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3.
AOTW: Besides the obvious element of technological/scientific content, what else do you think separates the fantasy genre from science fiction?
Robin Hobb: I think there are basic differences in the way these two genres are written. I had my nose rubbed in this on the occasions when I've written SF. It calls for a different mindset. Good SF, in my opinion, starts with an idea for something that changes everything else. This can be faster than light travel or time travel, to pull out some of the old chestnuts. Or it can be a concept of an alien world that is radically different from ours in some essential way. The stuff I enjoy most takes us to the edge of present day technology and says, 'this is what happened the next day.' It is humanity affected from the outside in, by the world we create around us. If this were so, then what? That's SF.
Fantasy, on the other hand, is the story told from the heart out. There is magic and there is wonder, but in some ways these are shortcuts that allow us to consider the every day problems of our own lives in a new light. The ring that grants three wishes is not a technological wonder that we hope to someday own. It is a magnifying glass that looks at whether humans are ever wise enough to know what would truly be good for them. And if you were in this situation, what would you do? That's fantasy.
Terri Windling: To me, they are very different fields that got linked together in America by the magazine and book publishing industries. Fantasy is rooted in myth and folklore. Science fiction is literature involving speculation about technological and social sciences. Despite the fact that they share some overlapping writers and readers, I think they have separate concerns.
Michael Stackpole: Magic predominates in fantasy, but does not preclude scientific technology. I've included gunpowder in several of my fantasy novels, and steam engines in Eyes of Silver. Magic is the key to fantasy, however, because it opens up all possibilities. It brings a whole realm of the supernatural to the story, which really is the fabric of mythology. While technology can seem to be magic because we don't understand it, we do know there is something to understand. Magic is wild and fascinating, as well as a bit scary. It takes us back to our childhoods, when magic was truly possible, and therein it has the power to thrill.
Teresa Edgerton: Well, there are two reasons why I can't answer that question directly. One reason is that I think it's been stated the wrong way around. It should be 'what separates science fiction from the rest of the fantasy genre' --- since I am one of those tiresome people who insist on regarding science fiction as a subset of fantasy.
The other reason is that I believe that other sorts of fantasy besides science fiction can have an element of technology or science. In fact, as soon as the science in a story becomes outdated and discredited --- as with Jules Verne or H. G. Wells --- the story has to function well as fantasy, or there's no reason any more, for anyone to read it, remember it, or care about it.
I do that sort of thing all the time myself --- use archaic science in my stories --- except, of course, that the science is already hundreds of years out of date when I sit down to write my story.
But as to what elements separate science fiction from more traditional fantasy: I think that science fiction tends to look toward the future, while fantasy tends to look toward the past, as an allegory for the present. However, there are no hard and fast rules. The boundaries are blurred.
Lynn Flewelling I'm not sure anything does, really. The old saw was that fantasy writers put more emphasis on character development, but I think that depends on who you read. I've grown rather impatient with the prevailing need to draw lines and create definitions. We are all writing speculative fiction of one sort or another. And let's face it, we're all together in the ghetto.
Juliet McKenna: It's a gross oversimplification and don't ask me to draw the line between SF and F but in general, I'd say SF is about what makes things tick, starting with the hardware and seeing how lives and societies relate to imagined developments. Fantasy is about what makes people tick, starting with the character and seeing how individuals cope and develop faced with the usual and not so usual human dilemmas.
Sean Russell: It's a good question. I think that fantasy always has an element of mystery to it: there are truths you don't know and can never know. Science Fiction is about peeling back the layers and understanding the mysteries. I also think that fantasy, to some degree, is about achieving wisdom (that is partly what the "quest" structure is about) while science fiction is more about acquiring knowledge.
Martha Wells: I don't think there is a lot of difference between the two other than the scientific content. Science fiction tends to deal with technology and its effect on the society and fantasy tends to deal with magic and its effect on the society. I think the two genres share more similarities than they do differences, mostly because both tend to be adventure fiction. Both often share elements with other genres too, like mystery or romance.
L.E. Modesitt: The largest difference between fantasy and science fiction --- overall, because this distinction certainly doesn't apply to all books in either genre --- is that fantasy has a greater tendency to explore a wider range of the human element, while science fiction explores the human element within the range of its reaction to the theoretically scientifically possible. In short, fantasy generally has more about people.
Lois McMaster Bujold: Not much. I'm one of those people who sees the two genres as a continuum, not as two discrete entities. For me, I suppose the existence of the supernatural is what makes a work fantasy instead of SF. There are also opportunities of style and tone that more or less cluster in the two ends of the continuum, but those are story options, not fundamental constraints.
Margaret Weis: To me, fantasy allows for exploration of the human condition, unlike science fiction, which focuses a great deal of the writer's and the reader's attention on the scientific.
Elizabeth Haydon: Nothing.
At the risk of insulting genre purists, I see fantasy as a loose genre encompassing science fiction as a subset [techno-fantasy], just as it contains horror [dark fantasy], magical realism, urban fantasy and all the traditional lines such as myths, legends, fables, folktales, tall tales, and other stories with a fantastic element. Homer wrote fantasy. Scheherazade wrote fantasy. Mary Shelley wrote fantasy. George Lucas wrote fantasy. A story does not have to contain swords, elves or spells to be fantasy.
If you are trying to contrast science fiction to EPIC fantasy, one could generalize that science fiction uses the future and technology where epic fantasy uses the past, usually a Dark Age/Medieval or Renaissance tech era, and a magic system. This is not always true, however.
I still think it is the same thing in a different package. As Arthur C. Clarke once said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.''
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