Ideas that push fiction towards (respectively) science fiction, or fantasy

[tomBitonti]

Something I got to thinking about re: Differentiating Science Fiction and Fantasy. That is, certain tropes (space travel, time travel, multiple dimensions) seem to push fiction into being Science Fiction. That is not to say that there hasn't been fantasy with such tropes (SpellJammer, Illithids and Penumbra, DragonStar). I don't find a lot of "Space Opera" cast as fantasy.

Is it that space travel and a description of the galaxy and space-time are just too much modern? (With the equivalence: Medieval thinking just did not have these ideas, although they did have Fae, and perhaps Shadow, and celestial realms.)

Not sure if there is a question here, but I find this outcome to be curious.

Thx!

TomB

 

[Ed_Laprade]

I'd say you've probably hit the nail on the head. Much of what we call science fiction from the pulp era was called space fantasy at the time, and often rightly so.

 

[Umbran]

I think what we qualify as science fiction changes over time. As in, some of the pulp and golden age sci-fi was, at the time, sci fi, while today we'd call it science fantasy. Why? Because our scientific knowledge changes!

A thing pushes a work to science fiction when it is based on current understanding of science - take current understanding, extrapolate it forwards, and you have science fiction. But science keeps teaching us new things, and our knowledge changes. So, some of the really old stories about space travel look fantastic now, because they are in conflict with our greater understanding. But, at the time, they were based on what was known, and were genuinely speculating on science in the future. Some of the stuff that, right now, looks like awesome science fiction will be reduced to mere fantasy when science proves what they do cannot happen.