Definitions and Boundaries between Fantasy and Science Fiction

[cybertalus]

As a kid my view was that anything with futuristic stuff was science fiction, and anything with magic, dragons, or based on a medieval time period was fantasy. Magic and dragons trumped futuristic though, so a story about Merlin and his pet dragon living on Mars and fighting robots in the year 3900 would've been fantasy, not science fiction.

These days I think of all of it as fantasy, just different sub-genres. Star Wars is most certainly to blame for the change, because at some point I realized that underneath the high tech trappings Star Wars is thematically a lot more like Tolkien or King Arthur than it is like Star Trek, or the works of Clarke or Asimov.

Then again, since no works that are truly fiction are real, I'd argue that all fiction is some sort of fantasy.

 

[eris404]

Just a note, in Russian (and other languages presumably) there is no difference. There is one word for both genres-- 'Fantastika', and no word that properly translates as 'Science Fiction'.

That is really the most sensible way of describing these genres - I don't really see a huge difference between the two myself and they tend to get lumped together in libraries and bookstores anyway. Why not just call them the same thing?

 

[D+1]

fiction dealing principally with the impact of actual or imagined science on society or individuals or having a scientific factor as an essential orienting component

That's pretty much how to differentiate between fantasy and SF. There simply isn't a more precise definition than that which could be put forward and also be accepted by any kind of decisive majority of readers/writers/publishers. Fantasy in particular, which because of its very nature REQUIRES that it encompass myth, legend, science, and more, can't be contained by a narrow definition. SF you can get more anal about (and some do - but just because they're wankers who want to exalt themselves or certain works as superior), but ultimately it too encompasses more material than can be deliniated by a hard definiton.

When you get picky about what you want to call "Science Fiction" you start to eliminate a LOT of writings. I've long accepted that the first science fiction book was Frankenstein. You postulate some scientific concepts (in the case of Frankenstein the reanimation of dead human tissue) and then use that as a hook for some means of telling your story. I think pulp fiction put that "definition" through the grinder because you had a lot of authors who wanted to take the trappings that "science fiction" had come to establish such as space flight, robots, computers, etc. and simply use them freely as if they were elements of fantasy. Of course, to a large extent they really WERE elements of fantasy. The fact that they later became reality is irrelevant.

By the time we got Star Wars any and all hope of truly DEFINING "science fiction" was already utterly lost. Star Wars was in a sense a defining element, but only in that "science fiction" had long since come to include fiction that merely uses the TRAPPINGS established by earlier science fiction, regardless of HOW it used them.

 

[Incenjucar]

Meh.

The difference between sci-fi and fantasy are whether or not something is arbitrary.

With magic, things don't have logical explanations. At some point, the argument becomes "Its magic".

With sci-fi, even if you change a rule of the universe, that rule is still a RULE.

Now, that said, in theory, magic should be able to be broken down in to rules until it becomes science. But that lack of information tends to be the difference.

Star Wars is the perfect example here.

Star Wars, as classically understood, is Science Fantasy. A blend of the genres. It has the rule-oriented science (robots and such), and the force, which is ultimately arbitrary in nature.

Midichlorians, if left as the true form of the force, would make it Science Fiction instead of Science Fantasy, because the one mystical aspect has become a scientific one.

The thing to remember is that they're not always wholly seperate.