it fantasy because space ships.
“Use the Force, Luke! (And not your umpteenth-generation space battle tech.)” - Q.E.D.
I’ve never been clear on how to split that hair, though. Take, say, Quantum Leap: our hero (superhero?) with the doctorate in physics has used his time machine to visit the '50s and change history as per the computed probabilities relayed by his holographic advisor – but in this episode, an old-timey gypsy fortuneteller derails things a bit by sensing what he really is, via a bona fide mystic power like unto The Force.
Science Fiction? Science Fantasy? Just Plain Fantasy? Damifino.
The final episode put it in proper perspective (IMHO, and I know there are arguments). Sam had never failed to address God in moments of crisis, and in the end, he met someone pretty much like God who had been guiding his efforts all along. So the technical bits became literal deus ex machina, or however you phrase “god IN the machine.”
But the wide field of speculative fiction never ceases to delight in splitting hairs, categories and cliches.
Well, switch it up a little to get a Don’t Fight The hypothetical: let’s say Marty McFly bumps into a carnival palm-reader who suddenly goes all wide-eyed and says he doesn’t belong here and is yet to be born or whatever, at which point she backs away nervously while making some kind of ritualized gesture and muttering crazy-sounding stuff about “second sight” and “the old country”.
So there’s presumably still nothing mystical about the fusion-powered flying car that doubles as a time machine and has a Mattel hoverboard in the back seat; it’s just that one woman who has some eerie psychic ability that somehow produces out-of-thin-air insights by way of a mysterious vision or something. What’s that hair?
An RCH, of course.
I’ve always said The Matrix was just a standard wizard fantasy dressed up in a science fiction costume.
Is the story “Strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” sci-fi?
Heck, that’s true-to-life reality non-fiction. Gin actually does that to people…
It struck me that here we have a story of a guy struggling with an evil side of himself that gets loose on occasion. (Chems, for the Doc, anger (adrenaline?) for the Hulk.) I thought there were parallels.
I have since looked up the definition of “science fiction” on wiki, and it appears that there is some fluidity to the definitions/classifications of sci-fi in literature.
I realise you folks have probably have done the debates about definitions to death on the Dope. I still am hazy on what makes something sci-fi, or just horror, drama, adventure, or whatever. Sorry.
In the same sense that nuclear weapons emit some energy. 
My favorite definition is the one allegedly used by John W. Campbell: “Science fiction is that which is published by science fiction editors”.
What the hell do they know? Have you read some of the stuff they’ve published!!!
For many years, I’ve suggested that Science Fiction is about the world where the innovative changes occur…while Fantasy is more about the individuals who have limited access to the innovations.
Harry Potter is Fantasy, because the magic is isolated and limited. Heinlein’s “Magic, Inc.” is SF, because he is writing about an entire world where magic is known. (Poul Anderson’s “Operation Chaos” is similar.)
“What if someone invented a flying pill?” is SF. “The boy who could fly” is Fantasy. The one explores the world; the other is only about the one individual.
Obviously, this is not an iron-clad definition, and anyone here can drive a truckload of exceptions through it. I’ll just note that David Brin complimented me on it, and said he thought it was a pretty good rule. (Okay, I promise to stop dropping his name.)
I dunno of you actually have a point in there. You wrote yourself that children’s literature is a subgenre of all literature types. The fact that Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings are both fantasy doesn’t eliminate LOTR or HP from the genre. There’s also a pretty commonly expressed viewpoint that superhero comics evolved from the detective and adventure pulps, rather than children’s literature. Writers started adding in broader and broader heroics, mystic abilities like the power to cloud men’s minds, and it went from there.
First, I’m not sure Heinlein and Anderson would call those stories science fiction. Wasn’t Magic Inc. published in Unknown, the home of fantasy?
In any case the Harry Potter world is embedded in our world, and is only limited in the sense of being secret. It was established that the PM was aware of it, after all. If Rowling wrote a sequel in which they came out of the magic closet, as it were, so they cohabited openly with muggles, would it become science fiction?
If you cross this with Sturgeon’s Law, you arrive at the conclusion that ninety percent of science fiction shouldn’t be science fiction.
Lord of the Rings is not in any way children’s literature. Harry Potter is. And the way Harry is told is much closer to all other children’s lit stories than it is to the classic fantasy tradition.
Origins don’t matter to present day in genres any more than word origins matter for modern day meanings. I completely agree that pulp heroes directly affected superheroes, but the way the stories were told are much closer to the older boy’s adventure novel tradition, which predated the pulps. The fact is that comics became children’s literature for a while and then stopped being children’s literature when a new style totally overwrote the old. The predecessors didn’t matter in either case.
That brings up a question I dodged earlier, when Little Nemo asked if I thought that Stan Lee did for comics what John W. Campbell did for science fiction. I don’t have a glib answer for that. There are parallels, certainly. Thinking about it, I see a major difference. Campbell unquestionably changed the field by being the right person at the right time to do so. I’d make the case that the field would have changed if he never existed. The timing was right, a new generation - about 90% of all major names - entered within a five year period, and the anchor that was Hugo Gernsback was temporarily out of the field. If Stan Lee hadn’t decided to create Marvel when he did, would comics have changed? Nobody else had the opportunity or the will. The older generation would have crawled on to their deaths - it was Marvel who created the new generation. DC could have gone on for decades just as it was.
As it turned out, both made their fields more adult but did so by different routes. Is that the same or not?
Well, if the social effects were explored honestly – the Prime Minister appoints a commission to study the effects of magic on the world; the Ministry of Defence starts a panic reaction to the existence of scrying – it would be a more “science fictional” approach to the matter.
(Frankly, I think it would be a really nifty story; I wish someone would write something like it!)
Think of two Ron Perlman offerings: “Beauty and the Beast,” and “Hellboy.” The latter is a little bit more “science fictionish” because it deals with the wider spread of the knowledge of mystical stuff out into the “real world.” More people know, and their responses to it are more realistically depicted and explored.
(And…don’t pick too much at the distinction, it leaves a nasty scab!)
I like to think of Superheros as their own genre, one which is typically a sub-category (and commercially the largest component of) Power-fantasy. The main aspect of Iron Man is not the social ramifications of newly invented compact power sources, just as Spiderman’s web formula has surprisingly few commercial applications. Rather, the reader is suppose to imagine how awesome it would be to fly through the air or throw cars around.
Star Wars is space opera, an offshoot of sci fi. Lump or split that according to personal preference.