posted
I've noticed that there's a trend these days to label what I think of as clear science fiction on the tv as fantasy. Dr Who, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica to name a few.
I'm wondering if this trend is happening in written fiction too, or whether its a marketing ploy to get people to watch something they probably wouldn't if they think its science fiction.
Does this mean that as writers, we can get away with submitting something we believe is clearly science fiction to an agent or publisher that deals in fantasy and not science fiction if we label it fantasy?
Is there a crossover between the two, and what are the limits?
posted
This might be easier to answer if you could tell me who is labeling those particular examples as fantasy rather than scifi. I have watched some of all of those and have never seen them listed purely as fantasy. Often, I see them listed under the umbrella heading "scifi and fantasy," which is a very common thing to do for a number of reasons. First, there is a lot of overlaps in the audience of the two genres. (I, for one, enjoy both when well done.) Also, until relatively recently, there hasn't been a lot in either one of the genres (especially on TV), so it was probably a good consolidation. And finally, there is a lot of crossover, especially when you get into "soft science fiction."
posted
I'd say no. Not at least to those that know better.
BSG and Dr. Who have been sold and are now being marketed which is different than trying to pitch them. I can see no scenario in which during pitches BSG and Dr. Who were ever called fantasy.
That being said, BSG and Dr. Who are both space operas. This label allows them to posses many fantastic elements and to follow Clark's maxim that any sufficiently advanced technology will appear like magic.
Now how does this apply to us mere mortal writers? It means know thy audience. If you're attempting to write Hard SF make sure it really is Hard and don't try passing off bolognium for the real thing.
Yet this does not mean that you can just ignore science if you're writing what OSC calls "fantasy but with science as the magic." I say this because while you don't have to write plausible science in space opera, you do have write believable science-ish advances. For example If you are trying to write a story like say Simon R. Green's Deathstalker Series, in the query letter when describing the distinctly fantastic elements of ESP powers, clones etc, you can't call these "magic" because the setting is in space and other planets and a large galaxy spanning empire.
Yet this doesn't mean that you need to have a empirically backed science foundation in your space operas.
Of course then there is "slipstream" which is or isn't a real and/or viable sub-genre depending on who is doing the description. Slipstream has yet to have a "big" title that can clearly be labled as slipstream, though some have tried to label books like The Time Traveler's Wife as slipstream but those who did weren't the powers that market a book.
Dozois edited an anthology of "slipstream" work a few years back but I don't think the market or audiences have really embraced the notion because most "slipstream" is really vague about what it wants to accomplish in the story.
posted
I perhaps should have been a bit more specific. I mean how they are advertised to the mere watching public in TV guides and on the tv. Dr. Who has always (at the least, these last new series) been advertised as a fantasy series. As for the others, Sky calls then fanasy series on the synopses for each episode. It made me wonder if by doing that, they were hoping to get people watching who wouldn't ordinarily watch those kinds of shows. Its like they are taking something away from those of us who like science fiction and it annoys me. I wondered if they did the same thing with novels.
I guess it's probably different in the states than it is here in England.
[This message has been edited by darklight (edited August 05, 2007).]
posted
What’s the emphasis on science? Original Star Trek had all those infodumps from the Science Officer. Some point of their technology played a role in a majority of the episodes. The science fiction was strongly there. The later Star Trek series had larger audiences and longer runs because they got farther away from the science. I thought of the wave that displaced Voyager and the worm hole at DS9 as more of magic than of fictional science.
Dr. Who had some technology component when the plot involved some capability of the TARDIS, but it was often presented with waving hands or dismissed as an accomplishment only the Time Lords could ever do. Science was often played at the level of magic. I’ve always thought of Dr. Who as character-driven fantasy, especially when compared to Star Trek. The most recent seasons have only used the TARDIS as an awesome gimmick and there aren’t any other Time Lords anymore.
BSG has a technology set a little closer to our level. Their FTL drive and Cylon development being the exceptions. They also have holes such as propulsion physics in their small ships. Those are glossed over - they are there in the story without any infodump explaining the differences from our technology. BSG is about the characters and the human/Cylon conflict gets to the personal level. There’s so much more of that than of the science, that BSG cannot be labeled science fiction – in my opinion, not even ‘soft science fiction.’
Labels, if they are needed, might be ‘Space Opera’, most apt for BSG; ‘fantasy’ for Dr Who; and back to ‘Space Opera’ for later Star Treks. Only Original Star Trek was true SciFi. Marketers learned from Star Trek that SciFi has a niche audience too small to carry a network program. They have to call today’s programs something else. ‘Space Opera’ sounds too negative, like an epithet. That leaves ‘fantasy’ as a palatable label for the genre.
posted
I disagree that science fiction can only be called that if it has a lot of explanations of scientific advances or equipment or whatever associated with it. Signs is science fiction because it had aliens in it, as with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but no explanation of science. Anything remotely futuristic is called sience fiction. I believe Children of Men is classed as science fiction, but doesn't have science as a theme or associated with it.
[This message has been edited by darklight (edited August 05, 2007).]
posted
I can't vouch for marketing, or even specifics of the series, but it seems the weight of preponderence on television does shift towards the science fiction end of things.
After all, it's never emerged as a separate "fantasy" section. It's always there with the "science fiction," unless it pops up in the children's books or mainstream stuff or the occasional bookstore that still has horror as a separate section.
In the seventies, you used to see some books that were clearly fantasy marketed outright as science fiction. It kinda emerged with several tries by Ballantine / Del Rey, with it finally sticking in the push that first put out Terry Brooks and Stephen Donaldson.
quote:The later Star Trek series had larger audiences and longer runs because they got farther away from the science.
That is a preposterous statement. The original series only ran three years because the networks didn't understand their audience. You're implying the letter-writing campaign that brought season three was from a small audience? The Star Trek conventions held before the first motion picture were small gatherings?
And the later versions were more popular because the stories were based on techno-babble? Assuming they were more popular (which I would like to see statistics to support) it would be due to the advance in special effects. How else do you explain the success of the last three Star Wars films? People like flashing lights.
posted
I remember reading somewhere that Star Trek The Next Generation was one of the most popular shows on T.V. for a period of time-- the early 90s, maybe. Whether that's due to a straying from science or not is hard to say.
But I'm straying from the topic. I have to disagree with darklight here. IMO, Signs was a fantasy. I haven't seen Children of Men yet, but based on the previews, I'd have to say it's sci fi.
I'm calling Signs a fantasy because though it has a quasi-scientific core, i.e., alien invasion, the story actually has little to do with the fact that the invasive force are, in fact, aliens. The aliens are just a vehicle for a completely different story.
Sci fi is when the story is about exploring a specific scientific question or situation. BSG explores an epic battle between cylons and humans. THe scientific idea is the driving principle of the story. i realize this is a hazy distinction, but it's what my gut's telling me.
Needless to say, there's a ton of cross over, and I'm not even sure how worthwhile it is to form hard and fast definitions, except that it comes in handy in marketing, I suppose. I do think the audience of both books and movies cross over, and i don't think marketers are likely to get more readers/ watchers if they classify something one way or another. THough the recent popularity of LOTR and HP books and movies might change that--i.e., they appealed to people who might not normally read/ watch fantasy, so they are ore likely to read/ watch fantasy again, rather than sci fi.
Oh, and Zero, I'd put my money on fantasy. In a literal fight, it's because fantasy has magic, and magic can kick technology's rear end any time. Figuratively speaking, I think fantasy has a much broader definition and would win out--think of all the "mainstream" novels that push the borders of fantasy--Haruki Murakami, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, etc.
[This message has been edited by annepin (edited August 05, 2007).]
quote:I'm calling Signs a fantasy because though it has a quasi-scientific core, i.e., alien invasion, the story actually has little to do with the fact that the invasive force are, in fact, aliens
I have to respectfully disagree with that. I beleive its science fiction, and a brief look on the internet confirms that. Admittedly, its also in the genres of thirller and drama, I could find no reference to fantasy.
Anyhow, my original question was about written fiction and how it applies to that. If some of the thoughts here are correct, then I could probably market some of my fiction as fantasy, however, I wouldn't call it that. I think of fantasy as Lord of the Rings, the novels of Terry Pratchet. And to be honest, it's not a genre I enjoy.
posted
I was asking the same question some time ago (can't remember why, probably surfing the net at work like right now) and I came across an interesting explanation.
Fantasy is if things happen because of unexplained magick
Science fiction is if things happen because of science
The site applied this explanation to Star Wars, if you follow these explanations Star Wars Episodes 4, 5 and 6 (originally released ones) were fantasy. The force was unexplained magick, and for those who would say Star Wars is futuristic, it is set in the past, just in space.
Episodes 1, 2 and 3 introduced the science of midiclorines (not sure about the spelling) which scintifically explained the force, therefore something people would claim as Science Fiction may have started its life as Fantasy.
posted
I'm inclined to think that "science fiction is what science fiction editors buy." Any other hard-and-fast explanation usually has so much wiggle in it that one can find excpetions to the rules.
I think I'm inclined to "write with the tropes," couching my fiction in the trappings of science fiction, rather than grounding it in science. I know a lot about science (or think I do), so it permeates my world view, and through that into my fiction.
posted
Darklight, it is just my opinion. I am well aware of what others call it; I choose to disagree.
"Fantasy is if things happen because of unexplained magick
Science fiction is if things happen because of science"
I have to take issue with this. There's Fantasy that has no magick. Mine included. Where would these fall? I suppose you could call them speculative fiction, but that's really just another flavor of fantasy.
I think Robert's got it right. It does help to have some idea, though, when querying an agent.
[This message has been edited by annepin (edited August 09, 2007).]
posted
My own two cents to this discussion... the respectful debate about the classification of Signs drew me in...
annepin, I find it interesting that the fact that Signs deals with human issues and ideas as it's primary focus, with the science elements in the background, is your primary reason for excluding it from the science fiction genre. A great deal of sci-fi deals with ideas, in my experience to a much greater degree than fantasy ever has. A great deal of sci-fi is technology/alien/science based, but many of the greatest and most profound works in the genre are very idea driven to the exclusion or reduction of the scientific elements.
Contrast that with fantasy, which generally tells a story more than it deals with ideas. I agree that fantasy can and does deal with ideas, but as a rule it is dealt with either as a subtle side not for the close reader, or not at all. Maybe I've been under a rock for a great deal of time, but I've never seen a fantasy character question their own existence in a way that even remotely resembles the internal conflict apparent in Rick Deckard.
An interesting topic all around, and it's nice to see everyone's points of view.
Jayson Merryfield
[This message has been edited by Wolfe_boy (edited August 09, 2007).]
posted
Well, I guess to insert my own two cents, I had this discussion with a few friends a while ago. It's still long enough ago for me to forget a lot of it, but I'll give it a shot.
First of all, the most basic - "science fiction" is anything with technology, and "science fantasy" is anything with magic with alien (read: extra-terrestrial) settings or elements (otherwise it's just "fantasy")
Now here comes the hard part. I would further define "science fiction" as "anything where technology plays a crucial role in the story." To quote what's on Analog's science fiction submission pages, no technology, no story. Or in other words, at least from the perspective of TV shows, episodes usually revolve around a plot device that in turn revolves around some sort of technology - hence, Star Trek is definitely science fiction. So where does this leave stuff like Star Wars or Dr. Who? Well, like Matt Lust was alluding to, I would classify these as "Space Operas." I would further define a "space opera" as any story with a space or alien-themed setting which may or may not feature technology as central to the story (Star Wars certainly does - Star Destroyers, Death Stars, the Millennium Falcon, X-Wings etc.) but of which the main focus is on a character or characters, i.e., character development.
And that leaves us with "hard" and "soft" sci-fi which is more of a sliding scale than a hard definition. The more adherent to real-life physics, the more "hard" it is. Thus, Star Trek is "soft" sci-fi since it uses a lot of concepts that are either scientifically fallible or completely impossible (warp drive, transporters, replicators etc). A fictionalized account of a near-future Mars mission based on actual NASA plans would probably be the best example of the most extreme form of "hard" sci-fi I could think of off the top of my head.
And then there's science fantasy, which may or may not have technological elements but at least has some magic or at least some sort of traditional "fantasy" element. Can't think of any examples though.