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Question: should this be a fantasy-free zone? (lemmy.ca)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/sciencefiction@lemmy.world
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I read a lot of both SF and fantasy. Most communities I've dealt with have commingled the genres, in part because the line between them can be blurry. Is this community supposed to be strictly SF, or are discussions of fantasy also okay?

I was going to post my mini review of Days of Shattered Faith, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, but it's clearly fantasy (though Tchaikovsky writes quite a lot of SF), so I thought I should ask.

Edit: it seems like I've had pretty good response to the question, and the vast majority would prefer to be more inclusive rather than draw a line. I'll go ahead and continue posting both, though note that so far a moderator hasn't weighed I in, and that could change things.

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[–] 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (6 children)

Personally I think

  • there is a difference between scifi and fantasy
  • the term scifi often sucks, it should be something like future fiction? Most scifi I like isn't really about the science

And while the term speculative fiction is valid, it's an umbrella term, not an actual genre. Also I think most fiction is, at its heart, an answer to a "what if" question, so maybe the term is too broad.

Your example is tricky.

There's one novel of Iain M Banks' Culure series that is like that. Without context you'd think it's typical fantasy, all medieval-like, except for one or two scenes that are either weird magic or a knife missile/drone. Of course we know it's the latter.

So as long as it has even 1% of "scifi", even by association, I'd say it's OK.

All that said I much prefer to read good books, no matter the genre.

edit: !fantasy@lemmy.ml or make a new one, it's easy!

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    Sci-fi is a big umbrella that includes 1984 and Star Wars. But what about the non-Jedi parts of Star Wars that do deal with technology, ethics, politics, religion, and the human condition? Banning "future fantasy" would mean getting rid of things like Andor, which does have a lot to say and is much closer to 1984 than A New Hope.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 2 months ago

    Yeah, I just replied to someone else about the spectrum between SF and fantasy. It's really hard to draw a hard line between them. I wouldn't go for "future fiction," because there's good SF (even hard SF) that occurs in present or the past.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (2 children)

    Anything relating to time is a bad term I think. Much of it's in an alternate universe with different timelines. For example, Star Wars is in the past, if you listen to them.

    I think a better term might be "technology fantasy" and "magic fantasy," but they aren't mutually exclusive. To use Star Wars as an example again, it has magic and technology. There shouldn't be an attempt to separate them as exclusive to each other because they're essentially the same things just with different settings.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 child)

    For example, Star Wars is in the past, if you listen to them.

    Not sure how you mean that, but in any case it requires humanity to become spacefaring beyond the solar system first, so in the future. And there's the "Sci" again. Or "Tech".

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    the first words on screen are "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away"

    so it's definitely set in the distant past.

    people in the Star Wars galaxy don't know which planet humans are native to, so while they may be native to that galaxy, there's equally little evidence against a time-travel event, and humans there are Earth humans from our future who went tens of thousands of years back in time as well as moving to a far away galaxy. This could also help explain why humans there use Latin and Greek letters so much.

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