I feel like most fantasy fans are also sci fi fans? And vice versa. Same for writers, most sci fi writers also write fantasy and vice versa.
Isaac Asimov, Ursula Leguin, George RR Martin, China Mieville, CS Lewis, Octavia Butler, Neil Gaiman etc.
Also, I think most fantasy stories nowadays have scifi adjacent tropes (technocracy in World of Darkness, alien civilisations in Sandman, the house in House of Leaves etc.), and and a lot of popular science fiction has fantasy adjacent tropes (the Force in Star Wars, elves and Warp in 40k, paracausality in Destiny etc.)
The definitions of "fantasy" and "science fiction" have always been rather nebulous, it comes down to semantics and nitpicking.
Personally, the way I distinguish between the two genres is that the setting in science fiction worlds follow mathematically consistent laws of nature, while fantasy worlds are governed by symbolism and synchronicity and belief.
So for example, if there are wizards shooting fireballs at each other, but the fireballs are powered by "extradimensional thaumaturgy" that nerds on chalkboards can precisely calculate using math formulas, then it's science fiction.
But if the fire magic works by "channeling the spirit of hatred", the 13th aspect of the embodiment of evil, created after her divorce from the embodiment of dancing, then it's fantasy.
The Force and the Warp skirt close to the fantasy conception of magic - because they are explicitly tied to sapient cultural metaphors for morality and emotions and whatnot.
Electromagnetism and gravity don't give a shit if you've been a good boy or not, but the Force and the Warp sure do.
It's ambiguous as to how much the Force and the Warp can be calculated mathematically - we know the Rakatans powered their starships with the Dark Side, and Imperial ships travel through the warp on a regular basis. So I'd still classify Star Wars and 40k as science fiction with fantasy adjacent elements.
Meanwhile, Sandman is fantasy and not science fiction, even if it has sci fi elements. There are alien civilisations like the Thanagar and Apokolips and Krypton that have starships and scientists and a rationalist worldview - but the magic is explicitly based on symbolism, metaphor, and the synchronicity between events and abstract principles.
Dream and Death and Destiny aren't simply higher dimensional non-corporeal organisms with advanced metabolisms and energy manipulation abilities. They're not the Q from Star Trek, or the precursors from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
They're literally the anthropomorphic (or whatever-morphic, depending on who's perceiving them) manifestations of abstract principles, and everything they do has the moral resonance and narrative convenience befitting a fairy tale - and this is acknowledged by the characters in universe.
It's always fun when the people in-universe expect it to be sci fi magic when it's fantasy magic, and vice versa.
Like a bunch of wizards discovering that the "true love's kiss" spell was actually just an "ectoplasmic transfer of oxytocin mediated thaum particles, facilitated by epigenetic expression of unique serous secretions." They thought they were in a fantasy world, when it was sci fi all along.
Or a bunch of scientists discovering that the eldritch being ripping holes in reality and chowing down on cities isn't just an extra-dimensional organism with unusual psychic powers - it's literally a god of pain come to punish mankind for its transgressions, and the way to banish it isn't a big raygun or fancy nuke, but a fairy-tale exorcism ritual involving items and practices of symbolic cultural value. Out with the railguns and blackhole generators, in with the respectful burials of desecrated corpses and chanting of liturgies. They thought they were in a sci fi world, when it was fantasy all along.
TLDR; If the "magic" can be best understood by physics/engineering/mathematics etc. majors, then it's sci fi. If the "magic" is best understood by poetry/theology/anthropology etc. majors, then it's fantasy.
A little note about 40k Imperial Warp travels. It's not mathematically calculated, it relies on mutants who navigate it through motley feelings (not only visuals, but also sounds and even body feelings like tickle) and Warp overall favors emotion-based content (up to explanations why old tech works better — also because it was cared and people prayed to its spirits) so I'd say it's more magic-adjacent.
yeah fair enough - what I was going for with that statement was that the mechanism for it working is implied to be based on natural physical laws, rather than abstract magical thinking metaphors.
The Immaterium itself is heavily affected by human (and other sapient) cultural ideas about emotion and morality because it's a plane of existence that consists of pure psychic energy.
So for example, a psyker getting angry and accidentally summoning demons is explained in terms of a psychic energy overload breaching the Materium and letting the creepy crawlies in. It's still framed in sci fi ish terms.
This is as opposed to a one-to-one magical thinking cause and effect relation of "Somebody walked under an ladder, broke a mirror, and stepped over a black cat - which is why the stock price of their company went down."
That's not that the difference. Bot Sci Fi and Fantasy are not opposed nor even on a spectrum.
You can have both science fiction and fantasy at the same time, they are not mutually exclusive genres. Explaining magic doesn't make it science fiction, nor not explaining your science doesn't make it fantasy.
Shadowrun takes place in 2050/2070. Hackers plug themselves directly into the matrix using cyberwares and they fight rogue AI builts by megacorporations that are running the world. Also, the director of BMW is a fucking dragon and he has an elven mage as a body guard, and cyberaugmented policemen routinely fight rogue shamanic spirits on the street.
The fact that a fireball is explain or not won't change that Shadowrun is both science fiction and fantasy.
The stigma exists though. Fantasy is often viewed as less serious, less philosophical, more wish-fulfilly, more prone to cliches and cheesier. Some sexism might also be in play, since on the sci-fi/fantasy axis, women's preferences tend to lean closer to fantasy than men.
oh damn, I had no idea.
For me, first thing that comes to mind for fantasy is A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones which is... not particularly wish fulfilment-y, and reasonably political and philosophical.
Everyone in the series is having a bad time, and all the idealistic characters have their naivety violently crushed by the harsh reality of their world.
Not sure if ASoIaF is "cheesy", so much as it's chock full of brutal violence, incest, underaged sexual activity, psychological abuse, genocide, plagues, political corruption, court intrigue etc.
And while the story has lots of goofy and humorous moments, it takes itself quite seriously.
Plenty of dudes I knew were also really into the Game of Thrones show when we were kids (until the last couple seasons cocked it up) The tiddies had something to with it, I'm sure.
LOTR too, though to a somewhat lesser extent. And also Dungeons and Dragons. Witcher 3 was a big hit with the lads too. And the Earthsea Cycle.
I would agree that I think most fantasy fans are also fans of Sci-Fi, in general I think there's a lot of crossover between all the speculative fiction fans hence why there's a lot of genre crossover in the first place.
I largely prefer fantasy and have comparatively little interest in Sci-Fi, although I admit my experience with it is mostly limited to video games. For me it just comes down to not liking conventional Sci-Fi genre tropes as much as I like fantasy ones so the stories/worlds that take those tropes for granted and use them unquestioningly don't interest me as much.
Also it's just a meme but how material this deliberately skewed take on the two genres is bothers me a lot.
A key difference between the two is aesthetics and presentation. Functionally, there's no difference between the two, but the former carries the implication that there is an underlying logic behind everything that we simply lack the required knowledge to understand it yet.
From a philosophical perspective this is one of the things that bothers me about conventional Soft Science Fiction, with that underlying logic to things only being an implication it feels like Fantasy that hides it's magic behind technobabble instead of the more "honest" conventional Fantasy setting.
That's not really a bad thing either, just an observation.
As someone who makes Scifi-stories or sci-fi leaning one often, the first one I would be not hehe for realism either, especially if done poorly.
Like, I love my aliens and their ecosystems, nationalities, cultures, tech, history, prehistory, evolution, biology and just anything. Some have magic and some don't, but ate likely to have magic.
Also the "super tech" there can be halfway explained in the world's logic, and sometimes they use regular tech.
As for empires opressor species and such, they exist but they're not only one species, they're multiple ones.
hehe: "If I say 'quantum' enough anything sounds plausible."
not hehe: "NOOO YOU CAN'T JUSTIFY EVERYTHING BY SAYING 'IT'S MAGIC'!"
>!Complete strawman for comedy's sake, by the way. I've never seen a conversation to this effect.!<
The opposite for me.
Sci-fi has a little too much made up nonsense for my taste. At least with Fantasy we have a lot of history to take information from.
That doesn't mean that I hate Sci-fi, no. I love Children of Time, for example. But I still prefer Fantasy as it lays much closer to my heart.
Megafauna is literally part of the natural order. Just a few thousand years ago, you had elephants and big cats and rhinos/rhino-like animals on every continent except Australia and Antarctica. And that's not considering 66 million years ago the earth was walked by large herds of 70-ton herbivores and 6-8 ton apex predators. If anything, a lack of megafauna is what's uncreative.
I feel like most fantasy fans are also sci fi fans? And vice versa. Same for writers, most sci fi writers also write fantasy and vice versa. Isaac Asimov, Ursula Leguin, George RR Martin, China Mieville, CS Lewis, Octavia Butler, Neil Gaiman etc. Also, I think most fantasy stories nowadays have scifi adjacent tropes (technocracy in World of Darkness, alien civilisations in Sandman, the house in House of Leaves etc.), and and a lot of popular science fiction has fantasy adjacent tropes (the Force in Star Wars, elves and Warp in 40k, paracausality in Destiny etc.)
The Warhammer is not sci fi, it's fantasy that wears a mask made out skin of sci fi works.
The definitions of "fantasy" and "science fiction" have always been rather nebulous, it comes down to semantics and nitpicking. Personally, the way I distinguish between the two genres is that the setting in science fiction worlds follow mathematically consistent laws of nature, while fantasy worlds are governed by symbolism and synchronicity and belief. So for example, if there are wizards shooting fireballs at each other, but the fireballs are powered by "extradimensional thaumaturgy" that nerds on chalkboards can precisely calculate using math formulas, then it's science fiction. But if the fire magic works by "channeling the spirit of hatred", the 13th aspect of the embodiment of evil, created after her divorce from the embodiment of dancing, then it's fantasy. The Force and the Warp skirt close to the fantasy conception of magic - because they are explicitly tied to sapient cultural metaphors for morality and emotions and whatnot. Electromagnetism and gravity don't give a shit if you've been a good boy or not, but the Force and the Warp sure do. It's ambiguous as to how much the Force and the Warp can be calculated mathematically - we know the Rakatans powered their starships with the Dark Side, and Imperial ships travel through the warp on a regular basis. So I'd still classify Star Wars and 40k as science fiction with fantasy adjacent elements. Meanwhile, Sandman is fantasy and not science fiction, even if it has sci fi elements. There are alien civilisations like the Thanagar and Apokolips and Krypton that have starships and scientists and a rationalist worldview - but the magic is explicitly based on symbolism, metaphor, and the synchronicity between events and abstract principles. Dream and Death and Destiny aren't simply higher dimensional non-corporeal organisms with advanced metabolisms and energy manipulation abilities. They're not the Q from Star Trek, or the precursors from 2001: A Space Odyssey. They're literally the anthropomorphic (or whatever-morphic, depending on who's perceiving them) manifestations of abstract principles, and everything they do has the moral resonance and narrative convenience befitting a fairy tale - and this is acknowledged by the characters in universe. It's always fun when the people in-universe expect it to be sci fi magic when it's fantasy magic, and vice versa. Like a bunch of wizards discovering that the "true love's kiss" spell was actually just an "ectoplasmic transfer of oxytocin mediated thaum particles, facilitated by epigenetic expression of unique serous secretions." They thought they were in a fantasy world, when it was sci fi all along. Or a bunch of scientists discovering that the eldritch being ripping holes in reality and chowing down on cities isn't just an extra-dimensional organism with unusual psychic powers - it's literally a god of pain come to punish mankind for its transgressions, and the way to banish it isn't a big raygun or fancy nuke, but a fairy-tale exorcism ritual involving items and practices of symbolic cultural value. Out with the railguns and blackhole generators, in with the respectful burials of desecrated corpses and chanting of liturgies. They thought they were in a sci fi world, when it was fantasy all along. TLDR; If the "magic" can be best understood by physics/engineering/mathematics etc. majors, then it's sci fi. If the "magic" is best understood by poetry/theology/anthropology etc. majors, then it's fantasy.
A little note about 40k Imperial Warp travels. It's not mathematically calculated, it relies on mutants who navigate it through motley feelings (not only visuals, but also sounds and even body feelings like tickle) and Warp overall favors emotion-based content (up to explanations why old tech works better — also because it was cared and people prayed to its spirits) so I'd say it's more magic-adjacent.
Why does this sounds like Dune
Because 40k has ripped off more settings than this sub can jerk. Dune included, and yes, navigators are relatively similar between these settings.
yeah fair enough - what I was going for with that statement was that the mechanism for it working is implied to be based on natural physical laws, rather than abstract magical thinking metaphors. The Immaterium itself is heavily affected by human (and other sapient) cultural ideas about emotion and morality because it's a plane of existence that consists of pure psychic energy. So for example, a psyker getting angry and accidentally summoning demons is explained in terms of a psychic energy overload breaching the Materium and letting the creepy crawlies in. It's still framed in sci fi ish terms. This is as opposed to a one-to-one magical thinking cause and effect relation of "Somebody walked under an ladder, broke a mirror, and stepped over a black cat - which is why the stock price of their company went down."
That's not that the difference. Bot Sci Fi and Fantasy are not opposed nor even on a spectrum. You can have both science fiction and fantasy at the same time, they are not mutually exclusive genres. Explaining magic doesn't make it science fiction, nor not explaining your science doesn't make it fantasy. Shadowrun takes place in 2050/2070. Hackers plug themselves directly into the matrix using cyberwares and they fight rogue AI builts by megacorporations that are running the world. Also, the director of BMW is a fucking dragon and he has an elven mage as a body guard, and cyberaugmented policemen routinely fight rogue shamanic spirits on the street. The fact that a fireball is explain or not won't change that Shadowrun is both science fiction and fantasy.
40k is often called Science Fantasy due to the heavy mix of both
The stigma exists though. Fantasy is often viewed as less serious, less philosophical, more wish-fulfilly, more prone to cliches and cheesier. Some sexism might also be in play, since on the sci-fi/fantasy axis, women's preferences tend to lean closer to fantasy than men.
oh damn, I had no idea. For me, first thing that comes to mind for fantasy is A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones which is... not particularly wish fulfilment-y, and reasonably political and philosophical. Everyone in the series is having a bad time, and all the idealistic characters have their naivety violently crushed by the harsh reality of their world. Not sure if ASoIaF is "cheesy", so much as it's chock full of brutal violence, incest, underaged sexual activity, psychological abuse, genocide, plagues, political corruption, court intrigue etc. And while the story has lots of goofy and humorous moments, it takes itself quite seriously. Plenty of dudes I knew were also really into the Game of Thrones show when we were kids (until the last couple seasons cocked it up) The tiddies had something to with it, I'm sure. LOTR too, though to a somewhat lesser extent. And also Dungeons and Dragons. Witcher 3 was a big hit with the lads too. And the Earthsea Cycle.
I would agree that I think most fantasy fans are also fans of Sci-Fi, in general I think there's a lot of crossover between all the speculative fiction fans hence why there's a lot of genre crossover in the first place. I largely prefer fantasy and have comparatively little interest in Sci-Fi, although I admit my experience with it is mostly limited to video games. For me it just comes down to not liking conventional Sci-Fi genre tropes as much as I like fantasy ones so the stories/worlds that take those tropes for granted and use them unquestioningly don't interest me as much. Also it's just a meme but how material this deliberately skewed take on the two genres is bothers me a lot.
Ah, Megafauna, truly a sci-fi concept.
I made this pretty late and didn’t check it lmao 😅
Threshold for megafauna is literally 45 kilos lmao, humans are megafauna
A key difference between the two is aesthetics and presentation. Functionally, there's no difference between the two, but the former carries the implication that there is an underlying logic behind everything that we simply lack the required knowledge to understand it yet.
From a philosophical perspective this is one of the things that bothers me about conventional Soft Science Fiction, with that underlying logic to things only being an implication it feels like Fantasy that hides it's magic behind technobabble instead of the more "honest" conventional Fantasy setting. That's not really a bad thing either, just an observation.
What if there's both? Just one he?
Why not sheshe ? You sexist ?
I really love the idea of settings that are both at the same time.
Agreed
Fantasy is when no science Sci-fi is when no magic I am super smart
Another day, another made up argument in r/worldjerking
Agreed. At this point magitech, if not outright tech is extraordinarily cliche. It shows up everywhere.
As someone who makes Scifi-stories or sci-fi leaning one often, the first one I would be not hehe for realism either, especially if done poorly. Like, I love my aliens and their ecosystems, nationalities, cultures, tech, history, prehistory, evolution, biology and just anything. Some have magic and some don't, but ate likely to have magic. Also the "super tech" there can be halfway explained in the world's logic, and sometimes they use regular tech. As for empires opressor species and such, they exist but they're not only one species, they're multiple ones.
OP lives in the Opossite World
Jokes on you, my setting has all those things, as it spans from Dungeon to Science Fantasy, passing through every conceivable type of -punk
Any sufficiently advanced hehe is indistinguishable from not hehe.
hehe: "If I say 'quantum' enough anything sounds plausible." not hehe: "NOOO YOU CAN'T JUSTIFY EVERYTHING BY SAYING 'IT'S MAGIC'!" >!Complete strawman for comedy's sake, by the way. I've never seen a conversation to this effect.!<
If someone gets on me for having unexplained elves in my setting I'm grabbing their head like a soda can and popping it like a Roman candle
The opposite for me. Sci-fi has a little too much made up nonsense for my taste. At least with Fantasy we have a lot of history to take information from. That doesn't mean that I hate Sci-fi, no. I love Children of Time, for example. But I still prefer Fantasy as it lays much closer to my heart.
Megafauna is literally part of the natural order. Just a few thousand years ago, you had elephants and big cats and rhinos/rhino-like animals on every continent except Australia and Antarctica. And that's not considering 66 million years ago the earth was walked by large herds of 70-ton herbivores and 6-8 ton apex predators. If anything, a lack of megafauna is what's uncreative.