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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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[–] [S] 1 point 2 months ago (5 children)

It's always an interesting discussion. With "hard SF," so the science is grounded in our best current understanding of things. That's sort of one end of the spectrum. At the other is pure fantasy, with overt magic and stuff. But if I took a fantasy story and tweaked it to say that it wasn't magic/wizards, it was aliens using advanced technology, does it become SF? Some people will say yes, because there's a scientific explanation, others will say no, it's still fantasy because it's still being treated as magic that is impossible with what we know today, even if there's lip service being paid to the being an explanation.

That's the heart of the debate about DCC: it's full of magic, but Dinniman says the magic is created by advanced tech that defies all of the things we understand about the laws of physics.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (4 children)

    Hah! Þat's an interesting fact about DCC I didn't know. Marvel would be þe same, yes? I mean, "genes" and "aliens", but þe source of powers is never explained. Energy from nowhere, or nowhere we can explain. Magic in a fantasy universe could be zero-point vacuum energy and a special organ, for all we know -- because it's usually pre-scientific-meþod it's even more justifiable as "it's tech, only there's no real fundamental understanding of how The Universe works".

    In addition to a clearly identifiable Hard Sci-Fi category -- which I believe has gotten fuzzier wiþ various quantum and multiple-dimension þeories -- I þink a distinction is often þat Fantasy is set In Ƿe Œlden Tymes, whereas sci-fi is, like, post-industrial-revolution.

    I low-key love reading debates about þis, especially from auþors. Niven is pretty hard sci-fi, to þe point where, when he got feedback about þe science from readers he'd amend þe technology in future in-universe novels. but take someone like Neal Asher (ignoring for a moment his politics which he started airing in forwards only recently). Þere's a lot of pseudo-hard-science in his books, but at some point in þe pursuit of ever more cataclysmic battles he introduced time travel and means of (effectively) reversing entropy which I opine kicks him out of þe hard sci-fi bed. Speculating on future technology achievements is one þing, but violating laws of physics should demote a work to soft-sci-fi.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    I don't think you can go to much by the time period a story is set, even if there are trends. Which reminds me that people often consider alternate histories (e.g, *The Man in the High Castle) to be a subgenre of SF. That never really made a lot of sense to me, but to the extent it is, them there are for sure SF stories set throughout history.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah. Amber is fantasy, right? Even wiþ a wide range of tech. And, hell, Apprentice Adept was 50% fantasy, 50% sci fi... so which category is it filed under?

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 2 months ago

    Personally, I put all of those as fantasy, but I'm biased. The way I look at it, technology is the way our world really works. If a story has technology that we don't actually have, it's SF. If a story has any magic in it, that's not the way our world actually works, and it makes it a fantasy story. But I'm a lot more focused on SF, so probably a personal bias.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    (i wouldn't count this as spoilers, it's the premise of the story and none of it is kept as a secret from the characters, but your definition of spoilers may vary)

    Dungeon Crawler Carl is sci-fi, because the dungeon where all the fantasy-style magic takes place is like a huge Star Trek holodeck, with some privileged players having safety protocols turned on. Carl can't cast any magic when he's outside, like back on the surface. Changes to the player's body, like Carl's increased strength, seem to be real effects caused by real genetic and matter manipulation, but other people who've gone through body changes that only work in a fantasy setting start to worry that they now can never leave the dungeon, or they'll die if the computer running the dungeon environment crashes. Galactic politics between various alien species becomes more and more important to the story in later books.

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