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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 2287397" data-attributes="member: 18832">My personal definitions work like this:Speculative fiction is a genre of literature concerned with stories which take place in a world not "our own".Fantasy is any work of speculative fiction which relies upon or partakes of mythic elements. Interestingly, a given work of fantasy can conceivably create its own mythology rather than rely upon reference to real-world legends, or can create myth from non-mythological elements of history and culture.(For example, Animal Farm mythologises the history of the Soviet Union by casting it in the form of a fable. Note that the legendry in question need not form the backdrop - in this case, the fabulous allegory is the whole of the tale.)Science fiction is any work of speculative fiction which explores (or at least portrays) the impact of "scientific" change on the human experience. This can be as perfunctory as a crappy military SF story about future "space navies" or as sophisticated as an epic story chronicling the impact of intelligent robots on society from their invention to millennia in the future.(The "scientific" is in scare quotes because I mean not only the hard sciences but also the soft "social sciences" - because there's been some very good science fiction written about sociological changes, much more in the spirit of science fiction dealing with the harder sciences and thus more deserving to share a designation than yet another "Rourke's Drift with laser rifles and power armour" story. Yet the latter, even when written by the worst hack getting paid to vomit forth words onto the page, qualifies as a portrayal of scientific change and its impact on the world - it has to show you how Rourke's Drift is possible in a world with power armour and laser rifles, at least. Even technoporn works these things out.)These are not mutually exclusive categories - for instance, Greg Egan has a story, "Oceanic", which falls into both categories. It draws upon mythological Christian motifs and portrays a very different kind of human society, with "hard biology" central to the story.There are other forms of speculative fiction which fit loosely into these categories, if at all - you can argue that horror is a very specialised form of fantasy, and that alternate history is a form of science fiction in which the "scientific change" is a change in the "soft science" of history. I think there's a stronger case for the former than the latter - there's not much of the scientific method in history, and I should know, whereas it's hard to think of a horror story which doesn't partake of myths, legends, or folklore, and again . . . I should know.(Are slasher movies, those in which the killer is nominally a normal human, thrillers because they take place in a world not identifiably dissimilar to our own, or are they horror because of the extent to which they possess an undercurrent of mythic motifs? I say the latter.)</blockquote>

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