I understand the point you’re making and I don’t necessarily disagree, but I’m arguing that amongst laymen and the general public…these definitions don’t mean what they used to. For them Star Wars is unequivocally “Sci-Fi” which any traditionalist would disagree with. but that fight is lost. Because of that slip the boundary of what is “hard Sci-Fi” has shifted dramatically to include stories that are decidedly less science-based than what traditionalists would like. But again, that battle is lost. Language moves whether we want it to or not.
IANA SF expert. I read a lot as a teen, but that was 40+ years ago. The last I read was Seven Eves a couple years ago. I think @Omniscient is on to something.
In the popular lexicon, a story containing technology Earth doesn’t have and won’t get in the next 10 years = SF.
Hence Star Wars is SF. The fact some elements of the in-universe technology (e.g. time dilation-less FTL or time travel) would require what we in 2020 would call “PFM; certainly not science as we know it” doesn’t alter the taxonomy. If it’s presented as existing tech, that’s the hallmark of SF. We really ought to have named the genre “techno-fiction” back in the day.
A story containing magic as magic is fantasy. Hence Harry Potter is fantasy.
Stories with both star ships and magic wands are harder to characterize. Depends on which is incidental and which is core to the plot.
When I think “techno-fiction” I think Tom Clancy and others of his ilk, who will spend countless pages describing the inner workings of things other writers would just call a “bomb” and get on with it.
Good point. There is the genre where the gizmos are the story. Or at least for some subset of readers it’s a lot of the attraction to the story. It’s the literary equivalent of the
https://www.google.com/search?q=tactical+geardo&tbm=isch
Star Wars certainly has fantasy elements - the Force, Jedi mind tricks, ghosts of Jedi in the next world, etc.
In every bookstore I’ve ever been in, Fantasy and SF are lumped together on the same shelves, and in the public mind they are different flavours of the same genre.
Even the Hugo Awards don’t have separate categories for F & SF.
I personally make a distinction between hard SF, soft SF, SF + Fantasy mixed, and Fantasy. I think many fans do, and I think the distinctions are valid.
No disagreement from me. There are knowledgeable consumers of the literature who care about these distinctions even if not everyone would agree on the details.
Then there’s the regular public who doesn’t know or care about the details, but they still use terms like “Science fiction” or “fantasy fiction”. Those were the crowd I was speaking about.
For some reason “space” always equals “Science Fiction” whether it’s Horror (Alien), Fantasy (Star Wars), or even History (Apollo 13).
In the mind of many of its best writers, too. Was Ursula K. LeGuin a science fiction writer or a fantasy writer? How about Jack Vance? Roger Zelazny? Robert Silverberg? Gene Wolfe? George R.R. Martin? Stephen R. Donaldson? If you asked any of them whether they wrote science fiction or fantasy, they’d probably just say “Yes”.
The actual writers don’t really care that much about the difference between hard SF, soft SF and fantasy. It’s just the fans who like to argue about it.
Many writers have written both, but I don’t think that equates to ‘don’t care about the difference’.
It’s not just abstract either. Many readers have a preference for a particular kind of fiction, or at least want to know what kind of book it is before they start reading it.
There’s also the gender split, which has caused a lot of problems over the years.
For decades, science fiction - especially “hard” science fiction - skewed heavily male, both in readers and writers. Women had a hard time gaining equivalence.
The Tolkien fantasy boom started with a lot of male writers, but brought in more female readers who turned into female writers. Fantasy today sells more than science fiction and it’s majority female.
Of course there’s overlap - there’s always overlap - but the perception that science fiction is male and fantasy female drives a lot of decisions in what to publish and what to write and what to read, and that creates a lot of tensions within the field. Tensions are never good.
My personal definitions, embodied as tags on Goodreads, includes science fantasy for the type of story that doesn’t really care about the “what would this technology do?” aspect.
It doesn’t seem correct to me that fantasy is majority female today, either in writers or readers. But maybe I’m wrong.
Do you have any data to back this up?
The closest I can find is this table based on 909 responses to an online survey. 54.5% of respondents identified as female. But it doesn’t break it down by science fiction and fantasy.
I agree with GreenWyvern. For example, LeGuin (based on her nonfiction that I’ve read) cared about fantasy as a genre, and about science fiction, and did not just lump the two together indiscriminately.
Fantasy and SF are lumped together on the same shelves partly because there are so many authors who have written both (so that all their books can be shelved together), and partly because there are so many readers who are interested in both (though there are plenty who only want fantasy or who only want science fiction), and partly because the boundary between them is fuzzy enough that some books don’t clearly fall into one category and not the other (but some definitely do).
Here’s some data on authors in the 3rd quarter of 2019:
Young Adult F&SF
84.38% were written by women
9.38% were written by men
(The rest are couples, non-binary, or unknown)
Adult Fantasy
44.07% were written by women
49.15% were written by men
Adult SF
34.29% were written by women
54.29% were written by men
I have heard women F&SF writers complain about their work being assumed to be YA, even when it isn’t
Why is dilation-less FTL not fantasy, but the Force is? I don’t see any distinction.
I’m basing it solely on being a close watcher of the field for 50 years. It’s an impression from a number of variables: the female names active in the field, the titles that show up as top sellers, the fan activity online, the names nominated for awards, the people on panels at conventions, and general gossip and discussion of f&sf.
There are no reliable surveys of readership that I’d put much faith in. Either they are surveys of some segment of readers, self-selected online surveys, or surveys that don’t ask the right questions. I’ve been saying for years - decades, at this point - that publishing is terrible at doing its job of surveying customers. This fault is endemic in art and popular culture generally - when do you ever see surveys of music, movies, or comics - because of the excuse that each new work is a unique and separate product. That would be a valid excuse if it weren’t obvious that the suits based their product choices on something that looks like data about likes and trends but was really pulled out of someone’s ass.
I just saw your recent post. Can I ask where you got those numbers from?
The growth in YA f&sf has so overwhelmed the field that everything else sometimes seems like an appendage. I think that skews all perceptions.
I linked to the source above. It looks like it’s basically taken from Tor and compiled by someone on reddit/r/Fantasy.
I have no idea how reliable it is, but as you say, it’s difficult to find any reliable data at all.
2016 data from Statistica, compiled by author D. Wallace Peach (who appears to write adult fantasy):
Reader Surveys by Genre and Gender
I was curious as to whether most of my readers are male or female and discovered that Fantasy is one genre that’s almost evenly matched.