There are a number of books / series that blur the lines between SF and Fantasy by presenting the trappings of one (usually fantasy) but claiming roots in the other. Quite a few are post-apocalyptic to some degree – variants on the Pern back-story: “we used to be star-farers but everyone has forgotten that”, and some do not reveal the back-story up front, leaving the revelation of scientific origins until later in the story.
A couple of examples off the top of my head would be Tepper’s The True Game, Brust’s Dragaeran novels, and Zelazny’s Lord of Light. (The more I think about it the more of these come to mind – I guess it’s a fairly common theme… Saberhagen’s Ardneh series, Gemmel’s Sipstrassi books, Stasheff’s Warlock series, (Prof.) Barker’s Tékumel books… and I’ll bet there are more on my bookshelf).
Pern seems (to me) to go the other way; stating an SF origin but then making little or no effort to be anything but fantasy – if it walks like a dragon and breathes like a dragon… (although I haven’t read the more recent books).
The market was very different in 1968 when Lord of Light came out. Lord of the Rings was just beginning to catch on, Lancer was reissuing the Conan books, but it was kind of cultish, and Ballantine was reprinting classic fantasy like by Lord Dunsany. People who wanted to do something like fantasy often put it into sf like settings. Call Me Conrad is an earlier example of Zelazny playing with myth.
I have no idea of what she wanted to do at the beginning. She was writing for Analog, which back then was the best paying if not the most prestigious market. I don’t know if she presented it to Campbell the way it got published or if she presented it as more of a fantasy and he made her add the back story. I’m pretty sure that after fantasy caught on her readership cared little about the sf aspects and a lot more about the dragon and magic stuff. Pern never did anything for me, even from the beginning.
To show how far things have changed, though I’m way behind in my sf magazine reading (like decades behind) I started reading issues from early last year. In one Analog was a story about a supposed female MIT physics grad student who got sucked into an alternate fantasy like world, where she got to wear frilly dresses and is swept off her feet by a hulky prince. There was a few lines of pseudo-physics, but it was mostly a fantasy Harlequin. That sound you hear is John Campbell spinning in his grave. This thing made Pern sound like a Stephen Baxter book. Bletcho.
“Fantasy” as a name is a little off-putting since it can sound so sexual. But I can’t get the SF, sci-fi, skiffy, speculative fiction, whatnot hullaballoo (uh, not that this is much of a hullaballoo).
If people have a low opinion of the genre, changing the name isn’t going to help that. They’ll just start equating “SF” with the crap and then you have to come up with yet another name.
There was amusing little poem in Isaac Asimov’s magazine years and years ago that neatly pointed out that “Sci-Fi” is phonetically incorrect as an abbreviation for “science fiction” because the first syllable of “fiction” isn’t pronounced “fike”.
Huh. I’ve always pronounced fidelity, and heard it it pronounced, “fy…” Backtracked influence from “hi-fi”? I’m not quite old enough to have grown up hearing stereos called “hi-fi”, though.
> If people have a low opinion of the genre, changing the name isn’t going to
> help that.
It’s not changing the name. The abbreviation “s. f.” came along first. It was later that the name “sci-fi” was invited. It wasn’t originally created as an insult, but it soon was adopted largely by people who disliked science fiction and knew no other abbreviation for it. Since the term was used mostly by people who didn’t know much of anything about science fiction and often actively disliked fans, it’s not surprising then that many fans decided that there was no reason to change to using “sci-fi” rather than “s. f.,” since that would be adopting the term often used by people who disliked science fiction.
Incidentally, it’s far from clear to me that the people who insult science fiction are literati. Once again, I urge you to read the columns called “How Others See Us” in Dave Langford’s newsletter Ansible. The people who dislike science fiction haven’t, in general, read both science fiction and literary fiction and then decided that they like literary fiction better. Often they don’t even read very much of anything. Some of them seem like the sort of people who always have to have someone to hate, and they decided that science fiction fans are an easy target for their hate.
In any case, when you’re objecting to a term not because it’s inherently pejorative but because it has associations you (this is a general you) don’t like, it’s going to be a tough row to hoe to get others to be mindful of it. The Trekkie/Trekker divide mentioned above is extremely similar. (Even when I was a Trek fangirl, I couldn’t understand what made people so het up about it. I never called myself either.)
If the name were something like “nerdlit” or “ner-fi” (pronounced ner-fie) or “people who can’t get a date fiction” or something inherently nasty, I could get it. But even if the majority of people who use “sci-fi” mean something mean by it, they mean something mean about the genre, not the name.
In the late '50s early '60s many comedians did hi-fi bits. I have examples from Spike Jones, Flanders and Swann and even Lenny Bruce. None pronounced fidelity fydelity. I’m sure the fy came from rhyming with high.
I don’t agree about people who dislike sf using sci-fi, I do agree that they don’t know much about it. My impression from articles in the paper about “sci-fi” is that it is treated as mindless entertainment, though fun, and these writers have never looked at the classics. Many of them are only vaguely aware written sf exists outside of stuff that became movies. Given the percentage of shelf space devoted to Star Trek and Star Wars novelizations, I can hardly blame them these days.
A few might actually realize that Philip K. Dick is considerably better than the movies made from his work, but now he is in The Library of America he might have been elevated to that spot occupied by Bradbury of sf writers who aren’t really sf writers.
As for the literary side, New Maps of Hell came out 50 years ago, right? It’s taking longer than we thought.
Thanks! And now you know my reading habits as a younger man, though I thought I had given up on Knave by 1989, what with having a regular girlfriend by then.
To me, SciFi means referring to movies, whereas SF is referring to books. SyFy is just stupid. I only knew about the difference between the two terms from reading my dad’s old Asimov pulp magazines. Otherwise I’d never have heard the difference.
I really despise that Fantasy is always lumped in with the science fiction section at book stores. They’re completely different genres, people!
re: Pern- granting that in a loose sense all fiction is fantasy, but going by alternate realities explained by magic vs. science as dividing line…
The dragons of Pern were genetically engineered to fight the thread (aliens) and to have an empathetic if not telepathic connection to their riders. So even if the current inhabitants of Pern have forgotten their origins, and are living in a fantasy world, it came about through science. That’s a credible dividing line for me in a grey area. Just my $.02…
It’s mainly that it’s not at all uncommon for fans of one genre to also enjoy the other. They’re both “geek” genres I mean, it’s no coincidence that roleplaying games come mainly in two flavors: fantasy settings and science fiction settings. You don’t see too many “western” or “romance” RPGs.
There’s another commonality between the two genres: in both, the stories are, at their cores, about the “here and now”. By setting the stories in a scientific “future” or a magical “past”, they allow the reader to step outside and look at the issues more objectively.
I mean, it’s no coincidence that roleplaying games come mainly in two flavors: fantasy settings and science fiction settings. You don’t see too many “western” or “romance” RPGs.