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My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before

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Re: My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before

#121

Post by vidarh »

bondarchuk wrote: post #12

I read sci-fi but not fantasy, why do people insist on lumping these together?

There's a lot of overlap of varying degree of trickiness that makes it more of a spectrum than a clear binary, and so it often makes sense to treat them as a such.

In particular, SF plots often mix in significant fantasy themes to the point that they are sometimes a majority of the book.

Banks' Inversions is a Culture novel (SF) that intentionally reads as fantasy if you don't know the Culture setting, while leaving the reader to infer the SF setting if you do.

"Grass" by Sheri Tepper, or "Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula Le Guin are other examples. Both happen on other planets, but while both have SF settings, most of the stories fits better into fantasy tropes.

Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep is very explicit SF at "top level", but a significant part of the plot is closer to fantasy, happening on a planet in a pseudo-medieval setting.

Others like Stanisław Lem's The Cyberiad, while more explicit SF, also intentionally mix the two - being written as fantasy in a mock-medieval inspired proto-feudal society, where the characters engage in typical fantasy-inspired quests, with dragons, princes and princesses, with medieval weaponry, but with most characters being robots and with access to space travel...

There's a lot of overlap where authors toys with the distinctions, or outright mocks them.

Re: My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before

#122

Post by vidarh »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #119
ck425 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is once you look at the definitions it's actually quite hard to exactly define what's Fantasy vs Sci-fi. It's more a venn diagram, than strictly separate genres and everyone has their own definition of which is which. So when someone likes one but not the other, it's hard to discuss books because what one person considers sci-fi, another may consider fantasy pretending to be sci-fi, thus the complaints of…

There are definitely things that blur the line and cross genres, or things that may meet one person's definition but not another's. I do agree it would be impossible to provide an entirely objective division that everyone would go along with. Even so, I'd love it if all the "medieval dragon witch ghost magic spirit quest" stories could be placed on a different shelf of the bookshop to the "black hole generation ship…

"The Cyberiad" by Lem is full of "medieval dragon witch ghost magic spirit quest" stories, but most of the characters in it are robots, and they travel through space.

"Inversions" by Banks is "just" a medieval quest story with magic unless you know The Culture stories, in which case is a interstellar politics story with high tech.

So even those categorisations aren't that straightforward (I would put both in the SF category, but Inversions is tricky - someone unfamiliar with Banks could read it as a straight-up fantasy novel, and if you don't like fantasy it might feel tedious)

Re: My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before

#123

Post by vidarh »

bondarchuk wrote: post #84
triMichael wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really aren't all that different from each other. One is imaginary things that might one day be possible, and the other is imaginary things that won't ever be possible. And even then, that can swap between the genres. Scifi often contains FTL tech, which from what we know is almost certainly impossible so it's actually more like fantastical magic. Meanwhile, fantasy can have hard rules for its magic, in which ca…

If the criterion is that it's to some extent imaginary, we already have a word for that: Fiction.

The more common, more constrained, superset, if one wishes to insist on a shared label, is "speculative fiction".

Re: My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before

#124

Post by vidarh »

edanm wrote: post #88
bondarchuk wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the criterion is that it's to some extent imaginary, we already have a word for that: Fiction.

That's inaccurate. SF/Fantasy contains elements which are not possible under the laws of physics, not anything imaginary. Literary fiction is also imaginary, but taking place in "our world". (The lines get blurrier when talking about imagined historical fiction, or even things like alternative fiction.)

A whole lot of hard scifi seeks to explicitly avoid things that are not possible under the laws of physics.

Re: My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before

#125

Post by vidarh »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #98
bondarchuk wrote: post #12

I read sci-fi but not fantasy, why do people insist on lumping these together?

> I read sci-fi but not fantasy I used to be the same. Ask yourself why. Harumi Marukami and Han Kang count as fantasy. (I’d argue so does Ian Banks.) Read Tolkien with a hard eye towards rules, meanwhile, and you find a universe that is largely consistent in the Unseen over the Seen, which pretty neatly maps to invisible physics guiding visible phenomena.

I think the technological focus of Banks makes a lot of his novels firmly scifi, but he also certainly toyed with the overlap, with fantasy-like settings for parts of the plot in some novels, as well as "Inversions" being effectively intentionally a fantasy novel where only the readers (potential) external knowledge of The Culture sets it in an SF setting.

Re: My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before

#126

Post by sceptic123 »

edanm wrote: post #88
bondarchuk wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the criterion is that it's to some extent imaginary, we already have a word for that: Fiction.

That's inaccurate. SF/Fantasy contains elements which are not possible under the laws of physics, not anything imaginary. Literary fiction is also imaginary, but taking place in "our world". (The lines get blurrier when talking about imagined historical fiction, or even things like alternative fiction.)

Ignoring the "science" in Science Fiction there

Re: My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before

#128

Post by krapp »

sceptic123 wrote: post #126
edanm wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's inaccurate. SF/Fantasy contains elements which are not possible under the laws of physics, not anything imaginary. Literary fiction is also imaginary, but taking place in "our world". (The lines get blurrier when talking about imagined historical fiction, or even things like alternative fiction.)

Ignoring the "science" in Science Fiction there

Which, let's be fair - most science fiction does to some degree.

Even the "hard" sci-fi tends to comprise of the author's one area of expertise or hyperfixation while everything else is nonsense. You'll have descriptions in intricate detail of how the spacecraft are engineered down to the self-sealing stembolts, but biology is basically magic.

Re: My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before

#129

Post by mrsvanwinkle »

tetris11 wrote: post #27
mritchie712 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you. My favorite sci-fi is something like Project Hail Mary, which is radically different from fantasy.

I do not understand the praise that PHM or Andy Weir get in general. I hate the way he writes. Characters are all interchangeable and quirky because he says so. The science is tacked on like a chemistry teacher putting their kids to bed. SciFi: Read Larry Niven and James Blish if you like feats of engineering, read Ann Leckie and Nancy Kress if you like characters defined by their actions. Don’t tell me to be excited…

Not a fan of his other works but his short story The Egg (not sci-fi) is up there with Asimov's best shorts (I'm not a fan of Asimov's Foundation series either). I'm more of a fan of Frankenstein and Singin in the Rain sci-fi that explores the social/personal disruptions introduced by technology. Much like how Stand Alone Complex (not Ghost in the Shell) focused on the media ecology i.e. interfaces between human and machine interactions and some of their (social) network topologies (rhizome for example).

Re: My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before

#130

Post by krapp »

noir_lord wrote: post #72
triMichael wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really aren't all that different from each other. One is imaginary things that might one day be possible, and the other is imaginary things that won't ever be possible. And even then, that can swap between the genres. Scifi often contains FTL tech, which from what we know is almost certainly impossible so it's actually more like fantastical magic. Meanwhile, fantasy can have hard rules for its magic, in which ca…

They are different if you like sci-fi and dislike fantasy which OP apparently does as do I, on the grand scheme of things not a big deal but it does get in the way when specifically looking for new sci-fi to read.

To be fair, that's a subjective difference in opinion, not an objective difference in type. Many people like "hard" sci-fi but not "soft" sci-fi, but that doesn't make them fundamentally distinct genres.

By the numbers, Star Wars is far more grounded as science fiction that Star Trek, but people will insist the former is at best merely "science fantasy." It's really all just vibes.

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