They really aren't all that different from each other. One is imaginary things that might one day be possible, and the other is imaginary things that won't ever be possible.
And even then, that can swap between the genres. Scifi often contains FTL tech, which from what we know is almost certainly impossible so it's actually more like fantastical magic. Meanwhile, fantasy can have hard rules for its magic, in which case it acts more like technology that we haven't discovered yet. I haven't read it yet myself, but I've heard of Wizard's Bane, where a programmer is transported to a magical land and becomes really powerful because he treats the magic system like a new programming language.
Other things I've noticed is that scifi tends to involve spaceships and is more mystery oriented, whereas fantasy tends to take place on the ground and is more hero's journey oriented. But even these aren't defining traits. Plenty of scifi books involve investigating alien planets and many contain the hero's journey (including the original Star Wars if you count that as scifi). Meanwhile plenty of fantasy books are on some sort of ship (Narnia - Voyage of the Dawn Treader) and many are more mystery oriented (Harry Potter for example).
Personally, I think a better line of division is hard vs soft. Was the world created first with actual rules and the characters molded to fit the world (Dune, Lord of the Rings)? Or were the characters created first and the rules are bent to create the story that is being desired to tell (Star Trek with its technobabble, Star Wars's prequels and sequels, the entire universe of Harry Potter)?
They are different if you like sci-fi and dislike fantasy which OP apparently does as do I, on the grand scheme of things not a big deal but it does get in the way when specifically looking for new sci-fi to read.
To be fair, that's a subjective difference in opinion, not an objective difference in type. Many people like "hard" sci-fi but not "soft" sci-fi, but that doesn't make them fundamentally distinct genres.
By the numbers, Star Wars is far more grounded as science fiction that Star Trek, but people will insist the former is at best merely "science fantasy." It's really all just vibes.
> By the numbers, Star Wars is far more grounded as science fiction that Star Trek, but people will insist the former is at best merely "science fantasy." It's really all just vibes.
Of course Star Trek has its implausible moments (planets where everyone acts like Romans, or 1920s gangsters, and the like), but the Star Wars "Force" is literally magic, and the heroes are fighting an Emperor who is very little different from someone like Sauron. The only reason why it is isn't considered fantasy are the space ships.
Sure, the Jedi are "magic." But that's one magic element in a universe that's otherwise grounded in science fiction elements. Aliens. Spaceships. Robots. I'll see you the Jedi and raise you Trelane, the Q, the Douwd, the Traveller and a dozen other aliens that are no less "magic." Or in the case of the Q, far more magic than the Jedi.
The Jedi are telepaths (which Trek also has) and telekinetics (which Trek also has) and can predict the future (which exists in Trek.)
And they connect to a mystical all-encompassing energy force... which, ok. Trek doesn't have that. Oh wait they do, it's called "subspace."
And the entire Trek universe runs on fantastical nonsense. None of the physics is actual physics, it's subspace and technobabble. The galaxy is surrounded by a mystical barrier and God lives in the middle of it. There are wild magic fields in space that can do literally anything, and one has a face. You can travel back in time if you go around the sun fast enough like Superman. If Star Trek is science fiction, where is the science?
To say one is fantasy and the other isn't is simply a matter of taste.
>and the heroes are fighting an Emperor who is very little different from someone like Sauron
If your complaint is that Star Trek doesn't feature a single, universal villain... fair, but that isn't a fantasy only thing, science fiction has plenty of Big Bad Evil Guys. If it's that Star Wars' villains are just broad caricatures MF the Klingons are literally Space Mongols. Romulans are Space Romans. Cardassians are Space Nazis. Ferengi are Space Jews. The Borg Queen is basically Sexy Sauron.
You could take the spaceships away from Star Trek and map many Star Trek races to a common fantasy race archetype. Vulcans are elves, Romulans are Dark Elves, Klingons are Orcs, Ferengi are Dwarves or Goblins, Cardassians are snake people from the desert and the Borg are insect people.
It's not on the quality level of these books, but the Off to Be the Wizard series of books are humorous programming-as-magic tales that skirt the sci-fi/fantasy line. [The fulcrum of the story is that there is a computer file "out there" that reflects reality; those who find it can edit it to do all kinds of "magic". Hilarity ensues.]
I never find it helpful when people say they aren't that different from each other.
Sure there may be some similarities if you want to take an analytical view of the genres, but there's an awful lot of people who like one but not the other.
The problem is once you look at the definitions it's actually quite hard to exactly define what's Fantasy vs Sci-fi. It's more a venn diagram, than strictly separate genres and everyone has their own definition of which is which. So when someone likes one but not the other, it's hard to discuss books because what one person considers sci-fi, another may consider fantasy pretending to be sci-fi, thus the complaints of the original commenter.
There are definitely things that blur the line and cross genres, or things that may meet one person's definition but not another's.
I do agree it would be impossible to provide an entirely objective division that everyone would go along with.
Even so, I'd love it if all the "medieval dragon witch ghost magic spirit quest" stories could be placed on a different shelf of the bookshop to the "black hole generation ship dark forest faster than light" ones :)
The Pern novels by Anne McCaffrey feature noble warriors riding genetically-engineered telepathic fire-breathing dragons in a feudal society protecting an alien planet's human space colony from toxic spores. Which shelf do I put them on?
Perhaps the author has a voice here? McCaffrey always insisted they were science fiction. Pern was colonized by space travelers desiring a non-technological lifestyle.
"The Cyberiad" by Lem is full of "medieval dragon witch ghost magic spirit quest" stories, but most of the characters in it are robots, and they travel through space.
"Inversions" by Banks is "just" a medieval quest story with magic unless you know The Culture stories, in which case is a interstellar politics story with high tech.
So even those categorisations aren't that straightforward (I would put both in the SF category, but Inversions is tricky - someone unfamiliar with Banks could read it as a straight-up fantasy novel, and if you don't like fantasy it might feel tedious)
I'm good with a few weird edge cases. Just let me find the majority of sci fi books without having to trudge through vast numbers of definitively fantasy books!
The thing is, it's not a "few weird edge cases". But this seems like an odd "problem" to me anyway - I must admit I've never been in the situation of having to trudge through vast numbers of definitively fantasy books to find SF books anywhere...
The majority are really not that hard to categorise.
In the UK at least, fantasy and sci fi occupy the same shelving. Takes me ages pulling books out of the shelf, and immediately rejecting because they are fantasy.
The majority of the books are fantasy, not sci fi. Fantasy seems to have a much bigger audience in the UK anyway.
I agree to an extent but they are usefully kept somewhat separate. The introduction to the great "Encyclopedia of Fantasy" put this well. Re: Fantasy :
"Its roots go much deeper into history, and its concerns are more archetypal" [1]
There can be a lot of cross-over of course. Right now, "fantasy" (perhaps of the "romantic" variety) seems to be a juggernaut and is taking over.
Fiction is a huge, unwieldy word that's mostly useful as the converse of non-fiction. It communicates virtually nothing useful to a potential reader, which is the entire purpose of genre categorizations.
That's inaccurate. SF/Fantasy contains elements which are not possible under the laws of physics, not anything imaginary. Literary fiction is also imaginary, but taking place in "our world".
(The lines get blurrier when talking about imagined historical fiction, or even things like alternative fiction.)
Strictly speaking you don't have to have elements not possible under the laws of physics. I would definitely call The Martian science fiction, but it doesn't really try to break any physical laws.
Even things like Tau Zero are using relativistic time dilation as the plot driver.
I agree, and sometimes the line is drawn between SF being "things that are theoretically possible" vs. Fantasy where things are impossible. But then you have things like Egan's Clockwork Trilogy, which is "what if the laws of physics actually worked a bit differently in this specific way" but which I assume anyone would consider SF. As opposed to Brandon Sanderson's books, which could be described in a similar way, but are usually categorized Fantasy.
At the end, it's mostly a marketing and feeling thing. As one of my favorite authors put it, the different between SF and Fantasy sometimes comes down to - are you putting a tree or a spaceship on the cover of your book?
I think some books can cross the threshold and be both, but the majority fall into one or the other category pretty easily. That would seem to apply to the linked authors' books from a cursory glance.
What would you say is the reason for categorising works differently? Can you see differences there or do you also think it's mostly marketing?
Sure, but my point being that saying SF/Fantasy contains elements that aren't possible is a too restrictive constraint - a whole lot of SF would fall outside of that category.
While Tau Zero that was mentioned elsewhere is believed to not match the laws of nature now, the science the entire plot rests on was considered scientifically plausible at the time it was written.
It was speculative, but it explicitly did not set out to make up a world in which some scientific law is different.
In other words, that isn't a defining factor of SF.
The speculative nature of it is closer to it - hence the shared label of speculative fiction often used to group SF and fantasy.
Which, let's be fair - most science fiction does to some degree.
Even the "hard" sci-fi tends to comprise of the author's one area of expertise or hyperfixation while everything else is nonsense. You'll have descriptions in intricate detail of how the spacecraft are engineered down to the self-sealing stembolts, but biology is basically magic.
A common sf theme is "here is this change to the laws of physics, what would our universe then look like". Eg Arrival (and the story it's based on), tons of books by Egan, any book with FTL.
Ursula Le Guin in her preface to The Left Hand of Darkness [1], describes Science Fiction as "descriptive." She invents "elaborately circumstantial lies" as a means of describing what she sees as some truth in our being. The full quote:
> I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.
This is how I think about both science fiction and fantasy. Elements of world building are different, even within each sub-genre, but this element of incorporating elements that are inconsistent with our world to tell stories is common to both. It's also why the term "speculative fiction" persists: a category that subsumes sci-fi and fantasy.
They're usually the same thing, differing only thematically. Some "hard" sci-fi may be completely grounded in reality, but for most the "sci" is just a background setting. Many space operas are even more fantastical than wizards throwing fireballs at each other. Some fantasy writers go far out of their way to build coherent worlds governed by physical laws just as strict as our own. Both/Either/The genre(s) use the flexibility of an imagined world, whether that's an imagined future or some land of myth, to contrast with the present, and as with the fantastical myths of old, to make moral or political points that couldn't be so easily expressed if weighed down by history and nuance.
Practically speaking, they're lumped together for a few reasons:
1. Many people who like one genre also like the other.
2. Many authors write in both genres.
3. There's a lot of similarity in the genres, and lots of things that are hard to categorize. More true lately btw.
Just as an aside though, I personally was an avid almost-only-SF reader for the first 30-ish years of my life, but lately have been reading a lot of fantasy as well. I highly recommend trying, especially more modern fantasy - I feel like the lines are even blurrier between them today, and a lot of the best work today has shifted from SF to fantasy. (I still love SF and there's a lot of great SF as well, to be clear.)
Bookstores like to make things easy for themselves by defining categories (a la Seeing Like A State), especially due to the perceived overlap between the readership of the two categories as the weird books the nerdy guys read.
While that may have been true historically, fantasy has a new, blossoming, largely female readership, although you could consider this to be overloading the term 'fantasy' as these new BookTok books seem to have little in common with the old school sword and sorcery.
How would you classify The Foundation? Classic sci-fi novel, right? But it has telepaths.. By modern standards, telepathy, empaths, telekinesis.. that's all magic. Fantasy. But in 20th century science fiction it was extremely common.
Only for the earlier parts of that century. By the late 70s to 80s the scientific consensus was coming down hard against parapsychology but it continued to be featured in science fiction for quite some time. It was still going reasonably strong well into the 90s with popular media like Star Trek, Babylon 5, etc. You can still see some traces of it today, to an extent it has become a part of the genre that persists for legacy reasons, respect for or reference to older media in the genre.
If it's called telepathy it's sci-fi, if it's called magic it's fantasy. Learn the rules!
On a more serious note, yeah scifi and fantasy can usually be distinguished, I get why it so often gets lumped in together as speculative fiction, even though it annoys me when I'm looking for one and have to sift through the other.
There's no clear cut line. Wizards in one, starships in the other, but there's lots of magic in sci fi and lots of space in fantasy. The two genres meld together into a continuum and so it's only fair when some people classify them together. Discrete classification of continuous phenomena will always be a bit subjective.
I imagine one of the reasons is that the master himself, Arthur C Clarke, said it himself with his 3 laws. The third of which is: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The distiction isn't clear anyway. Some "fantasy" book are more scientific than some "sci-fi" books - if they have a system of magic then is that any difference to FTL travel, or Vinge's Region's of Thought?
There's a lot of overlap of varying degree of trickiness that makes it more of a spectrum than a clear binary, and so it often makes sense to treat them as a such.
In particular, SF plots often mix in significant fantasy themes to the point that they are sometimes a majority of the book.
Banks' Inversions is a Culture novel (SF) that intentionally reads as fantasy if you don't know the Culture setting, while leaving the reader to infer the SF setting if you do.
"Grass" by Sheri Tepper, or "Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula Le Guin are other examples. Both happen on other planets, but while both have SF settings, most of the stories fits better into fantasy tropes.
Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep is very explicit SF at "top level", but a significant part of the plot is closer to fantasy, happening on a planet in a pseudo-medieval setting.
Others like Stanisław Lem's The Cyberiad, while more explicit SF, also intentionally mix the two - being written as fantasy in a mock-medieval inspired proto-feudal society, where the characters engage in typical fantasy-inspired quests, with dragons, princes and princesses, with medieval weaponry, but with most characters being robots and with access to space travel...
There's a lot of overlap where authors toys with the distinctions, or outright mocks them.
I'd argue that the setting doesn't make "A Fire On The Deep" anything close to a fantasy. The Tines are a non-human species at a certain stage of development that's similar to humanity's medieval period. There's no more fantasy there than Michael Crichton's "Timeline."
Might be based on Arthur C. Clarke's aphorism, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Ray Kurzweil uses this as a major motif for "The Singularity is Near" about how Harry Potter can be rewritten with all magic replaced with "advanced" devices with handwaved theoretical feasibility explanations. A more specific issue than sci-fi vs. fantasy is the "hard/soft" sci-fi delineation.
I know what you mean, but the boundary can get blurry in some cases.
A Canticle for Liebowitz for example mostly feels like some kind of fantasy but for the fact that the reader knows it's set in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland.
Big chunks of the Peter F. Hamilton Void series is basically more or less set in a slightly magical Early Modern Venice.
The Laundry Files is strongly and deliberately in the middle ground of technology and magic, despite being ostensibly set in the present-day.
Stone Spring is an alternate history set in the Stone Age, but is not substantially more ahistorical than a non-fantasy historical novel about a person who didn't exist in reality doing things that never actually happened. Perhaps there's more focus on the engineering rather than fighting, romance, politics, murder and whatever else historical novels often revolve around, but building is as valid a human thing to do as plotting a regicide, say.
Generally, the concepts in both are the same: construct an "unreal" world and set a story in there, often with a projection of real-world issues onto the hypothetical substrate. Often the only real difference is if the unreal element is driven by magic, technology or a small change in a historical event. Sometimes it's a mixture. Sometimes the technology is treated as magic because the users don't understand it. Sometimes the magic is treated as a technology. Sometimes the historical divergence was thousands of years ago, sometimes it has only just happened in the story.
It would probably be more accurate to lump the whole lot under something generic like "speculative fiction" but that's not really a well-known term and has a slightly different meaning that blends into things like historical settings which may not be generally considered fantasy.
> A Canticle for Liebowitz for example mostly feels like some kind of fantasy but for the fact that the reader knows it's set in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland.
You might compare The Sword of Shannara, which is a character-for-character, scene-for-scene copy of Lord of the Rings, but which is technically set in the postapocalyptic future (it's easy to read the book without noticing this) rather than the legendary past.
Harumi Marukami and Han Kang count as fantasy. (I’d argue so does Ian Banks.) Read Tolkien with a hard eye towards rules, meanwhile, and you find a universe that is largely consistent in the Unseen over the Seen, which pretty neatly maps to invisible physics guiding visible phenomena.
I think the technological focus of Banks makes a lot of his novels firmly scifi, but he also certainly toyed with the overlap, with fantasy-like settings for parts of the plot in some novels, as well as "Inversions" being effectively intentionally a fantasy novel where only the readers (potential) external knowledge of The Culture sets it in an SF setting.
Why? Because there’s technology somewhere? Why doesn’t magical realism through a cell phone, for example, count?
The line between sci-if and fantasy is often arbitrary, with a lot of it coming down to readers’ self-perceived identities than anything having to do with the text. What counts as tech or magic, moreover, comes down to priors and perspective. (Harry Potter and Star Trek are on similar levels of technobabble, for instance.)
Then I would say that you are engaging in equivocation, using a definition of "fantasy" different than the one applicable as a genre label in discussing genre labels.
I do not understand the praise that PHM or Andy Weir get in general. I hate the way he writes.
Characters are all interchangeable and quirky because he says so. The science is tacked on like a chemistry teacher putting their kids to bed.
SciFi: Read Larry Niven and James Blish if you like feats of engineering, read Ann Leckie and Nancy Kress if you like characters defined by their actions.
Don’t tell me to be excited Andy just because you wrote “THAT’S SOO COOL!” after revealing some tidbit. I’m not a fucking child.
Weir gets a lot of praise because his writing is accessible. While I also demand a bit more from the sci-fi I enjoy in terms of their narratives providing thought-provoking moments and a certain depth of information that we tend to call "hard" sci-fi, I'm not about to take a dump on Weir's work. He knows what he can do and who his audience is, so he writes for them. That is, arguably, the smartest thing any author can do if they want to make a living at it.
I had the same vitriol you do for Weir toward Ernest Klein. Absolute shit author in my opinion...but my opinion doesn't matter. His first book was still a wild success with a movie adaptation despite having one of the weakest plots and and some of the flattest characters I have ever seen in print, dressed up in a patchwork coat of nostalgia, which is the only reason it had the mass appeal that it did. But the book was not written for me, was it?
I think we forget, sometimes, that authors don't really owe us anything, that they're trying to pay the bills doing what they do, so our approval means little and only makes us look like self-rightious jerks so I had to learn to let that go and just not read those books that weren't jiving with my tastes or demands. In the end, let people have their books they like because, well, at least they're still reading and not watching TikTok or whatever.
Not a fan of his other works but his short story The Egg (not sci-fi) is up there with Asimov's best shorts (I'm not a fan of Asimov's Foundation series either). I'm more of a fan of Frankenstein and Singin in the Rain sci-fi that explores the social/personal disruptions introduced by technology. Much like how Stand Alone Complex (not Ghost in the Shell) focused on the media ecology i.e. interfaces between human and machine interactions and some of their (social) network topologies (rhizome for example).
You would not believe how bad publisher data is. I run a book website, and Dune is often tagged nonfiction in the data we get from publishers. I don't think they know how to use the BISAC system the industry uses (https://bisg.org/page/BISACEdition). With Dune, they were marking it "AI," which is a nonfiction-only category.
They really aren't all that different from each other. One is imaginary things that might one day be possible, and the other is imaginary things that won't ever be possible.
And even then, that can swap between the genres. Scifi often contains FTL tech, which from what we know is almost certainly impossible so it's actually more like fantastical magic. Meanwhile, fantasy can have hard rules for its magic, in which case it acts more like technology that we haven't discovered yet. I haven't read it yet myself, but I've heard of Wizard's Bane, where a programmer is transported to a magical land and becomes really powerful because he treats the magic system like a new programming language.
Other things I've noticed is that scifi tends to involve spaceships and is more mystery oriented, whereas fantasy tends to take place on the ground and is more hero's journey oriented. But even these aren't defining traits. Plenty of scifi books involve investigating alien planets and many contain the hero's journey (including the original Star Wars if you count that as scifi). Meanwhile plenty of fantasy books are on some sort of ship (Narnia - Voyage of the Dawn Treader) and many are more mystery oriented (Harry Potter for example).
Personally, I think a better line of division is hard vs soft. Was the world created first with actual rules and the characters molded to fit the world (Dune, Lord of the Rings)? Or were the characters created first and the rules are bent to create the story that is being desired to tell (Star Trek with its technobabble, Star Wars's prequels and sequels, the entire universe of Harry Potter)?
They are different if you like sci-fi and dislike fantasy which OP apparently does as do I, on the grand scheme of things not a big deal but it does get in the way when specifically looking for new sci-fi to read.
To be fair, that's a subjective difference in opinion, not an objective difference in type. Many people like "hard" sci-fi but not "soft" sci-fi, but that doesn't make them fundamentally distinct genres.
By the numbers, Star Wars is far more grounded as science fiction that Star Trek, but people will insist the former is at best merely "science fantasy." It's really all just vibes.
> By the numbers, Star Wars is far more grounded as science fiction that Star Trek, but people will insist the former is at best merely "science fantasy." It's really all just vibes.
The best rage bait I've seen in years.
Search your heart, you know it to be true.
Of course Star Trek has its implausible moments (planets where everyone acts like Romans, or 1920s gangsters, and the like), but the Star Wars "Force" is literally magic, and the heroes are fighting an Emperor who is very little different from someone like Sauron. The only reason why it is isn't considered fantasy are the space ships.
>but the Star Wars "Force" is literally magic
Sure, the Jedi are "magic." But that's one magic element in a universe that's otherwise grounded in science fiction elements. Aliens. Spaceships. Robots. I'll see you the Jedi and raise you Trelane, the Q, the Douwd, the Traveller and a dozen other aliens that are no less "magic." Or in the case of the Q, far more magic than the Jedi.
The Jedi are telepaths (which Trek also has) and telekinetics (which Trek also has) and can predict the future (which exists in Trek.)
And they connect to a mystical all-encompassing energy force... which, ok. Trek doesn't have that. Oh wait they do, it's called "subspace."
And the entire Trek universe runs on fantastical nonsense. None of the physics is actual physics, it's subspace and technobabble. The galaxy is surrounded by a mystical barrier and God lives in the middle of it. There are wild magic fields in space that can do literally anything, and one has a face. You can travel back in time if you go around the sun fast enough like Superman. If Star Trek is science fiction, where is the science?
To say one is fantasy and the other isn't is simply a matter of taste.
>and the heroes are fighting an Emperor who is very little different from someone like Sauron
If your complaint is that Star Trek doesn't feature a single, universal villain... fair, but that isn't a fantasy only thing, science fiction has plenty of Big Bad Evil Guys. If it's that Star Wars' villains are just broad caricatures MF the Klingons are literally Space Mongols. Romulans are Space Romans. Cardassians are Space Nazis. Ferengi are Space Jews. The Borg Queen is basically Sexy Sauron.
You could take the spaceships away from Star Trek and map many Star Trek races to a common fantasy race archetype. Vulcans are elves, Romulans are Dark Elves, Klingons are Orcs, Ferengi are Dwarves or Goblins, Cardassians are snake people from the desert and the Borg are insect people.
It's not on the quality level of these books, but the Off to Be the Wizard series of books are humorous programming-as-magic tales that skirt the sci-fi/fantasy line. [The fulcrum of the story is that there is a computer file "out there" that reflects reality; those who find it can edit it to do all kinds of "magic". Hilarity ensues.]
Been a while since I read those! I love the description of how they try to figure out program the file to allow them to "fly / hover in place".
this sounds intriguing, thanks!
I never find it helpful when people say they aren't that different from each other.
Sure there may be some similarities if you want to take an analytical view of the genres, but there's an awful lot of people who like one but not the other.
The problem is once you look at the definitions it's actually quite hard to exactly define what's Fantasy vs Sci-fi. It's more a venn diagram, than strictly separate genres and everyone has their own definition of which is which. So when someone likes one but not the other, it's hard to discuss books because what one person considers sci-fi, another may consider fantasy pretending to be sci-fi, thus the complaints of the original commenter.
There are definitely things that blur the line and cross genres, or things that may meet one person's definition but not another's.
I do agree it would be impossible to provide an entirely objective division that everyone would go along with.
Even so, I'd love it if all the "medieval dragon witch ghost magic spirit quest" stories could be placed on a different shelf of the bookshop to the "black hole generation ship dark forest faster than light" ones :)
The Pern novels by Anne McCaffrey feature noble warriors riding genetically-engineered telepathic fire-breathing dragons in a feudal society protecting an alien planet's human space colony from toxic spores. Which shelf do I put them on?
Perhaps the author has a voice here? McCaffrey always insisted they were science fiction. Pern was colonized by space travelers desiring a non-technological lifestyle.
"The Cyberiad" by Lem is full of "medieval dragon witch ghost magic spirit quest" stories, but most of the characters in it are robots, and they travel through space.
"Inversions" by Banks is "just" a medieval quest story with magic unless you know The Culture stories, in which case is a interstellar politics story with high tech.
So even those categorisations aren't that straightforward (I would put both in the SF category, but Inversions is tricky - someone unfamiliar with Banks could read it as a straight-up fantasy novel, and if you don't like fantasy it might feel tedious)
I'm good with a few weird edge cases. Just let me find the majority of sci fi books without having to trudge through vast numbers of definitively fantasy books!
The thing is, it's not a "few weird edge cases". But this seems like an odd "problem" to me anyway - I must admit I've never been in the situation of having to trudge through vast numbers of definitively fantasy books to find SF books anywhere...
The majority are really not that hard to categorise.
In the UK at least, fantasy and sci fi occupy the same shelving. Takes me ages pulling books out of the shelf, and immediately rejecting because they are fantasy.
The majority of the books are fantasy, not sci fi. Fantasy seems to have a much bigger audience in the UK anyway.
I'm in the UK. We must frequent different places, because I've never had that problem.
Well, it's a reasonably big place. It would be surprising if we did frequent the same places!
It isn't that hard until they start to blur. Elves and goblins and magic, fantasy. Space, spaceships, technology, and aliens, sci-fi.
You could argue a lot of semantics but the majority of fantasy and sci fi books are not blending the two.
I agree to an extent but they are usefully kept somewhat separate. The introduction to the great "Encyclopedia of Fantasy" put this well. Re: Fantasy :
"Its roots go much deeper into history, and its concerns are more archetypal" [1]
There can be a lot of cross-over of course. Right now, "fantasy" (perhaps of the "romantic" variety) seems to be a juggernaut and is taking over.
[1]https://sf-encyclopedia.com/fe/introduction
(edit: spelling)
Checks out - for a while there, the future seemed appealing.. right now, I would guess most folks would prefer to escape into the past.
If the criterion is that it's to some extent imaginary, we already have a word for that: Fiction.
Fiction is a huge, unwieldy word that's mostly useful as the converse of non-fiction. It communicates virtually nothing useful to a potential reader, which is the entire purpose of genre categorizations.
Fiction is the superset of definitions here. Science Fiction and Fantasy are genres in that pool, with many other genres.
That's inaccurate. SF/Fantasy contains elements which are not possible under the laws of physics, not anything imaginary. Literary fiction is also imaginary, but taking place in "our world".
(The lines get blurrier when talking about imagined historical fiction, or even things like alternative fiction.)
Strictly speaking you don't have to have elements not possible under the laws of physics. I would definitely call The Martian science fiction, but it doesn't really try to break any physical laws.
Even things like Tau Zero are using relativistic time dilation as the plot driver.
(Haven't read Tau Zero.)
I agree, and sometimes the line is drawn between SF being "things that are theoretically possible" vs. Fantasy where things are impossible. But then you have things like Egan's Clockwork Trilogy, which is "what if the laws of physics actually worked a bit differently in this specific way" but which I assume anyone would consider SF. As opposed to Brandon Sanderson's books, which could be described in a similar way, but are usually categorized Fantasy.
At the end, it's mostly a marketing and feeling thing. As one of my favorite authors put it, the different between SF and Fantasy sometimes comes down to - are you putting a tree or a spaceship on the cover of your book?
I think some books can cross the threshold and be both, but the majority fall into one or the other category pretty easily. That would seem to apply to the linked authors' books from a cursory glance.
What would you say is the reason for categorising works differently? Can you see differences there or do you also think it's mostly marketing?
A whole lot of hard scifi seeks to explicitly avoid things that are not possible under the laws of physics.
Some does, but often the source of interest in the story is making up a world in which some scientific law is different.
Sure, but my point being that saying SF/Fantasy contains elements that aren't possible is a too restrictive constraint - a whole lot of SF would fall outside of that category.
While Tau Zero that was mentioned elsewhere is believed to not match the laws of nature now, the science the entire plot rests on was considered scientifically plausible at the time it was written.
It was speculative, but it explicitly did not set out to make up a world in which some scientific law is different.
In other words, that isn't a defining factor of SF.
The speculative nature of it is closer to it - hence the shared label of speculative fiction often used to group SF and fantasy.
Ignoring the "science" in Science Fiction there
Which, let's be fair - most science fiction does to some degree.
Even the "hard" sci-fi tends to comprise of the author's one area of expertise or hyperfixation while everything else is nonsense. You'll have descriptions in intricate detail of how the spacecraft are engineered down to the self-sealing stembolts, but biology is basically magic.
Not really, no.
A common sf theme is "here is this change to the laws of physics, what would our universe then look like". Eg Arrival (and the story it's based on), tons of books by Egan, any book with FTL.
The more common, more constrained, superset, if one wishes to insist on a shared label, is "speculative fiction".
Ursula Le Guin in her preface to The Left Hand of Darkness [1], describes Science Fiction as "descriptive." She invents "elaborately circumstantial lies" as a means of describing what she sees as some truth in our being. The full quote:
> I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.
This is how I think about both science fiction and fantasy. Elements of world building are different, even within each sub-genre, but this element of incorporating elements that are inconsistent with our world to tell stories is common to both. It's also why the term "speculative fiction" persists: a category that subsumes sci-fi and fantasy.
[1] Read that full preface here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/342990/the-left-hand...
"A novelist's business is lying....
and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That’s the truth!"
The preface is as valuable as the book that follows.
They're usually the same thing, differing only thematically. Some "hard" sci-fi may be completely grounded in reality, but for most the "sci" is just a background setting. Many space operas are even more fantastical than wizards throwing fireballs at each other. Some fantasy writers go far out of their way to build coherent worlds governed by physical laws just as strict as our own. Both/Either/The genre(s) use the flexibility of an imagined world, whether that's an imagined future or some land of myth, to contrast with the present, and as with the fantastical myths of old, to make moral or political points that couldn't be so easily expressed if weighed down by history and nuance.
Practically speaking, they're lumped together for a few reasons:
1. Many people who like one genre also like the other.
2. Many authors write in both genres.
3. There's a lot of similarity in the genres, and lots of things that are hard to categorize. More true lately btw.
Just as an aside though, I personally was an avid almost-only-SF reader for the first 30-ish years of my life, but lately have been reading a lot of fantasy as well. I highly recommend trying, especially more modern fantasy - I feel like the lines are even blurrier between them today, and a lot of the best work today has shifted from SF to fantasy. (I still love SF and there's a lot of great SF as well, to be clear.)
> I feel like the lines are even blurrier between them today
*urban fantasy has entered the chat*
Bookstores like to make things easy for themselves by defining categories (a la Seeing Like A State), especially due to the perceived overlap between the readership of the two categories as the weird books the nerdy guys read.
While that may have been true historically, fantasy has a new, blossoming, largely female readership, although you could consider this to be overloading the term 'fantasy' as these new BookTok books seem to have little in common with the old school sword and sorcery.
How would you classify The Foundation? Classic sci-fi novel, right? But it has telepaths.. By modern standards, telepathy, empaths, telekinesis.. that's all magic. Fantasy. But in 20th century science fiction it was extremely common.
I would reach for John Carter of Mars (Burroughs, 1912) to make the same point.
Especially given how some of the "science fiction" elements of it read 100+ years later.
Interestingly, that was due to the top editor at a major sci fi publisher being really into psychics.
Note that in the 20th century telepathy was believed to be real.
Only for the earlier parts of that century. By the late 70s to 80s the scientific consensus was coming down hard against parapsychology but it continued to be featured in science fiction for quite some time. It was still going reasonably strong well into the 90s with popular media like Star Trek, Babylon 5, etc. You can still see some traces of it today, to an extent it has become a part of the genre that persists for legacy reasons, respect for or reference to older media in the genre.
Nearly. People born in the 20th century can do it, everyone born post-millenium cannot.
If it's called telepathy it's sci-fi, if it's called magic it's fantasy. Learn the rules!
On a more serious note, yeah scifi and fantasy can usually be distinguished, I get why it so often gets lumped in together as speculative fiction, even though it annoys me when I'm looking for one and have to sift through the other.
I don't see the problem. You yourself seem to have no trouble at all identifying The Foundation as sci-fi.
There's no clear cut line. Wizards in one, starships in the other, but there's lots of magic in sci fi and lots of space in fantasy. The two genres meld together into a continuum and so it's only fair when some people classify them together. Discrete classification of continuous phenomena will always be a bit subjective.
I imagine one of the reasons is that the master himself, Arthur C Clarke, said it himself with his 3 laws. The third of which is: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Because both deal with imaginary world building?
The distiction isn't clear anyway. Some "fantasy" book are more scientific than some "sci-fi" books - if they have a system of magic then is that any difference to FTL travel, or Vinge's Region's of Thought?
There's a lot of overlap of varying degree of trickiness that makes it more of a spectrum than a clear binary, and so it often makes sense to treat them as a such.
In particular, SF plots often mix in significant fantasy themes to the point that they are sometimes a majority of the book.
Banks' Inversions is a Culture novel (SF) that intentionally reads as fantasy if you don't know the Culture setting, while leaving the reader to infer the SF setting if you do.
"Grass" by Sheri Tepper, or "Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula Le Guin are other examples. Both happen on other planets, but while both have SF settings, most of the stories fits better into fantasy tropes.
Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep is very explicit SF at "top level", but a significant part of the plot is closer to fantasy, happening on a planet in a pseudo-medieval setting.
Others like Stanisław Lem's The Cyberiad, while more explicit SF, also intentionally mix the two - being written as fantasy in a mock-medieval inspired proto-feudal society, where the characters engage in typical fantasy-inspired quests, with dragons, princes and princesses, with medieval weaponry, but with most characters being robots and with access to space travel...
There's a lot of overlap where authors toys with the distinctions, or outright mocks them.
I'd argue that the setting doesn't make "A Fire On The Deep" anything close to a fantasy. The Tines are a non-human species at a certain stage of development that's similar to humanity's medieval period. There's no more fantasy there than Michael Crichton's "Timeline."
They typically have a lot of overlap. Vast majority of scifi is fantasy set in the future.
Might be based on Arthur C. Clarke's aphorism, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Ray Kurzweil uses this as a major motif for "The Singularity is Near" about how Harry Potter can be rewritten with all magic replaced with "advanced" devices with handwaved theoretical feasibility explanations. A more specific issue than sci-fi vs. fantasy is the "hard/soft" sci-fi delineation.
Because they need a place for Star Wars, best known fantasy in space
I know what you mean, but the boundary can get blurry in some cases.
A Canticle for Liebowitz for example mostly feels like some kind of fantasy but for the fact that the reader knows it's set in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland.
Big chunks of the Peter F. Hamilton Void series is basically more or less set in a slightly magical Early Modern Venice.
The Laundry Files is strongly and deliberately in the middle ground of technology and magic, despite being ostensibly set in the present-day.
Stone Spring is an alternate history set in the Stone Age, but is not substantially more ahistorical than a non-fantasy historical novel about a person who didn't exist in reality doing things that never actually happened. Perhaps there's more focus on the engineering rather than fighting, romance, politics, murder and whatever else historical novels often revolve around, but building is as valid a human thing to do as plotting a regicide, say.
Generally, the concepts in both are the same: construct an "unreal" world and set a story in there, often with a projection of real-world issues onto the hypothetical substrate. Often the only real difference is if the unreal element is driven by magic, technology or a small change in a historical event. Sometimes it's a mixture. Sometimes the technology is treated as magic because the users don't understand it. Sometimes the magic is treated as a technology. Sometimes the historical divergence was thousands of years ago, sometimes it has only just happened in the story.
It would probably be more accurate to lump the whole lot under something generic like "speculative fiction" but that's not really a well-known term and has a slightly different meaning that blends into things like historical settings which may not be generally considered fantasy.
> A Canticle for Liebowitz for example mostly feels like some kind of fantasy but for the fact that the reader knows it's set in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland.
You might compare The Sword of Shannara, which is a character-for-character, scene-for-scene copy of Lord of the Rings, but which is technically set in the postapocalyptic future (it's easy to read the book without noticing this) rather than the legendary past.
The genres weren't always as defined and distinct. The early authors and especially the editors who popularized the genre frequently worked in both.
> I read sci-fi but not fantasy
I used to be the same. Ask yourself why.
Harumi Marukami and Han Kang count as fantasy. (I’d argue so does Ian Banks.) Read Tolkien with a hard eye towards rules, meanwhile, and you find a universe that is largely consistent in the Unseen over the Seen, which pretty neatly maps to invisible physics guiding visible phenomena.
I think the technological focus of Banks makes a lot of his novels firmly scifi, but he also certainly toyed with the overlap, with fantasy-like settings for parts of the plot in some novels, as well as "Inversions" being effectively intentionally a fantasy novel where only the readers (potential) external knowledge of The Culture sets it in an SF setting.
I have not read Iain Banks books, but Iain M. Banks wrote Scifi
> but Iain M. Banks wrote Scifi
Why? Because there’s technology somewhere? Why doesn’t magical realism through a cell phone, for example, count?
The line between sci-if and fantasy is often arbitrary, with a lot of it coming down to readers’ self-perceived identities than anything having to do with the text. What counts as tech or magic, moreover, comes down to priors and perspective. (Harry Potter and Star Trek are on similar levels of technobabble, for instance.)
I would be hard put to place The Night Land in one genre or the other. Hodgson would have had no idea what the difference was anyway.
Same for movie/tv categories. Every service has “sci-fi/fantasy” lumped together. Annoying.
That's a major gripe of mine. Nothing against fantasy, but for me these are two almost opposite genres.
How would you define the difference?
Both fit in the category of speculative fiction and as the many commenters have pointed out, speciation is difficult.
One definition I saw that sort of kind of worked is:
One puts an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances, the other puts an extraordinary person in ordinary circumstances.
What if I told that all fiction books were fantasy?
Then I would say that you are engaging in equivocation, using a definition of "fantasy" different than the one applicable as a genre label in discussing genre labels.
I think it is mostly to differentiate it from other fiction genres. While there is some overlaps, there is much more common in those other genres.
I think because a lot of sci-fi dips it’s toes in fantasy. Once you invent FTL it’s not much further to a medieval era species of telepathic dogs.
I’m with you though.
I'm with you. My favorite sci-fi is something like Project Hail Mary, which is radically different from fantasy.
I do not understand the praise that PHM or Andy Weir get in general. I hate the way he writes.
Characters are all interchangeable and quirky because he says so. The science is tacked on like a chemistry teacher putting their kids to bed.
SciFi: Read Larry Niven and James Blish if you like feats of engineering, read Ann Leckie and Nancy Kress if you like characters defined by their actions.
Don’t tell me to be excited Andy just because you wrote “THAT’S SOO COOL!” after revealing some tidbit. I’m not a fucking child.
Andy Weir does a tight well placed adventure better than most.
I can see that you wouldn't like him if you're more into characters than plot, but that's not what everyone wants.
Weir gets a lot of praise because his writing is accessible. While I also demand a bit more from the sci-fi I enjoy in terms of their narratives providing thought-provoking moments and a certain depth of information that we tend to call "hard" sci-fi, I'm not about to take a dump on Weir's work. He knows what he can do and who his audience is, so he writes for them. That is, arguably, the smartest thing any author can do if they want to make a living at it.
I had the same vitriol you do for Weir toward Ernest Klein. Absolute shit author in my opinion...but my opinion doesn't matter. His first book was still a wild success with a movie adaptation despite having one of the weakest plots and and some of the flattest characters I have ever seen in print, dressed up in a patchwork coat of nostalgia, which is the only reason it had the mass appeal that it did. But the book was not written for me, was it?
I think we forget, sometimes, that authors don't really owe us anything, that they're trying to pay the bills doing what they do, so our approval means little and only makes us look like self-rightious jerks so I had to learn to let that go and just not read those books that weren't jiving with my tastes or demands. In the end, let people have their books they like because, well, at least they're still reading and not watching TikTok or whatever.
Not a fan of his other works but his short story The Egg (not sci-fi) is up there with Asimov's best shorts (I'm not a fan of Asimov's Foundation series either). I'm more of a fan of Frankenstein and Singin in the Rain sci-fi that explores the social/personal disruptions introduced by technology. Much like how Stand Alone Complex (not Ghost in the Shell) focused on the media ecology i.e. interfaces between human and machine interactions and some of their (social) network topologies (rhizome for example).
He's the Dan Brown of sci-fi.
That's not entirely fair. The Martian is the most fantastical technical manual I've ever read.
Because of Roger Zelazny
Not a fan of cheeky riddles based on dad jokes?
Zelazny was one of the earliest/best/most prolific authors that loved to use the boundary between sci-fi and fantasy as a jump rope.
Chronicles of Amber:
> Whats red and green and goes around and around and around? A frog in a cuisinart.
It’s not people, it’s publishers insist on it.
What's truly infuriating is how awful the tagging on Audible is. "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is tagged sci-fi.
You would not believe how bad publisher data is. I run a book website, and Dune is often tagged nonfiction in the data we get from publishers. I don't think they know how to use the BISAC system the industry uses (https://bisg.org/page/BISACEdition). With Dune, they were marking it "AI," which is a nonfiction-only category.
Just one small example...
Plus Dune, somewhat famously, doesn't have any AI in it.
The prequel books (if any such books exist), feature AI in order to showcase why the original does not.
We just need 3 categories:
* Sci-Fi
* Fantasy
* Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Of course there is a significant overlap in readers of both genres. I am mostly the same as you though, I rarely read fantasy.
Always annoys me having to wade through fantasy to find the sci fi on bookshop shelves. At least you can filter to just sci fi for ebooks mostly.