books Science Fiction vs. Fantasy

[Steel Accord 6,660]

@@Mand'alor Dash,

 

I revised my statement to be less annoyed sounding and hopefully more helpful. 

[Twilight Dirac 721]

But, if basic scientific impossibility is the test for sci-fi against fantasy, then wouldn't the use of FTL travel make nearly everything fantasy? Accelerating matter past the speed of light has been proven impossible numerous times, yet it maintains consistent prevalence in science fiction. And this isn't even factoring in the frequent use of time travel, even in works by otherwise non-fantastical writers. FTL, time travel, reanimation, teleportation, common depictions of energy weapons, and concepts like them are things that we, to borrow your terminology, straight up pulled out of our rear ends.

 

Like I said, it tends to be a judgement call as to how grounded the setting is.  Certain breaks tend to be forgivable, you can't have a time travel plot without time travel, but often that will be the only fantastic element at all in the setting.  FTL is currently considered impossible, for the most part, but not having it can easily drag down an otherwise good story if you are constantly having to work around relativistic time delays and its often better for everyone if you just hand wave it away so you can get on with your story.  Other concepts can migrate to either end of the spectrum.  Remember that even hard science fiction is still speculative; if we knew how to do exactly what was being shown in a science fiction setting, we would already have the technology to do it today (which actually does happen on occasion, especially for sci-fi that took place before the computer and internet revolution).

 

 

 

Star Trek in particular is quite the offender. Take a look at this chart. Not only can warp drives push our ships far past the speed of light (apparently by creating a "no physics allowed" zone around the ship), but different warp levels have some odd speeds. Warp factor 4.5, for instance, is described as being considerably slower than warp 4.4. Warp 3 has at least three different values, and warp 10 can apparently bring your speed to infinity. "Impossible" frankly doesn't even begin to describe it.

 

This has less to do with the plausibility of the tech in the setting and more to do with the fact the Star Trek consist of 5 separate television series and 12 different movies written by dozens of different writers over the course of half a century and they haven't bothered to remain consistent on what Warp X means.  As far as Warp 10 being infinite velocity is concerned, that is from the Voyager episode Threshold, and any Star Trek fan can tell you that Threshold is pure fantasy.  Actually Voyager in general tends to deviate from the much more grounded series of TNG and DS9 into absolute absurdity, although that can occasionally be glorious.

 

 

 

Does this make Star Trek fantasy? Or Mass Effect? Or Babylon 5 (though TBF, Babylon 5 has a very different mechanic for FTL travel)? No. It simply means that non-hard science fiction isn't determined by its scientific accuracy or plausibility.   This is why I use a very different test for determining science fiction. Though hard sci fi is fairly easy to identify as such, the rest I prefer to look at as (often exaggerated) extrapolations of cultural conceptions about the future. 50s science fiction, for instance, was dominated largely by alien invasion films because of the xenophobic early cold war attitudes of the time. We figured that whatever lingered outside the stars probably wasn't going to be friendly to us.   Star Trek, being a product of the space race 60s, instead saw the universe as something to be explored. It even went as far as to almost directly quote JF Kennedy in the series's intro, only substituting Kennedy's "New Frontier" for a "Final" one.   As for Star Wars, it sprang from the brilliant, yet demented little mind of 50s kid George Lucas, but with no small amount of nuance from the attitudes of the 70s. It was a post-vietnam world, where most had seen the abuses of the federal government, and feared a military industrial complex run amok. As a result of this combination, it was loaded with retro-futuristic technology, James Dean-esque heroes, themes of grand individuals sticking it to "the man," and the (however exaggerated) notion that one day the future-pentagon would invest in a weapon capable of literally destroying entire worlds.   Whatever fantasy elements Star Wars has, it certainly reflects cultural futurism in exactly the way that science fiction is supposed to.

 

Wait, so what your saying is if it reflects current or past historical events in anyway its automatically sci-fi?  Wouldn't that make Magicka Vietnam sci-fi instead of fantasy because it reflects the Vietnam war.  Doesn't that make even the standard pseudo-Medieval fantasy setting sci-fi as it is obviously a reflection of the Middle Ages.  That definition also kind of neuters the fantasy genre as a whole, because as soon as a fantasy writer tries to make a cultural statement they are going to be reflecting something about some culture and suddenly they are a sci-fi writer.  This is not a very good definition.

Edited March 26, 2015 by Twilight Dirac

[Rainboom Dash 1,056]

I am a massive sci-fi fan (Doctor Who, HG Wells, Philip K Dick, Star Wars, etc) so that gets my vote.