Well, I’m not sure about that. The line between “science fiction” and “science abuse” is pretty blurry. But I do feel there should be SOME definition, however imperfect. Not just “space wizards”.
I just want to make sure nobody gets their feelings hurt. Some people take this very seriously where I just view it as a semantic issue: Can we find a term that communicates what we mean?
Absolutely.
This is where I go cross-eyed. Fantasy is the encompassing descriptor of which Science Fiction is a subset of which Science Fantasy is a subset?
I think it’s impossible but I think there should be some kind of line. English is plagued with words that once had specific meaning and now mean…like, whatever, man.
Eh, I gotta backtrack on that, Bruce. As a van Vogt fan, I can’t really support that. It’s actually pretty hard-science (as is the first story, “The Sentinel”) except for the part you’re not supposed to understand.
There’s another element to this, in that there is such a thing as “bad” science-fiction. By which I do not mean science-fiction-which-is-not-good but science-fiction-where-the-science-is-bad.
@moviegique So… IF we were to erase the opening ten minutes and final twenty or so of 2001 (1968) you’d be comfortable describing it as Science Fiction?
Oh, totally, and what I’m also getting at is that—I actually went to a conference of Science Fiction writers last fall where this came up—there is a fair amount of elasticity. It’s unrealistic, IMO, to have science-fiction where there is no “wonder”, where no new revelation can astound* us, or turn our knowledge of physics on its head.
And I think the difference between Fantasy and Science Fiction lies in how the wonder is earned. Science Fiction (setting aside space opera) is more like “magical realism”, where we’re going along in a largely recognizable world that works more or less as we know except for this small advance here or there, and then when you get something like a giant monolith floating in space it blows you away all the more because you thought you knew what was going on.
That said, “a fair amount” isn’t infinite. The audience should not feel like you’re cheating.
Indeed. Seconded. Suspension of disbelief as Science Fiction. The Science attributes ought to account for most of the alteration from today and the storytelling in Science Fiction and be of fascination to the filmmakers somewhat aside the notions of Science Fiction it desires to dabble in. Fantasy fully stands as the realm you’re entering into and has no casual tie to the world we know hence it being Fantasy.
I’m going to veer heavily off topic here for just a minute and say that I agree with this. The worst offender for me? The current use of the word literally. I hear my students say, “I literally died last night!” or “I was literally flying through the air.” And I want to shout at them, “No! You figuratively died and you figuratively flew! Literally means the exact opposite of what you’re saying!”
Ahem. Back to science fiction.
This current discussion is fascinating because I’ll fully admit that I have never thought deeply about it. For me, it’s really a simple definition, although I’ll fully agree that Lord of Light does an amazing job of blurring the line between scifi and fantasy. But having read through this, I think there’s a reason why fantasy and scifi are often lumped together. There’s a degree of… sameness (although that’s not the word I really want here) of what the two genres are attempting to achieve.
I could actually get behind @KHalleron 's delineation, i.e. putting science fiction as a sub-genre of fantasy. But I can also see the value in keeping the two separate as well.
And really… to a certain degree, my reaction about whether something should be called science fiction or not isn’t very strong. …except Sharknado. That should absolutely 100% not ever be put in the scifi category. It besmirches the genre to be affiliated with that movie.
It’s like watching a friend being murdered in slow-motion.
Ahem.
No reason why most people should. For me it’s just a matter of liking to know where things come from and how they were shaped over the years. It’s interesting to me, but also tragic, that you have people ripping off people who ripped off people and even those guys didn’t know where they were coming from. (And it’s not just literary: You can see it in dance, music, visual arts, etc.)
Ah, that is a good word for it. (And I’ll admit that once I decided to watch all seven Sharknado movies while I was prepping a new class. Yeah, it’s best not done…)
Is it always ripping off or can it be an homage or even simply taking an idea and running off in a different direction?
Emphasis matters Teri. Science Fiction and Fantasy run after dissimilar things. Due to the persona and objectives of the two genres I can not place one under another. They sometimes blur while you’re able to tell by what the picture is and which dynamics it chases what genre it is. Thus Science Fiction and Fantasy have specific zip codes they hail from while they intersect and could be near one another identical to California and Texas the two aren’t so the same as to be grouped together. My opinion.
Thanks Teri on the kind words on this topic. Pardon my devotion to my own stance, I comprehend the logic of mixing the two together owing to visuals and the improbable manifesting in either. On which I walk away is eyeing the moving parts, motifs, and thematic and structural points of how the two genres develop, grow, and end themselves underneath the skin is where my sense of the two as singular genres derives from. We all have particular things we respond to after all. Cheers!
While I do agree with you on that, I think my lack of concern (and my willingness to blur the line separating them, putting them more like Cali and Nevada, rather than Texas) probably somewhat stems from the particular scifi I have read and enjoyed. I’ve read a few authors who do both. I myself have enjoyed writing stories where I take something that is a fantasy/supernatural trope and trying to give it a scientific explanation. Would they fit the pure science fiction definition that @moviegique prefers? I highly doubt it, and yet, by trying to give a scientific explanation to something that does typically dwell in the fantasy realm, I think it’s pulling it more toward scifi than fantasy.
I also have enjoyed more of the New Wave scifi authors than the Golden Age authors so I think that my definition is likely looser just by virtue of how I came into reading these stories.
Stellar points Teri. How you’re initiated and involved in this greater conversation caters much of your perspective. We all engage this bearing our walks of life in tow and where we’ve been and what we’ve seen. Huzzah!
Oh, yeah, “rip-off” is needlessly provocative. I think it was Picasso who said “Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.” But note that in order to be an homage, you have to know who you’re talking about.
The Japanese do a really great job of “culturally appropriating” Western culture. They make utter hash out of it, and it can be quite beautiful. But they almost always seem to know what they’re doing. Like Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service, which takes place in “Europe”. It’s a Europe that never was, but Studio Ghibli knew that, and it’s quite a fond homage.
I’m not a fan of Empire of Corpses but I was impressed by the central plot point being a (knowing) riff on a 19th century French play. Despite the kind of cheap layups (there are both Sherlock Holmes and James Bond tie-ins, and strong ones), I can’t say these guys didn’t do their homework. Speaking of science-fiction, Empire of Corpses is usually classed as science-fiction? (You have to uptalk on the “-un” sound to get my dubious regard.)
I just think if you don’t do your homework, you can end up looking foolish, and more importantly (if you’re an artist), rob the world of something additive rather than just repetitive.
I’d never heard of the movie, but reading a description of the plot, I wouldn’t put that in science fiction either. I’m not sure I’d put it in fantasy, though. I think you need to go into supernatural or something like that. The description while superficially perhaps having some scifi elements, I’m pretty sure that doesn’t work, although it doesn’t sound like horror, either.
But yes, if you’re going to use something, you should know where it comes from. I already mentioned that I write for fun. I enjoy fanfiction, but I also just write and I have a story that has an underlying theme of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. One of the characters actually quotes from it, but there are elements of the allegory scattered throughout the story, especially at the end and I do it very deliberately, enjoying playing with that source material.
…but I’m a historian, too, so the idea of not citing sources rubs me the wrong way.
When I was a kid, Superman was called “science fiction”. And, in fairness, much like the Barsoom books (from which Shuster and Siegel borrowed liberally), the original Superman was much more scientifically plausible based on the pop science of the time. (This is what I was referring to as bad-science fiction, where the fiction might be good but the science is not.) But now I think it’s clear that the superhero genre is its own beast and it only borrows science-fiction to make its fantastical premises more approachable.
Animé is kind of like that. Or rather, the fantasy/action anime is like that, since the Japanese wholly embrace cartoons and comic books in a way the West never has.
Or Kaiju movies, right? Americans made the first ones and Japanese took it an a whole new direction.
gasp
I became fascinated by “invisibility” as a common theme in literature. It’s presented as this all-powerful thing (LOTR, H.G. Wells) and, y’know, in fantasy gaming it’s like, +4 to hit! I mean, that’s cool and all, but I don’t get it.
Then I tracked it down to Plato’s* “Ring of Gyges” story and it all came together for me and I put together an “invisible man” novel that recontextualized the story to try to express that realization. There’s just a wealth of great material in the classics (he said redundantly).
And beyond irritation (which can be ample), culture is a civilization’s memory and we can’t seem to forget fast enough. And a man—or a culture—with no memory is insane.
It’s endemic in technology. Reinventing the wheel is just what you do in computers.
*IIRC, the story of Gyges is right around the cave allegory in Republic, is what made me think of this digression.
You could just as well say that of food and it would be just as accurate. Ask someone if they’d like to have Indian food or Italian, and if they say, “The best meals don’t need a box,” well, I hope you’re not hungry.
Most people, most of the time, look for particular genres whether food or literature. (And I say this as someone who often goes into books, movies and restaurants completely blind.) Things that blend or cross boundaries or defy conventions are sometimes quite good, but they’re good, I think, because they know what they’re doing.
And is it true that the best stories don’t fit into a box? Is it not the case that, while there are great stories that don’t, some of the greatest stories ever told fit squarely into specific categories, and many of the ground-breaking, genre-blending, non-categorizable ones make an initial splash and then fade away because all they had, really, was that they didn’t fit into a box?
Is it wrong to want to preserve the meanings of words, or to not always be happy all the time?
In a matter of speaking, you’re right. Distinction is calling it as you see it. One could describe Mystery Science Theater as Seasme Street and the outward box would be right. The two are puppet shows where a human mingles with puppets and discusses topics to an audience. To those not into either, they are roughly the same, seemingly childish to the disinterested, and novel concepts you could interchange. Those appreciating either and especially both would contend they function on their own levels and aren’t the same thing even if the broader term puppet show referred to them both.
Here moviegique and yours truly are at odds with those who see the boxes as alike mainly due to the boxes themselves and outward appearances mostly albeit moviegique and I are immersed in what’s in the box and what the contents distinguish or fulfill in addition to how it looks at a glance. Good stories “don’t need a box.” Also though, “don’t judge a book by its cover.” Great renditions transcend their origins yet where something comes from does matter and knowing how it does adds to the enjoyment of the ones that do.
That is quite debatable with some episodes of Star Trek, but it has had quite a few hands stirring that pot over the years, and I certainly get your point. I would point out that if it were 1977, and you told someone who had not heard of it before that Star Wars was a great fantasy film they should go to see because they love fantasy movies, after they had gone to see it I am sure that person would come back with something akin to “I though you said Star Wars was a fantasy movie, it had space ships and laser guns in it, that’s not fantasy!”
It would be similar to the picture you posted, “You told me we were having lasagna, and you served me Mexican food!”
So, definitions are kind of meaningless if they don’t allow us to properly convey meaning to another person. That leads me to another point regarding definitions.
I do not agree that definitions should be static things that never change. If the general usage of a word has changed to mean something else, clinging to the old definition will only cause more confusion. Language evolves to cover new concepts, and words are borrowed from other languages without perfect knowledge of what that word meant. Of course we are straying a bit off topic here, so I think I will just leave it at that.
No worries at all from my side of the conversation. It was this thread that actually prompted me to start another thread titled “The Art of Argument”, which provides a bit of background on how much I enjoy a good argument, and how that came to be. I will note that in this case I am entirely serious regarding the position I have staked out in this discussion, but that is not to say I will not attempt to inject a bit of humor now and then.
Perhaps I can borrow from Bruce a bit, and put this in terms of cuisine. Whether it is true or not, if I were to say that Texan cuisine is a subset of Mexican cuisine, and that further TexMex is a subset of Texan cuisine, one could surmise that TexMex is a specific variety of Texan cuisine that emphasized that Mexican connection.
The essential meaning of the word “fantasy” is of “something produced by the imagination” (see Merriam-Websters Fantasy Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster). And the etymology of the word supports this. With fantasy literature and film, this often comes with magical trappings, but as has been pointed out previously, Clarkes’ Third Law is " Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". So, given this line of thought, SciFi becomes a subset of Fantasy where the magic is advanced technology. Science Fantasy can then be viewed as Science Fiction that emphasizes the Fantasy roots of the genre.
I actually came to this position after having been exposed to almost the exact opposite argument, which is currently trending, as wikipedia currently says the following about Fantasy: “Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction involving magical elements” (Fantasy - Wikipedia). The person from whom I first heard this argument actually used the term “science fiction” rather than “speculative fiction”, but as was noted up thread, those terms are often seen as interchangeable. Before I found out that the original idea that was put forth used “speculative fiction”, and does not defines is as in a way that makes it synonymous with “science fiction”, I had already formed my counter theory above.
I would note that my definition of “fantasy” comes very close to the definition of “speculative fiction” linked to in the wikipedia article (Speculative fiction - Wikipedia): " Speculative fiction is a broad category of fiction encompassing genres with elements that do not exist in reality, recorded history, nature, or the present universe."
I wouldn’t say that the boxes are alike, but rather they are connected, and in a very messy way. Not all neat and proper like Russian nesting dolls, one fitting precisely inside another. More like the suspect board in a tv show with lines drawn from one place to another and back again.
Which is why the whole “is a hot dog a sandwich”-type discussions are so dumb.
Yes, in the context of movies, “science fiction” is entirely costume and set design-based. Though you’ll note in modern times people point out that Jedi are Space Wizards and that Lucas’ attempt to science-ify them (midichlorians) was a flop.
Now, what if you had the same story taking place on present day Earth: An oppressive government builds an aircraft carrier/battleship that can take out a country with nukes, and some rebels have found a weakness in it, and set out to destroy it. Like a spy thriller, except one of the rebels has minor but significant magic powers.
People would probably call it “magical realism” or something.
But somehow the addition of spaceships makes it “science fiction”. I guess don’t mind “Science Fantasy” as a term for “Fantasy, but with lasers.”
I think the irony of all this is that instead of freeing up art–getting it out of @KHalleron’s boxes, it tends to make everything a kind of mush, where science-fiction is all science-fantasy and fantasy is all elves and D&D.
Yeah, and I don’t disagree, generally about words changing. I only object to the historical meanings being lost (because it cuts us off from our past) and, to some extent, because we end up inventing new words because we’re ignorant of existing words.
Does science-fiction actually have fantasy roots? Or it is a distinct tradition of its own? Is it just “making stuff up”? Or does it have the scientific method and engineering in its bones?
And yet, there are many people comfortable with saying “Taco Bell is not Mexican food.”
