Forums » Smalltalk » Science Fantasy?

Hey all,

A close friend and I want to co-write a story, but there's a slight problem. She prefers fantasy, whereas I have experience with Sci-Fi (even though I'm flexible with both genres.)

My friend suggested that we do a sci-Fi/fantasy hybrid. Now I don't think that's such a bad idea myself, but I've heard of the Science Fantasy genre. She has not. So now I'm trying to explain it to her, but I don't quite understand it myself.

A little help?

Thanks,

~Oaky

I suggest your friend plays the game 'Hellgate'

The movie "Avatar" (while I admittedly personally disliked it) could be a fair example of the genre. You have your spaceships and your vat-grown clones and your pewpew lasers, but you also have your fairy-floating sentient pollen and mother tree and soulbonding stuff.

Growing up around big scifi writers and a literary agency specializing i them, I think of science fiction of having two branches. Hard science fiction, and science fantasy.

"Hard" science fiction takes current trends in technologies or new research and stretches them out to their logical conclusions, to possible futures where these discoveries or trends have changed the face of the planet -- or the universe. It asks us to question where we are going, and what we should really be doing with our technology. What precautions should we take? What ethical ramifications does it have? How does this change (or not) how we see ourselves as human beings? How does society change? Ursula Le Guin is a great example of an author who does hard science fiction using the soft sciences (psychology, anthropology, sociology, etc.) whereas we might look to someone like Isaac Asimov or James Blish for hard science fiction with the hard sciences.

Science fantasy, on the other hand, typically includes no such research, it just takes the common trappings of scifi (blasters, spaceships, robots, chips in your head, super high tech spy stuff) and asks the reader to accept them without explanation. Basic high school physics may be ignored on every page and no one worries about it. The author wants to tell a "futuristic" story without having to worry about reality. See all of Star Wars for an example.

Star trek careens wildly back and forth between hard science fiction and science fantasy, but often stays pretty well in the science fantasy camp.

Both categories might contain rocketships and blasters. Both might contain religious elements - how technology interacts with religion, or how we might make meaning out of it as human beings, is a very important question to explore, after all! They may both also exist in the far flung future, or take place in modern society with a few technological augmentations. They might also take place in an alternate past, where technology developed differently.

They MIGHT also both contain "magic", though hard science fiction will have obtained that magic from some real world piece of research and explain how it turns into such powers given a proper evolutionary channel or technological push. It is from hard science fiction that we get the phrase "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And it's true! There are creatures on earth with stupendous capabilities, or marvelous senses well beyond our own, and if found on a larger scale or in a fully sentient creature we might well view them as magic. Science fantasy will make no attempt to explain where the magic came from, explain it with hand waving that doesn't actually explain anything, or explain it in such a way that it has no apparent basis in anything that can happen ("midichlorians").

The real defining difference between them is how much real science went into it, and how much just glossing over stuff happened. Both methods can lead to fun stories that stand the test of time. They are very different methods with very different purposes, however.

Most stories exist somewhere on the continuum between these two. A hard science fiction story may take a single piece of science that it wants to explore, and focus heavily on exploring its ramifications, but also take certain elements of science fantasy for granted because they are not the focus of the story.

Thanks so much, guys! I think we've got it now.


~Oaky