Christopher Stasheff’s The Warlock in Spite of Himself and sequels.
Piers Anthony’s Apprentice Adept series (much as I hate Anthony).
Isaac Asimov’s “Azazel” short stories. Asimov rationalized them by calling Azazel someone from another dimension, but the stories wouldn’t have changed in the slightest if he called him a genie.
Doesn’t happen. The ground rules for fantasy are set early on (and it’s at least as difficult to create a logical fantasy world as it does to create a scientifically accurate world).
Sure they show science fiction. They are just SF that are works of the imagination, not hard SF, which is just a small portion of a genre. SF is a wide-ranging genre, but your definition is exceedingly narrow.
Ultimately, though, science fiction is a form of fantasy. It just pretends that there’s a “scientific” explanation for the fantastic elements. There’s no real difference between the two genres (most SF authors writer fantasy and vice versa), since the stories are very similar. Science fiction also picks and chooses rules and – let’s face it – even most hard SF writers use things that are impossible in any realistic sense (warp drive, for instance).
It’s fine if you like to stick to hard sf/space opera. That’s no different from reading only romance novels. But since SF and fantasy are two sides of the same coin, there’s no reason to separate the genres.
There are actually quite a few books that are Science Fiction and Fantasy. Anne McCaffrey has a lot of them but even Robert Heinlein has Glory Road & Number of the Beast which sure seem to qualify. Then as mentioned above, there is Clark’s Law.
As to Star Wars, though poor science it is Science Fiction. It is easier for books stores to lump them together as a great number of readers are indeed fans of both sides of speculative fiction.
It also dates back to when the average book store had one small section for the 2. I know my local book store had only half a rack devoted to Sci-fi and Fantasy.
Pointy eared dudes, psychics and warriors with fancy swords are obviously fantasy unless they’re on a spaceship, then they’re obviously science fiction.
A library I worked in changed the titles of the categories to “Historical Fiction”, “Contemporary Fiction”, “Westerns” and “Imaginative Fiction (IF)”. The librarian went on to point out that IF fiction is for cases where the story works IF we have FTL or IF we have magic, or so on.
The industry standard now seem to be to call fantasy & science fiction SF (Speculative Fiction). As folks have pointed out, the vast majority of science fiction is as much fantasy as explicit fantasy is. Since there are only a few ways to make manned space travel outside of a very narrow range viable, and all of the ones that are actually real science-based are kind of tedious (suspension, generation ships, etc), the “space warp” and FTL solutions are much more popular, and they may as well be fantasy/magic.
I have seen it said that Sci fi is about Extrapolation and Fantasy is about Morality. That seems to work for me. For one thing is explains why Star Wars is really Fantasy with Sci Fi trappings.
I hate it when a library or bookstore files all fiction together. Some days I want to read science fiction, sometimes I want a mystery, sometimes I want fantasy. Filing all fiction under fiction is like filing all nonfiction under nonfiction…it makes it much harder for the reader to find what s/he’s looking for. If I want to learn more about life in a medieval castle, I don’t want to read about the history of quilt-making (or at least, not right at this moment). I want to go to the section that I’m interested in, and compare the various books that I might want to read.
To me, that is so limiting, because I’m not going to find what I want to read by someone else’s definition of the boxes it goes under. I need a much more freeform browse experience…the one that gets you from David Eddings to Georgette Heyer (both in the genre “easy to read fun crap”) or from Jane Austen to Isabel Allende.
(Its why I am frustrated with bookstores - in the current age, I have far more luck clicking on Amazon or Goodreads or through wikipedia - where I have way more selection, and a browse process that can get me from Austen to Allende).
Speaking of Allende, genrefication gets really difficult when you start talking about her, or Salman Rushdie, or - well lets say that the line between reality and fantasy in non- Western literature is someone less sharp than we are used to. Is House of Spirits or Midnight’s Children fantasy? For that matter, some of the Western writers blur their lines. Michael Chabon - what IS The Yiddish Policeman’s Union - it won a Hugo, but I wouldn’t put it on an SF shelf.
Then we have different needs. I usually have an idea of the genre that I want to read next. Maybe I’ve overdosed on urban fantasy. Maybe I scored a dozen Peter Wimseys at the used book store, and I don’t want to read any more mystery for a while. I can get a freeform browse experience by just wandering down the aisles, but it’s harder to find the genre that I’m in the mood for if everything is filed under fiction. By your reasoning, why even bother to alpha by author?
I think your cynicism is excessive. There are plenty of quite successful F/SF authors right now writing books that are not about large muscled people with weapons. For every David Weber there’s a China Mieville.
I came to the conclusion a while back that to really organize my books the way I’d like, I’d need seven-dimensional bookshelves. I want all of my Asimovs together, and I want all of my science fiction together, and I want all of my nonfiction together, and all of my fantasy, and all of my poetry, and all of my classics, and all of my favorites, and so on… But any two of those categories will have overlap.
Nowadays, though, we’re getting to the point where seven-dimensional bookshelves, or something close to them, are possible. When all the organizing is done on a computer, it’s no problem, and takes up essentially zero space, to have a work placed in all of the categories where it belongs. You then read off from the computer what physical shelf the physical book is stored on (which need not have any particular significance, as long as you know where it is), go straight to that shelf, and take it down to read it.
It’s not just bookstores that lump Science Fiction and Fantasy together. As other posters have already pointed out, there are many authors who write in both genres. (Hence, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America—if the authors themselves aren’t complaining, why should you?) The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction has been around for over sixty years. The abbreviation “SF” is commonly used, since it can stand not only for “science fiction” but “speculative fiction,” which is more inclusive.
Sounds like you love hard science fiction, and/or fiction that is in some way about science and scientists. This is a perfectly legitimate preference, and a good deal of classic science fiction fits this category and was written by actual scientists (or at least people with scientific training).
For better or for worse, some “science fiction” fans (and even writers) don’t much care about science; they just like spaceships and robots and the “flavor” of futuristic societies.
On the other hand, some fiction that’s not normally thought of as “science fiction” is about science or scientists. (For example, medical dramas or crime dramas that make heavy use of medical science or forensic science, respectively.)
Some books/authors are a lot more conscientious about laying down and then playing by The Rules of their world, but the line between those that are and those that aren’t is not the same as the line between Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Bradbury’s stories were right in line with other things in the magazines he was publishing (which were not the big three.) Except he wrote better. And was a bit less consistent.
The characters being able to see Earth blow up with their naked eyes is far more fantastic than any Martians.
In any case, if you write this kind of stuff out of science fiction, you also write out large chunks of sf history.
Thinking about Bradbury makes me think of his story “The Veldt.” That is a piece of technology which does impossible things. Is it a fantasy since it is impossible or do you cook up a “scientific” explanation? If the former, remember almost the exact kind of thing happens on ST:TNG. Call that fantasy?
I’d much rather skip over books I’m not interested in to avoid having to look in two different sections for books I consider misplaced - and someone will disagree with any decision the poor book store clerk makes. If you can’t tell from the cover, you can tell from the blurb.
In any case, I consider Unknown style logical fantasy a lot closer to science fiction than the latest Lord of the Rings clone.
To me its not so much the flavor as it is the possibilities. You can tell more interesting stories, say more interesting things about humanity when you’re not constrained by the real world.
LOVE Jim C Hines! Love the libriomancer series! The other limiting factor is that he can only pull something out of a book which can fit the page dimensions. So he can’t pull out a car or a cannon. As was said, he does a great job of setting up his rules and then seeing what the main character can, and will, do!
I also enjoyed his Step Sister Scheme book! I need to read more in that series.
/hijack
A bit more on topic, I think that having sub genres is better than fewer classifications or one. I do agree that some series cross over or are cataloged in weird ways. We only got into Urban Fantasy about six years ago (with Dresden Files) and have been flabbergasted at how much is out there and how it is labeled. There is a series about a vampire queen (Queen Betsy) that is labeled romance! Is it? I suppose. But it’s also urban fantasy.
I guess, at the end, I’m with the person who said that in our age, we need to tag books with every label that fits them! But that only helps for online or database stuff. Not sure what to do about the physical books. (We also switched to ereaders for all of our fiction reading and some nonfiction.
Maybe what we need are more places like Goodreads or places that discuss the books, more than just a seller like Amazon, where we can find out if we will like a book or not? I agree that most books don’t fit neatly into only one category and you never know if you will like something until you try it.
