this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
701 points (97.6% liked)
Microblog Memes
5697 readers
1792 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Science fiction is a subset of fantasy. Fantasy is any work in which the setting is deliberately made different from the real world. Science fiction is when those differences are due to the presence of advanced science and/or technology.
No, Sci-Fi and Fantasy are two distinct subsets of Speculative Fiction. Another would be Supernatural Horror.
Counterpoint: Science fiction is fiction which shows a world different from our own, but different due to changes in culture or technology that plausibly could take place within our own universe, whereas the differences in fantasy are ones that are fundamentally incompatible with the known physical laws of our own universe.
Edit: How sharp of a division one wants to make out of that "plausibly could" clause is the dividing line between hard and soft scifi.
This is a great definition. There's a lot of "sci Fi" that is much more firmly in the realm of fantasy (I say this as someone who kinda likes Dr Who). Being in space is not enough IMO to be called sci Fi.
We need space elves with space magic like albator
What about sci-fi that's literally only different from the real world because of fictional technology? That makes up a bulk of the kind of sci-fi I am into. Cyberpunk and the like.
Star Trek technically takes place in the actual universe. Is it fantasy because it's almost never on Earth?
The genre is usually divided into "soft" and "hard" fantasy.
Cyberpunk is generally considered hard fantasy, as is stuff like The Expanse or Interstellar.
Star Wars is unabashedly soft SciFi, it's a straight Fantasy story in space.
Star Trek is a half-breed - it pays some lip service to scientific "plausibility", but much of it stretches that envelope beyond the breaking point. Scientific accuracy was never the point of the series to begin with.