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Scifi and Fantasy Forum: Sci-Fi Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: Fantasy & Sci Fi Debated to death
Fantasy & Sci Fi Debated to death
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Posted By:  DblUgly Dec 31, 2001 - 08:54 am |       | Fantasy has trees SIFI Dosent.
Posted By: faeriegirl Dec 31, 2001 - 06:44 am
Well we're all gonna have to write a SciFi novels with trees in now just to throw your theory! Biosphere's maybe?
Actually what I mean is that fantasy tends use nature heavly in the setting while SIFI does not. There are exceptions but overall evean when biospheres come up they are an out growth of tech. not nature. Besides Pipers little fuzzy has trees enough to invalidate this. Its not the trees but the forest, I mean its the emphisis that differs in the setting. Again I come back to emphisis in setting being the diffrence. I admit its a standard that is open to much personal interpetation. But for my two cents its the diffrence betwixt SIFI and Fantasy.
"Making what you are writing about/inventing SEEM believable is the main thing surely?"
Now that is a sensible statement! You will go far with that attitude 
| Posted By: Aslan Jan 01, 2002 - 07:42 am | | Not to get hung up on the trees thing, but my favorite sci-fi author is a huge tree fanatic. U.K. LeGuin has trees in a truckload of her soft-SF stories, including the very-cool short story "Vaster than Empires and More Slow."
True, traditional fantasy typically has more nature in it, but I think that's less a statement about the character of fantasy than the limititations of the typical sci-fi author's imagination. Ooo.. that sounded harsh. So be it!
Harsh indeed! Still, I know what you mean - people don't tend to imagine the future as being particularly nature-orientated which is sad really. It's not easy to picture a future Earth as some kind of Ecotopia!
Haven't read that Ursula leGuin one - I'm cuurently reading the Lathe of Heaven I think it's called... must be said, she is a complete master.
| Posted By: Aslan Jan 02, 2002 - 07:22 am | | Faeriegirl, you are my hero. *deep bow* Lathe is awesome. Pick up The Wind's 12 Quarters if you get a chance. 12 great short stories, by LeGuin, many centered around trees.
Ecotopia, huh? Sounds like a good idea. Good fiction is often where idealism conflicts with reality (or people's perceptions of it). So let's say there's an Ecotopia... who'd be against it? Maybe this is where many authors' imaginations abandon them. Sounds like a good story idea to me.
| Posted By: DblUgly Jan 02, 2002 - 09:02 am | | Aslan, Faeriegirl LeGuin is a masterful writer who (IMHO) blurs the line of Fantasy and SIFI. ( See her Short story Similey's Neckless(sp?))
I must admit to a flaw, much of what others call soft SIFI I lump into Fantasy. Often this makes for a bit of dificulty. I do belive the trees(or forest more accuratly) are a verry pivital image in fantasy.
Trees and Forest , I belive, represent the unknown and wild. That wich man has not mastered, often including him self. The sterill tech of SIFI represents what we have mastered, or at least belive we have mastered. The fundamental diffrence being what we have not mastered can destroy us if we cannot come to terms with it, and often shows one ways to intergrate the unknow into our life, that is fantasy.
SIFI shows that we can, thrugh what we have mastered, or somewhat mastered do two primary things. One, catapult us into the unknown, often an unknown that we are not prepared to deal with. But this unknown is of our choseing not forced upon us, as is the unknown of Fantasy. Second, we can create a heaven or a hell. Here SIFI often borders on specutlive sociology, not at all a bad thing in my mind. SIFI in this way lets us cloak uncomfortable subjects in allogory so that society can explore ways to deal with the uncomfortable in a acceptable manner. In this we have a kind of collective couch to lay back and examine our world thrugh a fun house mirror that often shows the truth far clearer than we would like.
| Posted By: Aslan Jan 03, 2002 - 08:06 am | | Everybody classifies differently, I think. I divide scifi and fantasy this way: sci-fi attempts to rationalize everything in it; fantasy ignores the rules.
Then I subdivide again. Fantasy goes into Traditional or Non-traditional. Traditional is Tolkien-based or fairy tale/folklore based, which includes pretty much everything with dragons, elves, dwarves, orcs, magicians, unicorns, etc. Dragonlance, Clash of Kings, Hero and the Crown, Wheel of Time all belong in this category.
Non-traditional includes things that aren't explained and really break the rules. You'll find a lot less of these, but The Dark is Rising and The Little Prince seem to fit into this fairly well. Star Wars (a fantasy because it breaks the rules of science and rarely (mitichlorions excluded) tries to explain them, yet it follows the rules of the classic myth) also fits this category.
Then there are the mixes, which I tend to favor: The Golden Compass, The White Mountains, Harry Potter, and the Chronicles of Narnia all use classic beasties and yet incorporate them into an entirely new story.
Then there's sci-fi. I divide anthropological (which I think you, DblUgly, throw into fantasy?) scifi into one group and hardcore scifi into another, and leave the rest as a freestanding mishmash. I only do this because I tend to favor anthropological scifi and tend to dislike hardcore (ultratech), not for any objective reason.
In fact, I think that's how a lot of us categorize these things and why it's important to some of us... because our classifications can be used to rationalize our instinctual likes and dislikes within the genre.
| Posted By: Aslan Jan 03, 2002 - 08:09 am | | Though, DblUgly, I do think you're right to a large degree. Fantasy does TEND to have more trees, due to humanity's everlasting struggle against nature and that which is within him/herself. Fantasy tends to focus on the individual (another division), whereas good sci-fi focuses on the society that made the individual. But I don't think it qualifies as a Rule. 
Best fictional trees ever = the Ents! Now there's a concept which should be copied!
Aslan, I suppose the people who'd be against an Ecotopia are the same kind of people who have no qualms about digging up and polluting 3rd world countries to lay down their oil pipes! All the Saruman's of this world who are obsessed with the power they can gain from new technology and machinery. It doesn't seem like they're anti-nature so much as they are just too interested in themselves to think about a) other people's lives and b) the beauty of the natural world! (Hey I'm not bitter!) I get the impression that most Fantasy writers do care about naturist type things and that this can be seen in their books whether directly or indirectly.
DblUgly, totally agree about the symbolic-ness of trees, the thing I'm writing at the moment has a big Naturist message in it so there's oodles of tree's and different tree's symbolising different things! Trouble is that I don't know anything about nature in a scientific way so I'm just making up my own species and names! (hey it's easier that way anyway...)
When it comes to catergorising I suppose I tend to think of things as 'good' or 'bad'! (Ah the subtle complexities of my mind...) A 'good' book whether it';s SciFi or Fantasy should have relevant themes and interesting topics as well as being well written and entertaining! So something like David Eddings or Piers Anthony's SciFi would be 'bad' because it's so simplistic whereas Ursula leGuin and Tolkien are anything but! I've heard people describe Soft SIFI as 'Space fantasy' or 'Space Opera' which are quite fitting terms I think... Doesn't mean we shouldn't read them though, not everything can be deep and meaningful!
| Posted By: DblUgly Jan 04, 2002 - 09:09 am | | "There is only one definition of science fiction that seems to make pragmatic sense: 'Science fiction is anything published as science fiction'."
-- Norman Spinrad, in "The SF Book of Lists", p.257,
| Posted By: Aslan Jan 04, 2002 - 03:15 pm | | faeriegirl, again you are my hero. Way to relate Tolkien to the present!
DblUgly, that's a very interesting quote, but I can't buy that either. I've worked in about ten different bookstores over the last ten years, and let me tell you that a lot of sci-fi gets classified as fiction: Crichton, H.G. Wells, and Atwood's "A Handmaid's Tale". If publishers think it will sell to a non-sf population as well as those of us who gobble it up, then it is published as fiction, not sci-fi, even though it is incredibly obvious to the reader that it IS in fact science fiction.
This ties into the recent tangential discussion in the Professional Help thread, for those interested in reading more. If it's fluffy, publishers market it to us. If it's not, they try to get everybody to buy it and typically don't call it sci-fi (though a lot of it turns out fluffy anyway... e.g. Crichton). So I have to disagree with you again (or at least Spinrad), DblUgly. But then, maybe that's why Scifi and Fantasy have been Debated to Death.
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