Sci-fi vs Space fantasy

[Kato]

True connoisseurs know it is hard to come by real hard sci-fi, because a lot of sci-fi, especially the space travelling variety, requires a lot of hand waving or techno babble to make space travel valid. And I don't mind that. Space travel is awesome but hard to justify in a way that is not rather boring or breaks our current understanding of science. (or at best exploits theoretical loopholes)
And the line between media that try to be hard and those that do not hide the fact that they are fairy tales in space can be blurry, even if there are definite examples.

So, I was wondering on people's opinions on the subject. Which do you prefer? Which do you think do a good / bad job one way or another?

This is not meant to discuss the overall quality of stories, but only in regard to their... Sci-fi hardness (? Is that a word?)

[Saph]

I've generally gotten the impression that the term "space fantasy" mostly exists to be used as a term of dismissal. If a show's got aliens, laser beams, and space ships flying around between planets, then claiming that it's not actually science fiction but just a "fairy tale in space" makes you sound pretty silly.

Sci-fi softness or hardness is definitely a thing, but in practice most people don't like hard science fiction as much as they say they do.

[Kitten Champion]

I tend to take "space fantasy" to mean using common fantasy tropes and expectations but within a SF setting rather than as a measurement of how believable a setting is supposed to be. Things like Dragonball GT, Warhammer 40K, or Star Ocean would qualify but not others like Star Trek, Farscape, or Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy despite how zany they can be because they aren't actively trying to go that route.

I don't really have a preference, I like variety of speculative fiction.

[Aotrs Commander]

I think trying to define sci-fi into "science-fiction" and "space fantasy" is not a particularly worthwhile distinction, especially, as Saph says, as one is used to shove off whatever a user considers to be "not proper science-fiction" (by which they mean "not hard-enough/not an exploration of human society enough" for their specific requirements).

(On the other hand, shovelling horror and whatnot into sci-fi's umbrella like the siffy channel does (if they wanted me to not call them that, they shouldn't have been silly about changing their name...) is a bridge too far, I think; fantasy is a bit dubious, but bookshops have long done but horror as well is a bit much...)

You can certainly have debates about hardness of a particular sci-fi story - but, though it's most common in sci-fi, you can have that arguement about a lot of things, too. (Or similar arguments on the level of comedy in shows, as not all comedies (say, cartoons) have the same level of "hardness."

I am not particularly picky, myself, so long as there are Good Starships Battles In It.

I think the hardest scifi I particularly read is thre Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell, which is fairly hard.

[deuterio12]

I tend to take "space fantasy" to mean using common fantasy tropes and expectations but within a SF setting rather than as a measurement of how believable a setting is supposed to be. Things like Dragonball GT, Warhammer 40K, or Star Ocean would qualify but not others like Star Trek, Farscape, or Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy despite how zany they can be because they aren't actively trying to go that route.


Yeah, that's about the way I go with it.

A really great example would be Xenoblade Chronicles, where there's the classic fantasy story of "evil race of monster is a threat to humanoids and only the chosen hero that can wield the sacred blade can save us", but the evil race are all robots and the sacred blade is an high-tech laser sword. Then there's the party's healer that wields a not-magic sniper rifle that's better at healing allies than actually harming enemies (also the only party member who knows how to use a gun, everybody else's melee of some sort) and high elves that have robots of their own and even gunships but otherwise behave all high-elfy.

[snowblizz]

It's Space Fantasy all the way down for me.

[Saph]

I tend to take "space fantasy" to mean using common fantasy tropes and expectations but within a SF setting rather than as a measurement of how believable a setting is supposed to be.

Sure, but that makes something a space fantasy and science fiction. Not space fantasy or science fiction, which was what it sounded like Kato was getting at.

I mean, from Deuterio's description Xenoblade does sound fantasy-ish, but saying "no, this show with the lasers and robots isn't science fiction, it's just space fantasy" sounds really silly, especially since it doesn't sound as though there's any "space" in it.

[Anonymouswizard]

I've generally gotten the impression that the term "space fantasy" mostly exists to be used as a term of dismissal. If a show's got aliens, laser beams, and space ships flying around between planets, then claiming that it's not actually science fiction but just a "fairy tale in space" makes you sound pretty silly.

Eh, science fantasy is certainly a thing, although people can't quite agree on where it starts or if we should plonk it under 'science fiction' or 'fantasy' when deciding which one it's closer to. There's a general agreement that Star Wars is science fantasy, although I've heard people reject the designation because SW is 'too SF' and 'too fantasy'.

In general something becomes identified as science fantasy as more mystical elements get added. So let's take an example, psionics. Both Star Wars and Babylon 5 have 'psionic' characters, but I call the first science fantasy but the second science fiction.

In Star Wars psionics is heavily tied into religion. The primary religions in the setting, Jedi and Sith, both revolve around this thing that allows certain people to use ESP, telekinesis, and telepathy, and at least in the films everybody with these abilities is either a member of one of these religions or wants to become a member (this gets muddied a bit in the ST due to Kylo Ren being ex-Jedi and a lack of details about the Knights of Ren beyond 'they are force users').

In Babylon 5 psionic (human) characters are generally part of Psi-Corps, a government agency leaning towards espionage and commercial purposes. The discovery of telepaths caused enough of an uprising to make 'serve the government or take harmful supressors' to sound like a good idea. By this point Psi-Corps is corrupt, but telepaths are considered useful enough to be used, if not allowed to live their own lives.

Now we could go deeper, but the fact is the lack of mysticism makes the soft element seem more like a reasonable prediction of the future than the hard element.


Sci-fi softness or hardness is definitely a thing, but in practice most people don't like hard science fiction as much as they say they do.

People like SF of varying degrees of hardness. Now people do tend to prefer softer stuff with aliens or faster than light travel, but there's also a lot of people who want realistic socialogical elements or plausible technology alongside their space elves.

EDIT: but yes, there are a lot of people who claim to dislike soft stuff or like hard stuff a lot more than they do. As a general rule people like harder science fiction the closer the work is set to the present.

[Rodin]

I tend to prefer my Sci-Fi "al-dente", so laser beams, easy hyperspace travel, and plenty of aliens - but with at least a nod being made to Newtonian physics, a minimum of technobabble, and otherwise having science be at least within touching distance of reality.

And of course, there are fun stories to be had on either side of that. Doctor Who is utter nonsense, but I love it all the same.

[Mechalich]

Space is a setting. Science fiction and fantasy are genres.

However, the general public - and people who should know better - has as an unfortunate tendency to assume that anything set in space qualifies as science fiction - which is a historical artifact from the origin decades of the modern incarnations of these genres that is no longer applicable. Fantasy and science fiction utilize very different tropes and themes (though there is some overlap, as extremely soft science fiction rounds into the fantastical at points, the classic example being Dune), and mistakenly criticizing fantasy set in space accordingly as if it were science fiction is problematic and gives the term 'space fantasy' real utility - it's a description of a particular and popular genre/setting combination with clarification value.

Worth noting that science fiction and fantasy certainly don't have any sort of monopoly on space. As noted above, horror has a long tradition of operating in space, as does comedy. Mystery and romance are less commonly set in space, but you can certainly find examples of those too.

[Saph]

In general something becomes identified as science fantasy as more mystical elements get added. So let's take an example, psionics. Both Star Wars and Babylon 5 have 'psionic' characters, but I call the first science fantasy but the second science fiction.

See, I just don't think that's a good distinction. In B5, the psionic powers are tied to a government agency, in Star Wars, they're tied to a Zen-like religion. Why should that make one science fiction and the other not? Both are equally "scientific" – which is to say, not at all, since Star Wars, Star Trek, and B5 all break our currently understood laws of science into dozens of pieces and then happily jump up and down on the bits.

The fact that something uses fantasy tropes doesn't stop it from being science fiction. If it did, the murder mysteries Asimov wrote and the romance-and-relationship books Lois McMaster Bujold writes wouldn't be science fiction either.

[Anonymouswizard]

See, I just don't think that's a good distinction. In B5, the psionic powers are tied to a government agency, in Star Wars, they're tied to a Zen-like religion. Why should that make one science fiction and the other not? Both are equally "scientific" – which is to say, not at all, since Star Wars, Star Trek, and B5 all break our currently understood laws of science into dozens of pieces and then happily jump up and down on the bits.

The fact that something uses fantasy tropes doesn't stop it from being science fiction. If it did, the murder mysteries Asimov wrote and the romance-and-relationship books Lois McMaster Bujold writes wouldn't be science fiction either.

Really science fiction and fantasy are subtypes of the same genre (called science fiction, fantasy, or specualative fiction based on who you ask), which is the core of my point. Science Fiction versuses Fantasy is much more a matter of presentation rather than elements. Babylon 5 presents telepaths as something scientific, Star Wars as something mystical, and blah blah blah this isn't actually an argument worth having.

For Asimov's mysteries, I believe he wrote both SF and nonSF ones, and the short answer is that the SF mysteries fall into both genres. There's no two genres so closely linked as science fiction and fantasy to the point where it can be legitimately hard to differentiate between them at times (okay, there probably are some others, but the point is that in effect the defining elements of SF and Fantasy are the same thing, and there's a whole spectrum of works where there's quite a bit of disagreement as to which they fall into).

[Mechalich]

The fact that something uses fantasy tropes doesn't stop it from being science fiction. If it did, the murder mysteries Asimov wrote and the romance-and-relationship books Lois McMaster Bujold writes wouldn't be science fiction either.

Overlap exists. A work can utilize elements of both. Asimov's murder mysteries are mysteries set within a broader science fiction backdrop. Terry Prachett's Discworld is a parody comedy series set within a broader fantasy backdrop. Anne McCaffery's Pern books are romances set within a science fiction backdrop that also includes themes derived from fantasy. Generally a work is primarily one thing, but this can be hard to judge. Dune, for instance, has a clearly science fiction universe, with many elements extremely carefully plotted in order to say specific things about the human condition. At the same time, the overall plot is straight out of mythology and hews hard to fantasy tropes. And this is considered one of the all time science fiction classics.

'Pure' science fiction is hard and tends to be fairly rare - in part because writing a story that is driven almost entirely by exploration of science, social phenomena, and humans trends requires a great deal of familiarity with the material which limits the qualified author pool to scientists or at least amateurs willing to do a lot of research (there's also the problem that the technical limits of reality seem impose heavy restrictions on what you can actually do in space while still taking the science seriously). It also can be pretty boring and so other genre conventions get pulled in for the purpose of spicing things up. Starship Troopers is a nice example. It's a work about social philosophy and government - the dudes-in-powered-armor-fighting-alien-arthropods action plot is simply the backdrop canvas across which the central argument plays out, but that plot still happens, and all the necessary elements to conduct it are included.

At the same time, it is possible to recognize that there are many modern works set in space that have absolutely nothing in common with the themes of science fiction. The MCU, for instance, has a number of examples, with Guardians of the Galaxy being the most obvious. By contrast, the first Iron Man film, despite being set entirely on Earth, has a greater inclusion of science fiction elements.

[Knaight]

See, I just don't think that's a good distinction. In B5, the psionic powers are tied to a government agency, in Star Wars, they're tied to a Zen-like religion. Why should that make one science fiction and the other not? Both are equally "scientific" – which is to say, not at all, since Star Wars, Star Trek, and B5 all break our currently understood laws of science into dozens of pieces and then happily jump up and down on the bits.

Both are equally scientific - but to some extent the actual genre name "science fiction" is a historical artifact for the beginnings of the genre as a particular strain of speculative fiction which has largely developed separately from fantasy. Most writers do one or the other, a lot of readers focus more on one than the other, the forms they tend to show up in are fairly distinct (science fiction is a genre extremely heavy on short stories, fantasy is possibly the single most likely genre to tend towards long, multi-volume novel series). This has allowed for the development of two largely distinct corpuses of themes, aesthetic elements, and similar.

So, Star Wars? It's not just that the psionics are tied to a religion. It's that they're tied to an order of mystics that is a remnant from the glorious past, embodied in a chosen one who will restore the old order. Babylon 5? They're tied to a powerful governmental faction that is a particularly nasty embodiment of the bureaucracy heavy surveillance state, existing as a threat that grew out of increased technology and increased social connectivity that runs parallel to a whole host of benefits gleaned from the technological improvement of a society on the rise.

[Eldan]

I really quite like both. I'll watch Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Who or John Carter just as much as I'll watch Black Mirror, or Ghost in the Shell, or Blade Runner, or Arrival or Her, to quote a few recent examples. I recently read Neal Stephenson's Seveneves, which is a book about 60% about orbital trajectories, nutrient cycling and fuel requirements, and I loved it. And I'll gladly turn around from that and read, I don't know, Hitchhiker's Guide.

What I can't stand is when the first pretends to be the second and does it badly. When they set up a movie, claim it's realistic and then the solution for the problem in the end comes out totally out of the left field and turns out to be the power of love or something like that.

[Anonymouswizard]

So, Star Wars? It's not just that the psionics are tied to a religion. It's that they're tied to an order of mystics that is a remnant from the glorious past, embodied in a chosen one who will restore the old order. Babylon 5? They're tied to a powerful governmental faction that is a particularly nasty embodiment of the bureaucracy heavy surveillance state, existing as a threat that grew out of increased technology and increased social connectivity that runs parallel to a whole host of benefits gleaned from the technological improvement of a society on the rise.

This is a much better way of saying what I was trying to.


What I can't stand is when the first pretends to be the second and does it badly. When they set up a movie, claim it's realistic and then the solution for the problem in the end comes out totally out of the left field and turns out to be the power of love or something like that.

*cough* Interstellar *cough*

[Kato]

I've generally gotten the impression that the term "space fantasy" mostly exists to be used as a term of dismissal. If a show's got aliens, laser beams, and space ships flying around between planets, then claiming that it's not actually science fiction but just a "fairy tale in space" makes you sound pretty silly.

I feel like I should have spent more time explaining where I draw the line..
Sci-fi hardness for me means how much the 'science' half still matters. A very hard science show only has one or very few aspects that go against known science (like every action movie ever made ignores half the newtonian physics and what the human body is capable of). Mid range Sci-fi just puts in whatever it wants but cares a little about giving the impression that some thought was put into it. (SW tends to be a good example for me)
And a "fairy tale in space" just does whatever it wants, using technology to substitute magic, and the rules might change from one episode to the next but debating this destroys everything. And I know this sounds negative, and I guess it somehow is, but Doctor Who is the massive example for this but I still love it.

As was said, hardness can correlate with quality but it doesn't have to and I make no claim to like harder more.




What I can't stand is when the first pretends to be the second and does it badly. When they set up a movie, claim it's realistic and then the solution for the problem in the end comes out totally out of the left field and turns out to be the power of love or something like that.
I absolutely agree. *coughsupersuccessfulscifimovieofthedecadecough*
I know that the Martian isn't perfect but it tries hard to be realistic, and it does a decent job I think.

[GloatingSwine]

A more useful way to think about this distinction isn't "Sci-fi vs space fantasy".

It's Details vs Drama.

Some stories put the details of their worldbuilding at the forefront, how the world works is mapped out in advance and dramatic stories are allowed to grow out of those details.

Some stories put the drama first, the desired shape of the dramatic story is mapped in advance and the details of the world are constructed to allow that story to take place.

[Aotrs Commander]

A more useful way to think about this distinction isn't "Sci-fi vs space fantasy".

It's Details vs Drama.

Some stories put the details of their worldbuilding at the forefront, how the world works is mapped out in advance and dramatic stories are allowed to grow out of those details.

Some stories put the drama first, the desired shape of the dramatic story is mapped in advance and the details of the world are constructed to allow that story to take place.

Well, yeah; but you can apply that to basically any fiction, though (compare, I dunno, a well-researched histroical novel compared to, say, a generic romance novel (I wanna say Mills & Boon or something, but never actually having read one, I don't want to entirely tar them with a brush from limited hearsay).

[GloatingSwine]

I would suggest that the ability to apply the detail vs. drama distinction widely to lots of different types of fiction is a strength not a weakness.

Because the original "sci-fi vs space fantasy" distinction will invariably get bogged down into fiddling specifics, so a more general and powerful intellectual tool that helps you understand how the story is built is better to use.

[Sapphire Guard]

It seems to me to be just a matter of preference, not a hard line.

No matter how long your explanation is, any kind of cold sleep or hyperspace travel is functionally magic.

I don't think I can think of any fictional work that is truly hard, credible science.

[Darth Ultron]

I've generally gotten the impression that the term "space fantasy" mostly exists to be used as a term of dismissal.

I don't think this is true at all. Fantasy in this context is just describing the hand-waving of reality. A lot of fiction is fantasy.


I think trying to define sci-fi into "science-fiction" and "space fantasy" is not a particularly worthwhile distinction

I think it's worthwhile. It lets fans know what to expect from the fiction. In a general sense, people are on one side or the other...and don't much like the other side.



It's Details vs Drama.


This is a good reality vs fantasy. In reality details the writer must keep track of everything based on real science and the established fictional science of the setting. In drama fantasy, the writer just does whatever: the drama comes first and foremost, and the writer does not care about details.



It seems to me to be just a matter of preference, not a hard line.

No matter how long your explanation is, any kind of cold sleep or hyperspace travel is functionally magic.

I don't think I can think of any fictional work that is truly hard, credible science.

Well, there is hard science fiction, but it's mostly limited to written works. You can have pure, hard science, with the only ''fiction" being the characters and setting. Though your just about making the story set on Earth in the past or present and it has a limited appeal to the masses. For a 'science hero' to win a fight by 'heating up the ice to above zero and melting it' is just not as cool as a space ninja with a laser sword.

[Yora]

I am a super hardcore Star Wars fan. And the term science fiction is completely inappropriate. Not a single trace of science to be seen anywhere.

Now Mass Effect makes the effort to make the universe look science based, even if it uses a made up physical phenomenon. However, in practice it's still a straight up generic fantasy plot: Stop the evil sorcerer who is trying to open a portal that summons a horde of demons who want to consume all people.

[Leewei]

Some examples of "hard" Sci-Fi movies which I adore:
Contact
Gattaca
Children of Men
The Martian

There are enormous numbers of action, horror, fantasy, and other works which I also enjoy, which take place in a "science fiction" framework.
Alien/Aliens
Predator
Terminator 1 & 2
Star Wars movies (most of them)
Marvel Cinematic Universe movies
Pacific Rim
Blade Runner
Strange Days

What separates the "hard" from other movies is, for the most part, the movie being a meditation on what happens to the world if a simple change happens.

Blade Runner and Strange Days stand out to me as noir thrillers in hard science fiction settings. The stories they tell are greatly enhanced by the setting, but could be rewritten to take place in 1920s Los Angeles (they're conceptual cousins to L.A. Confidential, which isn't a bad thing at all).

[dps]

And of course, there are fun stories to be had on either side of that. Doctor Who is utter nonsense, but I love it all the same.

I'm glad that you brought up Doctor Who. Generally speaking, Doctor who certainly isn't hard SF, though there are a few Doctor Who stories that I think are. Or look at the show's most famous villains, the Daleks and the Cybermen. Conceptually, there's nothing about either that is particularly on the "soft" end of the hardness scale (though the stories that they are in are often definitely not hard SF, and the physical design of the Daleks is a bit silly, though still not necessarily soft SF). Zygons are much more over toward the soft end of the scale. The point is, it's not the "hardness" of a particular story that makes it good or bad, it's how well executed it is. But I will say that if a story isn't just soft, but the science is actively bad, it ruins the episode, at least for me. A good example would be "Kill the Moon"; what happens in that story isn't just silly, it's stupid, and it makes for one of the worst episodes ever,

[Devonix]

SciFi is about using science and technology to examine the human condition. How space affects behavior. What do people do in a post scarcity society? How society might change in response to a nuclear war.

How does the existence of aliens change how we treat ourselves as a species.

SciFi is about the questions. As long as you're asking them. You're SciFi.

[Anonymouswizard]

It seems to me to be just a matter of preference, not a hard line.

No matter how long your explanation is, any kind of cold sleep or hyperspace travel is functionally magic.

I don't think I can think of any fictional work that is truly hard, credible science.

I've seen a couple of attempts. Revelation Space seems reasonable until you take a decent look at the Conjoiner Drives (in essence they have the ability to propel a fully loaded Lighthugger at 1g for eternity on no significant fuel or remass source [they have an inbuilt ramscoop, but it's mentioned once in the 'main trilogy']), although it eventually goes on to ignore causality even harder than FTL does. I've seen a couple of other attempts to use ramscoops or similar plausible sounding methods to have relativistic travel, but they failed to stand up to my amateur attempts at analysis.

I've seen a couple of attempts to do generation ships that were at least plausible, although they generally do that by skipping over a couple of the problems.

Finally I've seen very good stories which have FTL or very good relativistic travel in the universe, but that only serves to enable the setting being 'not Earth'. Alistair Reynolds gets a lot better when he stops messing around with Lighthuggers (as awesome as they might be) or inertia-dampening technology and focuses in on hard sf set in his Epsilion Eridani colony.


Getting into stories which do have star crossing magic, the question is how much is okay to still be science fiction. It depends a lot, but as a general rule relativistic travel is more 'reasonable' than FTL travel because while you're still probably breaking the laws of physics, there is nothing saying it's outright impossible (you just have to pull a lot of energy from somewhere). With FTL travel itself, it's generally agreed that the more consistent the better.

What if we want a truly hard piece of science fiction that doesn't break any laws of physics? I've seen a couple of attempts. Most of them set on earth and being rather cyberpunky (not that those don't also tend to have problems with science), the only space-set one that I can remember finishing is Blindsight, and even then I think some bits of it were playing fast and loose with physics and a lot was kept vague so that the ship could fab enough equipment and antimatter for the plot.

[Lethologica]

Science fiction, sure. Space fantasy, sure. It's the "vs" that gets me. I'm not much for genre wars.

[Tvtyrant]

I always found the distinction between sci-fi and fantasy, regardless of the costumes they wear, is if the golden age is in the future or the past. If the best time to be alive or the high point of possible civilization is in the past it is fantasy, if the golden age is now or in the forseeable future it is sci-fi.

Compare Picard saying that mankind had grown beyond being beholden to interlopers and their tests to Ben Kenobi's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized age."

Basically is the past something we have grown beyond or is it something we have lost.

[Lethologica]

By those standards, The Mote in God's Eye is fantasy and not science fiction, and RWBY is science fiction and not fantasy. It is an interesting distinction to make, and there may be tendencies in one genre or the other, but it's not clearly a distinction between the two genres, and as a binary concept it falls within the paradigm of considering the two genres mutually exclusive, which I disagree with.

[Tvtyrant]

That is a valid point. I think you can still have overlap where characters disagree over the philosophical point, like Firefly where living standards are generally higher now at the cost of freedom and characters debate over the difference.

I'm reasonably comfortable in thinking Gurren Lagann is sci-fi while 40k is fantasy despite being very similar settings. The tonal difference is colossal.

[The Glyphstone]

I'd quibble over a series where the main characters can rewrite the laws of reality by wishing really really hard being science fiction. If any Super Robot series is sci fi, I'd nominate the Gundam franchise (to a point) far before TTGL gets a mention.

[Tron Troll]

I'm glad that you brought up Doctor Who. Generally speaking, Doctor who certainly isn't hard SF, though there are a few Doctor Who stories that I think are.

DR. Who is soft fantasy, with little or no science fiction. Most stories have no real details, ''stuff" just happens. And New Who is ten times worse.




Or look at the show's most famous villains, the Daleks and the Cybermen. Conceptually, there's nothing about either that is particularly on the "soft" end of the hardness scale (though the stories that they are in are often definitely not hard SF, and the physical design of the Daleks is a bit silly, though still not necessarily soft SF).

Both are perfect examples of soft fantasy races: they just show up for drama and to (sort of) kill...or Exterminate! or Delete! There is no more detail to the races other then that.

Daleks and Cybermen are all drama fluff, with no science details.

[deuterio12]

I'd quibble over a series where the main characters can rewrite the laws of reality by wishing really really hard being science fiction. If any Super Robot series is sci fi, I'd nominate the Gundam franchise (to a point) far before TTGL gets a mention.

You know, that's one of the main reasons why Gundam was basically considered a whole new genre, the "Real Robot" genre where the robots try to be just be big pieces of machinery with consistent rules.

[monomer]

By those standards, The Mote in God's Eye is fantasy and not science fiction, and RWBY is science fiction and not fantasy. It is an interesting distinction to make, and there may be tendencies in one genre or the other, but it's not clearly a distinction between the two genres, and as a binary concept it falls within the paradigm of considering the two genres mutually exclusive, which I disagree with.

I agree. Other examples are arguably William Gibson's Sprawl and Bridge trilogies. While not quite a dystopia, the Middle Class in the Sprawl have been converted to Proles who have basically signed their lives over to large corporations, and the only way for the lower class to get ahead is through crime. The Bridge isn't quite as stark (the protagonist from Idoru has a seemingly pretty decent life), but the rich have definitely gotten more rich and powerful to the point where they can't be touched by the law, while poverty seems abundant.

One way I have discerned between Sci-Fi and Space Fantasy is that in Sci-Fi, the ramifications of technological advancement are explored, while in Space Fantasy, technological advancements are just used as a backdrop or tool they happen to have access to. This isn't necessarily a hard and fast rule, but as an example, comparing the Hyperdrive in Star Wars to the Hyperdrive in Larry Niven's Known Space, the faster-than-light travel in Star Wars is just used as a way to get from one planet to another in a short enough time for the story to be completed, while in Known Space, Niven explores how having faster-than-light travel impacts civilization and society. Additionally, while both are beyond what we understand are physically possible, the Hyperdrive in Star Wars doesn't seem to have any technological underpinnings, and ships travel at the speed required by the plot, while in Known Space, the Outsider's hyperdrive has some sort of basis in reality (though requires physics we don't understand yet, and even they barely do), and has an internally consistent set of limitations that are spelled out in the books and affect how space is explored.

(For example, in one story which was set up as a Mystery, Beowulf's ship was able to be caught in a hyperdive "net" because the antagonist knew the exact velocity of their ship, and was able to use the fact that the hyperdrive can't get too close to a gravitational source without imploding to another dimension.)

Edit: I understand that the technology and ramifications of Hyperspace has been spelled out in various Star Wars novels, but none of this is captured in the movies themselves.

[Devonix]

Twilight Zone, Ray Bradbury Theater, and Outer Limits are some of my all time favorite Scifi Series.

[Darth Ultron]

One way I have discerned between Sci-Fi and Space Fantasy is that in Sci-Fi, the ramifications of technological advancement are explored, while in Space Fantasy, technological advancements are just used as a backdrop or tool they happen to have access to

This is a good part of it. I would also say that the more hard the Sci-Fi is, the more the science is more ''real", but also more part of the story. The more soft the Sci-fi is, the more their is no science, and the science is not part of the story.

[Knaight]

This is a good part of it. I would also say that the more hard the Sci-Fi is, the more the science is more ''real", but also more part of the story. The more soft the Sci-fi is, the more their is no science, and the science is not part of the story.

These are disconnected axes. Star Trek has staggeringly soft science, but it's also a huge part of the story. Large portions of most episodes end up as long technobabble scenes. Meanwhile there's a huge amount of near future science fiction which has a ton of background research to make the setting plausible that doesn't go into it at all. Ship Breaker has a couple paragraphs over a novel that address the science directly, and yet it's pretty much all rock solid, based on thorough climate models, cutting edge material research, and other actual science.

[Darth Ultron]

These are disconnected axes. Star Trek has staggeringly soft science, but it's also a huge part of the story. Large portions of most episodes end up as long technobabble scenes.

Star Trek is really right in the middle: semi hard science and semi realistic fantasy. Star Trek makes a good effort to lay down the rules of science for their reality and do mostly stick to them. And a lot of the drama is pure fantasy, like ''what if you got zapped to being a kid again", but at the same time a lot of the drama involves real characters with real problems

Star Wars is far on the side of Space Fantasy. There are no in universe rules and everything just ''is" and "works" in the exact way the drama and story want it to work.

Dark Mater is light science fantasy, but they focus much more on the drama then details.

Babylon 5 is more on the side of hard, but not too hard, Sci Fi. They do have a lot of very down to Earth, very real science based universe, with very little 'magic' at all.

Battlestar Glactica is really more pure military drama/Apocalypse drama...with a slight Sci Fi back ground. Though really most of the universe and drama is not even really happening in any sort of ''sci fi" or even really much of a ''space" setting...other then establishing shots show you a space ship. And the show, quite deliberately, has just about no magic or fantasy.

The Expanse, is really close to hard Sci Fi, and the universe is careful to not go too far, and there is almost no fantasy or magic.

[Silverraptor]

The first time I ever heard the term "Science Fantasy" was when someone was trying to describe the setting of Warhammer 40k to me. I remember it did not sound like those 2 words went together. But when I learned more about Warhammer 40k and how there are literal space orks and space elves and people who actually cast spells and go to hell (the warp) with literal demons and such all around star ships and guns, I realized it is the epitome of what Science Fantasy is all about.

[Eldan]

I always found the distinction between sci-fi and fantasy, regardless of the costumes they wear, is if the golden age is in the future or the past. If the best time to be alive or the high point of possible civilization is in the past it is fantasy, if the golden age is now or in the forseeable future it is sci-fi.

Compare Picard saying that mankind had grown beyond being beholden to interlopers and their tests to Ben Kenobi's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized age."

Basically is the past something we have grown beyond or is it something we have lost.

Would that make a cyberpunk novel, a dystopia or a post-apocalyptic story fantasy, then?

[Ibrinar]

Star Trek is really right in the middle: semi hard science and semi realistic fantasy. Star Trek makes a good effort to lay down the rules of science for their reality and do mostly stick to them. And a lot of the drama is pure fantasy, like ''what if you got zapped to being a kid again", but at the same time a lot of the drama involves real characters with real problems

Star Wars is far on the side of Space Fantasy. There are no in universe rules and everything just ''is" and "works" in the exact way the drama and story want it to work.



I don't think laying down rules and sticking to them is relevant to hardness. There are rule based system magic systems that consistently stick to them but if Brandon Sanderson wrote a scifi story with mages with rule based consistent magic that probably wouldn't be regarded as hard scifi. As I understand it hardness is about mostly keeping to science that is plausible based on our current understanding.

[Darth Ultron]

I don't think laying down rules and sticking to them is relevant to hardness.

Well, reality is Hard Rules that we can't break, and fantasy is Anything Goes No Rules.

A Sci fi setting is often ''not reality" for the simple fact that it has space ships and aliens. So that setting has a slightly different base line for reality. But the trick is, does the setting stick to it's stated reality?

In pure fantasy, anything can happen...whatever the writer wants to happen, in hard Sci-Fi you have the limit of reality. So any limits, makes a setting less fantasy.

Star Wars is ''push a button and magic happens", and no body cares how or why. Star Trek, about half the time, does explain things in fantasy detail and does stick to it. The Expanse sticks to 'close' to real world science, with just about no magic.

[Lethologica]

I think if we separate out hardness as a distinct concept which is more genre-agnostic, then we can have a reasonable metric for how rule-following and limited settings are without throwing in absurdities like "fantasy is Anything Goes No Rules" along the way.

[Mordar]

As I think about it, I am coming to believe that FOR ME, the "science fiction vs. science fantasy" (or space fantasy, to hold to the OP) has a lot to do with distance and spirit.

The further away the story (in distance or in time), the more likely it is to have fantastical elements. Maybe it is that whole "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" thing. Maybe it just results from there being so many options for settings, characters and methods in the far future or on Planet X that they will be so different from our reality that they by default appear fantastical, even if familiar. Thus, to me, a few hallmarks on the Fiction to Fantasy scale would be Nano (book by Robin Cook) - The Martian - Starship Troopers - Star Trek - Star Wars.

Spirit to me relates to the intended response and reaction from the audience. Plausible dramatic tension kind of on the science fiction end, wonderment and awe on the science/space fantasy end. For me, things like Alien(s) (just the first two...all the rest make me sad), Blade Runner, Martian...those all "feel" like Science Fiction to me despite being horror, action, detective and survival movies first and [setting] movies second. Star Wars, Avatar, a lot of Star Trek...they feel more adventurey/fantasy to me.

Now it is possible that my distance idea informs my spirit/feel thing, but not exclusively. For instance, Bubblegum Crisis feels much more fantasy to me than fiction despite being not so alien or far in the future.

Anyway, my thoughts.

[ASIDE: I do think there are some people that I have known and like that did use "Space Fantasy" or "Space Opera" to denigrate "scifi" work they didn't like...but I'm not sure how widespread that is...]

[jayem]

As I think about it, I am coming to believe that FOR ME, the "science fiction vs. science fantasy" (or space fantasy, to hold to the OP) has a lot to do with distance and spirit.

The further away the story (in distance or in time), the more likely it is to have fantastical elements. Maybe it is that whole "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" thing. Maybe it just results from there being so many options for settings, characters and methods in the far future or on Planet X that they will be so different from our reality that they by default appear fantastical, even if familiar.

It's got to help (both ways). Set things near and you can pretty much have everything similar and predict simple trends. Which makes it easier to write hard-science-speculative-fiction (e.g. a world almost like ours apart from the first robots, where the characters even grew up just like us), but makes fantastical elements stand out.
Set things far out and you have the lattitude to ignore the trends and handwave things (and gish-gallop through any difficulties) to focus on what's important for space-fantasy. But predicting that far...

Of course there are exceptions (Foundation for the far future, I guess you could put Harry Potter in the really imminent fantasy box), and there are many other genres interacting in mix as well.

[Knaight]

I think if we separate out hardness as a distinct concept which is more genre-agnostic, then we can have a reasonable metric for how rule-following and limited settings are without throwing in absurdities like "fantasy is Anything Goes No Rules" along the way.

The thing is that the concept doesn't separate out well - "hard fantasy" systems are an established thing, but there's a very meaningful difference between following a rule set and following the rule set imposed by actual reality.

[Lethologica]

The thing is that the concept doesn't separate out well - "hard fantasy" systems are an established thing, but there's a very meaningful difference between following a rule set and following the rule set imposed by actual reality.
Is there? Apart from catering to the expertise of code scrapers and would-be modders for Outside, what's the big deal? I could rewrite The Cold Equations with magic instead of physics creating the inexorable mechanisms that condemn a girl to death, and while it's obviously moved from SF to fantasy, is it any more or less 'hard'?

[Knaight]

Is there? Apart from catering to the expertise of code scrapers and would-be modders for Outside, what's the big deal? I could rewrite The Cold Equations with magic instead of physics creating the inexorable mechanisms that condemn a girl to death, and while it's obviously moved from SF to fantasy, is it any more or less 'hard'?

The big deal is that The Cold Equations makes a point about something real*, where if you do the same thing with magic it's just going to feel arbitrary and pointless, at least if it's not embedded within a much larger text. "Catering to the expertise of code scrapers and would-be modders for Outside" is a big deal, and that's a very large group of people. Which is why that reference can even meaningfully exist.

*A point limited by the extent to which the failure was less in equations and more in security, but whatever.

[Mechalich]

Is there? Apart from catering to the expertise of code scrapers and would-be modders for Outside, what's the big deal? I could rewrite The Cold Equations with magic instead of physics creating the inexorable mechanisms that condemn a girl to death, and while it's obviously moved from SF to fantasy, is it any more or less 'hard'?

No matter how awesome you are, you can't simulate an entire world, it's just too complicated. While it is possible to create robust magic systems, something will always get missed and weird logical inconsistencies will emerge in fantasy worlds. Additionally, a fantasy system is designed and therefore it conforms to the desire of the designer, it's not naturally emergent, like the real world, and the temptation to tweak the design during the process is not only inevitable, it is necessary to get a workable system (much in the way a procedural video game has to be built).

There are greater and lesser levels of both consistency and detail to fantasy worlds (an incredibly detailed world, like FR, can be built on startlingly inconsistent systems) but they have nothing like the robustness of the real world, and until we invent super-intelligent AI, they never will.

[Lethologica]

The big deal is that The Cold Equations makes a point about something real*, where if you do the same thing with magic it's just going to feel arbitrary and pointless, at least if it's not embedded within a much larger text. "Catering to the expertise of code scrapers and would-be modders for Outside" is a big deal, and that's a very large group of people. Which is why that reference can even meaningfully exist.

*A point limited by the extent to which the failure was less in equations and more in security, but whatever.
Security and arbitrarily tight engineering tolerances (frankly, arbitrary beyond the point of reason or realism). And more besides - the author kept coming up with ways to save the girl and the editor kept on having to stop him because the point was to write the story where the girl can't be saved. Fantasy can't perfectly simulate a whole world, but no narrative is a simulation - they're all illusions, arbitrarily built, and we buy into the illusion because we want to feel the weight of a dead woman walking. The story is about that, and it's real in any setting. A competently written fantasy version could get reader buy-in.

[Saintheart]

I wonder whether the distinction comes down to the suspension of disbelief required?

Science fiction - in the classic sense - strikes me as not requiring much suspension of disbelief at all, because the author's conceit -- as artificial as the Pact or the Pledge which is the first stage of a magic trick, see The Prestige for details -- is that he's basing his story in a world built wholly on verifiable rules of physics. The pledge to the reader is that they don't have to ask their rational brain to shut down much at all, because apparently the fictional world flies on physics as we know them right now. The classic definition of science fiction -- where only one rule of physics is suspended without extrapolation or explanation -- is the bragging rights of the authors in that world, but still highly artificial.

Fantasy, though, requires greater suspension of disbelief, because typically large swathes of reality's rules as we know them are being ignored outright. In this case, the Pledge an author offers is one of two things: either that this universe which doesn't work like our own still has some identifiable rules on which the non-physics-bound phenomena operate, or that the non-physics-bound stuff is not going to interfere with narrative consistency or so change people that it makes them unrecognisable as humans or unrelatable as humans.

The Matrix, then, is an amusing case of a fantasy cocooned inside science fiction, as obviously set out as in Morpheus's dialogue: "What you must learn is that these rules [of reality within the Matrix] are no different to the rules of a computer system. Some of them can be bent. Others can be broken."

[Mechalich]

I wonder whether the distinction comes down to the suspension of disbelief required?

No. You can have very soft science fiction that requires immense suspension of disbelief but that it still very clearly science fiction and not fantasy. A good example is the Culture Universe of the late Iain M. Banks. That universe posits and impossibly advanced post-scarcity civilization where even death has become optional and stupendously absurd feats of physics defying power are commonplace, but it is very clearly an exploration of the influence of technological and social development (specifically the idea of post-scarcity and nigh-limitless tech) on the human condition. No one would claim those books are fantasy.

At the same time you can have very 'hard' and grounded fantasy - which usually means low-magic, very limited supernatural elements and solid research into the relevant societies, with very limited suspension of disbelief needed, and still have the work obviously be a fantasy. The pseudo-historical works of Guy Gavriel Kay, for example, such as Sailing to Sarantium or Under Heaven, are built around actual historical events and facsimiles of real people with only the most shadowy and nebulous of fantasy elements - indeed, in most cases less than people in the relevant cultures actually believed, but are still very clearly works of fantasy.

Ultimately in science fiction the speculative elements are extrapolated from some known concept or process, even if they may be extravagant or even known to be impossible (like time travel), and acknowledges this origin. In fantasy the speculative elements are fabricated whole cloth from the author's design and no explanation is needed. One starts with the real world, the other does not, even if they ultimately end up in similar places. Also, it is generally true that speculative elements in science fiction are included as part of an exploration of their consequences, while in fantasy this is unlikely or, if it is done, is done as an allegory (the zombie apocalypse is a prominent modern example).


The Matrix, then, is an amusing case of a fantasy cocooned inside science fiction, as obviously set out as in Morpheus's dialogue: "What you must learn is that these rules [of reality within the Matrix] are no different to the rules of a computer system. Some of them can be bent. Others can be broken."

Digital worlds (and also mental worlds like in Inception), do not make a story a fantasy, what they do is import a fantastical setting as an element of a science fiction narrative. In digital world science fiction there are always stakes in the simulation that link back to the real world. That's why characters who are in a simulation have to know, or at least quickly figure out, that they are within a simulation, so that they behave accordingly. After all, a character who does not know they are in a simulation will obey the rules of the world as they understand it and will end up playing out a fantasy story instead. It is of course possible to play around with this and various authors have been doing so forever, it's just become more common as the actual simulations we've developed have become more and more immersive and a larger part of the cultural consciousness. The old school method used space travel, time travel, or a convenient apocalypse, to take a character from the 'modern' world and place them into one that was apparently fantastical, as in Planet of the Apes (the original, obviously) or The Time Machine.

[BeerMug Paladin]

I'm not sufficiently convinced that these two terms label different things. As in, they're not mutually exclusive. So I can't really say that I have a preference. However, I have noticed I tend to dislike/not-care-about the things which people describe as Science Fantasy. Categories can be helpful in general without necessarily being well-defined, but other than that general trend I've noticed, I can't really say much more.

Internet forums aside, hardness of science fiction seems to me to be more of a measure of technobabble than anything else. Were there technical specifics given for the technology? Did the technical details seem plausible? Did you figure out what was implausible in the details or would be the real-world engineering issue? Generally, the less knowledge on the subject the reader has, the author has an easier time passing off as "hard".

I like the idea of the central conflicts of the story being resolved using scientific understanding or engineering knowhow. At one point I even said that's what distinguished science fiction from speculative fiction (or other categories) but I don't really draw that particular distinction anymore.

[Eldan]

Do we have different interpretations of technobabble? For me, technoabble is what Star Trek or Doctor Who do, where they bounce a reversed polarity neutron beam off the main reflector dish, i.e. string a lot of techy sounding words together into something mostly meaningless, just to show that the character is "doing something techy" when hacking the mainframe's linux loop buffer. Whereas when the explanation actually makes sense, I don't consider it technobabble. To bring it back to a book I already mentioned, Seveneves is about life on Earth being hit out by a shower of rocks in the near future and about 2/3 of the book is mainly spent discussing whether or not humanity has the resources to set up a space station or swarm of space stations that could be self-sustainable for a few thousand years until Earth is habitable again. With a lot of discussion of launch capabilities, fuel requirements and orbital paths that seem to hold up to at least my limited knowledge gained from playing Kerbal Space Program and watching a lot of NASA TV.

[Mechalich]

Technobabble is generally defined as the utilization of terminology such that it is impossible for an outsider to understand for the purpose of obfuscation. This can be done both in real life (for instance in finance, which is why the film The Big Short has special vignettes designed to 'unpack' financial terminology) and in fiction. This is different from actual use of highly specialized technical jargon within a field by practitioners to communicate among themselves. In general, hard-science fiction should actually have a minimum of technobabble since it is intended for a lay audience that would not be familiar with specialized terminology, and in-field jargon should only be used for illustrative purposes - for example to provide impact behind what a character is actually doing while otherwise simply staring at a screen or microscope - or be explained while in-use. The film version of the Martian includes several good examples of using plain language to demonstrate technical points for the audience despite being among the hardest of hard sci-fi productions.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

The more fiction I look into, the more I think this is a questionable division, especially because both genres were strongly interlinked with one another and with horror fiction during their origin in the 50s and onward, during a period where these sharp genre boundaries didn't exist. Bradbury, prolific sci-fi author, also wrote about a magical carnival of evil. PKD has a short story about honest-to-goodness fairies. Arthur C. Clarke pushed the idea of "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

Ultimately, despite attempts to classify them uniquely, both sci-fi and fantasy are about creating worlds where one or more fundamental rules of reality are changed. Sometimes, it seems mundane (the world is governed by a feudal society, as in low-magic fantasy); sometimes, it's fantastical (we've invented "positronic brains" which grant human-like decision-making and possibly consciousness, as in I, Robot). Sometimes, it's abstract, as in stories where good and evil have real, concrete presence.

Ultimately, it's branding. Tell a story about an unformed mind coming to grips with reality, and it's fantasy if that mind is a golem with the Divine Name on its forehead, but it's sci-fi if it's a robot with the will of its creator imprinted on its circuits. The story can be exactly the same in substance, ignoring the question of how this entity gained consciousness, and the branding will determine whether it's a sci-fi or a fantasy. It's about what the story feels like or gets marketed as.

Frankenstein is a Gothic Horror story about a creature animated through impossible mad science, but it would be right at home in Black Mirror.

[Saph]

I wonder whether the distinction comes down to the suspension of disbelief required?

Science fiction - in the classic sense - strikes me as not requiring much suspension of disbelief at all, because the author's conceit -- as artificial as the Pact or the Pledge which is the first stage of a magic trick, see The Prestige for details -- is that he's basing his story in a world built wholly on verifiable rules of physics.

The problem with that is that somewhere between 90% and 99% of the currently popular science fiction out there (depending on how strict you are) completely breaks those rules. The biggest example is FTL travel, which makes a joke out of any claim that you're building your world on "verifiable rules of physics".

FTL is actually much less realistic than the common tropes of fantasy. It's possible to write a universe that has dragons, unicorns, orcs, elves, and magic spells that is believably consistent with our current understanding of scientific laws (e.g. John Ringo's There Will Be Dragons). It's not possible to do the same with FTL travel unless you want to get into really crazy stuff like abandoning causality.

[Darth Ultron]

Is there? Apart from catering to the expertise of code scrapers and would-be modders for Outside, what's the big deal? I could rewrite The Cold Equations with magic instead of physics creating the inexorable mechanisms that condemn a girl to death, and while it's obviously moved from SF to fantasy, is it any more or less 'hard'?

You can do the ''Cold Equations" unless you are using real, hard science.

To have the drama of ''oh no the character is trapped in the Upside Down and their quantum life pulse is running out of power", does not have the same effect as "the character is lost in space and running out of air". Most of the time in sci fi when they do a ''hard" story, they stick to ''hard science" for the "hard survival" part, even if everything else is utter fantasy.


Internet forums aside, hardness of science fiction seems to me to be more of a measure of technobabble than anything else.

Except Hard Sci Fi won't have technobabble, it will have reality. Hard is saying ''we need X amount of thrust to take off from Earth", soft is technobable like ''we need to recharge the flux capacitor with a cascading reversal of the neutron flow!" and pure fantasy is just ''hit a button and whatever the plot wants to happen, happens".


I think the line between reality based fiction and fantasy is in the details and tone of the story. A character gets trapped in a room with a hungry alien monster: they are eaten and killed, period(hard). The characters are free to move around as every single bad guy with a weapon has Stromtrooper Aim (fantasy). Two characters accidentally go ''out of phase" and yet don't die of suffocation, cold or just float away into space(fantasy). Characters have to keep track of consumables like food, water and air (hard). When a character takes a serious injury to the spine and dies....they suddenly have an..er..complete secondary nervous system that saves them(fantasy)

[Rodin]

The problem I have with judging based on techno-babble is that stories can be hard in some ways and not in others. For example, the Honor Harrington novels. David Weber takes physics and ties it in a knot to make his spaceships fight like Age of the Sail ships because the whole series is "Horatio Hornblower INNNNN SPAAAAAACCCEEE!!" There's pages and pages of techno-babble to show how all that works, which would place the work in the "space fantasy" mode.

Except that, apart from that one conceit, the series is relatively hard. No other sentient spacefaring races, and sentient aliens period are virtually non-existent (I believe all of two races are shown). Transmission lag due to slower-than-light communications. Acceleration matters, and ships maneuver realistically in space rather than swooping and diving everywhere. The technobabbled rules themselves are very consistent, and nobody is switching the polarities to get special results.

At the end of the day, it's all just guidelines and trying to pin a hard and fast definition is like trying to define "RPG" - everyone has their own idea of what the term means and nobody is really wrong.

[BeerMug Paladin]

The problem I have with judging based on techno-babble is that stories can be hard in some ways and not in others. For example, the Honor Harrington novels. David Weber takes physics and ties it in a knot to make his spaceships fight like Age of the Sail ships because the whole series is "Horatio Hornblower INNNNN SPAAAAAACCCEEE!!" There's pages and pages of techno-babble to show how all that works, which would place the work in the "space fantasy" mode.

Except that, apart from that one conceit, the series is relatively hard. No other sentient spacefaring races, and sentient aliens period are virtually non-existent (I believe all of two races are shown). Transmission lag due to slower-than-light communications. Acceleration matters, and ships maneuver realistically in space rather than swooping and diving everywhere. The technobabbled rules themselves are very consistent, and nobody is switching the polarities to get special results.

At the end of the day, it's all just guidelines and trying to pin a hard and fast definition is like trying to define "RPG" - everyone has their own idea of what the term means and nobody is really wrong.

I think Honor Harrington (at least the first novel, I haven't read any of the others) is a pretty decent example of what I mean. There's technobabble. It's how they have ftl drives, and there's some effort given to describe how it impacts the workings of ships and influences war. How much detail in the technobabble and how consistent it is is what makes hardness, not any measure of "realness" of the made-up science. Treecats aside, obviously.

[Kato]

Ultimately, it's branding. Tell a story about an unformed mind coming to grips with reality, and it's fantasy if that mind is a golem with the Divine Name on its forehead, but it's sci-fi if it's a robot with the will of its creator imprinted on its circuits. The story can be exactly the same in substance, ignoring the question of how this entity gained consciousness, and the branding will determine whether it's a sci-fi or a fantasy. It's about what the story feels like or gets marketed as.

I disagree. Not in principle but in nine out of ten cases. When have you seen a story about a golem in an otherwise normal setting? They almost always come along with a load of magic and possibly other supernatural things.
While stories about AI also have a tendency to be set in unrealistic futures, it's much more common to have such a story in the present or realistically close future.
If your golem is the only fantastic thing, feel free to call it sci-fi, but I'd be surprised if anyone wrote that story.
Edit: also, the idea that creating an ai with sufficient knowledge is more likely / realistic (to me) than with a magic word..



FTL is actually much less realistic than the common tropes of fantasy. It's possible to write a universe that has dragons, unicorns, orcs, elves, and magic spells that is believably consistent with our current understanding of scientific laws (e.g. John Ringo's There Will Be Dragons). It's not possible to do the same with FTL travel unless you want to get into really crazy stuff like abandoning causality.

I'm actually curious how you can justify dragons and magic but take offense at FTL.
Yeah, the latter requires you to ditch general relativity but the latter means you ignore everyday physical laws.
Both are unrealistic but calling one "much less realistic" seems like quite a stretch.

[Rodin]

I'm actually curious how you can justify dragons and magic but take offense at FTL.
Yeah, the latter requires you to ditch general relativity but the latter means you ignore everyday physical laws.
Both are unrealistic but calling one "much less realistic" seems like quite a stretch.

Depends on your dragon type somewhat. A ground-based giant lizard version is basically a dinosaur. Adding fire breath is kind of difficult, but when "breaks the sound barrier as a hunting technique" already exists in real life my credulity isn't strained. They tend to be long-lived, but once again we have plenty of example of really-freaking-old animals in real life.

Flying dragons are tough, because flight physics suck to begin with and get really bad for large creatures. Ones that are more intelligent than humans present their own problems, and those that are master spell-casters then require the magic system to be explained. Wish-granting dragons are right out.

As for magic, you can again take it in different ways. A lot of magic is just "it exists, deal with it", but with others you're essentially adding a new energy source. A pool of energy not reachable by "normal" means that can then be used in a variety of ways once harnessed. And that's similar to how FTL travel works in a lot of cases - hyperspace is basically stepping into another dimension and moving across a shorter distance and then emerging again into our reality. Both methods involve envisioning something outside of human experience as a medium to accomplish a goal. Softer Sci-Fi treats FTL the same way that magic is treated - "it exists, technology is just that advanced, lalala I can't HEAR you..."

Now, I wouldn't go so far as to say it's much harder to believe. But I would say that they can be about equal, depending on the setting.

[Darth Ultron]

How much detail in the technobabble and how consistent it is is what makes hardness, not any measure of "realness" of the made-up science.

The instant you have something that does not exist for real on Earth, you have fiction. So as soon as you have something even very simple like a space ship or an alien, it's ''not real". But the important part is how close to ''real" to you make your setting/story.


I disagree. Not in principle but in nine out of ten cases. When have you seen a story about a golem in an otherwise normal setting? They almost always come along with a load of magic and possibly other supernatural things.

Well, the original golem story for one.



While stories about AI also have a tendency to be set in unrealistic futures, it's much more common to have such a story in the present or realistically close future.

AI is well represented in future stories. But the more realistic futures have little or no AI, while the pure space fantasy ones have AI ''just like humans".

[Ibrinar]

AI is well represented in future stories. But the more realistic futures have little or no AI, while the pure space fantasy ones have AI ''just like humans".

Isn't not having hard AI in the far of future quite unrealistic? Hard AI is inconvenient for many stories because the question comes up why our human main characters are in charge of X instead of offloading it to an AI, but we know thinking machines are possible since each of us has one in their head, so not adding it to a far future setting seems like deliberately ignoring the logical development because you don't want to deal with its effects on humanity..

[The Glyphstone]

Isn't not having hard AI in the far of future quite unrealistic? Hard AI is inconvenient for many stories because the question comes up why our human main characters are in charge of X instead of offloading it to an AI, but we know thinking machines are possible since each of us has one in their head, so not adding it to a far future setting seems like deliberately ignoring the logical development because you don't want to deal with its effects on humanity..

We know we have them, but how to replicate the insane complexity of an organic brain in synthetics isn't necessarily a logical progression. So it's not a guarantee that we will have hard AI.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

I think there's fictional elements which will make most people agree that a story is sci-fi (aliens, AI, guns that use energy instead of matter), and fictional elements which will make most people agree that a story is fantasy (dragons, spirits of nature, magic fireballs). And yet, if you look into it, those are just superficial differences. "Space fantasy" is a genre that cheekily pokes at the line between the two and finds that there isn't actually one. Retell Bradbury's "The Veldt" with a djinn enslaved to the house, doing the bidding of the children, and nothing changes.

"Fantasy" doesn't always mean "without defined rules" and "sci-fi" doesn't always mean "clearly defined physics and adherence to known rules". It's really about what aesthetic you're evoking, which is why the genres were so successfully blurred in the 50s and 60s.

At best, "sci-fi" and "fantasy" are aesthetic justifications for building a story based on rules that are unlike the rules of our world. They're a way of making the reader believe in the "world with the green sun", as Tolkien put it (his essay "On Fairy-Stories"). We can accept the reality of a nonhuman being that thinks, or a relationship between two people that doesn't correspond with normal chronology, or an item that knows who the goodhearted are, but only if we say that the story is justified by the presence of the supernatural, or by sufficiently advanced technology.

[Saph]

I'm actually curious how you can justify dragons and magic but take offense at FTL.
Yeah, the latter requires you to ditch general relativity but the latter means you ignore everyday physical laws.
Both are unrealistic but calling one "much less realistic" seems like quite a stretch.

Dragons can be justified by giving them an internal reservoir of lighter-than air gas to provide buoyancy and fire breathing. Magic can be replicated by some combination of nanotech and advanced energy transfer. They'll both probably require technology well in advance of what we can currently access, but it's theoretically possible to make them work.

You can't justify FTL within our current understanding of how the universe works at all. At least, not the "spaceships going back and forth across the galaxy" kind. It just doesn't work. From a scientific point of view, it's much more egregious than anything in your average swords-and-sorcery fantasy novel.

It's the difference between someone asking you "I want you to carve this log into a weight bench" (which is annoying and fiddly but theoretically possible) and someone asking you "I want you to carve this log into another log with twice the mass of the first log".

[Darth Ultron]

Isn't not having hard AI in the far of future quite unrealistic?

Not at all. You can say we might...maybe..have X in the future, but you can't know for sure.



"Fantasy" doesn't always mean "without defined rules" and "sci-fi" doesn't always mean "clearly defined physics and adherence to known rules". It's really about what aesthetic you're evoking, which is why the genres were so successfully blurred in the 50s and 60s.

This is why there is Hard Sci Fi and Space Fantasy: they are sub definitions. There is no Hard Fantasy: Fantasy can only exist with no rules and anything goes.

[Ibrinar]

I was tempted to ask before, but Darth Ultron have you just never read any significant amount of fantasy or why are you so wrong about it?

Edit: forget it

[Lethologica]

Noooo resist the temptation

The more the thread talks about whether or not DU has bad opinions, the less it talks about things that are worthwhile


Dragons can be justified by giving them an internal reservoir of lighter-than air gas to provide buoyancy and fire breathing.
This was the Temeraire justification and I never bought it, at least not by itself. Like, dragons are not actually blimp-shaped and do not maneuver like blimps. The hot-air-balloon organ might be able to push the size limits to a very modest degree, but nowhere near the extent to which dragons typically exceed those limits (never mind dragons being ridden).

Some combination of buoyancy and a greatly thickened atmosphere could possibly work. However, I don't have the background to work through the implications of the latter, or how to get it without increasing planetary gravity (which defeats the purpose).

[Ibrinar]

Yeah I guess it would be pretty offtopic so I hereby retract my question.

About dragon flying maybe place the story on something with much lower gravity. Hmm but I guess that also lower the uplift gained by the air, wouldn't it. Though I think wingbeats would still be more effective but you don't really get gravity low enough anywhere with a proper atmosphere. Yeah unless they basically are blimps and barely contain anything beside gas (which would make them rather weak and fragile) a normal sized dragon flying just doesn't have a plausible explanation.

[The Glyphstone]

Noooo resist the temptation

The more the thread talks about whether or not DU has bad opinions, the less it talks about things that are worthwhile


This was the Temeraire justification and I never bought it, at least not by itself. Like, dragons are not actually blimp-shaped and do not maneuver like blimps. The hot-air-balloon organ might be able to push the size limits to a very modest degree, but nowhere near the extent to which dragons typically exceed those limits (never mind dragons being ridden).

Some combination of buoyancy and a greatly thickened atmosphere could possibly work. However, I don't have the background to work through the implications of the latter, or how to get it without increasing planetary gravity (which defeats the purpose).

The Temeraire explanation was also written as an in-universe document. So when it clearly could not justify the results, I was happily able to categorize it as 'they're wrong'. They live in a universe with magical dragons, they just don't realize it because there is no other magical phenomena to compare against.

[Darth Ultron]

I was tempted to ask before, but Darth Ultron have you just never read any significant amount of fantasy or why are you so wrong about it?


I read a lot.

And, so, are you going to say fantasy is real then? Or that Space Fantasy is real?

[Kato]

Dragons can be justified by giving them an internal reservoir of lighter-than air gas to provide buoyancy and fire breathing. Magic can be replicated by some combination of nanotech and advanced energy transfer. They'll both probably require technology well in advance of what we can currently access, but it's theoretically possible to make them work.

You can't justify FTL within our current understanding of how the universe works at all. At least, not the "spaceships going back and forth across the galaxy" kind. It just doesn't work. From a scientific point of view, it's much more egregious than anything in your average swords-and-sorcery fantasy novel.

It's the difference between someone asking you "I want you to carve this log into a weight bench" (which is annoying and fiddly but theoretically possible) and someone asking you "I want you to carve this log into another log with twice the mass of the first log".
No, you can not make dragons fly by giving them a gas reservoir unless you turn them into balloons. That's breaking physics as much as anything else. And "nanotech and advanced energy transfer" sounds as much as technobabble" as "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow", as in there is no way to make it work how it is supposed to. I mean, I guess you can justify some magic-ish things with nantoech but that only encompasses more mundane spells.

Again, I'm not making any case about FTL being (super) realistic but at least there are some concepts for how it can work without breaking brutally physics, like worm holes or dimensional bubbles. Yes, yes, yes, these are still unrealistic but no less than the fantasy examples.



"Space fantasy" is a genre that cheekily pokes at the line between the two and finds that there isn't actually one.

I have never come across that definition or an example of it. I guess there are some stories which are just elves/orcs/dwarves in SPAAAACE but never to specifically poke at the idea.

[Saph]

Again, I'm not making any case about FTL being (super) realistic but at least there are some concepts for how it can work without breaking brutally physics, like worm holes or dimensional bubbles. Yes, yes, yes, these are still unrealistic but no less than the fantasy examples.

I really don't think you understand just how badly sci-fi FTL breaks our current scientific model. It's not "oh, it's kind of unrealistic, but it's no big deal". It's "there is no way this could ever ever work unless current physics is wildly, hopelessly wrong, and if it were true it would imply things that are so contradictory no one has any idea how to even begin to make sense of them".

[BlacKnight]

I really don't think you understand just how badly sci-fi FTL breaks our current scientific model. It's not "oh, it's kind of unrealistic, but it's no big deal". It's "there is no way this could ever ever work unless current physics is wildly, hopelessly wrong, and if it were true it would imply things that are so contradictory no one has any idea how to even begin to make sense of them".

Well, the "spaceship goes from point A to point B" is realistic.
How it's doing that (going FTL) is not.

The "dragons fly" is realistic.
How they are doing that (light gas or whatever) is not.

Where's the difference ?
I think that in one case you are concentrating on the means, while in the other you are just looking at the end result and saying "no big deal, there shall be some way that it can work".

Or maybe you are saying that relativity is more important than gravity ?

[Mechalich]

Well, the "spaceship goes from point A to point B" is realistic.
How it's doing that (going FTL) is not.

The "dragons fly" is realistic.
How they are doing that (light gas or whatever) is not.

Where's the difference ?
I think that in one case you are concentrating on the means, while in the other you are just looking at the end result and saying "no big deal, there shall be some way that it can work".

Or maybe you are saying that relativity is more important than gravity ?

FTL has the problem that it almost always violates causality, which turns the very idea of a narrative structure into explicit swiss cheese - in the same way that time travel does (which shouldn't surprise us, because FTL travel is time travel). Once you have FTL, you've explicitly permitted paradoxes to exist, and this makes telling a typical story with a linear through line impossible because there is no beginning, middle, and end anymore. It's not impossible to do, several recent high-concept science fiction films: Arrival and Interstellar, have both done so, but it tends to be weird, unsatisfying, and makes your head hurt if you think about it too hard.

Making dragons fly is much less involved, because it doesn't need to have any implications outside of itself. To make an implausibly large winged animal fly is simply a matter of tweaking numbers such that their wings output far more lift and thrust than they should. It's merely altering values in an existing equation. The science fiction equivalent is allowing spacecraft to have implausibly powerful drive systems (which is extremely common even in rather hard science fiction like The Expanse). Your average science fiction torchship has an engine equivalent that broaches 'continual nuclear detonation' power levels and is generating enough waste heat to melt the ship attached to it in seconds, but this can be handwaved by putting some implausibly high and low numbers into the relevant equations.

FTL, by contrast, is equivalent to discarding essentially all the relevant equations entirely.

[Knaight]

I have never come across that definition or an example of it. I guess there are some stories which are just elves/orcs/dwarves in SPAAAACE but never to specifically poke at the idea.

It's not so much that the genre exists to poke at the line as that the genres existence does that as a side effect - though all it really does is show that it's less a hard line and more a blurry region, which that genre lives within.

[BlacKnight]

FTL has the problem that it almost always violates causality, which turns the very idea of a narrative structure into explicit swiss cheese - in the same way that time travel does (which shouldn't surprise us, because FTL travel is time travel). Once you have FTL, you've explicitly permitted paradoxes to exist, and this makes telling a typical story with a linear through line impossible because there is no beginning, middle, and end anymore. It's not impossible to do, several recent high-concept science fiction films: Arrival and Interstellar, have both done so, but it tends to be weird, unsatisfying, and makes your head hurt if you think about it too hard.

Making dragons fly is much less involved, because it doesn't need to have any implications outside of itself. To make an implausibly large winged animal fly is simply a matter of tweaking numbers such that their wings output far more lift and thrust than they should. It's merely altering values in an existing equation. The science fiction equivalent is allowing spacecraft to have implausibly powerful drive systems (which is extremely common even in rather hard science fiction like The Expanse). Your average science fiction torchship has an engine equivalent that broaches 'continual nuclear detonation' power levels and is generating enough waste heat to melt the ship attached to it in seconds, but this can be handwaved by putting some implausibly high and low numbers into the relevant equations.

FTL, by contrast, is equivalent to discarding essentially all the relevant equations entirely.

Altering the numbers of some equation would has consequences on the entire world, not just dragons.
And if tweaking numbers is not breking physics then you can just change the speed of light or reduce the distance between celestial bodies and then you have quick space travel without FTL.

[Knaight]

Altering the numbers of some equation would has consequences on the entire world, not just dragons.
And if tweaking numbers is not breking physics then you can just change the speed of light or reduce the distance between celestial bodies and then you have quick space travel without FTL.

You don't need to change important constants like speed of light or the distance between celestial bodies in the other case, is the point. You can get where you want entirely by messing with material properties, and while that involves heavy use of unobtanium in the form of various super materials with properties that not only don't correspond to real materials but are way off the scale of where real materials end up.

[Rodin]

I don't think you have to be quite as extreme as "we are going faster than light, with all the time-based nonsense that entails" for FTL travel to be a thing. You just have to cheat the system by positing that there is a shortcut via which light (and other matter) does not normally travel. This is why I mentioned tesseracting, which has the simplest explanation - rather than try and beat light in a straight-line path, you fold space and then punch a hole through and are thus waiting at the destination when light finally arrives having taken the scenic route. Most FTL travel in Sci-Fi that doesn't simply handwave it uses something to this effect - hyperspace and jump points being the main two.

That's why I think it's "only" as implausible as a flying dragon - to get a flying dragon, you need an external power source to beat physics, i.e. magic. To get FTL travel, you need an extra dimension to travel through in order to beat the physics.

[Kato]

I really don't think you understand just how badly sci-fi FTL breaks our current scientific model. It's not "oh, it's kind of unrealistic, but it's no big deal". It's "there is no way this could ever ever work unless current physics is wildly, hopelessly wrong, and if it were true it would imply things that are so contradictory no one has any idea how to even begin to make sense of them".

And I think you greatly exaggerate. Before Einstein / GR it wasn't that scientists didn't know how anything worked. Yes, GR has answered a lot of questions and fixed some mistakes, and removing relativity from our universe would break it. But no more than your average fantasy magic that creates energy or mass from nothing, manipulates gravity or force by the power of mind or whatever else magic can do.
Again, I'm not saying either makes sense, but claiming one is "much less realistic" I'm just unwilling to agree with.

[BlacKnight]

You don't need to change important constants like speed of light or the distance between celestial bodies in the other case, is the point. You can get where you want entirely by messing with material properties, and while that involves heavy use of unobtanium in the form of various super materials with properties that not only don't correspond to real materials but are way off the scale of where real materials end up.

And why is the distance between celestial bodies important, but the physical properties of materials aren't ?
It seems to me that it's a very arbitrary distinction.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

This is why there is Hard Sci Fi and Space Fantasy: they are sub definitions. There is no Hard Fantasy: Fantasy can only exist with no rules and anything goes.
Uhh.

Can I point you to Brandon Sanderson?

[GloatingSwine]

Again, I'm not saying either makes sense, but claiming one is "much less realistic" I'm just unwilling to agree with.

It's the difference between saying "this requires more energy than a creature of this size could extract from food" and "this requires more energy than exists in the universe".

[Knaight]

And why is the distance between celestial bodies important, but the physical properties of materials aren't ?
It seems to me that it's a very arbitrary distinction.

Because in one of them you can just introduce a new thing, and in another you have to remove known properties from existing things. If you want to pull the galaxy far away card where the stars are closer, cool, it works just fine. Set locally though? That's like requiring a bunch of different unobtaniums, and then stubbornly insisting that they're all specific named materials.

[BlacKnight]

Because in one of them you can just introduce a new thing, and in another you have to remove known properties from existing things.

But you can't just invent things with impossible properties and call it a day.
Otherwise we can just make Eezo which allows to cheat relativity.
You are basically saying that "Unobtanium which cheats thermodynamics" is ok, but "unobtanium which cheats relativity" is not.

[Mechalich]

But you can't just invent things with impossible properties and call it a day.
Otherwise we can just make Eezo which allows to cheat relativity.
You are basically saying that "Unobtanium which cheats thermodynamics" is ok, but "unobtanium which cheats relativity" is not.

Cheating thermodynamics in a localized way, by giving a specific person or a specific class of animal 'super-strength' for example, doesn't rip causality apart. The ability to use superman as a power source (https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13) is part of the nasty fridge logic consequences of small scale localized violations of thermodynamics, but it doesn't violate story structure in the process.

The problem with violating relativity in fiction is not that it allows you to go faster than the speed of light, it is that going faster than the speed of light explicitly introduces paradoxes into your universe because FTL travel is time travel, and paradoxes are a huge story-killing problem because they eliminate agency - 'this happens next because it already has happened.'

Now maybe, maybe you can find an FTL method that doesn't produce paradoxes. It's possible that there are 'folded-space' methods that work in this way because nothing actually moves faster than c, but to get it right would be both hard and requires a proper understanding of relativity, which the overwhelming majority of authors and audiences don't have. Good luck with that.

[Darth Ultron]

Where's the difference ?


There is no difference, but then your focusing on the wrong thing. To just travel, it does not matter if it by boat, train, space ship or flying dragon. No matter what you are just moving from point A to B.

The difference is reality, and hard sci fi has Limits. Things the author can't change even for the story. A human in a setting ''just like Earth" can't walk from New York to L.A. in one second. No matter the need of the story, you can't change the limits.

That is what makes fantasy fantasy: anything goes. Whatever the author wants to happen, just happens, with no limits at all. The character can be anywhere, on a whim.

Science is not really so ''hard" when it comes to nitpicking. You can say that it is impossible for us in 2018 to travel faster then light...but you can't say that it (or anything) is impossible period. After all, ask any scientist from the past, say 1718, about anything advanced we have today and they will say it's ''impossible"...at least to them.





Uhh.

Can I point you to Brandon Sanderson?

Ok? So a fantasy writer that writes fantasy? And?

[Lethologica]

Sanderson is a typical example of someone writing rules-oriented fantasy, DU, which you think of as an oxymoron.


Cheating thermodynamics in a localized way, by giving a specific person or a specific class of animal 'super-strength' for example, doesn't rip causality apart. The ability to use superman as a power source (https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13) is part of the nasty fridge logic consequences of small scale localized violations of thermodynamics, but it doesn't violate story structure in the process.

The problem with violating relativity in fiction is not that it allows you to go faster than the speed of light, it is that going faster than the speed of light explicitly introduces paradoxes into your universe because FTL travel is time travel, and paradoxes are a huge story-killing problem because they eliminate agency - 'this happens next because it already has happened.'

Now maybe, maybe you can find an FTL method that doesn't produce paradoxes. It's possible that there are 'folded-space' methods that work in this way because nothing actually moves faster than c, but to get it right would be both hard and requires a proper understanding of relativity, which the overwhelming majority of authors and audiences don't have. Good luck with that.
Wormholes and warp drives both potentially get around this problem. (http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/FTL.html) So does introducing a preferred FTL reference frame. (https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/46873/are-there-any-ways-to-allow-some-form-of-ftl-travel-without-allowing-time-travel/47038#47038)

[Rodin]

Cheating thermodynamics in a localized way, by giving a specific person or a specific class of animal 'super-strength' for example, doesn't rip causality apart. The ability to use superman as a power source (https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13) is part of the nasty fridge logic consequences of small scale localized violations of thermodynamics, but it doesn't violate story structure in the process.

The problem with violating relativity in fiction is not that it allows you to go faster than the speed of light, it is that going faster than the speed of light explicitly introduces paradoxes into your universe because FTL travel is time travel, and paradoxes are a huge story-killing problem because they eliminate agency - 'this happens next because it already has happened.'

Now maybe, maybe you can find an FTL method that doesn't produce paradoxes. It's possible that there are 'folded-space' methods that work in this way because nothing actually moves faster than c, but to get it right would be both hard and requires a proper understanding of relativity, which the overwhelming majority of authors and audiences don't have. Good luck with that.

They're only a huge story-killing problem if you, well, care. The Red Dwarf episode where they break the speed of light and start seeing future visions of themselves is ludicrous scientifically, but it made for great comedy.

I find FTL travel in Sci-Fi to be identical to magic in Fantasy. It's a wink and a nod from the author saying "the world just works this way, and that enables me to tell the story I want to tell". As long as they then remain consistent, I have no problem looking past physics problems they introduce. A phaser/disintegration spell totally vaporize a person? As long as it does so every time, the fact that this causes massive conservation of energy problems doesn't matter to me.

The one case where I do tend to get bothered is time travel, and that's because it's virtually impossible to introduce time travel in a way that doesn't violate story structure. There's always the question of "why not go back and try again", and "why not go back further?" and that's without even getting into the usual time travel paradoxes. FTL as a concept is so easy to bypass from a story perspective that it doesn't even ping on my radar in comparison.

Or, to put it more bluntly, I don't need the author to show me 50 pages of mathematical equations to explain why his ship got from point A to point B.

[Knaight]

You are basically saying that "Unobtanium which cheats thermodynamics" is ok, but "unobtanium which cheats relativity" is not.

Extremely low thermal conductivity doesn't cheat thermodynamics. Extremely high emissivity doesn't cheat thermodynamics. That's all you need here, and it's a far smaller cheat than going faster than light.

I'm also not saying that unobtanium which cheats relativity isn't okay. I'm fine with faster than light travel in fiction, I just consider it extremely unrealistic to the point where I wouldn't classify anything that has it as hard science fiction. That still leaves a lot of genres with excellent stories in them.

[Darth Ultron]

Sanderson is a typical example of someone writing rules-oriented fantasy, DU, which you think of as an oxymoron.

You can have ''rules" in universe in your fantasy world...but it is still fantasy. And, after all, the fantasy rules are ''anything can happen".

[Rodin]

You can have ''rules" in universe in your fantasy world...but it is still fantasy. And, after all, the fantasy rules are ''anything can happen".

Except where, as we keep telling you, this is flat wrong.

Fantasy stories have rules in exactly the same manner as sci-fi stories have rules. All that changes are WHICH rules are getting broken.

A fantasy story in which "anything can happen" would be a pretty crap one. If the hero can randomly decide to turn the villain into delicious sponge cake, there isn't a lot of drama to be had.

[Kato]

It's the difference between saying "this requires more energy than a creature of this size could extract from food" and "this requires more energy than exists in the universe".
It's not a matter of energy. I'm going to give your dragon as much energy as you want, I still want an explanation how this gets a dragon shaped thing with dragon weight moving the way a dragon does.
(also, other magic)


But you can't just invent things with impossible properties and call it a day.
Otherwise we can just make Eezo which allows to cheat relativity.
You are basically saying that "Unobtanium which cheats thermodynamics" is ok, but "unobtanium which cheats relativity" is not.
Both are OK. My problem is with "one is much worse than the other", when I can imagine a universe where I "ditch relativity" (one universal time frame or some other means) and fix the holes easier than one where people or elves or dragons violate conservation of mass, energy and momentum by willpower.

[Knaight]

Fantasy stories have rules in exactly the same manner as sci-fi stories have rules. All that changes are WHICH rules are getting broken.

A fantasy story in which "anything can happen" would be a pretty crap one. If the hero can randomly decide to turn the villain into delicious sponge cake, there isn't a lot of drama to be had.

"Anything can happen" is not remotely the same thing as "any character can just do anything", and fantasy stories have rules in the sense that sci-fi stories have rules only if you note that there is a lot of very soft sci-fi. Hard fantasy isn't the only kind.

[Rodin]

"Anything can happen" is not remotely the same thing as "any character can just do anything", and fantasy stories have rules in the sense that sci-fi stories have rules only if you note that there is a lot of very soft sci-fi. Hard fantasy isn't the only kind.

Isn't that the point I was trying to make?

There is hard and soft sci-fi. In hard sci-fi, there are a lot of stringent rules on what can happen. In soft Sci-Fi, you can have stuff like the Force or Q come down and make whatever you want to happen, happen.

There is hard and soft fantasy. In hard fantasy, there are a lot of stringent rules on what can happen. In soft fantasy, you can summon in literal Deus Ex Machina to solve your plot for you.

DU is saying "Well, you can have so-called 'rules', but they don't count because FANTASY", an idea which I reject absolutely. ANY given story has a set of rules by which it operates by, and that applies equally to sci-fi as well as to fantasy.

[Lethologica]

"Anything can happen" is not remotely the same thing as "any character can just do anything", and fantasy stories have rules in the sense that sci-fi stories have rules only if you note that there is a lot of very soft sci-fi. Hard fantasy isn't the only kind.
I'm honestly struggling to figure out what point you're trying to make here. No one suggested that hard fantasy was the only kind - on the contrary, that part of the discussion has been pushing back against DU's assertion that soft fantasy is the only kind. And with not even an assertion as to what additional rules hard SF follows, your own apparent claim is extremely vague. I can imagine SF that hews more closely to the real world than pretty much any fantasy - for example, a story about currently nascent technology becoming commonplace, and the societal implications thereof - but such a story is also harder than most SF, even otherwise hard SF.

[Knaight]

I'm honestly struggling to figure out what point you're trying to make here. No one suggested that hard fantasy was the only kind - on the contrary, that part of the discussion has been pushing back against DU's assertion that soft fantasy is the only kind.

I'm all for pushing back against DU's ridiculous assertions, but while nobody has said that hard fantasy is the only kind Rodin did say "A fantasy story in which 'anything can happen' would be a pretty crap one." That's what I'm pushing back on - the idea that hard fantasy is just better than soft fantasy, to the point where soft fantasy is straight out crap.

[Lethologica]

I'm all for pushing back against DU's ridiculous assertions, but while nobody has said that hard fantasy is the only kind Rodin did say "A fantasy story in which 'anything can happen' would be a pretty crap one." That's what I'm pushing back on - the idea that hard fantasy is just better than soft fantasy, to the point where soft fantasy is straight out crap.
Nnn. I see your point, but I think Rodin was taking a much stricter position on what "no rules" means than you are, in order to argue that even soft SF/fantasy follow rules. Lord of the Rings is the archetypal example of soft fantasy (warranted or not), and there are all kinds of rules preventing things like, say, Frodo turning the Ring into sponge cake.

[Darth Ultron]

Except where, as we keep telling you, this is flat wrong.

Fantasy stories have rules in exactly the same manner as sci-fi stories have rules. All that changes are WHICH rules are getting broken.

A fantasy story in which "anything can happen" would be a pretty crap one. If the hero can randomly decide to turn the villain into delicious sponge cake, there isn't a lot of drama to be had.

I don't think your understanding here. When I say ''anything can happen", I'm not talking about the characters in-universe, I'm talking about the story, plot and overall arc of the fiction.

So in-universe rules are like: ''if a wizard points his hand and says 'soor' it will create a fireball spell". OK, that is a fantasy rule...and a writer might stick to that rule they made up..or not. But it's still just an in-universe rule. The rule is based on nothing other then the author's whim.

Hard sci-fi mostly follows the rules of our own real universe: if it is true here in the real world, it is also true in the fictional world. The hardest sci-fi does not change the rule of reality, or the fictional reality, even for the plot or the story. That is what fantasy does: change anything for the story.

It's true that a lot of space fantasy stories are, like you say ''bad''...but people still love to watch magic space wizards fighting is space with cool laser swords..


DU is saying "Well, you can have so-called 'rules', but they don't count because FANTASY", an idea which I reject absolutely. ANY given story has a set of rules by which it operates by, and that applies equally to sci-fi as well as to fantasy.

Right...once you establish that there is a magic force that can do anything, you can't just tack on rules. That is the problem with fantasy: it will always be fantasy. When you say magic can do anything...but oh, limit a character for no reason, that is still fantasy. Fantasy, by it's nature, has no limits...and definitely has no real world based limits. Fantasy magic or tech can do whatever the writer wants it to do.

[BeerMug Paladin]

Hard sci-fi mostly follows the rules of our own real universe: if it is true here in the real world, it is also true in the fictional world. The hardest sci-fi does not change the rule of reality, or the fictional reality, even for the plot or the story. That is what fantasy does: change anything for the story.
Hmm.. I can fix this...


Fiction mostly follows the rules of our own real universe: if it is true here in the real world, it is also true in the fictional world. Comprehensible stories do not change the rules of reality, or the fictional reality, even for the plot or the story. That is what fanfiction is for: change anything for the story.

Anyway, all this talk about things seeming real reminds me of a couple of things. I've seen plenty of fiction with seemingly no humans anywhere. However, there often are still human doppelgangers who exist to fool the audience.

And the presence of normal animal life that has the focus and dedication of a slasher killer. As we all know, if one were to encounter wildlife on an island that a human has never been to, it will immediately and aggressively attack on sight. Extra aggression and viciousness if there are lots of humans and only one animal.

In terms of changing reality, science fiction is overloaded with these two particular issues of making anything happen for the sake of the plot.

[Rodin]

Right...once you establish that there is a magic force that can do anything, you can't just tack on rules. That is the problem with fantasy: it will always be fantasy. When you say magic can do anything...but oh, limit a character for no reason, that is still fantasy. Fantasy, by it's nature, has no limits...and definitely has no real world based limits. Fantasy magic or tech can do whatever the writer wants it to do.

Or to rephrase:

Once you establish that there is unobtainium that can do anything, you can't just tack on rules. If the Enterprise is only able to handle going at Warp 9, OK, that is a Sci-Fi rule...and a writer might decide to stick to that rule they made up...or not. But it's still just an in-universe rule. The rule is based on nothing other then the author's whim.

A wizard using a spell to summon a ball of fire that he then flings at someone's face is exactly as plausible to me as a handheld gun that uses technobabble to fire a concentrated beam of energy at someone and vaporizes them. If it doesn't exist in the real world, then it's fictional properties are entirely at the whim of the author. Period.

The one point I'll concede is that the hardest Sci-Fi can get closer to reality than the hardest fantasy - although even there, you can get pretty damn close with a fictional non-magical setting telling an alternate history. Even hard Sci-Fi is much more controlled by the demands of the plot than any focus on realism. The spacecraft in The Martian travels exactly as fast as is needed to make it arrive at a dramatically opportune moment, and Matt Damon's food lasts exactly as long as required for him to still be alive when the ship returns. Biology joins physics in crying in the corner, because nobody wants to read a story where the ship arrives 2 months too late and picks up a skeleton.

[Kitten Champion]

It's not really different from any other kind of fiction.

In fiction you establish the perimeters of your reality, these are things like setting, characterizations, and to a certain degree tone. If you're writing a story set in a specific place and time, bringing in anachronisms can fundamentally undermine the immersion of the work. If your characters act in a way that's deeply incongruous with how they've been characterized thus far without adequate development or reasonable external justification, the sense that they're people and not just instruments of the writer breaks down. If your work has been a gritty, morally grey, heavy kind of thing and suddenly it becomes a romantic comedy, the expectations you've created in your audience hitherto as to how the world of their fiction should work are undermined.

None of this has anything to do with magic or physical laws, the conceits of speculative fiction are really not that different than the actors not actually being soldiers, cops, doctors, etc. that they're playing on the screen. The conceit is accepted because that's the nature of fiction, unless you're one of those aliens from Galaxy Quest of course.

The biggest difference with speculative fiction is... well, when you're asking the audience to believe a big lie - which they're ready and willing to presumably - you need to surround it with verisimilitude. Characters that feel believable, a world in which the consequences of your big lie are meaningful and logical, some kind of pay off for the fantastical concepts you've introduced, etc. Star Trek isn't about phasers and warp drives, it's the characters and discourse which made that franchise meaningful and last as a long as it has. The fictional technology enables that, and so long as the characters remain believable we can accept the impossibilities.

That's why the dragons v. FTL is irrelevant to me, they aren't stories. Unobtainium isn't a story, anymore than unicorns or talking Pikachus. The context you put it in characterizes how its ultimately perceived, and what the fiction ultimately is.

However, if you're using dragons, even if you go into meticulous lengths to justify it scientifically, you're doing science fantasy in the same way Warhammer 40K is when they bring elves and orks into their universe You're evoking one of the most common tropes in fantasy - and real-world myth for that matter - presumably because they are this huge fantasy conceit with lots of resonance to it. It's an aesthetic choice with a clear intent behind it, the realism of it is secondary.

[Darth Ultron]

In terms of changing reality, science fiction is overloaded with these two particular issues of making anything happen for the sake of the plot.

The vast majority of Sci-fi is 'soft' or fantasy sci-fi. It's popular.


If it doesn't exist in the real world, then it's fictional properties are entirely at the whim of the author. Period.

I think we agree here?

To cast a spell to shoot a fire ball is fantasy, and so is shooting a laser blaster.



The spacecraft in The Martian travels exactly as fast as is needed to make it arrive at a dramatically opportune moment, and Matt Damon's food lasts exactly as long as required for him to still be alive when the ship returns. Biology joins physics in crying in the corner, because nobody wants to read a story where the ship arrives 2 months too late and picks up a skeleton.

Well, no one is disputing it is all fiction.


.

[Rodin]

It's not really different from any other kind of fiction.

In fiction you establish the perimeters of your reality, these are things like setting, characterizations, and to a certain degree tone. If you're writing a story set in a specific place and time, bringing in anachronisms can fundamentally undermine the immersion of the work. If your characters act in a way that's deeply incongruous with how they've been characterized thus far without adequate development or reasonable external justification, the sense that they're people and not just instruments of the writer breaks down. If your work has been a gritty, morally grey, heavy kind of thing and suddenly it becomes a romantic comedy, the expectations you've created in your audience hitherto as to how the world of their fiction should work are undermined.

None of this has anything to do with magic or physical laws, the conceits of speculative fiction are really not that different than the actors not actually being soldiers, cops, doctors, etc. that they're playing on the screen. The conceit is accepted because that's the nature of fiction, unless you're one of those aliens from Galaxy Quest of course.

The biggest difference with speculative fiction is... well, when you're asking the audience to believe a big lie - which they're ready and willing to presumably - you need to surround it with verisimilitude. Characters that feel believable, a world in which the consequences of your big lie are meaningful and logical, some kind of pay off for the fantastical concepts you've introduced, etc. Star Trek isn't about phasers and warp drives, it's the characters and discourse which made that franchise meaningful and last as a long as it has. The fictional technology enables that, and so long as the characters remain believable we can accept the impossibilities.

That's why the dragons v. FTL is irrelevant to me, they aren't stories. Unobtainium isn't a story, anymore than unicorns or talking Pikachus. The context you put it in characterizes how its ultimately perceived, and what the fiction ultimately is.

However, if you're using dragons, even if you go into meticulous lengths to justify it scientifically, you're doing science fantasy in the same way Warhammer 40K is when they bring elves and orks into their universe You're evoking one of the most common tropes in fantasy - and real-world myth for that matter - presumably because they are this huge fantasy conceit with lots of resonance to it. It's an aesthetic choice with a clear intent behind it, the realism of it is secondary.

Do you know, I could respond further to this thread, but this encapsulates all I wanted to say far better than I have been doing.

Kudos.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

I wouldn't say that hard sci-fi being grounded in an existing reality is anything different from hard fantasy being grounded in a fantastical but well-defined reality. After all, there are many seminal science fiction classics which no longer correspond to an existing reality, because the scientific principles they were based on are no longer considered to be true.

The difference is indeed aesthetics, whether someone feels a story is "plausible" (although any hard sci-fi still has to deviate from known reality in some fashion, otherwise it would merely be contemporary fiction) or "fantastical". Therefore, there is no essential difference at the core of the genres.

[Mechalich]

I wouldn't say that hard sci-fi being grounded in an existing reality is anything different from hard fantasy being grounded in a fantastical but well-defined reality. After all, there are many seminal science fiction classics which no longer correspond to an existing reality, because the scientific principles they were based on are no longer considered to be true.

The thing is, existing reality is many orders of magnitude better defined than the best fantastical world. It just is. Additionally, existing reality has truths that are counter-intuitive but true that can stand up to scrutiny in a way they never will if they are introduced by a single author. Relativity, for instance, has been mentioned numerous times in this thread. If you tried to introduce a mechanism that worked like relativity does in a fantasy setting no one would accept it, because it would appear to be obvious garbage. It simply is not possible to create a fictional world with anything like the plausibility of the real world.

[keybounce]

On the Star Wars versus Babylon 5 comparison: one of them has psionics as a result of a biochemical reaction that is explained by chemistry and/or genetics, and the other one …

I mean, in the original trilogy, Star Wars' "the force" simply existed and wasn't explained, and then in the retcon trilogy it was changed to bacteria. In comparison, in the first season of Babylon 5, no one really understood the psionics, yet we knew that they could breed and that one of the goals of the Psi Corps was to breed stronger psionics; in the second or third season, we found that it was advanced science of the Vorlons and genetic manipulation of our DNA to develop a weapon in their war.


By those standards, The Mote in God's Eye is fantasy and not science fiction, and RWBY is science fiction and not fantasy. It is an interesting distinction to make, and there may be tendencies in one genre or the other, but it's not clearly a distinction between the two genres, and as a binary concept it falls within the paradigm of considering the two genres mutually exclusive, which I disagree with.

"The Mote in God's Eye" has to be the hardest science fiction story that I know of -- Niven and Pournelle have said that they have as much unpublished background, including pages of differential equations that explain what they were doing with the drive and the field -- with the least violations of physics (possibly even zero violations -- just need a 5th force that is generated by the fusion reactions inside suns, that happens to behave a certain way, and a parallel universe that has classical behavior instead of quantum behavior. Ok, so it might not be likely, but it's consistent with known physics as of when it was written.).

I have only seen some hints as to the amount of research and consultation they had to do with other people to develop the cultures and societies that you might only see a little bit of, but they actually named the drive itself after the person who helped them with the physics.

I suppose it helps that the majority of the background (societies, culture, physics) had already been developed for prior books that they had worked on together in the Sparta/second Empire setting.

[Mechalich]

"The Mote in God's Eye" has to be the hardest science fiction story that I know of -- Niven and Pournelle have said that they have as much unpublished background, including pages of differential equations that explain what they were doing with the drive and the field -- with the least violations of physics (possibly even zero violations -- just need a 5th force that is generated by the fusion reactions inside suns, that happens to behave a certain way, and a parallel universe that has classical behavior instead of quantum behavior. Ok, so it might not be likely, but it's consistent with known physics as of when it was written.).

The Mote in God's Eye wasn't even an especially hard science fiction story when it was written in 1974 and doesn't even approach more modern hard science fiction. Mote is a story with high verisimilitude, and it uses its fantastical handwavium technologies in a highly consistent way that allows them to utilize other scientific principles essentially unmodified, but it still has an interstellar empire using a drive technology that should flagrantly violate causality, and the central biological trait that drives the Moties as a society has no biomechanical explanation and represents a major handwave.

Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama was published two years earlier and is significantly harder. Hard science fiction later blossomed throughout the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s with novels such as Heart of the Comet, Jurassic Park, and the Mars Trilogy. A significant number of hard science fiction novels of extremely high levels of hardness have been published more recently, including novels such as The Martian, Hugh Howey's Silo Trilogy, much of the work of Steven Baxter and Alastair Reynolds, and many others.

In fact, many startlingly speculative pieces of modern science fiction are arguably 'harder' than old works involving space empires or interstellar exploration simply because they do not include causality violating FTL travel because they never bother to leave the solar system. Most of the highly speculative and mind-boggling possibilities inherent in digitization of consciousness, for instance, are perfectly plausible in terms of the theoretical boundaries of computation. It's something of an SF irony that the one thing people seem to want most for storytelling purposes, FTL, is also the one thing physics comes down hardest against.

[pendell]

True connoisseurs know it is hard to come by real hard sci-fi, because a lot of sci-fi, especially the space travelling variety, requires a lot of hand waving or techno babble to make space travel valid. And I don't mind that. Space travel is awesome but hard to justify in a way that is not rather boring or breaks our current understanding of science. (or at best exploits theoretical loopholes)
And the line between media that try to be hard and those that do not hide the fact that they are fairy tales in space can be blurry, even if there are definite examples.

So, I was wondering on people's opinions on the subject. Which do you prefer? Which do you think do a good / bad job one way or another?

This is not meant to discuss the overall quality of stories, but only in regard to their... Sci-fi hardness (? Is that a word?)

To my mind, "space fantasy" means that you have a setting in space but you're not even going to try to make it line up with real-life science. DND's spelljammer module and Star Wars come to mind for this. GL was specifically told at one point , when setting up the battle on the flagship in Ep. III when Grievous leaps out of the ship, cape billowing in the evacuating atmosphere, that space does not work that way. He replied "I know". Science gives way to story. Final Fantasy games are much the same way. Just because you have airships and machine guns and lasers doesn't mean it's not a fantasy story.

"Hard" science fiction means that you extrapolate from known or plausible science and construct a story around these principles. Jules Verne's 20,000 leagues under the sea or destination moon were both examples of this, and in fact nuclear-powered submarines and lunar expeditions took place less than a century after his writings.

The difficulty is that I've known very few "hard" writers (Niven, Heinlein to varying degrees, Pournelle, Clarke, Asimov) who could write well about science while still telling a good story. And likewise, few artists are skillful enough to both tell the story they have in mind and respect the setting's laws.

So both have their place. As a rule, SF is a good think piece , but it has a very restricted audience. Science fantasy, as a rule, is a better story.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Mordar]

A fantasy story in which "anything can happen" would be a pretty crap one. If the hero can randomly decide to turn the villain into delicious sponge cake, there isn't a lot of drama to be had.

See, this is where you're wrong. What kind of sponge cake? What lies between the layers? What icings, frostings or inclusions? Did it use the secret ingredient well? Did it match the theme of the time/location/event? Was it completed in the required time limit? Did it manage to assuage the pretentious judge, the ole'time'homey judge and the pointless celebrity judge all at the same time?

There is an entire genre of television predicated on the drama related to delicious sponge cake.

Oh...that's not the part you meant about the drama? Um, never mind then.

- M

[The Glyphstone]

Now I kind of want to see a baking-themed shonen fighting manga/anime, with cooking/food-themed combatants and a finishing move that turns the opponent into a delicious sponge cake.

[Knaight]

Now I kind of want to see a baking-themed shonen fighting manga/anime, with cooking/food-themed combatants and a finishing move that turns the opponent into a delicious sponge cake.

How important is the "fighting" bit here? Because if ridiculously over the top tournament anime in the style of shonen fighting anime but about competitive bread baking is of interest, Yakitate Japan has you covered.

[Rodin]

There's also Toriko, which is basically "What if Goku was a Chef?"

[The Glyphstone]

I just want an in universe reason for turning people into cake. The shonen genre seemed like the best place to look for something that weird taken dead seriously.

[Tvtyrant]

I just want an in universe reason for turning people into cake. The shonen genre seemed like the best place to look for something that weird taken dead seriously.

I mean DBZ did it so it is bound to show up somewhere.

You could go full Anime and have them fight a flour monster.

[Ibrinar]

Well couldn't buu transform people into candy?(Edit: AAH Ninja!) Hmm but yeah it is something I could imagine in say Law of ueki where the mc has the ability to turn trash into trees, though I guess transforming opponents directly is rather op so more likely to be an opponent ability.

[Darth Ultron]

I wouldn't say that hard sci-fi being grounded in an existing reality is anything different from hard fantasy being grounded in a fantastical but well-defined reality.

Science Fiction has technology, Fantasy has magic. Technology, in hard Sci-Fi is based off reality. And the less it's based off reality, the softer it becomes...until it's magic. Magic is not based of reality, and can do anything.


To my mind, "space fantasy" means that you have a setting in space but you're not even going to try to make it line up with real-life science.

Sounds right to me.


I think the main split might be that most Sci-Fi is hard, realistic, intellectual and written for adults.

Most Space Fantasy is soft, unrealistic, less detailed and written for kids(or worse Kidz).

This does not mean ALL of Sci-Fi or All of Space Fantasy is the above two...just that most of it is. And it does not matter or make it ''good or bad", it simply is what it is.

It's still a useful label to have. If your looking for a serious, intelligent story with adult viewpoints then you are looking for Sci Fi. If you want a fun, silly, basic story with basic(and kid friendly) viewpoints, you are looking for Space Fantasy.

So if you want to sit back and relax and watch a silly fun movie with a basic good vs evil plot, you can look at Space Fantasy and pick to watch Star Wars.

If you want to sit up and be engaged and watch a serious interesting movie with a complex plot, you can look at Sci Fi, and pick and watch Blade Runner.

Neither choice is in any way ''better" then the other...it is just watching what you like.

[Kitten Champion]

There's also Toriko, which is basically "What if Goku was a Chef?"

We'd see a lot less of Chi-Chi, I'd imagine.

[monomer]

May favorite example of hard-ish fantasy magic is in Patrick Rothfuss's The Kingkiller Chronicles.

In this series, a fairly large number of people have access to Sympathy magic. While it doesn't really explain how they can actually use Sympathy (basically concentrate super hard on it), the laws of Sympathy are rooted in conservation of energy. So sure, you can make fire appear out of nowhere, but you need to link it to a source of energy (i.e. another fire), and efficiency decreases as the distance between the linked objects increases. So outside of a lab or carefully setup conditions, using Sympathy is almost always less efficient than doing something manually if you have the right tools. You can also draw energy directly from yourself in a pinch, but it's very inefficient and incredibly dangerous as doing so will decrease your core temperature.

On the flip side, the more powerful form of magic, Naming, is not rooted in any form of physics, but is also only able to be done by a very small number of people, and even then is not always able to be called on.

[pendell]

I just want an in universe reason for turning people into cake. The shonen genre seemed like the best place to look for something that weird taken dead seriously.

This happened in Ar Tonelico 3. It is a TRON-like world in which things from the computer world (also known as the "binary field") are manifested in the physical world via high technology. If the thing you're dealing with is a computer projection in the first place, the projection can be altered into a cake easily. Flesh-and-blood creatures are slightly harder: If you can send physical creatures to the binary field and back, there's no reason you can't send a person out as a human and back as a cake.

For that matter, it's the same with star trek transporter. If you can accept the conceit of a matter transmitter converting matter to energy, then re-assembling based on data patterns, then you could disassemble a person and reassemble them with a cake blueprint rather than a human one.

Respectfully,

Brian P.