Other What if Sci-Fi and Fantasy had a baby?

[Birdsie]

Ever since times immemorial, Futuristic settings in movies drew elements and concepts from Fantasy.

Don't believe me?
Let's have a look at Star Wars IV: A New Hope and it's 2 sequels.
Or more precisely, let's break down the major characters:

Luke Skywalker: A young, idealistic boy who wants to overthrow an evil regime... and he wields a blue sword that has been wielded by his father, who used to be a knight in the past. Doesn't this sound like a classic fantasy hero to you?
Obi-Wan Kenobi: An old, experienced and calm man in control of himself. Continues to mentor Luke even after his death, guiding him in the form of a ghastly apparition. This is clearly a Gandalf-ish character if anything.
C3PO & R2D2: Not much to say about these two. Mostly comic relief.
Han Solo: He fits into the "rogue," archetype.
Chewbacca: On the other hand, this giant fits into the "brute warrior," archetype. He can rip a man into pieces with his arms and wields a crossbow that kills and staggers armored soldiers with one, lethal shot.
Princess Leia: Exactly what it says there on the tin; She's a princess that needs saving.
Yoda: If Kenobi isn't Gandalf, then he is.
Darth Vader: Black knight archetype. Also, a fallen hero and the father of the hero.
Palpatine/The Emperor/Darth Sidious: He's the most stereotypical evil overlord/evil sorcerer that I've seen. He even aspires to cheat death, as we learn in the prequels and EU, which makes him somewhat fitting of the necromancer trope too.

However, the setting above is far more on the "Sci-Fi" side of things. But I was thinking of taking some liberty and going further, incorporating more elements of Fantasy.

What would we get? Orcs as aliens? Elves using laser rifles instead of bows? Psychic powers instead of magic? Demons as evil psychic entities from a parallel dimension? Space travel by opening a gate to hell, moving some distance and re-entering real space?

What do you think?

 

[Hall Kervean]

I actually have a scifi story thing where Sauron won, and Orcs have advanced tech, relatively. Orcs with guns invading other worlds.

 

[_Line 213]

If Science Fiction and Fantasy had a baby, it would be called Science Fantasy.

Works like Star Wars, Dune, and Warhammer 40k exemplify the genre.

 

[Aether1]

One Genre to rule them all. (/) (°,,°) (/)

 

[Seldil]

Fun fact star wars is actually heavily based off old Akira Kurosawa samurai movies. If you Google it you will even find many of the scenes are mirror copies. Lucas threw them in as a homage to Kurosawa who he looked up to as a director. I think sci-fi and fantasy were never really separate things at all, so you can't really merge them. The heart of both genres is exactly the same.

 

[_Line 213]

Fun fact star wars is actually heavily based off old Akira Kurosawa samurai movies. If you Google it you will even find many of the scenes are mirror copies. Lucas threw them in as a homage to Kurosawa who he looked up to as a director. I think sci-fi and fantasy were never really separate things at all, so you can't really merge them. The heart of both genres is exactly the same.

I disagree heavily on this. Though both genres could be considered branches of speculative fiction, they differ heavily outside of that vein.

Pure Science-Fiction involves the extrapolation of real-world knowledge, technology, and physical laws, while pure Fantasy does not bind itself to those constraints.

One may think that something like Steampunk often becomes more fantastical than technological, but it is still considered science-fiction because it is still an extrapolation. Technology that existed during the industrial revolution is taken and expanded upon until it comprises many elements of current-era technology.

Fantasy, meanwhile, does not "expand" upon any particular technological facet, and instead tends to "add" things to any given historical period.

 

[Seldil]

Hmm I don’t know if this quite gets us there either. Many works we call sci-fi are no more extrapolations of real world physics, technology, and politics than ones we call fantasy. The characteristics of a setting really shouldn’t define the genre a story goes into. Take an old samurai move change katanas to light sabers and castles to star bases and its sci-fi. If you instead give them six guns and horses and it becomes a western (yea that’s actually where most of our westerns come from too).


But now I'm interested in how we could actually divide up speculative fiction into fantasy and sci-fi. I was in a similar debate about what makes something a soup vs. a stew. After a long time arguing about the characteristics of the object or the methods used to make it we kept running into road blocks with one outlier or another not fitting. We finally settled on intentions. If the chef intended to cook the ingredients it was a stew if he instead wanted to flavor a broth it was a soup. I suspect we will arrive at a similar conclusion here.


For example steam punk isn't defined by lots of brass gears and steam engines. It is created when an author says what if we kept this set of values, style, and culture as we continued to advance. I don’t think steam punk becomes diesel punk (or would it be stiesel punk? That actually sounds kinda cool) when you add a diesel engine to it.


But what do you guys think? Is the question the author asks somehow fundamentally different between fantasy and sci-fi? If so what do you think the difference is?


Or do you the difference is in fact in the trappings of the setting and outliers are just being miscategorized (i.e. is star trek actually fantasy)

 

[_Line 213]

Dieselpunk is defined as a Steampunk-esque extrapolation of technology prevalent during the war era of the 1940s. It isn't born out of Steampunk, and the comparison only comes because the cultural and technological extrapolation is similar. It is necessary for Steampunk to be classified primarily by its technological standing, else it would merely be something more along the lines of "Victorian fiction." And that's without getting into the possibility of Steampunk being set in cultures that are normally completely divorced from the genre, a la Bioshock Infinite.

As for the first paragraph, many things that we consider to be Sci-Fi (i.e., Star Wars) aren't Sci-Fi so much as Fantasy in the first place (at least until Lucas gets screwy in the Prequels). Dune, though considered "science-fiction" by most people, is as Fantasy as you can get.

Cross-polination is something that happens often (see: Westworld), but that doesn't mean that science fiction and fantasy become any more interchangeable than Westerns and Cyberpunk would.

 

[wonderandawe]

My first introduction to Fantasy after a childhood of Science Fiction was the Dragonriders of Pern. It's a far distance Sci-Fi setting that rides dragons.

Most of the setting is based in a Medieval based society, but Dragonsdawn tells how humans from Earth colonized Pern.

 

[Silver Tsar]

Definitely check out the table-top RPG Fading Suns background if you want to see some cool sci-fantasy. Basically, take some Dune, some Warhammer 40k, some Star Wars, and some Greco-Roman/Medieval myths and blend liberally. The result is a really cool setting with a galactic empire of a couple dozen systems, alien menaces, Space Ottomans, guilds, Catholic Church in SPACE, and stars that are fading.

 

[Noon]

Hmm I don’t know if this quite gets us there either. Many works we call sci-fi are no more extrapolations of real world physics, technology, and politics than ones we call fantasy. The characteristics of a setting really shouldn’t define the genre a story goes into. Take an old samurai move change katanas to light sabers and castles to star bases and its sci-fi. If you instead give them six guns and horses and it becomes a western (yea that’s actually where most of our westerns come from too).

No, I don't think so. I'd say that setting comes into it, but genre is more about world-building as a whole than any one element.

For anyone who didn't understand:
Fantasy stories rely on the likes of magic ('that's just how it is') to explain their events, whereas sci-fi uses science. Sometimes that science is totally implausible, but it still counts.

Science versus magic. That's the divide.

 

[Stormyface]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhammer_40,000

 

[Ranix Aurus]

Science-fantasy as a genre exists, you know...

If it steers clear of scientific explanation, then it's fantasy.

If it is grounded on scientific explanation of current era of its conception and expand upon the speculation of its improvement, then it's science fiction.

If both happens at the same time, then it's science-fantasy.

Quoting from Arthur C. Clarke, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

 

[Grey]

Been doing this for years, pers'nally. I love sci-fi, but I'm neither intelligent nor educated enough to write it at a level I could be satisfied with.
I've got two settings (although the latter hasn't got as extensive a write-up yet) that are basically different extrapolations of the concept.

A pair of companion works by Roger Zelazny are both excellent examples, though - Lord of Light and Creatures of Darkness.

Somewhere around RPN I've got a lengthy tutorial about this...

 

[Count Gensokyo]

You get a setting like FF XIII's.

 

[Saccharine Cyanide]

Technically, Star Wars and LotR are so similar because they're based on the same plot archetype, the Bildungsroman. All of the characters fit into a certain character archetype, which is why they seem identical.

 

[Bone2pick]

As much as I love discussing the finer points of storytelling, I've always found the debate over genre rather borish. Whenever it treads into territory that I don't recognize as being intuitive I dismiss the arguments. And so far I haven't discovered any writer/reader consequences for doing so.

I was in a similar debate about what makes something a soup vs. a stew. After a long time arguing about the characteristics of the object or the methods used to make it we kept running into road blocks with one outlier or another not fitting. We finally settled on intentions. If the chef intended to cook the ingredients it was a stew if he instead wanted to flavor a broth it was a soup. I suspect we will arrive at a similar conclusion here.

I like the food analogy. For me the proper genre for a piece of fiction is however I digest it. It's personal. It's intuitive. I can't imagine finishing a book that I didn't experience as a science fiction novel only later to be argued into placing it there. For me a critical element to genre is tone, which has to be felt as I work through the piece and cannot be simply explained or justified after the fact.

As an example, I measure steampunk and dieselpunk as a breed of fantasy rather than scifi.

 

[AtlannianSpy]

I think when you talk about genre It can be more useful to discuss the underling themes and concerns of the story rather than the surface elements, often that has a lot more impact on how people feel about and respond to a story than the aesthetics.

So fundamentally I think science fiction is interested in the future and how we're going to change, especially how technology is going to change us. For large periods of human history the fundamentals of life evolved very slowly. Particular groups or peoples would rise and fall and new technologies were slowly introduced but for the most part 90% of people could look to the lives of their ancestors and have a pretty good idea of how their lives and the lives of their children and grandchildren were going to shake out.

For the last two centuries that has become less and less true as the rate of change in technology has accelerated rapidly. If you ask me as an early twenties guy to tell you what my future grandchild's life is going to be like I could guess, but that would be all it would be some people are doubtful of the idea that humans will still be around by then.

Science fiction is, I think, fundamentally an attempt to answer those questions about the future or at least an expression of our anxieties and uncertainty about it.

Fantasy is actually a pretty modern genre in its own right, we usually consider think about Tolkien as the father of fantasy and while that's probably a simplification the timing is about right, sort of WW1 ish. But I actually think Fantasy is the continuation of a much older tradition, something I mentioned earlier and that's this idea of looking towards the past for answers. Almost every culture on earth has some kind of mythical, idealized past. Ancient societies spoke of ages long past when their gods, demons and heroes walked the earth having larger than life adventures, the middle ages and renaissance looked back on the golden days of Rome and this continues into the Western genre and samurai flicks that looked back to an earlier time as an example of a better time to be emulated.

If you don't have science or it hasn't really matured yet then your most reliable source of insight into human nature and the world around you is the past so culturally there's a strong impulse to look backwards. Fantasy isn't usually explicit set in our past but it almost always draws heavily from it and paints this past-like society as, if not outright superior to modern life in some romantic way then at least flashier and more exciting.

Even fantasy stories that are dark or pessimistic in tone like Game of Thrones at least posit that there's something compelling about the past or that we can learn something about people from these stories. Fantasy posits that there's something fundamental and unchanging about humans and quite often the world at large as well.

So to summarize with a pithy single sentence that lacks a lot of nuance: Science fiction is concerned with change and Fantasy is concerned with permanency. This kind of sets them up as polar opposites but what's interesting is that they actually have a lot of common, historically they've occupied a similar pulpy niche and they often appeal to outsiders or people that aren't quite satisfied with society because they both depict a different world either as escapism, a sort of a proposed alternative to the status quo or as a lens to focus on some aspect ourselves or our world.

This is where crossover happens because if your goal is to depict a new world than you can easily draw from both the past and speculation about the future. I think a lot of science fantasy is based on the premise that "humans have done X in that past. If circumstances in the future mirror circumstances in the past then humans will do X again," the great thing is that you control those circumstances as the author so you can tweak them to create a world in which some aspect of a particular period is probable.

 

[Burrito Boy]

Shadowrun.

That is all.

 

[Imperator_tenebrae]

Steampunk.

That is all.