6 ms·

I read sci-fi but not fantasy, why do people insist on lumping these together?

croes 1y ago
Because they need a place for Star Wars, best known fantasy in space
rapind 1y ago
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.
MattPalmer1086 1y ago
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.
pointlessone 1y ago
It’s not people, it’s publishers insist on it.
nsavage 1y ago
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.
mritchie712 1y ago
I'm with you. My favorite sci-fi is something like Project Hail Mary, which is radically different from fantasy.
- tetris11 1y ago
  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.
  - 0xEF 1y ago
    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.
  - wmil 1y ago
    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.
  - helterskelter 1y ago
    He's the Dan Brown of sci-fi.
georgefrowny 1y ago
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.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > 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.
nl 1y ago
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?
ReptileMan 1y ago
Because of Roger Zelazny
- sodaclean 1y ago
  Not a fan of cheeky riddles based on dad jokes?
  - ReptileMan 1y ago
    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.
    - sodaclean 1y ago
      Chronicles of Amber: > Whats red and green and goes around and around and around? A frog in a cuisinart.
root_axis 1y ago
They typically have a lot of overlap. Vast majority of scifi is fantasy set in the future.
freetonik 1y ago
That's a major gripe of mine. Nothing against fantasy, but for me these are two almost opposite genres.
topynate 1y ago
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.
gjstein 1y ago
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-of-darkness-by-ursula-k-le-guin-with-a-new-foreword-by-david-mitchell-and-a-new-afterword-by-charlie-jane-anders/9780441007318/excerpt https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/342990/the-left-hand...
- readthenotes1 1y ago
  "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.
mikkupikku 1y ago
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.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  Note that in the 20th century telepathy was believed to be real.
  - mikkupikku 1y ago
    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.
  - hexasquid 1y ago
    Nearly. People born in the 20th century can do it, everyone born post-millenium cannot.
- wmil 1y ago
  Interestingly, that was due to the top editor at a major sci fi publisher being really into psychics.
- jowea 1y ago
  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.
- bondarchuk 1y ago
t-3 1y ago
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.
auntienomen 1y ago
The genres weren't always as defined and distinct. The early authors and especially the editors who popularized the genre frequently worked in both.
wmil 1y ago
What's truly infuriating is how awful the tagging on Audible is. "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is tagged sci-fi.
- bwb 1y ago
  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 https://bisg.org/page/BISACEdition). With Dune, they were marking it "AI," which is a nonfiction-only category. Just one small example...
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - ZeroGravitas 1y ago
    Plus Dune, somewhat famously, doesn't have any AI in it.
    - fragmede 1y ago
      The prequel books (if any such books exist), feature AI in order to showcase why the original does not.
triMichael 1y ago
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)?
- noir_lord 1y ago
  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.
  - krapp 1y ago
    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.
readthenotes1 1y ago
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.
Ekaros 1y ago
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.
edanm 1y ago
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.)
- ethbr1 1y ago
  > I feel like the lines are even blurrier between them today *urban fantasy has entered the chat*
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> 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.
- vidarh 1y ago
  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.
- TiredOfLife 1y ago
  I have not read Iain Banks books, but Iain M. Banks wrote Scifi
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > 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.)
St00ge 1y ago
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.
calmworm 1y ago
Same for movie/tv categories. Every service has “sci-fi/fantasy” lumped together. Annoying.
vidarh 1y ago
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.
- themadturk 1y ago
  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."
sceptic123 1y ago
We just need 3 categories: * Sci-Fi * Fantasy * Sci-Fi & Fantasy
mrsvanwinkle 1y ago
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.
MrFantastic 1y ago
What if I told that all fiction books were fantasy?
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  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.

Because they need a place for Star Wars, best known fantasy in space

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.

MattPalmer1086 1y ago

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.

pointlessone 1y ago

It’s not people, it’s publishers insist on it.

nsavage 1y ago

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.

mritchie712 1y ago

I'm with you. My favorite sci-fi is something like Project Hail Mary, which is radically different from fantasy.

tetris11 1y ago
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.
- 0xEF 1y ago
  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.
- wmil 1y ago
  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.
- helterskelter 1y ago
  He's the Dan Brown of sci-fi.

georgefrowny 1y ago

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.

thaumasiotes 1y ago
> 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.

nl 1y ago

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?

ReptileMan 1y ago

Because of Roger Zelazny

sodaclean 1y ago
Not a fan of cheeky riddles based on dad jokes?
- ReptileMan 1y ago
  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.
  - sodaclean 1y ago
    Chronicles of Amber: > Whats red and green and goes around and around and around? A frog in a cuisinart.

root_axis 1y ago

They typically have a lot of overlap. Vast majority of scifi is fantasy set in the future.

freetonik 1y ago

That's a major gripe of mine. Nothing against fantasy, but for me these are two almost opposite genres.

topynate 1y ago

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.

gjstein 1y ago

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-of-darkness-by-ursula-k-le-guin-with-a-new-foreword-by-david-mitchell-and-a-new-afterword-by-charlie-jane-anders/9780441007318/excerpt https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/342990/the-left-hand...

readthenotes1 1y ago
"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.

mikkupikku 1y ago

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.

thaumasiotes 1y ago
Note that in the 20th century telepathy was believed to be real.
- mikkupikku 1y ago
  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.
- hexasquid 1y ago
  Nearly. People born in the 20th century can do it, everyone born post-millenium cannot.
wmil 1y ago
Interestingly, that was due to the top editor at a major sci fi publisher being really into psychics.
jowea 1y ago
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.
bondarchuk 1y ago

t-3 1y ago

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.

auntienomen 1y ago

The genres weren't always as defined and distinct. The early authors and especially the editors who popularized the genre frequently worked in both.

wmil 1y ago

What's truly infuriating is how awful the tagging on Audible is. "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is tagged sci-fi.

bwb 1y ago
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 https://bisg.org/page/BISACEdition). With Dune, they were marking it "AI," which is a nonfiction-only category. Just one small example...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- ZeroGravitas 1y ago
  Plus Dune, somewhat famously, doesn't have any AI in it.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    The prequel books (if any such books exist), feature AI in order to showcase why the original does not.

triMichael 1y ago

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)?

noir_lord 1y ago
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.
- krapp 1y ago
  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.

readthenotes1 1y ago

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.

Ekaros 1y ago

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.

edanm 1y ago

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.)

ethbr1 1y ago
> I feel like the lines are even blurrier between them today *urban fantasy has entered the chat*

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> 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.

vidarh 1y ago
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.
TiredOfLife 1y ago
I have not read Iain Banks books, but Iain M. Banks wrote Scifi
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > 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.)

St00ge 1y ago

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.

calmworm 1y ago

Same for movie/tv categories. Every service has “sci-fi/fantasy” lumped together. Annoying.

vidarh 1y ago

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.

themadturk 1y ago
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."

sceptic123 1y ago

We just need 3 categories: * Sci-Fi * Fantasy * Sci-Fi & Fantasy

mrsvanwinkle 1y ago

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.

MrFantastic 1y ago

What if I told that all fiction books were fantasy?

dragonwriter 1y ago
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.