The Difference Between SF and Fantasy
Filed under General • 21-03-2010 •
I think I use more SF tropes than fantasy ones. Plus, my work is intended to be science fiction. Whether it succeeds in that aim is something for someone else to decide. To me, the difference between SF and fantasy lays not so much in technique or subject matter as in application. Broadly speaking, I see SF as a tool for exploring what it will mean to be human in an increasingly strange and baffling future; whereas I see fantasy exploring what it means to be human (or superhuman) in worlds which plainly do not, nor ever will, exist – a hotline into our archetypal dreams and superstitions, where mighty heroes vanquish armies of grotesque sub humans and beautiful vampires fall in love with their food.
Of course, there are exceptions to these categories, and the borderline between them is fuzzy and hard to pin down. Not every story can be slotted neatly into one category or the other. Perhaps it would be more helpful to think of science fiction and fantasy as two ends of a spectrum, with all the various shades of grey in between. Most of my work falls towards the SF end of the spectrum but that’s not to say there aren’t a few shades of fantasy in there. So to sum it up in a neat sound bite: SF and fantasy are exercises in exploring what it means to be human – SF explores scenarios which could plausibly occur while fantasy maps those which never could. However, both genres can be employed to a greater or lesser extent within a single story.
(Written in June 2009. Quoted in British Science Fiction & Fantasy: Twenty Years, Two Surveys, ed. Paul Kincaid & Niall Harrison).
Tags: Fantasy • sci-fi • SF
I think purpose is what sends many folks back and forth between those two labels. When the following of genre constraints gets in the way, those particular genres are pretty receptive to deviance.
I wonder if all sci-fi eventually ends up as fantasy. As the years go by “could never plausibly occur” seems to crop up all over each text.