Science fiction and/or/versus Fantasy

[River]

I think of sci-fi and fantasy as sisters born of the parent speculative fiction. They both deal with a what-if, though sci-fi is more of a material what-if and fantasy a mystical one.

[Maria]

Maria, psychic abilities is another thing I don't use in my books because, to me, it would make them not SF. There is no physical mechanism for such powers, and we know physics pretty well.

Just because the mechanism hasn't been found yet, doesn't mean it doesn't exist and the process isn't real. I've experienced too many sorts of mild psychic experience to discount the tales of stronger abilities. Until we can figure out how even the little things work (and they do, albeit randomly!) I will not admit that we know physics very well at all. Better than we ever have before, maybe, but nowhere near understanding the nature of this reality.

[Primula Baggins]

We'll have to agree to disagree on this, I think, Maria. I don't rule out the possibility that you will end up being right someday; I just haven't seen any scientific evidence of such processes, even when experiments have been set up specifically to test them. You have personal experiences that outweigh that, for you; I don't.

[Frelga]

I don't know that fantasy is worse in that regard than other genres, Prim. Any genre has its stock characters and situations by now. Chick lit, thriller, you name it. Fantasy and SF both offer more potential than the other genres, because you just need one really good idea to bring freshness and novelty to the books. And as in every other genre, everything hinges on the characters. No matter how intricate the world-building, how fascinating the premise, if I don't give a half-cred whether characters live or die, the book will not leave an impression.

[Maria]

But there's loads of scientific research out there. The CIA did exhaustive studies on remote viewing for 20 years, for instance. Personally, the most impressive thing I've been involved in was a perfect run of Zener cards. (I was the sender, not the receiver). There really wasn't any way to cheat, either. Sure, it wasn't "scientific"... but it was very convincing.

The little stuff like knowing who is calling on the phone, or my college friend that I'd lost track of and hadn't spoken to in 20+ years finding me on facebook the day after I signed up, or our bird who seems to know when someone is coming home far before their car can be seen or heard- that's the sort of thing that could probably never be duplicated in a laboratory.

But, yes, believe what you want. I, for one, know it's real- at least the little stuff. And the little stuff being real implies the big stuff is possible.

edit: misspelled "zener"

[Primula Baggins]

Yes, everything hinges on the characters. And certainly you're right that all genres have stock characters and situations. But I think it's worse for genres where the stock characters and situations have become pervasive in pop culture, whether it's derivative fantasy games or, for SF, cheesy movies or TV series. And fantasy, being more respectable than SF, might have a longer reach in that way.

Edit: Cross-posted with Maria. Has there been a peer-reviewed publication of in a scientific journal of results showing that psychic abilities are real? CIA studies don't carry a lot of weight for me.

As I said, given that you've had experiences I haven't, and that the kind of objective evidence I'm looking for isn't out there (or it would be front-page news), we'll have to agree that we disagree about this.

[Frelga]

I'm with Maria here - the psychic stuff should qualify for SF because it COULD possibly work under the rules of known universe. Even if we don't know how.

[Primula Baggins]

There's a long history of science fiction that includes characters with psychic powers; but there hasn't been much in the last forty years or so, since genuinely objective ungameable tests started failing to validate them.

And (speaking purely from my own prejudices) if we include psychic powers in SF because they might possibly work under physical laws, we probably need to extend the same courtesy to magic and other things. To me SF has value in not being fantasy, and I'd prefer to maintain the distinction. Both genres are valuable, both have produced excellent books, but they shouldn't be blurred together. IMHO.

[Maria]

Has there been a peer-reviewed publication of in a scientific journal of results showing that psychic abilities are real?

*hurts head looking for such*
I'm not a serious student of such things, but I found a wikipedia article about some company called SRI International that has funded such research and published results in peer reviewed journals. The discussion is down the page a bit under "Research outside of the mainstream". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRI_International The thingy at the bottom lists sources for the wiki article (can't remember name for that kind of list!) --the articles and the journals they were published in.

That said, I agree with Prim after all. Psychic stuff can't be the focus of a science fiction story because science is all about results being replicable by just about anyone with the right equipment under laboratory settings. So much about psychic phenomena involves the subconscious mind and bonds between people that such things are easily disrupted by the subject being uncomfortable or worried that one is never assured of replicable results in lab setting. It isn't science. It's more of an art, at which some people are more gifted than others for whatever reason.

All I was really objecting to was the idea that such things aren't real and thus can't be science fiction. They are real... but there isn't really a science to using them. Not yet, anyway.

edit: forgot to include link!

[Crucifer]

I think that the inherent problem with fantasy clichés is that it's all too easy to rewrite other fantasy. Take the Sword of Shannara, for example, AKA The Lord of the Rings on a Bad Day. The problem is that people read really excellent fantasy, and want to create their own world, but lack the skill to do so. Unfortunately, I don't have the exposure to SF to comment on whether or not that happens (so far, it's just Prim's series, the Space Odyssey series and the beginning of the Foundation series. Oh, and Ender's Game), but it's pretty blatant in fantasy.

[Primula Baggins]

It certainly happens in SF, but SF has such a huge range of subgenres and styles that I think it's quite a bit harder to be completely unoriginal.

Fantasy is also quite a bit more commercially successful as a genre just now than SF, which may attract people who aren't really fantasy readers to try writing it for money reasons. That doesn't seem to produce much that's worth reading, as a rule; it's hard to dodge clichés if you're not familiar enough with the genre to know what they are.

If you're getting curious about SF, Crucifer, I'm sure lots of people here could suggest good books to try next.

[Frelga]

It certainly happens in SF, but SF has such a huge range of subgenres and styles that I think it's quite a bit harder to be completely unoriginal.

I must disagree again, Primster. There is a huge range of subgenres in fantasy, as well. There's the sword and sourcery, sure, but there's also urban fantasy, super-heroes, Victorian vampires, "real world with a twist" fantasy, updated fairy tales, and there's Pratchett whom I can't peg at all.

And I don't see why FTL is SF, even though it actually contradicts the known laws of physics, but psychic ability is not, when it is merely unexplained and unverified.

[Primula Baggins]

Frelga, thanks. I shouldn't generalize about a genre I don't know well. I understand the complexities of the genre I know best, and the rest not so much; it distorts my perceptions.

Pratchett is a subgenre unto himself.

As for FTL vs. psychic abilities. FTL is just a tool for getting into the story—a convention, like having characters in Westerns ride horses. The horses aren't the point of the story—they just move people through it.

Psychic ability would probably be the point of an SF story. And yes, I think you could write SF about someone with those abilities; but the story would have to be about explaining why they existed, IMO. There just isn't the acceptance, at least among people who read SF.

FTL feels like something we might someday figure out how to do, in the far future. Psychic abilities—if we will ever have them, we ought to have them now. And a lot of people, including me, just don't see objective proof of that.

[BrianIsSmilingAtYou]

But there's loads of scientific research out there. The CIA did exhaustive studies on remote viewing for 20 years

And the results were negative, or consistent with chance. This is widely written about by folks like Carl Sagan, James Randi and others.

Scientific research into a subject where the result shows that it is not valid is not supportive of that subject. It's like saying that you never saw China on the other side of the globe, so the Earth must be flat, and then citing Magellan's voyage and the NASA space program as proof that the flat Earth hypothesis has been researched, so it must have something to it.

BrianIs AtYou

[MithLuin]

To be fair, ST:TNG was certainly created less than 40 years ago, and it attributes psychic powers to aliens regularly - following in the footsteps of the mind-meld of the original series. Most notable is Troi, an empathic half-Betazed, whose full-Betazed mother is telepathic. Some other episodes where these things come up: 'The Perfect Mate' and 'A Matter of Time.' (Hehe, Memory Alpha is a great site.)

What makes it a sci-fi approach is not that they attempt to explain it (they really don't), but that they have doctors comment on it and quote statistics, as if it is a commonly known/accepted attribute of these species. In the Original Series, McCoy makes some comments about how common certain traits are in the episode 'The Empath'. Thus, the condition is seen as a medical one, not a mystical/magical one. Some people just are, and that's a fact of life that needs to be dealt with.

Sci-fi and fantasy are cousins. Some people like one and dislike the other, so it gets uncomfortable to get too far into this discussion (especially since there are exceptions to most any sweeping generalization). Both fantasy and sci-fi deal with something that is different from the world we live in, and this imaginative setting is essential to the story in some way. People have said that Middle Earth is practically a character in LotR, it is so important to the story.

I would also agree that Star Wars is largely fantasy, despite its emphasis on spaceships and galactic empire. Taking place in space is not irrelavant to the story - to the contrary, that's a huge part of the appeal with the sweeping backdrop and undiscovered fronteirs and alien worlds. But as Prim got at, they don't waste much time explaining the gizmos - droids just work, and nobody worries about why they have personalities. Politics and history are more likely to be explained, while the technology is just there. But still, Star Wars borrows heavily from sci-fi - all the stuff they're using, whether it's Luke's artificial arm or speeders that can hover above the ground, are the types of unique technology you'd expect to see in a sci-fi saga.

The problem with saying that sci-fi is about speculative science while fantasy is about magic, is that magic and science themselves are cousins. Trace chemistry far enough back and you get alchemy. Newton may have been a great physicist, but that doesn't mean he wasn't interested in some of the more esoteric/mystical stuff, too. There's this large overlap as one grew into/replaced the other. Sure, it was a long time ago. But magic tends to have rules that look very scientific. Werewolves transform during the full-moon, and if they bite but don't kill someone during this time, the other person becomes a werewolf. You can kill them with a silver bullet in the heart. Those details, absurd as they may be, show a scientific bent. Werewolves aren't demons who descend upon people who are helpless to defend themselves - they are governed by rules, and thus behave in predictable/repeatable ways.

Almost all the classes at Hogwarts are science classes: Astronomy, Herbology, Potions, Care of Magical Creatures. We don't see much of Ancient Runes or Arithmancy, and Divination is scoffed at as being too 'soft'. Charms and Transfiguration are about manipulating real objects to have particular forms or traits - and Defense Against the Dark Arts just deals with the dangerous aspects of all of the above. Magic is just a form of engineering based on a made-up set of scientific principles. Being a werewolf (and likely a vampire, too) is clearly just an unfortunate, stigmatized medical condition in this world.

All that being said, people don't often mix up fantasy and sci-fi. The goals of the stories are so different, that you can recognize the tone almost immediately. If Tolkien had ever written his Time Travel story, it would have been firmly fantasy...and not just because time travel seems to be physically impossible.

[axordil]

Those details, absurd as they may be, show a scientific bent.

I would say they show an systematic bent, as opposed to a scientific one, in that they aren't based on methodical observation, or in some cases, on any observation. They're more akin to the theory of humours and the tetrad of elements: a metaphysical system where the notion of how things should be ordered far outpaces any empirical evidence they're ordered that way. There were reasons why Aristotelian mechanics and Ptolemaic cosmology lasted as long as they did, but chiefly, they endured because they were orderly and satisfying to casual observation.

They just happened to be wrong.

But the Western hermetic tradition of magic (and astrology, and alchemy) is ALL about pattern and order and structure. It looks tremendously scientific, from the outside. And Newton is an excellent touchstone on this question. He really did want to believe in the Philsopher's Stone, et al, just as he wanted to believe in the elegance of his mathematical descriptions of the motion of objects. Orderly systems have that pull on the human mind--the more powerful the mind, the more powerful the pull, one could argue.

[Frelga]

The problem with saying that sci-fi is about speculative science while fantasy is about magic, is that magic and science themselves are cousins. Trace chemistry far enough back and you get alchemy. Newton may have been a great physicist, but that doesn't mean he wasn't interested in some of the more esoteric/mystical stuff, too.

Excellent points, Mith. And I can't believe we got this far into the discussion and no one yet quoted Clark's third law. Must I do everything myself? *Velcro hand*

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

And Gehm's Corollary

Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.

Perhaps that's why Galadriel is puzzled by Sam's interest in Elven magic. It's not magic to her, it's sufficiently advanced art and wisdom, aka science.

[yovargas]

Certainly. But fantasy provides so many easy tools for sloppy writers. In no other genre of writing is deus ex machina quite so easily available. D&Dish cliché characters require almost no thought, and a cardboard medieval setting is a snap to establish. All you need is a quest, and you've got your outline.

I believe the problem you are sensing with fantasy is a result of something rather obvious - Tolkien DOMINATES the fantasy landscape. I don't think any other genre has a single source that so completely defined a template. What you're describing is probably not a "fantasy" problem, it's an "endless barrage of lazy Tolkien knock-offs" problem. Thanks a lot, Tolkien!

[Frelga]

ROFL, yov. Well put.

I think the problem is not so much that Tolkien defined the genre for the writers, as that he defined it for the reader, and even worse, as Ax had pointed out in another thread, he defined it for the publisher.

In reality, fantasy as a genre is far larger than Tolkien-inspired quest in pseudo-medieval world, just as SF is far larger than the adventures of Captain Thruster and the Galactic Barbie.

The boundaries between fantasy and SF can be quite blurry. Take The Picnic by the Roadside by the brothers Strugatsky, the novel that the Stalker movie is based on. Is it SF or fantasy? It apparently involves aliens, and certainly involves scientists studying the strange phenomenon. It also involves the dead coming to life, and A SPOLIER! a device that makes wishes come true, the stuff of fantasy.

[Primula Baggins]

Yov, Tolkien is the elephant in the room for quest fantasy writers, definitely.

Mith, the feeling I've always gotten from early alchemy was that it was an attempt to explain real phenomena that looked magical, at a time when no one knew or had the tools to learn what was actually happening. Nobody really turned lead into gold, but some real chemical reactions are almost as spectacular and seem just as improbable if you don't understand them.

It wasn't, for at least some of the alchemists, magic that eventually turned into science; it was "magic" struggling toward science, struggling to explain the world. Some of them really were scientists, working blind and without method.

Frelga, Clark's third law is undeniable, but not of much actual use to an SF writer, at least one like me. SF readers expect to have things explained at least somewhat. "Magic" technology that goes unexplained all through the story is, for the purposes of speculative fiction, actually magic, and the story simply becomes a fantasy.

Mith, I am talking about written SF for the most part when I draw these distinctions. Popular entertainment (and you know I'm not sneering—I dearly love Star Trek!) has always been much more tolerant of things like psychic powers, because many people do believe in them and a future that didn't contain them would seem odd.

Written SF, though, is not aimed at a mass audience (how well I know it!) and rarely finds one. As an SF reader for decades and, now, a writer myself, I've seen the kind of insularity that creates in the SF-reading culture—the standards of scientific verisimilitude a writer is expected to meet that almost no TV show or movie labeled "SF" ever even attempts (even if the filmmakers knew about them, which they don't).