Fantasy with Friends – hosted by Pages Unbound – poses questions each Monday about fantasy, either as a genre as a whole or individual works.
Things have been quiet on the blog recently, due to a mix of things. I was hit hard with illness in mid October, and it lingered really badly. Pretty much everything I was working on came to a head. On top of that, I’ve fallen way behind in reviews for both this blog and DHR, so I’ve been working hard on getting caught up with them. Hopefully now through November I can balance things out a little, especially as I would like to try and do some form of Blogmas this year!
Fantasy with Friends:
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Science fiction and fantasy are often bundled together. Why do you think this is? How do you see the two genres as related or distinct? Do you enjoy both?
I think SFF are often bundled together in quite an archaic way. As in, it goes back to the formations of the genres, and hasn’t really been pulled apart since, despite both sci-fi and fantasy now forging their own more distinct identities. Forgive me for not remembering exactly where, but a long, long time ago I read about the difficulties of trying to sort sci-fi and fantasy books when both were fledgling genres, and the understanding was that if it looked to the future, it’s sci-fi, if it looked to the past, it’s fantasy. Now, to me this makes sense for a time when the two were more closely aligned and it was as fantastical to go to the moon as it was to have an epic adventure with hobbits, elves and dwarves or cross from a wardrobe into a new world.
Both genres’ origins, therefore, were speculative, and it’s why I quite like the distinction between SFF and speculative fiction, where spec fic also draws in horror. But as both sci-fi and fantasy have evolved, they have become more distinct, their own things, while also encompassing more under each umbrella. And I think it’s long past time where we pull them apart. If I had any say, I’d actually introduce a third genre to join SFF: science fantasy.
There remains a lot of crossover between sci-fi and fantasy, but often this emerges as its own thing. IMHO, the distinction is perhaps best demonstrated by two of the largest sci-fi franchises in the world: Star Trek and Star Wars. To me, I’ve always though of Trek as science fiction – it places the emphasis on science, it utilises gadgets and technology to create this wide universe. Wars is more science fiction, where it draws on elements of fantasy, has knights running around the galaxy, an emphasis on steeds (ships), and is low on technology. If you introduced someone to these two properties without any genre knowledge, would they even recognise them as both belonging to the same genre?
It’s frustrating, too, to come across ‘SFF’ bundled together in bookshops or on sites like NetGalley. I enjoy the more fantasy side of sci-fi, but combing through books that aren’t clear if they’re hard sci-fi, science fantasy, space opera etc gets frustrating! I think of all genres and subgenres, sci-fi typically has the ones I dislike the most (military sci-fi, ugh!), and I think it’s definitely got to the point where both genres are way too big on their own and more likely to have distinctive fanbases that categorising them together just doesn’t make sense.
So – SFF is bundled together because both genres came from the same place. The two are related with fantastical elements, exploring worlds and universes that either don’t exist ‘irl’ or we don’t yet have the technology to reach, but have both grown far away from each other that it no longer makes sense to tie SFF so closely. I (mostly) enjoy both, though whereas I’ll pick up almost any subgenre of fantasy, there are sci-fi subgenres I absolutely will not touch!
