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Science Fiction vs Fantasy

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Science Fiction vs Fantasy
Post by Redleg68   » Wed Mar 20, 2013 6:22 am

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:evil: Why do publishers, reviewers, and sellers insist on mixing things into science fiction. I recently tried to get an answer from Amazon and the basic answer was anything can be science fiction. I was search for something to put on my kendal for a trip. I got Swords and Magic and Dragons in one series of books first. Next I got a title about werwolves and vampires. Then several more that were not really science at all. I went down about 8 or 9 pages of books before I came to a David Weber Honor Harrington book.
I know tastes vary, but why if they are fantasy do they appear in Science Fiction. So I switched to Fantasy and found no true science fiction. I know authors dabble in both fields. Elizabeth Moon with sf in Vatta's war series and fantasy with Deeds of Parksarian series. Some of David Weber's works would be fantasy. If we suddenly have space dragons who eat SD(P)s while winging through space its then not science fiction its fantasy. Its like what I found as I was browsing Nautical fiction in the age of Sail and I found a book with werwolves and Vampires in it. Its not Nautical Fiction its fantasy set in a nautical arena. The very same fantasy was listed in fantasy and I did not find a Harrington novel in that classification.
Is this a marketing thing or laziness? I don't find SF in a search for historical fiction not even with Eric Flint's 1633 series or s.M Stirling's Ashanti shards books.

Am I the only one to notice this or do I have a dumb view of SF?
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Re: Science Fiction vs Fantasy
Post by KNick   » Wed Mar 20, 2013 7:14 am

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Unfortunately, the trend to combine Fantasy and Science Fiction started in the late 70's and early 80's during a sluggish output of true Scifi. The Fantasy category was just starting to take off in a big way at the same time. Retailers had shrinking shelf coverage in one and expanding coverage in another. That was further complicated by authors writing in both genres at the same time. Stores started clumping the two together and then combined them into one category.

To be fair, at that time most of the Fantasy writers were writing what could be considered somewhat Science Fiction. One of the most prolific writers of that time was Anne McCaffery with her science based Dragonriders of Pern series. It was included with the rest of Scifi and the other Fantasy writers kind of followed her in.

Also remember that by that time Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov were no longer writing new material. No one had as yet stepped into their place in the market place. Just to give you an example of how the market has changed in the last 30 years, the local Barnes & Noble had 3 shelf sections dedicated to both Scifi and Fantasy combined. The count is now up to 16 sections and growing.
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Re: Science Fiction vs Fantasy
Post by Daryl   » Wed Mar 20, 2013 8:14 am

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To see a classic genre clash check out RFC's Out of the Dark novel. For the first 90% it's a hard science military SF story then suddenly vampires appear and solve everything quickly by magical means. Not all fans were supportive.
Steve Stirling's Shadowspawn series is vampire fantasy with a carefully constructed scientific base.

A good story by a good story teller is worth reading anyway regardless, but I believe the trap in some fantasy is that anything is possible and some authors use handwavium to get them out of plot corners; while the trap for some science fiction is that the gadget tech crowds out the plot leaving no space for character building.
Julian May's Saga of the Exiles and Steve Stirling's Emberverse both seem to manage the blend well. Harry Turtledove in some stories uses magical analogs to machinery to play with concepts (WW1 with dragons instead of biplanes, and leviathans instead of submarines).
I enjoy both but prefer hard SF when all else is equal.
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Re: Science Fiction vs Fantasy
Post by rmsgrey   » Wed Mar 20, 2013 8:21 am

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KNick wrote:To be fair, at that time most of the Fantasy writers were writing what could be considered somewhat Science Fiction. One of the most prolific writers of that time was Anne McCaffery with her science based Dragonriders of Pern series. It was included with the rest of Scifi and the other Fantasy writers kind of followed her in.


The Pern books are a good example of why bookshops have a difficult task on their hands when it comes to shelving books in the right places.

Dragonflight is pretty much fantasy - dragons, feudal society, psychic powers and killing rain. On the other hand, the introduction sets it up as SF (describing Pern as a lost colony) and later-written books in the series are plainly SF - from Dragonsdawn describing the initial colonisation and the genetic engineering effort that produced the dragons on.

Darkover poses similar issues - it started with stories exploring the interaction between native society and Terrans, pretty clearly SF, but books set during the Darkovan dark ages are pretty pure fantasy. Even some of the books set after recontact could replace the Terran spaceport with a small town magically transported, or some other way of transplanting an enclave of more-or-less modern people into Darkover's fantasy setting...

Of course, since they're not exactly magic, psychic powers are accepted in SF (and particularly in space opera) where more conventional magic would be rejected...

My pet example of SF being poorly defined in shops is the trouble I had finding a copy of The Time-Traveller's Wife - invariably shelved under General Fiction rather than SF despite being, by any objective measure, not just SF, but pretty hard SF...
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Re: Science Fiction vs Fantasy
Post by Howard T. Map-addict   » Wed Mar 20, 2013 1:12 pm

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a Naughty Moose explains:
Because so many book-buyers do!

Naughty Moose

Redleg68 wrote:
Why do publishers, reviewers, and sellers insist
on mixing [fantasy] things into science fiction.
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Re: Science Fiction vs Fantasy
Post by Howard T. Map-addict   » Wed Mar 20, 2013 1:15 pm

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Some of us say that psychic powers are *exactly* magic!

Which does not necessarily stop us from
considering them to be "chic."

HTM
Commodore, bucking for promotion

[quote="rmsgrey"]
[snip - htm]
Of course, since they're not exactly magic, psychic powers are accepted in SF (and particularly in space opera) where more conventional magic would be rejected...
[snip - htm]
quote]
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Re: Science Fiction vs Fantasy
Post by rmsgrey   » Wed Mar 20, 2013 1:48 pm

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Howard T. Map-addict wrote:Some of us say that psychic powers are *exactly* magic!

Which does not necessarily stop us from
considering them to be "chic."

HTM
Commodore, bucking for promotion

rmsgrey wrote:[snip - htm]
Of course, since they're not exactly magic, psychic powers are accepted in SF (and particularly in space opera) where more conventional magic would be rejected...
[snip - htm]


Psychic powers often fall into the "pseudo-science" category - depending on how inventive you are with your technobabble, they can be anywhere from a different form of magic to some form of artifact of persistent quantum entanglement or non-localised consciousness, or some other semi-plausible hand-wave.

Everything from Treecats to Vulcans (and beyond) brings psi into SF without prompting mass riots... You can argue that they don't belong, but they're in there alongside the various forms of FTL travel as accepted tropes...
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Re: Science Fiction vs Fantasy
Post by akira.taylor   » Wed Mar 20, 2013 5:02 pm

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Redleg68 wrote::evil: Why do publishers, reviewers, and sellers insist on mixing things into science fiction. I recently tried to get an answer from Amazon and the basic answer was anything can be science fiction. I was search for something to put on my kendal for a trip. I got Swords and Magic and Dragons in one series of books first. Next I got a title about werwolves and vampires. Then several more that were not really science at all. I went down about 8 or 9 pages of books before I came to a David Weber Honor Harrington book.
I know tastes vary, but why if they are fantasy do they appear in Science Fiction. So I switched to Fantasy and found no true science fiction. I know authors dabble in both fields. Elizabeth Moon with sf in Vatta's war series and fantasy with Deeds of Parksarian series. Some of David Weber's works would be fantasy. If we suddenly have space dragons who eat SD(P)s while winging through space its then not science fiction its fantasy. Its like what I found as I was browsing Nautical fiction in the age of Sail and I found a book with werwolves and Vampires in it. Its not Nautical Fiction its fantasy set in a nautical arena. The very same fantasy was listed in fantasy and I did not find a Harrington novel in that classification.
Is this a marketing thing or laziness? I don't find SF in a search for historical fiction not even with Eric Flint's 1633 series or s.M Stirling's Ashanti shards books.

Am I the only one to notice this or do I have a dumb view of SF?


Your view is not dumb. The catch is, have you ever tried to define where the line is between science fiction and fantasy? Swords and dragons usually means fantasy, and space ships means science fiction - but (as others have noted) Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series had swords & space ships (and it made sense, unlike some examples of swords & space ships). There is a lot that falls in the vague area between. There is a lot that falls clearly on one side or the other. When you need to define a single genre (which brick and mortar stores do, as do libraries), you find that you can't split science fiction and fantasy - or at least, you will get a lot of annoyed readers who disagree with you if you try. Now, in principle, Amazon and Barnes & Noble's website could assign multiple genres, but they haven't gotten into that new paradigm yet (or their audience hasn't, but it amounts to the same thing - not yet). And thus, you get the genre "SF/F" - we don't know which side of the line you put this work on, and we don't need to.

Huh. That's a long post, telling you a simple thing (your definition isn't bad, it just probably has the same issues everyone else's have).
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Re: Science Fiction vs Fantasy
Post by rmsgrey   » Thu Mar 21, 2013 10:04 am

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Another example of hard-to-classify:

Piers Anthony's Split Infinity series is set on a twin world, where one world is the SF setting of Proton, where technology is generally sufficiently advanced; the other is the fantasy realm of Phaze, where Proton's high-tech gadgets mostly fail to work, but magic is fully operational. If you accept, for the sake of argument, that the two settings are, respectively, pure SF and pure fantasy (with the possible exception of the interface between them), how should the books be classified?

Another example:

Rick Cook's Wizardry series starts with a Silicon Valley computer programmer being summoned by magic to another world, where he takes advantage of the features of that world's magic - sufficiently complex spells manifest as demons that can then cast other spells - to create a programming language. Okay, it'd probably go under fantasy, but it's more aimed at computer-geeks than Tolkien-geeks...
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Re: Science Fiction vs Fantasy
Post by Spacekiwi   » Thu Mar 21, 2013 3:47 pm

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rmsgrey wrote:Another example of hard-to-classify:

Piers Anthony's Split Infinity series is set on a twin world, where one world is the SF setting of Proton, where technology is generally sufficiently advanced; the other is the fantasy realm of Phaze, where Proton's high-tech gadgets mostly fail to work, but magic is fully operational. If you accept, for the sake of argument, that the two settings are, respectively, pure SF and pure fantasy (with the possible exception of the interface between them), how should the books be classified?

Another example:

Rick Cook's Wizardry series starts with a Silicon Valley computer programmer being summoned by magic to another world, where he takes advantage of the features of that world's magic - sufficiently complex spells manifest as demons that can then cast other spells - to create a programming language. Okay, it'd probably go under fantasy, but it's more aimed at computer-geeks than Tolkien-geeks...



I would say the wizardry series counts as hard fantasy in that its fantasy that has more realistic rules and setup then other series.



Maybe of interest to everyone is that the bookstores in my area group them together under fantasy fiction so I can find David Weber next to Terry Pratchett next to Cassandra Clare, next to the World of Warcraft tie in novels.
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