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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

#131

Post by edanm »

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

Not really, no.

A common sf theme is "here is this change to the laws of physics, what would our universe then look like". Eg Arrival (and the story it's based on), tons of books by Egan, any book with FTL.

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

#132

Post by edanm »

vidarh wrote: post #124
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.)

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

Some does, but often the source of interest in the story is making up a world in which some scientific law is different.

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

#133

Post by mrsvanwinkle »

bondarchuk wrote: post #12

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

Might be based on Arthur C. Clarke's aphorism, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Ray Kurzweil uses this as a major motif for "The Singularity is Near" about how Harry Potter can be rewritten with all magic replaced with "advanced" devices with handwaved theoretical feasibility explanations. A more specific issue than sci-fi vs. fantasy is the "hard/soft" sci-fi delineation.

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

#134

Post by d4rkp4ttern »

A couple books I'd put in this category:

1. Roadside Picnic, by the Strugatsky brothers, loose basis of Tarkovsky's Stalker movie.

2. XX by Rian Hughes -- hugely under-rated book. Starts with a signal from outer space and goes quite far, and also has a book-within-a-book. Nearly 1000 pages but found it very engaging.

Currently trying to read Stanlislaw Lem's His Master's Voice which has a similar theme of a possible signal from an alien intelligence.

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

#135

Post by vidarh »

edanm wrote: post #132
vidarh wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Some does, but often the source of interest in the story is making up a world in which some scientific law is different.

Sure, but my point being that saying SF/Fantasy contains elements that aren't possible is a too restrictive constraint - a whole lot of SF would fall outside of that category.

While Tau Zero that was mentioned elsewhere is believed to not match the laws of nature now, the science the entire plot rests on was considered scientifically plausible at the time it was written.

It was speculative, but it explicitly did not set out to make up a world in which some scientific law is different.

In other words, that isn't a defining factor of SF.

The speculative nature of it is closer to it - hence the shared label of speculative fiction often used to group SF and fantasy.

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

#136

Post by sceptic123 »

edanm wrote: post #96
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strictly speaking you don't have to have elements not possible under the laws of physics. I would definitely call The Martian science fiction, but it doesn't really try to break any physical laws. Even things like Tau Zero are using relativistic time dilation as the plot driver.

(Haven't read Tau Zero.) I agree, and sometimes the line is drawn between SF being "things that are theoretically possible" vs. Fantasy where things are impossible. But then you have things like Egan's Clockwork Trilogy, which is "what if the laws of physics actually worked a bit differently in this specific way" but which I assume anyone would consider SF. As opposed to Brandon Sanderson's books, which could be desc…

I think some books can cross the threshold and be both, but the majority fall into one or the other category pretty easily. That would seem to apply to the linked authors' books from a cursory glance.

What would you say is the reason for categorising works differently? Can you see differences there or do you also think it's mostly marketing?

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

#137

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

vidarh wrote: post #122
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I'm good with a few weird edge cases. Just let me find the majority of sci fi books without having to trudge through vast numbers of definitively fantasy books!

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

#138

Post by ReptileMan »

sodaclean wrote: post #113
ReptileMan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of Roger Zelazny

Not a fan of cheeky riddles based on dad jokes?

Zelazny was one of the earliest/best/most prolific authors that loved to use the boundary between sci-fi and fantasy as a jump rope.

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

#139

Post by [deleted] »

bwb wrote: post #65
wmil wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's truly infuriating is how awful the tagging on Audible is. "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is tagged sci-fi.

You would not believe how bad publisher data is. I run a book website, and Dune is often tagged nonfiction in the data we get from publishers. I don't think they know how to use the BISAC system the industry uses ( https://bisg.org/page/BISACEdition ). With Dune, they were marking it "AI," which is a nonfiction-only category. Just one small example...

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