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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 6757579" data-attributes="member: 6683613">Fantasy is different from reality in intuitive ways, ways that are comfortable for us to process.  In Tolkien's fantasy, agriculture, war, government, art, morality, and feeling are all immediately recognizable to those of us brought up in Western culture.  It feels natural to us, in some ways more natural than reality, because the essences of these things as we understand them are distilled and set before us in pure or even exaggerated form:  the pumpkins are always round and orange, the battles are always epic clashes of steel, the kings are always descended from an ancient line, and so on.  It's the world as we're ready and willing to imagine it -- that's the emotional resonance whence the genre derives its power and appeal.SF, in contrast, challenges our imaginations with reality, because the truth is that reality is much, much weirder than we are well equipped to imagine.  The most "out-there" SF is not science fantasy, but hard SF, because when human authors make up the rules of the universe they always tend to gravitate towards familiar-feeling ones -- hence the rubber-forehead aliens and planets of hats -- but when they extrapolate from actual rules of physics or biology they can get to some really counterintuitive places.  Look at Interstellar, which was a (poorly reconciled) hybrid of both genres:  it begins with truly un-earth-like extraterrestrial worlds and mind-boggling relativistic situations, but ends by concluding that all this alien novelty is trumped by the power of love, something we have known and told stories about since forever.  The third act is the fantasy, a mirror showing our own emotions; the first and second acts are the SF, a telescope showing the hugeness of the universe.(And remember:  all serious telescopes have mirrors in them.)</blockquote>

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