Online warfare is easily unleashed. Ask a simple question like “Is a pizza a sandwich and if not, is an open face sandwich a sandwich?” and then sit back to watch the carnage unfurl.
Many people like categories to be clear cut and mutually exclusionary: food is either a sandwich or not a sandwich, a story is either science fiction or fantasy, and a nation-state is either vaguely rectangular or a democracy. In practice, boundaries are often fuzzy, and placing a work into one set or another fails because it satisfies criteria for both. Or for many.
See, for example, discussions about where to place The Fifth Season and Gideon the Ninth. Both works have elements generally associated with science fiction, as well as elements traditionally associated with fantasy. Hard classification will fail because the assumption that things are only one thing at a time is wrong. Utterly wrong.
[sarcasm] I am certain that having explained this so clearly, there will never be another argument on such matters. [/sarcasm]
Real world or online, classificatory warfare is nothing new.1 Here are some novels that straddle borders and genres, novels over which readers might legitimately disagree as to classification.
Kindred (1979) by Octavia E. Butler
In this classic novel, Butler’s young African-American protagonist Dana is inexplicably drawn back across space and time from 1970s California to antebellum Maryland. In modern-day America, she is a writer. In pre-Civil War America, every white person she meets assumes that she is a slave, or at least someone who can be abused and exploited without consequence. Dana’s experiences in the past illuminate the unpleasant realities of American history, and shed light on more recent history as well.
But is it science fiction or fantasy? While I will grant that the physical mechanism is never explained, Dana is caught up in a stable time loop whose logic dictates much of what happens to her. Very much the same state of affairs (minus the insightful social commentary) can be found in Poul Anderson’s There Will Be Time, generally classified as science fiction. Butler thought Kindred was fantasy, but it also seems perfectly reasonable to call it science fiction.
***
Metropolitan (1995) by Walter Jon Williams
Aiah is a Barkazil, a despised ethnic minority, who has the misfortune to live in the city of Jaspeer. What middling prosperity and status she possesses results from years of hard work in Jaspeer’s Plasm Authority, which regulates the energy source powering this civilization. Plasm, the product of geomantic currents, is valuable. Aiah uncovers a secret trove of plasm that could mean wealth beyond her dreams. It’s far too risky for one minor bureaucrat to move that much on her own—exploiting her treasure requires partners, and considerable risk.2
Nothing delights an author quite like an audience deciding that a book the author intended as an unambiguous example of one thing is instead an unambiguous example of something else entirely. To quote the author:
So here I had written what I considered to be an exemplary high fantasy, full of magic and mystery, but what did my readers see?
They saw science fiction.
There is considerable discussion at the other end of the link as to why readers disagreed with the author. Perhaps it is as simple as treating high fantasy elements in an SF manner? The geomancy that powers Aiah’s society is magic, but the manner in which the product is used feels more SF.
***
Sabella, or The Bloodstone (1980) by Tanith Lee
Nova Mars was the world that the SFF authors of the early 20th century imagined: an ancient, dying world rich in relics of a once-complex ecology and advanced civilization. It was saved from lifelessness by human terraformers, New Mars is now a thoroughly human world. It is Sabella’s home world. There the recluse indulges her fondness for dark clothes, gloomy shadows, and human blood.
On the one hand: space travel! Terraforming! Planets named “Mars.” On the other, Sabella is pretty clearly a vampire. Surely her sort of vampire is creature of horror, or at least fantasy? But Lee does not appear to have sorted her tropes by genre, preferring to use whatever was most suitable for the story she had in mind.
Perhaps Lee had a specific planetary romance in mind when she wrote Sabella. This book has echoes of C. L. Moore’s famous Northwest Smith story, “Shambleau.”3
***
Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry by C. L. Moore
Speaking of Moore reminds me that she too straddled genres—I am thinking of two of her characters.
Northwest Smith is a hyper-promiscuous ray-gun-waving genre-blind smuggler who stumbles into near-death situation after near-death situation in a futuristic Solar System, surviving only thanks to his remarkable talent for convincing beautiful women to sacrifice their lives for his. His adventures often end badly—but not for Northwest. Clearly SF.
Jirel of Joiry flourishes in Medieval France. She protects her fiefdom of Joiry with an impressive capacity for violence and an indominable will. These are deployed against ambitious lords, wizards, and demons. So, fantasy.
Two characters, so two distinct settings? NO. Moore makes it clear that both settings take place in the same universe, a few centuries apart. Thanks to time travel, there’s even a crossover between Jirel and the hapless hunky nincompoop of tomorrow (Jirel is, and I am sure everyone is relieved to hear this, completely immune to Northwest’s charms). Regarded separately: two characters, two genres. But together…?
***
The Roads of Heaven Trilogy: Five-Twelfths of Heaven (1985), Silence in Solitude (1986), and The Empress of Earth (1987) by Melissa Scott
Star pilot Silence Leigh has the misfortune to live in the comprehensively misogynistic Hegemony, consigned to second-class status because she is a woman. She escapes this social trap by agreeing to marry two strangers who are willing to grant her liberties the Hegemony would deny her, provided she help them legalize their relationship. The Hegemony does not recognize same-sex marriages; polyandrous marriages, on the hand, are just fine.
Alien worlds and star-spanning empires are nicely science fictional. In this case, however, the means by which all this advancement has been achieved is applied Hermetic/neo-Platonic magic. Geases abound. Silence’s eventual mentor is a Magus. These details appear to undermine the unambiguous way in which the book’s original publisher sold this as SF. Not that it matters in the end how one classifies books, as long as they are entertaining. (But it may matter in the beginning, as books are being marketed and sold.)
***
No doubt there are other examples I could have included. And no doubt some of you are annoyed that I did not, so feel free to mention them in comments…
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]I remember lengthy, in-depth familial discussions as to whether a particular aquamarine bowl was blue or green. I took the correct view but others disagreed.
[2]There’s a sequel to “Metropolitan,” titled “City on Fire” (1997). Just a reminder in case you liked the first book and weren’t aware that there was a sequel.
[3]There are two Moore collections: “Black God's Kiss” (2007) and “Northwest of Earth: The Complete Northwest Smith” (2008) by C. L. Moore. Both collections contain material dating back as far as the 1930s, so be prepared for…um…attitudes that are of their time.
Online warfare can also be started by pointing out that emacs is far better than vi (or vice versa). It can reach thermonuclear levels if, a hundred flames in, you mention that you mostly use Notepad++ on Windows.
In the 60’s through at least the 80’s various psychic phenomena were acceptable SF, if treated in a SFnal way, or within an otherwise SF framework.
Also, the Perpetually Eclectic Rubbish Lister is a waste of bytes and really should be replaced, everywhere, by Python or maybe JavaScript.
Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy adventures are generally classified as alternate history and science fiction, but center on magic. The magic is treated rigorously, and the scientific method is used, but it is still magic, pure and simple.
I once started a lengthy and energetic discussion on USENET by asking whether wuxia stories were SF or fantasy. These days, I’d concede it’s orthagonal but has elements of both.
(mind you, it was easy to trigger long threads back then. Editing: threat or menace got a lot of responses)
“The Anubis Gates” is another example – the time travel is produced by magic, and there are other magical elements as well, but the fact that the time travel is self-consistent and the villains tend to use the magic to achieve goals in a mechanistic way makes it possible to read it as SFish (certainly, one could paint over the magic with SF terminology and get something that could easily be marketed as SF).
@1: emacs is a decent operating system, but the text editor it ships with is just terrible.
So glad you mentioned the Roads of Heaven series. Well worth reading, it really straddles the line between SF and fantasy. There are also a number of books, clearly fantasy, set in a SF-nal framework. Doris Egan’s Ivory trilogy is set on “the planet where magic works”.
Liz Williams’ Detective Inspector Chen series has great worldbuilding. The books take place in the future, on a Chinese-ruled island(?) called Singapore Two. The books are fantasy mysteries riffing on Chinese mythology, with gods, demons, and ghosts. A good SF / F crossover is a thing to treasure.
AndyLove @@@@@ 4
Tim Powers likes to do that sort of thing — the supernatural creatures in The Stress of Her Regard being silicon-based (with the Sphinx’s riddle re-interpreted as dealing with valence electrons of different elements), the site of the Fountain of Life in On Stranger Tides involving hand-wavy, scaled-up quantum effects, the mystical time machine secretly built by Albert Einstein in Three Days to Never, etc.
Didn’t hand-wavy, scaled-up quantum effects factor into Stableford’s David Lydyard books (The Werewolves of London (1990), The Angel of Pain and The Carnival of Destruction (1994))?
Steven Brust’s Dragaera stories, with sorcery-(mind magic) practicing elves and witchcraft-(ritual magic) practicing humans, and reincarnation and resurrection magic and soul-eating weapons… only the humans traveled to Dragaera via spaceship, and the elves were genetically engineered from humans by sufficiently-advanced aliens.
@7: Thanks Peter. That reminds me: Ted Chiang’s “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” sounds like it ought to be fantasy, but is easily interpreted as science fiction being described by someone with a pre-scientific understanding.
The idea of “magic” as an “alternate” system of scientific/natural laws could also be traced back to de Camp and Pratt’s Harold Shea stories, which present “magic” as the “science” or “laws of nature” in alternate universes.
Regarding time travel (as Kindred and most other novels) one’s classification I think it depends on how strict or dogmatic you are.
In my books it’s SF because generally time travel stories feel like SF – usually the stories are otherwise realistic, devoid of fantastical elements such as magic or monsters. But strictly speaking the majority of time travel stories are fantasy because time travel as it is presented is not realistic at all. The fact that often machines are involved don’t change this as their mechanisms are usually not explored and are effectively magical.
There are exceptions, of course, where some arcane physical theories are used but this is not the case for the majority of time travel stories.
The argument that the time travel technology is an extrapolation and therefore the very thing that science fiction does doesn’t hold water if you ask me because time travel as it is presented is impossible as far as we know.
But like I’ve said, even though rationally these time travel stories should be classified as fantasies they feel like SF and I guess for most readers, me included, that is what counts.
There are similar cases. Alternate timelines, usually classified as SF (unless it is viewed as a separate genre), are technically fantasies as well for much the same reasons but often feel more like SF just like time travel. Unless, and here we get into sticky territory, there’s magic present in those alternate timelines!
Another case, now less often seen but quite common in 50s and 60s SF is psychic powers. Telepathy, telekinesis, and other “psionic abilities” were quite frequently found in stories that were meant to be SF but since there is no basis in science at all these are technically fantasies, too.
In the end, it doesn’t matter that much to me.
Yes, in my head I make quick and dirty classifications (fantasy, SF, horror) but often there are cases that blend different elements of speculative fiction and I’m fine with that.
What’s more important to me is that the story is consistent.
I want to read a good story, first and foremost. If it mixes elements of different genres in a consistent and interesting way, that’s great.
James: Since you mention Sabella – thanks to our recent Twitter discussion of Tanith Lee, I went and browsed through your ‘Year of Tanith Lee’ reviews. In your review of Sabella there, you mentioned that you thought Lee’s Kill the Dead might be related somehow. I actually have that one on my shelf, and although I haven’t read it in a long time, I don’t believe it can be. Kill the Dead is the story of a wandering exorcist, featuring some interesting twists and an alcoholic bard with a tendency to stumble into hauntings, and is set in a Lee-ish generalized fantasy setting, late Medieval Europe flavor. I don’t recall any vampires, and if there were some character named Sabella, I’d be more inclined to consider it a simple reuse of the name. If you’ve had trouble finding a copy of that one to read, I’d be happy to loan it to you.
Wiredog @@@@@ 1: emacs vs. vi is at best intermediate level flame-bait, and too well-known at this time. Far better is to ask earnestly for an explanation of the pros and cons of different open source software license terms and which would be best to use for a project. The sheer number and variety of license choices means that there’s infinite fuel to throw on the fire if it ever seems to be waning.
PeterErwin @@@@@ 7: The Stress of Her Regard also reinterprets the “one eye” of the Graeae in terms of Schroedinger’s quantum-level observer effects, along with many cleverly far-out scientific interpretations, such as the Italian Carbonari being partisans for of carbon-based life forms. It’s not my favorite Tim Powers, but it certainly has a lot of great stuff in it.
@1 wiredog — My reactions, respectively: hahaha!; how wise of you; I kill you dead.
I love Steerswoman. The protagonist is going thru a fantasy story … except she’s applying science. The readers see science fiction.
Jack Vance The Dying Earth books and much of Matthew Hughes straddle the line between fantasy and sf.
Cherryh’s Morgaine books have all the elements of high fantasy (Horses! Quests! Soul-sucking magic swords!) but are framed as SF (a meddling precursor race who built spacetime portals that eventually destroyed them and that need to be closed through in-person application of technology) – and if memory serves are explicitly placed in the SF Alliance/Union universe (Morgaine being the last surviving member of a Union science team that was charged to close the gates).
@1 I think the biggest reason psi and paranormal powers are considered part of science fiction today is because they were accepted as science by John Campbell, and included on the pages of Analog. And Campbell had a habit of accepting a lot of pseudo-science as possible, come to think of it. His magazine was full of things like faster than light travel, reactionless space drives and the like that appear more akin to magic than science.
I don’t think they suspended https://www.tor.com/moderation-policy/ – even for play-fighting.
“Time travel” can be magic or science. After all, there was at least one magic flying bed in a story (“The Magic Bedknob”) and at least two separate scientific test vehicles called “The Flying Bedstead”, so the same effect is produced. The same with time travel, although H. G. Wells didn’t really justify how a “Time Machine” works, only that it does. The point is to get to the past or to the future and then have an adventure there.
It falls in the category of story of exhibiting some strange power or effect and calling it science, realistic or not. And treating it as such. From mentally wrestling with theists, my idea of what’s natural or supernatural is that when material unthinking matter knows what it’s supposed to do and it respects the rules, even in a story where rules are not as they are here e.g. there’s anti-gravity or FTL, then that’s natural; mind over matter is supernatural. But that doesn’t exclude investigating it systematically. So you can have a story of magic but with people behaving like scientists in it. It’s still magic though.
Also you expect a story with magic to be a bit gothic…
Thor and Iron Man were founding members of The Avengers (in comics): an actual god, a brilliant engineer.
You could probably argue that Charlie Stross’s Laundry series is another genre straddler – Lovecraftian fantasy/horrordescribed in terms of information science.
The city of Ember and The People of Sparks both have scifi plots but an overarching fantasy feel to them The character and world building techniques especially feel fantasy, if this sounds good to you, you should read it, if it doesnt, you should look into it, you’ll probably like it to
Larry Niven was quite upfront about the relationship of magic to time travel in his Svetz stories.
Fred Saberhagen’s excellent Empire of the East comes to mind here also.
@21: Which he went into in more depth in his essay “The Theory and Practice of Time Travel”.
Star Wars is basically high fantasy with space opera decor. Magic wielding Knights with flaming swords? Check. Evil Dark Lord? Check. Beautiful, spirited, princess? Double check!
Tim @14 Steerswoman is a good example of “looks like fantasy, has an SF frame.” Sharon Shinn’s Samaria books are similar in that the reader is a ways in before recognizing the SF-ness of the origin story.
One of my favourite instances of this is in James A. Hetley’s <i>The Summer Country</i> (2002), which is a (moderately brutal) Celtic fantasy. One of the main antagonists is a fearsome user of magic…who also keeps lots of notes on a laptop. Why not?
@20: Ooh, a very interesting example. I read both in my mid-teens (I was past the target age, but they’d only just been published), and reread The City of Ember a bunch of times. The cover-copy had originally made me think we were in for something like <i>The Giver</i>, but it defied my expectations by being more science-y than that one.
Back in rec.arts.sf.written, Pern was the test case. It’s got medieval tech and dragons, but it’s on another planet. And the threat was Thread, which showed on on a 200 year cycle because of a second planet in the same solar system.
Three words:
Lord. Valentine’s. Castle.
@23 – Forgot about that one. Niven could go into the ramifactions of an SFnal assumption in some detail. At least, he used to.
Iain M. Banks’ Inversions is a sort-of fantasy novel set in a mediaeval type world with kings and bodyguards – with just small elusive hints that the protagonists of the intertwined story strands are actually alien agents from the Culture. But then the Culture setting in other novels, so full of spaceships and other tropes of SF, but is so richly post-scarcity that it is a form of high fantasy.
@27 The Pern stories first appeared in Analog. And I have read that McCaffrey considered the series SF.
I’m going to take this opportunity — as I do any chance I get — to mention the Phantasy Star series of games. Terraforming? Robots, and robot rebellions? Genetically engineered species? Smothering under the benevolent but misguided rule of a master computer? Generation ships?
All there!
Also wizards, teleportation, owlbears and monsters, necromancy, and a mystical battle between Light and Dark where the supreme weapon is an enchanted sword acting as a vessel for all the heroes of history!
PS:
Pizza is obviously a sandwich.
My favorite example of this genre straddling is Jack Vance’s “The Miracle Workers”, in which the descendants of star-travelers use the power of suggestion and ‘voodoo dolls’ (poppets) to wage war.
Pern also had telepathy. My view of Pern is that it started as fantasy then McCaffrey successfully retconned it into SF.
A more interesting case (to me at least) is Orson Scott Card’s Worthington Saga. Taken together they’re SF (with mind reading); some of the stories are fantasy when separated from the Saga as a whole.
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny straddles the (arbitrary) border between science fiction and fantasy.
What’s wrong with the term “science fantasy”? Genre-straddling isn’t forbidden by the laws of science, magic, or — more to the point — fiction. Also, nobody seems to have mentioned the Mageworld books by Debra Doyle & James D. Macdonald.
Hot dogs are sandwiched into buns, but are they indeed a sandwich?
Yoon Ha Lee’s Hexarchate stories certainly inhabit the grey area between fantasy and science fiction.
I’ve always viewed the categories “science fiction” and “fantasy” to be ambiguous, and defined at least as much by marketing as by any kind of objective criteria.
@1
I’m too late to the game to have been involved in the emacs vs vi religious wars. I’m also too kind and gentle to be a harsh crusader against the evils of bondage and discipline languages, like Pascal or (true horror awaits…) Ada.
Glynn Stewart’s Starship Mage series is exactly what it sounds like: space opera with interstellar nations and politics on a grand scale, planetary-scale engineering, special agent derring-do IN SPACE!, hunter-killer cyborgs…and starships that depend on magic-users to do FTL and assorted other tricks defensively and offensively. One of those polities specifically prohibits mages and seeks alternative technology to do the same kinds of things, and said aforementioned hunter-killer cyborgs are elite agents who are upgraded specifically to hunt down and kill mages.
Kameron Hurley’s Bel Dame trilogy has spaceships along with bug-based magic—unless one wants to argue that it’s really nanotech-pixie dust
Also Stross’ Merchant Princes books start off seeming to be Portal Fantasy, but become SF, though that was partly due to contractual/marketing reasons
“Indominable” does not seem to be a word. Did you mean “Indomitable”?
A couple of famous classics on the borderline between fantasy and science fiction are The Dying Earth by Jack Vance and The Unholy City by Charles G. Finney.
Frank Herbert would like a word. Or maybe several hundred thousand words.
A few more of my favorite genre-straddlers: Tanith Lee wrote at least one book — it may have been “The Birthgrave” but I couldn’t swear to it — that starts out appearing to be fantasy but eventually pivots firmly toward science fiction. R.A. MacAvoy’s “Tea With the Black Dragon” delightfully combines 1980s-era computer programming and… dragons. J.S. Morin’s “Black Ocean Missions” series features a Firefly-esque scrappy crew of misfits who live on a spaceship — and one of them is a wizard. And of course, Lois McMaster Bujold has stated that her “Sharing Knife” series, which to most people (myself included) reads as fantasy, is really post-apocalyptic science fiction. Genre distinctions are overrated.
I guess the distinction is relative, electricity and magnetism being indistinguishable from magic imo.
@45 is clearly fantasy.
Two of my favourite series really cross the divide … which by the way doesn’t actually exist.
C.J.Cherryh’s glorious Morgaine books – definitely have elements of high fantasy (ladies in armour wielding “magic” swords are deifintely high fantasy, aren’t they?) and hard SF- portals, scientifically explained weapons, teams using gates to prevent time travelling anomalies etc.
Already mentioned once but is sooo good it needs mentioning again … DUNE!!!
Argh I forgot to mention Gene Wolf’s Urth Books – especially the New Sun series. These books have elements of fantasy, SF and horror – plus other themes that are pure Wolfe.
I’m surprised no one’s mentioned Max Gladstone’s Craft sequence. Yes, they’re fantasy, but they feel like SF in how the characters of the story apply and use the magic they’ve got available.
@50- I’ve only read Three Parts Dead, but, perhaps because I was watching a lot of Suits at the time, it struck me as treating magic almost as a legal thriller might.
@33,
Nope. Sandwich: bake bread, put junk on top. Pizza: spread raw dough, put deliciousness on top, then bake.
@55 Ah, in that case a Croque Monsieur is a pizza, right? Or is it a pie?
Anime and manga tends to play loose with the fantasy/science fiction distinction. Tenchi Muyo for example was ostensibly a space opera with Sufficiently Advanced Technology…which had an ancient mummy turning into a beautiful woman with all kinds of powers, cute animals turning into spaceships, trees powering a galactic civilization, and so on. Urusei Uatsura (Those Obnoxious Aliens) had demons which were actually aliens, except really they were kind of demons, and there was magic and curses…
The superheroic media have all kinds of blending of magic and science. Soon I Will Be Invincible had a mad scientist protagonist creating a doomsday device that sounds suspiciously like sympathetic magic. And Dreadnought Nemesis may have the protagonist and villain defining their abilities in terms of strange science, but there’s also a full on magical antagonist.
I’d have to throw C.S. Friedman’s Coldfire trilogy into the mix as well.
I think the Darkover novels by Marion Zimmer Bradley should be mentioned (despite the reputation of the author). Although the setting was science fiction, the stories read largely as fantasy. They were some of the first of this type that I remember reading.
Great article, but Kindred is clearly a horror story.
@53,
Sandwich, unless they start with raw dough.
I don’t read manga or watch anime, so I cannot comment on them, but I think superhero fiction tends more towards fantasy than sf.
SF and fantasy are on a spectrum. The boundary is ill-defined and arbitrary.
Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny is a great book and if you find the question of ‘sf or fantasy’ interesting, this book will expand your thinking. I’d say more but, … spoilers. Totally worth the time, it’s relatively short by current standards. I’ve heard it described as a Jack Vance pastiche by Zelazny. Anything that combines two of my favorite authors should be, and definitely was, a major win.
I was actually surprised that people thought Metropolitan was SF. I didn’t even classify it as science fantasy, which is a category I use quite frequently and happily. I call it High Fantasy, because that’s what it is, even if it doesn’t feature the medieval stasis which is so common in that genre.
Anyway, others have already covered most of the examples I came here to mention, so I’ll just toss in Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light.
And while I’m here, I’d like to point out that the Japanese seem to be far more comfortable with straight-up science fantasy than we in the west. Demons and Wizards from outer-space is a common element in a whole lot of anime and manga.
“Heroes die” by Matthew Woodring Stover is another novel that is hard to classify. It starts in a fantasy world, but quite soon you discover than some people in this world actually come from a futuristic world. Their experience is then wired back into viewers in their world, for their entertainment. It’s a brilliant book (and its sequels may even be better).
Ah, taxonomy is so much fun!
The worst flame wars that I’ve seen (and have avoided participating in) have centered around what constitutes “space opera” and what constitutes “hard SF” and if THEY overlap. Most readers from what I’ve seen seem to get that there can be overlap between SF & F.
My own rule of thumb is as follows: To the extent that the author feels the need to explain how things* work (even if said explanations are pure handwavium), the text is SF. To the extent that the author does not feel the need to explain how things* work, the text is fantasy. This allows for overlap because some authors will do both in the same text for different things*. Things* refers to anything that is not part of our mundane lives, ranging from FTL drives to princes being changed into frogs.
I take a much more heterodox view of Horror, which I don’t see as a genre at all, but as an attitude that can be applied to any genre. You can have SF Horror (much of Lovecraft, the 1st Alien movie), Fantasy Horror (Dracula, The Mummy), psychological horror (Silence of the Lambs, arguably The Babadook), et al. But there is no such thing as pure Horror. It always has to be attached to something else. Zombie fiction can either be SF/H if the creators at least feel the need for some sort of explanation (virus, bioweapon, cosmic rays, whatever), or F/H if stuff just happens and the creators don’t feel the need to interrogate it.
These labels are great to help me find what I want to read. However, they are just labels and are not the book. All these vcassifications are great guides to everything, but there are always items that don’t fit.
Just enjoy the story.
I refer the reader to the gaea trilogy, by John Barley.
Hard SF written almost entirely with fantasy tropes.
I didn’t read thru all the comments, so I hope this wasn’t already mentioned, but I’ve come across a term that easily resolves this argument. Science Fantasy. I would call Star Wars a classic example of this hybrid genre. Same too for Julian May’s Saga of Pliocene Exile series.
Florence Ambrose, in _Freefall_: “Any science that can be distinguished from magic is insufficiently advanced.”
A friend of mine used to assert that if the story mentioned dragons it couldn’t be SF — and therefore, he would claim with a straight face, Dragon’s Egg is fantasy.
One of the relatively recent Hugo nominees — forgetting the name right now — featured a spacefaring culture whose physics was clearly based on what we would call magic.
Sharp dividing lines are a marketing myth. Reality is fractal. Borrowing from the afore-mentioned Lord Darcy stories by Randall Garrett, sf and fantasy is a matter of symbolism and intent.
@61 Is the Wheel of Time science fiction, then, because so much about the magic system and the Wheel itself and the nature of the world is investigated and explained? (You could probably argue this either way, but it’s interesting that usually WoT is marketed as fantasy. The “obvious” SF features are quite sporadic.)
On the other hand, as was mentioned, Pern is clearly a crossover. In fact, between different books in the series, it veers quite wildly between appearing as a pure fantasy with dragons, mind-magic, and a medieval culture, and as pure SF with FTL space travel, planetary colonization, and genetic engineering. Many books have clear elements of both. I say “appearing” though, because taken all together, it’s clear that the fantastic elements have SF explanations behind them, and at the same time, the SF elements have fantastic handwaving to make them work. That’s why Pern is the poster child for genre-mixing.
Sheri Tepper also wrote some very interesting genre-mixed books, some of which are practically a spoiler to identify. If I’m remembering correctly, I’m pretty sure that at least one book of hers involves eventually finding out that genetic engineering was the cause of intelligent talking animals becoming the dominant lifeforms on Earth. Until the explanations of what’s really going on, the story mostly seems like a normal high fantasy with talking animals and their very strange pets, interspersed with some flashbacks to modern-day scenes. It turns out to be even weirder than that sounds, but I won’t spoil anything else.
61 BillReynolds: I think you’ve got something there about the amount of explanation, though I think the type of explanation matters, too.
Bujold explains that she wanted to use period Renaissance magic in The Spirit Ring, but period magic was just recipes and modern readers want conservation laws.
Your views on horror probably aren’t very heterodox. I’ve seen other people say that horror is a mood, not a genre.
@60 Stover himself considers HEROES DIE to be sci-fi, as the protagonist uses the story’s speculative technology to win the day. Likewise, the sequel, BLADE OF TYSHALLE, is fantasy, even if much of it takes place on futuristic Earth.
Mark Geston’s Lords of the Starship and a couple of associated novels melded chiliastic fantasy with science fiction. In The Siege of Wonder he portrayed a magic-based society that ruled half the globe in constant warfare with an empirical, science-based society that governed the other half.
Few things bug me more than people who claim that Star Trek is science fiction and Star Wars isn’t. Oh yes, Star Trek, that show with all the gods, demons, witches, psychic powers, and pointy eared people with superhuman longevity and psychic powers doesn’t have any fantasy elements at all. As for Anne McCaffrey, her initial influence was clearly Andre Norton who frequently dipped her chocolate into her peanut butter because there was no market for straight fantasy when she started.
Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire trilogy feels like science fiction, but most of the tech is magic.
These days, I’d concede it’s orthagonal but has elements of both.
@35: McCaffrey said not long after starting Pern that Campbell had asked her for science fiction with dragons in it; at that time she’d never written what was then considered fantasy. Psi powers were one of Campbell’s … interests … — and were taken seriously enough that they had a scientific-form research magazine (still published). If we’re going to try to draw a line outside Pern because it’s now unbelievable, ISTM that a lot of what we still call SF borders on fantasy; even leaving aside uncertainties like FTL travel, there’s the awkward fact that chemical rockets won’t give nearly the impulse needed for easy space travel.
There’s at least a short story (and possibly more — I’ve only read a few of the novels) that makes clear that Recluce, like Dragaera, was colonized from space. I recall reading it in his one collection, Viewpoints Critical, but I’m blanking on the title.
@64: thank you — I was wondering how long it was going to take for someone to bring up May, who also relates high fantasy to the stfnal this-idea-came-from-space-colonists. (Not a spoiler — that’s made clear very early on.)
Coming in to this discussion late, but just to throw in an example that I rarely see mentioned:
The Second Sons trilogy by Jennifer Fallon.
These books are written in the language of fantasy (kings, wars, priests, etc.), but they contain no magic at all. They have plenty of *pretend* magic and *pretend* religion that are explicitly revealed as being fraudulent — science/natural law and rationality prevail. The only difference between the in-series planet and Earth is the presence of two suns, which is central to the plot and the religion/science conflict.
Terry Brooks Shannara books start out as typical high fantasy with elves and magic swords and all. But then, we learn that the setting is really a post-apocalyptic version of our world. Is it sci-fi? Not really. But there are definitely elements there.
Wow, 75 comments and no one mentioned the Lee/Miller Liaden novels? They definitely mix SF and fantasy elements….
@75: As I recall, it’s even more convoluted for Shannara : first it appears to be medieval fantasy, then we learn it’s a post apocalyptic setting, with dwarves and trolls being mutants – but then we learn that elves aren’t mutants; they’ve always been around, and just came out of hiding after the bomb.
Patricia Kennealy’s Celts in Space were smack dab in the middle. They used magic/swords and force fields/ray guns.
Second the Liaden books and their magic cats and the Glynn Stewart books, which are half and half.
Speaking of crossovers, Suzette Hayden Elgin has a set of charming fantasies collectively referred to as the Ozark Trilogy. She also has a set of SF adventures, starring telepathic/empathetic superspy Coytoe Jones. And there is Yonder Comes The Other End of Time, the Coyote Jones/Ozark crossover.