/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.2850699]

What is the difference between science fiction and fantasy?
I am not looking for a definitive answer so much as a list of different definitions.

[Anonymous No.2850700]

>>2850699
One is tripe, the other is shite.

[Anonymous No.2850702]

You can tell a good story without going into detail about how systems use operate or are repaired. A lot of the time it isn't relevant to the story. Lots of fantasy goes into this type of detail and the world depicted is logically consistent. By that I mean there are no plot holes or contradictions in the way its magic or physical laws work they just obey rules different than the real world.

Similarly I would not say it is plausibility that differentiates fantasy and science fiction. To do so would limit the definition of science fiction to only hard science fiction, thereby removing the vast majority of the genre. Not only would the term collapse to near uselessness by merging with a subgenre, but historically it has never been used that way.
I concede that Asimov himself used a plausibility definition
>"Isaac Asimov, once asked to explain the difference between science fiction and fantasy, replied that science fiction, given its grounding in science, is possible; fantasy, which has no grounding in reality, is not."
However, what if you have a premise that is fundamentally implausible? Such as a world where the strong nuclear force is significantly weaker, like Asimov used in part 2 of the gods themselves. It is doubtless science fiction but very implausible. Not to mention genre classics like hitchhikers guide.

Personally I would say that science fiction is fiction that
- has a hypothetical question fundamental to its premise
- Involves science or technology in some way

Where as fantasy does not need a premise or even to explain itself so long as it is consistent with the rules it establishes.

[Anonymous No.2850706]

"If sf is the exploration of all the constraints thrown up by history - the web of counterfinalities and anti-dialectics which human production has itself produced - then fantasy is the other side of the coin and a celebration of human creative power and freedom which becomes idealistic only by virtue of the omission of precisely those material and historical constraints. I propose to read magic, then, not as some facile plot device (which it no doubt becomes in the great bulk of mediocre fantasy production) but, rather, as a figure for the enlargement of human powers and their passage to the limit, their actualisation of everything latent and virtual in the stunted human organism of the present.

The very nature of magic itself becomes a whole literary programme for representation; and this is why the most consequent fantasy is never some mere deployment of magic in the service of narrative ends, but proposes a meditation on magic as such: on its capacities and its existential properties, on a kind of figural mapping of the active and productive subjectivity in its non-alienated state."

[Anonymous No.2850707]

>>2850699
Bradbury, though he often wrote about space shit and time travel shit, said that he wrote 'fantasy' not 'science fiction.'

I think I read in one of his interviews, that he didn't believe in 'science fiction'. He thought that was a paradox of sorts.