Do’h! I picked a particularly poor example; that’s why you see no distinction.
As I was writing about Star Wars I was thinking entirely about the ambient tech throughout their society and almost every scene in the movie. I totally spaced it (heh;) ) about the Force, the Jedi, and all that stuff. :smack:
In fact the Force is exactly the kind of magic wand waving I had in mind when thinking of and writing about Harry Potter.
As you and @GreenWyvern rightly say, Star Wars is as much SF as fantasy. Arguably more fantasy since all the real “Cavalry saves the day!” drama involves the magick defeating the tech. The tech dominates much of the visual, whereas the magick dominates the story.
I really need to stay out of literature threads; I just show off my blinkered ignorance. But at least I’m polite about it.
But when Heinlein writes about psychic powers that are rooted in the brain, and evolved with humanity, and can be trained and strengthened, wasn’t that considered science fiction? why is it science fiction if you tie it to human evolution, but fantasy if it’s in Star Wars, presented as an observable, measurable force?
When Han Solo gives that summary of the Force in The Force Awakens, he’s speaking as a sceptical empiricist who is convinced that the Force is a real and observable something. He doesn’t know how it works, but it’s there, he’s observed it. Why is it that postulating that something exists and is observable and measurable, even if the mechanism isn’t known*, is considered fantasy?
we skip over the midchlorians, but if that is accepted, why doesn’t that provide a scientific explanation for the Force, on par with hand-waved explanations about hyper-space FTL?
Yes, but I’m still not following the distinction. You’ve stated that the Force is fantasy, suggesting there’s a clear boundary. What is that clear boundary?
As far as I can tell from those posts, by convention FTL is considered hard, even though it’s usually just hand-waved, but mental powers are considered soft or fantasy.
It’s a story-vs.-setting issue, as described above. Star Wars is a fantasy story in a science fiction setting, which according to your personal definition can mean it’s either, or both.
It has knights and princesses and prophecies and places of power. It has all the trappings of fantasy, and the story structure of a fantasy saga.
It also meets my own personal definition of fantasy: subjectivity. The mental forces it portrays have inherent morality - a “light side” and a “dark side”. That, to me, is one defining difference between science and magic: science is objective, magic is subjective. There’s no such thing as “evil” science, only science used for evil, while “dark” magic is inherently dark no matter what you do with it. Science doesn’t know right from wrong; magic does. The Force is magic.
Why do you think the SW fandom completely rejected the concept of Midichorians, so much so that Lucas never mentioned them again? Because they knew he shoving getting science fiction into their fantasy story, and they didn’t like it.
That’s because, in principle, FTL and wormholes are allowed by Relativity. It doesn’t contradict known science to imagine that future advances in physics and technology might make FTL travel possible.
Mental powers, on the other hand, do not have any scientific backing whatsoever.
Hard and soft are not rigid categories. It’s a gray scale, not black and white. 90% or 95% hard is usually considered hard enough to be classified as hard SF.
Asking the same question again and again is not going to result in a different answer. You may disagree, but that’s how many people see it.
Back in the 40s and 50s, serious sf writers seriously believed in psi powers. It was hard to get a story into Astounding without them. (Others thought they were nuts, of course.) A probably even larger number of authors thought that other planets in the solar system would be livable and that easy travel to those planets would become routine. And everybody assumed that atomic rockets were the next step. That baked a lot of concepts into hard sf.
The numbers from Tor are interesting, but even though Tor is huge, it’s a small part of the whole field.
And then there’s even “hard fantasy”, like Master of the Five Magics, written by physicist Lyndon Hardy. It’s magic, but all of the magic follows rigid rules and constraints, such that there are some things that thaumaturgy, say, or alchemy, simply can or cannot do (though there are some things that thaumaturgy can’t do but alchemy can, and so on, and so a master, or even dabbler, of all of them has a decided edge over a master of only one).
What’s the difference between artful nudity and pornography?
You know it when you see it.
I think some of you are trying to get overly litigious about what constitutes “science-based” fictional elements and and stories. For 95% of the world, if it takes place in a fictional world that looks vaguely like a specific period in the Earth’s past…it’s fantasy. If it takes place in a world that looks vaguely like a potential version of Earth’s future, it’s Sci-Fi. It’s imprecise and unsatisfying, but I’m not sure there’s ever going to be a definition that’s really useful.
