ShawnDriscoll said:
alex_greene said:
First of all, all science fiction is fantasy.
In your opinion. Fantasy means many things to many people.
To most people, it's all wizards with wands versus robots and ray guns, and never the twain shall meet. To the general public, fantasy is the Harry Potter movies and Game of Thrones, and science fiction is Star Trek anf Doctor Who - and a vast gulf exists between them, such that you'll never see a green-skinned alien with a Buck Rogers raygun appearing in a Conan movie, any more than you'll expect to see Merlin in his robe and pointy hat blasting walls asunder with a wave of his magic wand in Doctor Who.
If one did see such crossovers, each would be explained within the context of their settings - the green aliens are degenerate descendants of an ancient pre-human race which fell to the world from one of the points of light in the sky along with Cthulhu and the Fungi from Yuggoth, bringing their strange otherworldly sorceries with them (oh, and here are some blueprints for some nifty big triangular buildings we'd like you to build, along with a life sized statue of our genetically modified pet, Man-Faced Kitty); and "Merlin" would eventually be exposed as some charlatan using a version of sonic screwdriver technology by the cunning Doctor.
However, what I said about all sf being fantasy still stands. Martians and invisibility serum and time machines do not exist, any more than anti-gravity, Jump drives and - sadly - Droyne and Zhodani. The trappings - shiny suits or robes, rayguns or swords, spaceships or horses, green aliens or elves and dwarves - are what people mostly see when they point to something and say "That's got robots in.
That's science fiction," or "That one's got blokes in chainmail in and swords and crossbows, and a chap in a pointy hat embroidered with stars and planets waving a stick about.
That is fantasy."
What about
Count Zero, with its matrix infiltrated by immense Voudoun loa? What about
Dune, which had the spice melange, psionics, clairvoyance, telepathy and prophecies? What about Barbra Hambly's
The Walls of Air, and the Cycloid Guild of
Master of the Five Magics with its citadels defended by force fields and - in the case of the Cycloid Guild - magical implanted RFID chips?
Indeed, what about
Master of the Five Magics altogether, with its magic systems clearly devised by an engineering PhD from CalSci?
Lastly, what about the
World of Darkness and
Shadowrun, where modern tech meets ancient chthonic powers and, in the case of the
WoD, often immense evil? The WoD explains Disciplines and Arcana and Gifts and Contracts as magic, but there is also the advanced tech of the Free Council or, in the old
Mage: the Ascension, the Enlightened Science of the Technocratic Union - which, while being explained as products of Enlightenment, nevertheless produce effects which can only be described as magical.
If you have a setting where even the magic systems are logical, distinct and chained by rules akin to what look like laws of physics (moon magic only works at night, when the moon is visible, healing magic cannot be performed by one who has taken a life, magic only works if you have a piece of the target to establish the arcane link) and which is consistent, it's science fiction. If, on the other hand, you have a universe of high tech where
nobody knows how to read, or where the school teaches only psionics - and never such things as science, engineering, history, languages, mathematics, philosophy, law, medicine or ethics - then it's a fantasy, even if the buildings are all shiny and the cars float in mid-air like the Jetsons' vehicles.
