The Undefended Borders of SF
Jan. 18th, 2010 11:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliI was on this one. That is, it was on the list that Programming gave me, and while I wasn't in the program's list, they didn't throw me off. (Hey, that works.)
Where we thrashed about using SF tropes in fantasy and fantasy tropes in SF.
I brought up Gunnerkrieg Court (living shadows! robots! a class project involving Greek Mythology! stopping alien invasions! psychopomps! Coyote!) and Warhammer 40000 (military SF in the far future! With sorcerers!) Also John Hemry's Paul Sinclair books, which only touch on this: futuristic courtroom drama involving the space-faring US Navy. Except that two characters die in the book and other characters attribute certain things to their ghosts. Not anything that has to be ghosts, but could be.
Some of the panelists are of the opinion that you can call something fantasy merely because it doesn't actually involve any science; I am firmly of the rivets school of thought, because the machinery makes it clear that you are appealing to the authority of science to achieve the suspension of disbelief. Hindsight is twenty-twenty; I should have pointed out that their example Star Wars is clearly SF because it contrasts the Force to the machinery they use, and if you made the machinery fantastical in nature, that contrast would have gone away.
Where we thrashed about using SF tropes in fantasy and fantasy tropes in SF.
I brought up Gunnerkrieg Court (living shadows! robots! a class project involving Greek Mythology! stopping alien invasions! psychopomps! Coyote!) and Warhammer 40000 (military SF in the far future! With sorcerers!) Also John Hemry's Paul Sinclair books, which only touch on this: futuristic courtroom drama involving the space-faring US Navy. Except that two characters die in the book and other characters attribute certain things to their ghosts. Not anything that has to be ghosts, but could be.
Some of the panelists are of the opinion that you can call something fantasy merely because it doesn't actually involve any science; I am firmly of the rivets school of thought, because the machinery makes it clear that you are appealing to the authority of science to achieve the suspension of disbelief. Hindsight is twenty-twenty; I should have pointed out that their example Star Wars is clearly SF because it contrasts the Force to the machinery they use, and if you made the machinery fantastical in nature, that contrast would have gone away.
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-19 04:54 am (UTC)Also, even the Force is clearly a scientific reality in their Universe. The tradition of having a psychic science in science fiction dates back to William Hope Hodgson ("Carnacki the Ghost-Finder" stories, The Night Land) and Arthur Conan Doyle (The Maracot Deep), and was especially popularized by John W. Campbell and E. E. "Doc" Smith. The far-future Earthmen of "Forgetfulness" are using science, not sorcery, although they can achieve apparently-supernatural results; and the Arisians of the Lensman series are similarly scientific, even though their understanding of psionics includes the existence (though not the precise nature) of an afterlife.
In truth the boundaries are vague, and include overlap with historical fiction. Is Jean M. Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear science fiction (Ayla and Jondalar's continual gadgeteering), fantasy (Ayla's accurate vision of a technological future), or purely historical fiction (it's set in Late Pleistocene Europe)? Is the "People" series of Kathleen O'Neal and Michael Gear historical fiction (it presents life in various Amerindian cultures in lovingly-accurate historical detail) or fantasy (it assumes that the shamans had real psychic powers)?
The boundaries of fiction are eternally fuzzy.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-19 05:05 am (UTC)Though I think you have grounds for argument.