Which gives most fantasy setting a very unrealistic/unbelievable feel. Humans have always used the tools at hand to improve their life, so why wouldn't they do that with magic?
SciFi has the advantage that there is no single big work of SciFi (or at least there are multiple ones). In Fantasy you have one big work, Lord of the Rings, where the vast majority of all other fantasy works are clones from. (The ones which are not give a nod to Conan). Nearly every fantasy work features elves, dwarves and often orcs in the same way as how they were portrayed in LotR. On the other hand you will have to search very hard to find an alien race which appears in the majority of SciFi works.
Fantasy is literary stagnating because nearly no one tries to escape the influence of Lord of the Rings.
Woops, still getting this multiquote thingie working right.
The above is just wrong. There's no other way to say it. It's flat out factually wrong. I'm not even particularly a fantasy fan and I know that's wrong. China Meiville and the New Weird movement, Harry Potter, Highlander, Robin Hobb, Pratchett, and a host of others have very, very little to do with Tolkien.
I'm not sure how you consider a genre that publishes more titles per year than it used to publish per DECADE to be stagnating. There's been more fantasy published since the new millenium than was published in the last century. That's not stagnation, that's the opposite.
Forked from:
Is D&D 4E too "far out" to expand the market easily?
That's a philosophical question, not a scientific question.
I never said that SF had to deal with science questions. What I actually said was that SF, by and large, differs from fantasy because it does ask these sorts of questions. Typically, it's asking how some effect - space travel, meeting aliens, (in the case of Dune - omniscience) - affects how we define ourselves. SF at its best is a genre that tries to examine deeply philosophical questions, usually those posed by the development of science.
I'm not sure how you can really divorce SF from philosophy. Going back to Asimov's 3 Laws - you have an examination of humanity as it relates to each other and violence in society. Foundation is another very philosophical book. Farenheit 451, Starship Troopers, all the Golden Age stuff was deeply philosophic.
Now, to be １００％ fair, you cannot claim clean lines in any genre. Genre by its nature is messy. Can you claim Star Wars as SF? Quite probably. Not terribly good SF, but, SF nonetheless. However, my original beef was the idea that SF is defined by setting. I think I've shown that to be false. SF is defined by theme primarily with setting taking a pretty far back seat.
As the terms are used, I think fantasy and science fiction mostly refer to setting elements. Fantasy has knights, dragons and wizards. SF has robots, lasers and spaceships. Star Wars has all of those SF trappings but it also has magic (sort of), swords (sort of) and knights (sort of) so it wouldn't be wrong to call it fantasy. The most apt terms are probably 'space opera' and 'science fantasy'.
Summary: I agree with hong.
I would agree that common usage is a lot fuzzier than academic. People lump a lot of things together that probably shouldn't be, mostly out of convenience. And, yes, the line can be very blurry.
They're both just "speculative fiction." Deep down, they're the same. Science fiction has lasers and fantasy has dragons, except when the lasers are bolts of arcane energy and the dragons are mechanical.
This I disagree with obviously. Fantasy themes are typically wish fufillment. The function of magic is simply a plot device to enable the protagonist to do something he normally couldn't do. Take a look at most fantasy and it is exactly that. Who wouldn't want to be Conan? Or Harry Potter? In one, you're the perfect macho man - all women swoon at your feet and you crush any who oppose you beneath your sandal. In the other, you are a dorky, lonely kid (like no D&D player was EVER that
) who becomes the hero who saves everyone and beats the bad guy.
But, in neither case is magic really the vehicle for carrying any sort of philosophical debate. Harry does magic to overcome an obstacle. But, doing magic is never used in the text to discuss anything particularly. About the closest it comes is the class division between wizard and non-wizard, but, since everyone in the novels are wizards (at least everyone who matters), that distinction is far less important than the class distinctions discussed over blood relations.
In SF, you don't usually get wish fulfillment stories. You might get some sense of wonder tales in Space Opera, but, that's usually quite different. Again, SF typically has a philosophical point to make and it uses the existence of whatever element in the story is needed to make that point.
