Our solar system

[UnArcaneElection]

Adam Daigle wrote:

This totally isn't important for this discussion, but I feel the need to clarify that Earth is not in a "dead magic zone." (At least in Pathfinder.)

AND

thejeff wrote:

Also, just for reference, since Earth as a magicless zone has come up multiple times here, this is the official word from the foreword to Rasputin Must Die.

Quote:

I considered advocating for a magic-dead Earth, but ultimately we all recognized we couldn’t strip away the PCs’ power for an entire adventure.

First, I theorized that the magic our myths and legends speak of was once real in our world, but has since faded.
{. . .}

Just because Earth isn't a dead magic zone now doesn't mean that it HASN'T been a dead magic zone. Maybe going through a dead magic period was what was needed for science-based technology to get established to the point where it would persist even if the dead magic period ended -- it might take people a long time to find out about the existence of real magic, and when they finally do, they would probably work it into their technology.

If magic went on the fritz often enough and/or in enough places, people would see that it would pay to have backup systems to fall back to when the magic doesn't work, and an orderly process for making the transition between non-magical and magical operation. It would also pay to have a way of detecting dead magic zones at a distance (and for detecting live magic zones at a distance from within a dead magic zone).

[Drahliana Moonrunner]

moon glum wrote:

Torbyne wrote:

The Vandermeres used an interesting defintion of science fiction for the anthology 'The Big Book of Science Fiction' (great anthology BTW): science fiction is fiction about the future. By that definition, star trek is science fiction.

That's about as useful a definition as a warranty on an Edsel, given the track record of futurists through the ages. I vastly prefer Usrula LeGuin's take that what we consider science fiction should be better named speculative fiction. The definition being stories that speculate a world setting somewhat or more different than our own. It's advantage is that it's not a definition that hangs on science.

I have absolutely no problem with Star Trek, or Eberron,, being considered speculative fiction.

[thejeff]

Drahliana Moonrunner wrote:

moon glum wrote:

Torbyne wrote:

The Vandermeres used an interesting defintion of science fiction for the anthology 'The Big Book of Science Fiction' (great anthology BTW): science fiction is fiction about the future. By that definition, star trek is science fiction.

That's about as useful a definition as a warranty on an Edsel, given the track record of futurists through the ages. I vastly prefer Usrula LeGuin's take that what we consider science fiction should be better named speculative fiction. The definition being stories that speculate a world setting somewhat or more different than our own. It's advantage is that it's not a definition that hangs on science.

I have absolutely no problem with Star Trek, or Eberron,, being considered speculative fiction.

Except that it's a definition that actually covers most* of what normally gets shelved or sold as science fiction. Most of the subgenres that fall into it.

Whereas the "speculative fiction" label seems to cover pretty much all of fantasy and science fiction, which is fine, but leaves you wanting labels to distinguish them.

Frankly, trying to set restrictions around what qualifies as science fiction (or more rarely around what qualifies as fantasy) doesn't really seem useful to me. For the vast majority of purposes the "high tech=science fiction", "magic=fantasy" divisions work better than anything else I've seen. People know what you're talking about. If you want more specificity or to handle the crossgenre works, break it down into subgenres.

*Most. There are of course stories set in the future that look a lot more like fantasy - post-apocalypse magic returns stories or colony world with technology loss and psychic powers, for example. And stories set in the past that look far more like science fiction - either not set on Earth or historical alien contact, etc.

[Orfamay Quest]

Drahliana Moonrunner wrote:

moon glum wrote:

The Vandermeres used an interesting defintion of science fiction for the anthology 'The Big Book of Science Fiction' (great anthology BTW): science fiction is fiction about the future. By that definition, star trek is science fiction.

That's about as useful a definition as a warranty on an Edsel, given the track record of futurists through the ages. I vastly prefer Usrula LeGuin's take that what we consider science fiction should be better named speculative fiction.

No. If the Vandermere's definition is a warranty on an Edsel, LeGuin's definition is simply useless.

Quote:

The definition being stories that speculate a world setting somewhat or more different than our own.

That's not a definition of speculative fiction. It's a definition of fiction.

Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe series speculates a world setting somewhat different then our own. There's a famous detective with an orchid collection living on West 35th Street in that world, but not in our own. Robert Graves' I, Claudius speculates a world setting where Claudius wasn't an idiot.

Quote:

It's advantage is that it's not a definition that hangs on science.

Yeah, but its disadvantage is that it's not a definition, full stop. If all you want is something that is "not a definition that hangs on science," I can provide you with one.

The whole point of fantasy vs. science fiction is to distinguish two different subgenres of speculative fiction (according to any definition other than Le Guins'), which in turn is distinguished from non-fiction of various sorts, which in turn can be distinguished from.... As you might expect, there's a whole ontology of genres, and the people who take the ontology seriously often have commercial uses for it -- for example, it's much easier to sell The Worm Ouroborous to fans of The Lord of the Rings than it is to Ringworld fans (or Nero Wolfe fans).

[The Sideromancer]

There's a reason my university has the Fantasy Literature Anime Scifi and Horror club. Lines between them blur often.

[Tom Kalbfus]

UnArcaneElection wrote:

Adam Daigle wrote:

This totally isn't important for this discussion, but I feel the need to clarify that Earth is not in a "dead magic zone." (At least in Pathfinder.)

AND

thejeff wrote:

Also, just for reference, since Earth as a magicless zone has come up multiple times here, this is the official word from the foreword to Rasputin Must Die.

Quote:

I considered advocating for a magic-dead Earth, but ultimately we all recognized we couldn’t strip away the PCs’ power for an entire adventure.

First, I theorized that the magic our myths and legends speak of was once real in our world, but has since faded.
{. . .}

Just because Earth isn't a dead magic zone now doesn't mean that it HASN'T been a dead magic zone. Maybe going through a dead magic period was what was needed for science-based technology to get established to the point where it would persist even if the dead magic period ended -- it might take people a long time to find out about the existence of real magic, and when they finally do, they would probably work it into their technology.

We need to explain why we don't see wizards and sorcerers all over the place. Ever see the cartoon Thundarr the Barbarian? There is a Sorceress in it that has magic powers, Thundarr had something that looked like a light saber, and he had a beast companion riding his own beastie horse to carry his weight, they travel around in a post holocaust Earth, which was apparently caused by a giant comet that passed too close.

This is what that trio looked like. So would future Earth look like this?

Quote:

If magic went on the fritz often enough and/or in enough places, people would see that it would pay to have backup systems to fall back to when the magic doesn't work, and an orderly process for making the transition between non-magical and magical operation. It would also pay to have a way of detecting dead magic zones at a distance (and for detecting live magic zones at a distance from within a dead magic zone).

The lost civilization of Atlantis perhaps, they worshipped Greek deities, and when magic failed to work, their civilization collapsed.

[Drahliana Moonrunner]

thejeff wrote:

Drahliana Moonrunner wrote:

moon glum wrote:

Torbyne wrote:

The Vandermeres used an interesting defintion of science fiction for the anthology 'The Big Book of Science Fiction' (great anthology BTW): science fiction is fiction about the future. By that definition, star trek is science fiction.

That's about as useful a definition as a warranty on an Edsel, given the track record of futurists through the ages. I vastly prefer Usrula LeGuin's take that what we consider science fiction should be better named speculative fiction. The definition being stories that speculate a world setting somewhat or more different than our own. It's advantage is that it's not a definition that hangs on science.

I have absolutely no problem with Star Trek, or Eberron,, being considered speculative fiction.

Except that it's a definition that actually covers most* of what normally gets shelved or sold as science fiction. Most of the subgenres that fall into it.

Whereas the "speculative fiction" label seems to cover pretty much all of fantasy and science fiction, which is fine, but leaves you wanting labels to distinguish them.

Frankly, trying to set restrictions around what qualifies as science fiction (or more rarely around what qualifies as fantasy) doesn't really seem useful to me. For the vast majority of purposes the "high tech=science fiction", "magic=fantasy" divisions work better than anything else I've seen. People know what you're talking about. If you want more specificity or to handle the crossgenre works, break it down into subgenres.

*Most. There are of course stories set in the future that look a lot more like fantasy - post-apocalypse magic returns stories or colony world with technology loss and psychic powers, for example. And stories set in the past that look far more like science fiction - either not set on Earth or historical alien contact, etc.

The problem with your approach as it is.. is that it treats non-science AS science, something we're trying to get away from in the educational sphere. We really should be complementing that approach in the serious discussion of literature.

When the dust settles, Barns and Noble will shove it all into the "Fantasy" rack anyway.

[Orfamay Quest]

Tom Kalbfus wrote:

We need to explain why we don't see wizards and sorcerers all over the place.

No, we don't. I'm not sure where this compulsion of yours comes from, but there is no necessity involved.

[thejeff]

Drahliana Moonrunner wrote:

The problem with your approach as it is.. is that it treats non-science AS science, something we're trying to get away from in the educational sphere. We really should be complementing that approach in the serious discussion of literature.

When the dust settles, Barns and Noble will shove it all into the "Fantasy" rack anyway.

The B&N I've seen generally have a Fantasy & SF section. As do the libraries and nearly everything else. Makes sense. There's a huge overlap in both authors and readership.

I don't think there's any real need to segregate only the "real science" fiction into its own genre, but it's still useful to have a larger scale break between the sciencey stuff and the magicky stuff. If you want "real science", look at subgenres - "hard Science fiction" is a perfectly good subgenre. We're also not going to convince the authors and publishers to make some broad change on educational grounds.

You're talking about redefining the terms and names. I'm talking about actual usage.

[Matthew Shelton]

So there is a lot of crossover nowadays. Elves aren't just for D&D anymore; you can have Eldar from WH40K. Interstellar travel is no longer a SciFi trope; there's also Starjammer and Starfinder. Magic and psionics are more alike than different; they're just two different styles of doing the same thing.

There are setting elements that are mostly fantasy-based, and some that are mostly-science based. We are flexible enough in our suspension of disbelief to accept just about anything as having a scientific explanation or a fantasy explanation of "the will of the gods makes it possible".

Star Trek is describable as soft science fiction, because some of its superscience is more pseudoscientific. The line is blurred even more because of things like the Q. But even in TOS there were unexplainable phenomena: the Archons' hollow weapons, the things Charlie X could do, the insanity-provoking appearance of the Medusans... but we call it SciFi because most of the ingredients of the Star Trek "recipe" are science fiction-based. Maybe Q's powers are purely psionic like the Talosians? Or maybe his powers are technological like V'ger's? We just don't know. But the core of Star Trek is flying in space and meeting aliens while trying not to die (and sometimes bedding them, but I digress)...

Then we have the old Spelljammer setting, which is mostly fantasy elements with some science fiction mimicry. We still call it fantasy though, because that's its core genre. The same for Call of Cthulhu, because its core is concerned with the inevitable destruction of man by cosmic forces beyond his comprehension.

Star Wars is also fantasy because even though it has a lot of sciencey stuff, it's mainly about The Force and Jedi versus Sith philosophies. The Starships and blasters are window dressing. You could roll back Star Wars to an ancient pre-hyperdrive era and it will still feel like Star Wars, good vs. evil with pantheistic magic.

Weird mashups like Shadowrun seem to want to strike a balance between science and fantasy. These settings are a genre unto themselves and are probably the most deserving of the "science fantasy" label. Shadowrun can't be Shadowrun without all the cyberpunk stuff, and it wouldn't be Shadowrun if you took out the metahumans and magic. Starfinder seems to want to take the same approach of making fantasy and scifi so tightly intertwined you can't do true Starfinder without both.

I'm not sure how the Horror genre fits into any of this. Horror is its own animal on par with Drama, Action, Comedy, Romantic, Thriller, and other emotion-keyed descriptors. Saw, Alien, Paranormal Activity, Insidious, Dracula, Dante's Inferno, and The Exorcist are all considered horror genre but are very different in other ways.

[thejeff]

Matthew Shelton wrote:

So there is a lot of crossover nowadays. Elves aren't just for D&D anymore; you can have Eldar from WH40K. Interstellar travel is no longer a SciFi trope; there's also Starjammer and Starfinder. Magic and psionics are more alike than different; they're just two different styles of doing the same thing.

There are setting elements that are mostly fantasy-based, and some that are mostly-science based. We are flexible enough in our suspension of disbelief to accept just about anything as having a scientific explanation or a fantasy explanation of "the will of the gods makes it possible".

Star Trek is describable as soft science fiction, because some of its superscience is more pseudoscientific. The line is blurred even more because of things like the Q. But even in TOS there were unexplainable phenomena: the Archons' hollow weapons, the things Charlie X could do, the insanity-provoking appearance of the Medusans... but we call it SciFi because most of the ingredients of the Star Trek "recipe" are science fiction-based. Maybe Q's powers are purely psionic like the Talosians? Or maybe his powers are technological like V'ger's? We just don't know. But the core of Star Trek is flying in space and meeting aliens while trying not to die (and sometimes bedding them, but I digress)...

Then we have the old Spelljammer setting, which is mostly fantasy elements with some science fiction mimicry. We still call it fantasy though, because that's its core genre. The same for Call of Cthulhu, because its core is concerned with the inevitable destruction of man by cosmic forces beyond his comprehension.

Star Wars is also fantasy because even though it has a lot of sciencey stuff, it's mainly about The Force and Jedi versus Sith philosophies. The Starships and blasters are window dressing. You could roll back Star Wars to an ancient pre-hyperdrive era and it will still feel like Star Wars, good vs. evil with pantheistic magic.

Weird mashups like Shadowrun seem to want to strike a balance between science and fantasy....

Part of the problem, that you touch on here, is that most classic genres are defined in literary terms - horror, Drama, Action, Comedy, Romantic, Thriller, mystery, etc. But some are defined in setting terms - SF, fantasy, western, historical, etc.

That's where you run into a lot of the confusion.

[Voss]

moon glum wrote:

Torbyne wrote:

oh yeah, Star Trek is science fiction the same way that an Aircraft Carrier is a space ship. Its just... not. It superficially maybe sort of looks like it is but its really, really not.

"And i said, bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish, That's the way we do things here, make s**t up as we wish, the Klingons and the Romulons pose no threat to us cause if we find we're in a bind, totally screwed up but never mind, we just pull something out of our behinds, we just make some s**t up!"

The Vandermeres used an interesting defintion of science fiction for the anthology 'The Big Book of Science Fiction' (great anthology BTW): science fiction is fiction about the future. By that definition, star trek is science fiction.

By that definition, so is a story I write about tomorrow's blizzard.

Quote:

I used to have my own definition of science fiction: Its fantasy fiction where the imagined world is presented to the reader through a scientific paradigm (as opposed to a magical one). By that definition, star trek is also science fiction.

Eh. Debatable. Star trek science works more like magic and faith than actual science.

Quote:

If you were to allow only known, or even just believable science in your science fiction, then great science fiction classics like Dune

Dune absolutely isn't. Its speculative sociology with a lot of focus on oracular visions, and the consequences thereof.

[thejeff]

Voss wrote:

moon glum wrote:

If you were to allow only known, or even just believable science in your science fiction, then great science fiction classics like Dune

Dune absolutely isn't. Its speculative sociology with a lot of focus on oracular visions, and the consequences thereof.

And yet it is widely considered one of the classics of science fiction. It's not hard science fiction certainly, but hard SF is a pretty small slice of science fiction. This is why we have subgenres.

[UnArcaneElection]

Tom Kalbfus wrote:

UnArcaneElection wrote:

{. . .}

Just because Earth isn't a dead magic zone now doesn't mean that it HASN'T been a dead magic zone. Maybe going through a dead magic period was what was needed for science-based technology to get established to the point where it would persist even if the dead magic period ended -- it might take people a long time to find out about the existence of real magic, and when they finally do, they would probably work it into their technology.

We need to explain why we don't see wizards and sorcerers all over the place. Ever see the cartoon Thundarr the Barbarian? There is a Sorceress in it that has magic powers, Thundarr had something that looked like a light saber, and he had a beast companion riding his own beastie horse to carry his weight, they travel around in a post holocaust Earth, which was apparently caused by a giant comet that passed too close.

This is what that trio looked like. So would future Earth look like this?
{. . .}

Wait, you mean that bad cartoon-makers actually have some prophetic insight into the future? That's a really disturbing thought . . . .

[The Raven Black]

I would like a source for Paizo people stating humans do not come from a single source

That there are many creatures common to Earth's mythology and Golarion's reality, including the likes of Baba Yaga and creatures linked to her, the Mythos pantheon and the Egyptian pantheon suggest a very strong link, considering that there are almost no portals between these two planets

[The Raven Black]

Adam Daigle wrote:

This totally isn't important for this discussion, but I feel the need to clarify that Earth is not in a "dead magic zone." (At least in Pathfinder.)

And what would the situation be in Starfinder ? :-)

[UnArcaneElection]

The Raven Black wrote:

I would like a source for Paizo people stating humans do not come from a single source

That there are many creatures common to Earth's mythology and Golarion's reality, including the likes of Baba Yaga and creatures linked to her, the Mythos pantheon and the Egyptian pantheon suggest a very strong link, considering that there are almost no portals between these two planets

Wait! I think I've figured it out! At least one set actually originated as pirated copies! Besmara might be more important than we think . . . .

[Voss]

thejeff wrote:

Voss wrote:

moon glum wrote:

If you were to allow only known, or even just believable science in your science fiction, then great science fiction classics like Dune

Dune absolutely isn't. Its speculative sociology with a lot of focus on oracular visions, and the consequences thereof.

And yet it is widely considered one of the classics of science fiction. It's not hard science fiction certainly, but hard SF is a pretty small slice of science fiction. This is why we have subgenres.

Nah, it's why we have marketing categories.

I'm not even sure what the other subgenres of sci-fi would actually be (other than fantasy, of course, but I disagree with most companies on that), and I spent too much of my twenties working in bookstores.

If you take the guns and ships out of Dune (or replace them with bows and sailing ships), nothing really changes. The shields and clones could just as easily be magic ones, and the navigators could open portals to other planes of existence. The effect on the story would be minimal.

You could even do an alt-universe present day and have the Emperor rule for Constantinople and have the Atreides move from their home in Not!Greece (or wherever) to take over Spice production in Alt-Arabia. Then the legions issue forth under Paul and take over the world, and Leto the Worm 'reshapes' civilization.