Date: Fri, 01 Apr 2005 10:56:12 -0500 To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org> From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com> Subject: [WSFA] Re: Who said: SF is fantasy with nuts and bolts painted on? Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org> At 09:47 AM 4/1/05 -0500, Ernest Lilley wrote: >Help. Anyone know the full quote and its source? > >Ernest Lilley http://blog.swiftalpha.com/archive/2005/02/10/307.aspx That link's author claims it was Terry Prachet. I'd say he seems to have missed a great deal of SF, along with its main point. It may be a political statement based on the "camp" he belonged to I suppose (isn't most of his stuff pretty much clearly Fantasy?) IMHO the difference between Fantasy and SF is that Fantasy is about wish fulfillment while SF is about problem exploration. Both may in the end be about getting what you want, but Fantasy just hands it to you, while SF treats it as an engineering problem and makes you work for it. There is certainly a great deal of work that is in the grey area between these two, making the term "Science Fantasy" a reasonable invention, but I still see those two very distinct nodes in the sea of fiction. It's not as simple as "dragons and magic means it's fantasy, lasers and spaceships means it's science fiction but otherwise the two are the same", as the quote seems to me to be indicating. I see a real difference of purpose between, say, "The Hobbit" and "The Last Days Of The Permanent Floating Riot Club". One is an escapist travelogue set in the midst of a very generic human problem like "good vs. evil" and how various traits like friendship, duty, suspicion, greed, etc. affect the battle between these two (the outcome is generally not in question...the heros will figure out how to win in the end), the other is a very specific description of a particular problem created directly or indirectly by advancing technology and how technology might be used to solve it. "The Hobbit" doesn't tell us anything really new, it just restates what we hope is true in a novel and interesting way. TLDOTPFRC raises an issue related to an SF standard, teleportation, when combined with instant on-the-spot news reporting, that might not have occurred to most, and then attempts to solve the problem. Other stories by Niven on other problems raised by the teleportation technology exist as well, covering in more or less depth topics like smuggling, burglary, government control of borders, psychological effects of instant travel to unfamiliar locales, etc.. Some might refer to what I'm calling "SF" as "Hard SF". That part of what is usually called SF that tends to appeal to engineers and scientists who deal with "What if?" questions all the time. That would seem to leave the rest of SF as "Soft SF", and perhaps more easily confused with Fantasy...but even Soft SF is still working at specific problems and trying to come up with plausible answers. The difference seems to me to be what sorts of problems it takes on. Hard SF tends to take on technological problems, and comes up with technological solutions. The problems created by technology may be social, political or psychological in nature, not just technological, but the solutions are generally related to more use of technology. In Soft SF the problems are almost never technological, they are usually social, political, or psychological, and the solutions are generally social, political or psychological as well. Both sorts are distinct from Fantasy by their being so problem oriented. In Fantasy it's usually the case that the only problem involved is that of the protagonist, which may give the basis of the plot, but it doesn't usually involve the reader personally the way the problems in SF do...or will if the enabling technologies ever happen (and they must be at least *possible* given what we know of the universe to be good SF). What is required for something to be "human"? is an SF question given advances in AI or genetic engineering. "How can I destroy the magic dingus that gives the evil one his power?" is a Fantasy question for the protagonist to solve, but the question will never arise for the reader or anyone else in real life since a magic dingus can't really exist in our universe. As I said, there are stories that work hard to be in the gray areas. "The Wiz Biz" by Rick Cook for instance. It's set in a Fantasy world of magic and wizards and dragons, but the protagonist is a computer programmer from California. When dragged into the Fantasy World he has a problem (survival and fighting the bad guys in a world he doesn't really understand) which he approaches in a very Hard SF manner, using a technological approach to magic, but since magic doesn't exist in our universe the reader will never be faced with this problem, making it more Fantasy like in format (the wizards and magic and dragons alone don't do that really...see: "B5 Technomage" for an example of these things in SF). In the end it's a bit of both...a Fantasy with an SF feel to it...and it's a lot of fun to read, particularly if you are a programmer who's played with Forth! :-) This is my best attempt to define the differences without just resorting to the old, "I know it when I see it" definition. I'm well aware that not everyone will agree with me about it. Feel free to attempt your own definitions! :-) -- Mike B. -- The real world is not user friendly.