#sci's musings

[sci-firenegade]

I was compelled to do this.

[aroaceleovaldez]

I have to wonder if Will being into space themed sci-fi specifically is like. A weird side effect of being an Apollo child. He's the sun god and the first major NASA expedition was called Apollo and now sometimes his kids get Space as a special interest. Doctor Who, Dune, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are also probably up his alley.

I like this thought a LOT and am immediately incorporating it into my Will hcs.

[redxdesign]

[cleopatragirlie]

❀ 𝐔𝐬𝐜𝐡𝐢 𝐎𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐞𝐫 (𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐑𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐫 𝐋𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐬) 𝐢𝐧 '𝐇𝐚𝐲𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐨' (𝟏𝟗𝟕𝟏) ❀

[entropyvoid]

Honestly with all the overlap between sci-fi and fantasy fans, I’m really surprised that “high fantasy in space” isn’t more of a thing.

There are some things generally assumed by most to be sci-fi that I’d personally label space fantasy, like Star Wars, where the high tech is just there as a backdrop to a classic heroic story of good guys vs. bad guys, who are definitely doing magic (by using the force). The point of Star Wars isn’t the tech or anything, it just happens to be a tale told in space. It contrasts pretty starkly with something like Star Trek, where the vast majority of episodes revolve around exploring whatever scientific or philosophical concept the writers thought would be kinda neat that week, using established characters as a vehicle for said exploration.

I think one of my favorite things about Honkai Star Rail is that it freely and unabashedly mixes sci-fi and fantasy. It just goes “You are a walking neutron bomb. Also turns out your bestie is from a self-reincarnating race of dragon people with powerful water and illusion magic. They live on this big, planet-sized ship that’s dedicated to hunting down this one cosmic horror that cursed all the ship’s inhabitants with immortality, under the banner of this other cosmic horror that exists solely to kill the first cosmic horror. Let’s go on vacation to the theme park planet, the actual resort is technically an Alice-in-Wonderland style dream triggered by the same kinda cosmic-horror-gifted bomb as you. Your new friend is a meme. By the way, did we tell you about the one time this super-genius harnessed the power of *imagination* to build a death ray that instantly obliterated a bunch of planets? That was kinda fucked up, huh.” Sometimes Star Rail tries to give explanations for its tech in a way that seems believably sciencey. Sometimes shit’s just straight up called magic or it’s from some deity or another and none of the characters present have a good understanding of why, so you all just go about your bullshit. It makes it work within the context of its established universe.

Cosmic horror in general is often (but not always) found in sci-fi, but where the point of sci-fi is to expand on and detail a concept in a believably scientific way or explore the impacts of a scientific thing, the point of cosmic horror is that there is a Thing that is beyond human understanding or comprehension. Sci-fi is a fun thing to insert it into, because the more scientifically sensible and well-understood elements of the world you have, the more jarring that becomes.

Then you’ve got things like Dungeon Meshi, which exists in an inverse of something like Star Rail: it takes a very Tolkien-inspired Dungeons and Dragons-esque setting, and then details it in a very scientifically sensible way. There is magic, and there are these fantastical monsters, yes, but the monsters are parts of their own delicate and intricate ecosystems, they are edible, and they have very particular nutritional values and ways you can cook them! The protag’s biggest strength lies in him being a nerd about monster biology. Magic, too, by the end of it, ends up with a plausible enough explanation as well. And the explanation is a cosmic horror! In this way, Dungeon Meshi, despite being built entirely off of very easily recognizable and classic fantasy tropes, is probably more accurately classed as sci-fi.

I just love all of it. Can I get like 50 more of these fucked up lil mixtures of science and magic please?

[humunanunga]

Commit to one or make your argument for other in the notes. If it depends, make your argument. If it's multiple of the above, make your argument. If it's "op you forgot ___" make your argument. If you wanna "well actually" and get historical or multicultural or multifandom about it, tell us which one or few should be the standard and make your argument.

Have strong opinions. Pick a hill to die on. Give a slideshow presentation for why your take is the right one. Go to war with your mutuals and die in each other's arms on the battlefield over it.

[harpuiaa]

i've been dead and gone bc of school and jobsearching and everything happening all at once but ive been playing the boktai series games lately and i'm enjoying it a lot. I just got past the third boss in boktai 2. I don't know why but i'm enthralled with these games, i highly recommend them

[yuanwang]

save me asian ocs.. save me...

[mindfulhavens]

In the blink of an eye, the earth had been destroyed.

But by dumb luck, a regular man named Arthur Dent found himself the sole human survivor, aboard an alien craft with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in hand. On the cover, the words:

“Don’t Panic”

[verum-artifex]

They are from the future, but still in touch with nature. 🏞️

[ariel-seagull-wings]

@thealmightyemprex @themousefromfantasyland @the-blue-fairie @piterelizabethdevries @stormandforge

There is not always a guarantee that a more realistic depiction of minority characters, our struggles and opression will be better when written in a realistic scenario.

Sometimes, the realistic scenario does a poor aproach in representation, while a fantasy or sci fi allegory or even a case where a minority viewer or reader identifies with a fantastical character that wasn't necessarily meant to be a metaphor for them, becomes the better received, most effective and respectful form of representation.

I am thinking primarily on the X-Men franchise as a comentary on passing, assimilation, minority opression and resistance, but other examples can be The Matrix, Nimona, the Star Trek franchise, fairy tales and their film adaptations, Dinosaurs, The Muppets...

Feel free to ad more examples.

[sci-firenegade]

Scandalous... his hair is all loose!

[redxdesign]

[cydonianart]

SCI-FI

ROCK

PIXIE

[starklyscifi]

Listen, I didn’t even read Flowers for Algernon, my boyfriend did, but he read me the last line and it’s still haunting me.

[kyliafanfiction]

There's 'Sci-Fi as the Physical Dressing of the Story' and there's 'Sci-Fi as themes and narratives'.” —-Can I beg you to elaborate on this?! I don’t know enough about it to comment on it intelligently or even to articulate the differences between sci-fi and fantasy, so I find this really fascinating! Thank you!!

To be honest, while I know enough about it to recognize it and acknowledge the distinction when I see it, especially as it relates to something as big and obvious about it as Star Wars, I am not necessarily versed enough in it to give you a particularly articulate expansion.

With many grains of salt, and with the awareness that both Fantasy and Sci-Fi are expansive genres with a lot of subsets (Space Opera, Hard SF, Cyberpunk, Urban Fantasy, Low Fantasy, Etc) and that some stories will absolutely blur the line or exist right on it (a lot of steampunk stories are both Sci-Fi and Fantasy in a lot of ways, for instance, or stuff like Shadowrun, which is both Cyberpunk and Urban Fantasy), One way to look at it is this:

Sci-Fi is, at least in theory, much more about what's possible. Science Marches On and so things sci-fi writers of yore thought possible may be proven incorrect, but that's different. Sci-Fi, even Space Opera (though Space Opera does risk transitioning over to Space Fantasy more than most genres). There is an expectation - though again it varies by subgenre and context - that characters and situations will tend to be a little more grounded. That things that are 'nakedly impossible' are supposed to not be in it, though Sci-fi doesn't have to be plausible (though some subgenres have high standards as far as plausibility goes).

Another hallmark of Sci-fi is that it tends to have stricter rules governing the 'physics' of it's universe. 'Hard Fantasy' where magic has strict rules, etc is a thing, but it's not the conventional view of the genre (and a lot of people think that magic having such strict rules kills the wonder. I disagree, but YMMV). Sci-fi also tends to have it's story moving forward through science.

If a key element of the story hinges, for instance, on a character solving a given mathematical puzzle or something like that, that's a point in favor of the story being Sci-Fi. (The Second Sons Trilogy, despite not having technology more sophisticated than a primitive telescope, is distinctly Sci-Fi because characters using science to understand and inform themselves about the world around them is pretty central to how the main conflict of the story both happened, and is resolved).

Fantasy, by contrast, is seen more as a the fiction of what's impossible. There is a certain degree of willingness by the average fantasy audience to accept larger than life, over the top characters and behaviors they might not from a Sci-fi story. Magic isn't expected to adhere to the same sorts of hard rules in-universe as Sci-Fi tech usually is. Fantasy is often seen as much more character-driven, which is grossly unfair these days, but perception is a thing.

In Fantasy, things like prophecy are much more acceptable. In Fantasy it is generally more acceptable for the underlying 'narrativium' of the story to be a little more obvious. Fantasy is allowed, I would argue, more contrivances. Plot Armor is often less offensive - to a point - in Fantasy. Again, there's plenty of people who don't like that and try to write a more 'harder' fantasy, or fantasy that doesn't run on as much narrativium, but the very existence of those people speaks to the trends they're pushing back against.

Romance stories in fantasy are generally allowed to be more 'Romantic' in the larger, literary sense of the word. Less grounded, less realistic, more about big feelings and big reactions. More sweeping off the feet and all. 'Romantic Fantasy' is seen as a subgenre of Fantasy in a way 'Romantic Sci-Fi' isn't a subgenre of Sci-Fi.

Another thing to bear in mind with all this - in addition to those grains of salt I asked you to hold - is that genre itself is a fairly tricky beast to pin down. Genre in a book and genre in a movie will mean different things. Genre in a TTRPG and Genre in a video game will as well.

Genre is not simply a checklist of tropes where you weigh everything and then say 'okay, it's Fantasy'. Genre is as much about works being in conversation with one another as it is anything else.

Genre is also a fucking marketing category - there's absolutely stories that are full of magic or advanced science that still wouldn't get shelved as or marketed as Sci-Fi/Fantasy. The Outlander series relies on Time Travel as a central conceit of how the story exists, etc, and yet no one except the worst sort of pedant would call Outlander Sci-Fi or shelve it in the Sci-Fi section of a bookstore.

Genre is also the visual language - if a story has spaceships and lasers, it's probably Sci-Fi, or trying very hard to look like it. If a story has wizards and dragons, it's probably Fantasy.

Except of course, if you drill down and the Spaceships are powered by demons bound to summoning circles and the lasers are made possible via weird alchemy, then maybe it's fantasy. If the wizards are actually just using advanced scientific understanding of the universe to 'trick reality' or something like that, and the Dragons are just a species that evolved on a different world, or are the result of genetic engineering in a lab, then maybe it's sci-fi.

Of course, if it turns out that the 'demons' are just extradimensional beings from a universe that relies on different physical laws intruding on our own and the 'summoning circles' are actually created by psychics who can interface with other dimensions to achieve the goal of binding the 'demon', well...

You get the idea.

Finally, though this was never true, is less true now, and is thankfully not even as prevalent a mindset, there was (and in some quarters, still is, despite being far less common) that 'Sci-Fi is for Men' and 'Fantasy is for Women'. And that has had an impact on the genre in decades past. While I have no idea if it's still true, there was a time when it would be a lot easier for a female author to get a fantasy story published than a sci-fi one, for instance, as I understand it.

There are people who are much better versed in this, and I'm sure some experts on genre and SFF/Etc would disagree with all or some of what I've said, or even argue that the label of 'Space Fantasy' for Star Wars is fundamentally incoherent or missing the point. It's tricky and messy and there's a lot of moving parts.

Genre is one of those things where you know exactly what it is... until you start to actually try to nail it down. Because you'll start constructing taxonomies and then realize something that really is Sci-Fi isn't technically Sci-Fi under the metric you've laid down, and you're left with trying to decide if you change your metric or just accept that the thing you agree really is sci-fi... isn't.

I don't know how helpful this is to you, and those grains of salt are really important, but hopefully it's at least elucidated the complexities of the matter better.

If you can find it, there's a short book by Orson Scott Card called 'How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy' (I think) that outlines a lot of the difficulties in trying to separate these things out, and the extent to which it might even be pointless. He has an example of how, when he was in college or just after (IIRC) of a post-apocalyptic on another planet (I think) story he wrote where characters have psychic powers that let them do things that he submitted to a Sci-Fi short story anthology magazine, but it was rejected because 'That's fantasy and we don't do fantasy, but your story is very good otherwise'

He was pissed about it, but then was like 'well, I don't actually outline in this specific short story that they weren't on just another pseudo-medieval fantasy setting, and while the main character's ability to communicate with birds was never explicitly magic and he didn't use chants or incantations or ritual implements, I also didn't really lay out that it was a psychic power either.

Card's point was that drawing that sharp dividing line between the two is not very easy, and often pointless because the two genres borrow from each other and interact so much they're really just the one genre anyway, in a lot of ways. But he has some other interesting thoughts on the subject as well.

tl;dr - it's really fucking complicated and you sometimes just have to feel for it and go 'I know it when I see it'. At least if you're like me and not a studied expert in the field.