Mixing Sci-Fi and Fantasy
 

I'm sure this would be suicide as far as fans go (the fantasy readers would hate the sci-fi, the sci-fi would hate the fantasy... can't we all just get along?) but the way I see it we can really tackle it two ways...

I don't know if there are any books like this (please tell me if there are) but there was a RPG by Sierra named "Arcanum." Basically, you had dwarves, elves, gnomes and magic... so you had all your fantasy goodies, on one side. Opposed to them were the technologists who are more towards the Jules Verne style of sci-fi (1800s tech). I personally thought the game was interesting, but it didn't end up being too popular.

Then, we have the sci-fi/fantasy mix like Star Wars that cleverly masks it. Instead of elves we have aliens and instead of magic we have the force...

Do people consider adding elements of fantasy into your sci-fi to be a sin against nature? Can you have a sci-fi story with a ghost in it without half of the people getting cranky about it being submitted to the wrong magazine/publisher/forum? I know there won't be a clear answer from the people here so let me get your input.
Stories set in the future are inherently sci-fi, throw in some high tech gizmos just to solidify that, now have ghosts and elves hiding in the forest... What do you classify this as?

Science Fantasy - Fantasy with a consistant science base.

The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey had dragons. You later learn they were genetically modified from local 'firelizards' generations ago by the first colonists to combat 'thread'.

There's nothing taboo about it. Literally hundreds of authors have done this. Terry Brook's Shannara stuff is set in a post-apocolyptic earth, Phillip K. Dick has ghostly visitations in a bunch of his sci-fi books.

The "dictionary" distinction used to have something to do with internal, scientific logic. But since most of the modern fantasy writing employs a system of magic even that distinction has become very blurry.

You can put ray guns in the hands of your elves, you can have fairies turn your space captain into a frog. Most readers who read one, read the other and most publishers that publish one, publish both.

I more often see fantasy with a little SF than SF with a little fantasy, you know what I mean?

Examples: 1) Fred Saberhagen's Lost Swords series. Basically fantasy, it's got all the tropes: magic, gods, swords. However, it's a post-apocalyptic Earth and there are still some solar-powered flashlights (oohh, big magic!) running around. 2) C.S.Friedman's Coldfire Triology. Again, basically fantasy w/ fey forces and quests and the like, but it turns out to be an alien planet which humans came to by spaceship. (Not too big of a spoiler, I hope).

I guess the counter example is, as always, Star Wars. Basically SF, spaceships and high-tech and everything, but with the "Force" standing in for magic. So, OK, it does cut both ways. When you look at it that way, there's really a lot of crossover, and I think people enjoy it. Adds some spice to our genre lives, eh? ;)

The dividing line is your rationale for the existence of your story elements, not the elements themselves. It doesn't matter if you have elves and if those elves have ray guns or not. What matters for definition purposes is why the elves exist, and whether the ray guns shoot out laser rays or magic fairy dust.

So, if you have a supernatural ghost, like Peter Straub's "Ghost Story," it's fantasy. If you have a ghost created by a person's consciousness put on a computer chip, like in a novel I used to have but now have forgotten the name -- "Night Owl" or something like that -- it's science fiction. Vampire risen from the grave and fears crosses -- fantasy; vampire alien creature who sucks blood -- science fiction. Anne McCaffrey's Pern books where the dragons and telepathy abilities were genetically engineered -- sf, Gene Wolfe's Ur-Sun and New Sun series which are on a generational space ship, also sf. Jonathan Carroll's "The Wooden Sea" seems at first like a fantasy, but since all the phenomena turns out to be caused by aliens and time travel, it's actually sf. Science fiction can be as mythic and lyrical in approach as fantasy, as long as they have a science basis for the story.

If you have both fantasy and sf-based elements in a story, it is usually considered a fantasy story, because by having supernatural elements for which there is no scientific explanation, you have taken science out of the story and made it a fantastical tale. So even if the elves have ray guns and live in a post-apocalyptic Earth, if they are magical elves, it's fantasy. If, however, all seemingly supernatural elements are explained by a scientific basis, however slight and hard to buy a rationale, it's science fiction. So if the elves are descendents of aliens and their mental abilities are genetically inherited, then they are not fantasy elves but sf elves. And if the Force is sub-particle energy that can be manipulated by the mental abilities of Jedi (or, as we later came to be told, tiny alien microrganisms,) it's sf, no matter how whacky that may seem to be.

SF publishers used to publish fantasy stories under the umbrella of sf, so when it looked like publishing straight fantasy was going to be profitable, they were the natural ones to put out titles, which is why sf publishers also publish fantasy. But they do slot their titles into one genre or another and the rationale the author uses for story elements is usually the dividing line. Lots of authors use both sorts of elements in their stories but they chose a fantasy or sf explanation, which puts them in one camp or the other. That does not mean that fans of one genre cannot enjoy stories from the other genre if they seem similar, and indeed, many fantasy fans simply ignore any science explanations in a story they want to claim as their own, especially if the author is someone who writes both fantasy and sf. And quite a few authors, though they've chosen one or the other direction for their work, like to pretend they haven't and eschew all such distinctions. Nor do all sf stories have to be futuristic. Some sf stories take place in the past, or alternate versions of the past, or in the contemporary day.

If you want to have a very sf set-up but have fantasy elements that have no scientific explanation to them, a good example is Stephen King's horror post-apocalypse fantasy, "The Stand." There are lots of sf elements in "The Stand" -- the destruction is caused by an engineered plague that gets loose, etc., but there are also many mystical elements that don't have any scientific explanation -- visions, character transformations, strange events, and so on, that make the work a fantasy. If you want to have a sf story with no definite fantasy-based elements but a fantasy-like feel to it, then you want the sf sub-genre that has been dubbed, for want of a better name, science fantasy. The lead titles in that sub-genre are McCaffrey's Pern books, C.S. Friedman's Coldfire trilogy, Wolfe's Sun books, and C.J. Cherryh's Rider at the Gate series. All of these novels read very fantasy like, but the phenomena in each story is given a scientific basis to explain it.

So mix all you like, and then choose your explanations, I guess. As for how it will be received, well, it won't be a new thing, whichever way you go, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

I think StarWars masters that?

Two books I have written........
 

In my first novel, Earth Stone it was all pure fantasy except for the fact that the Lead protagonist, Henry, is from contemprary Earth.

In the sequel, Realm World Henry goes back to the Realm using current NASA tech, he goes by space shuttle and the the shuttle uses a "Nuclear Pulse Engine" (VERY widely used FSF propulsion method, theorized back in the 1950's).

The synopsis to both books are on this bulletin board if you want to check them out.

Antoher book I'd like to write is a story about a group of colonists travelling to another world. It wil take, let's say, 10,000 years to get there. Medical science, in the book, has learned to freeze the body, but not the mind. What to do? They'll all go MAD frozen solid for 10,000 years while being conscious!

Well, here's what I do. In order to keep the colonists from going insane, the scientists freeze their bodies and feed a virtual reality fantasy world program into their brains. So, the story basically flip flops back and forth between the SF element of other world colonization and the fantasy world they live in while frozen.

Piers Anthony wrote a really good series of books . I can't remember the first title in the series, but the second title was "Juxtaposition." Its about a SF world based in science called "Proton" and an alternate world that some of Proton's people learn to get to called "Phaze." The worlds are side-by-side and are mirror images of each other. One of the BEST series I ever read and its STILL in print. Actually, I think the first book was called, "Out of Phase."

Really interesting idea you have there. Hope you write it cause it sounds like something I'd like to read. :)

One question. What do you "flip" to out of the artifical fantasy world, isn't it just a bunch of frozen people in a spaceship? That sounds quite boring. Maybe the ship is run by an AI and you could give the AI's side of the story. Frederik Pohl used an AI as a narrator in "Heeche Rendezvous" (well, co-narrator at least). Anyways, just a suggestion.

And what if the colonists don't know they're colonists? I mean, not all of them.

Won't a 10,000 year lifespan confuse them though? Unless they periodically 'die' and get 'reborn', as directed by the AI. Sorta Matrixy. The AI could introduce Kharma.

I wonder how many times and under how many conditions you could build a colony in simulation?

That sounds like a twisted sci-fi version of "Groundhog Day"

Piers Anthony did it with his Apprentice Adept stories. I thought he pulled it off rather well.
China Mieville is pulling it off as we speak.

Funny you should mention all of that...
 

Why have them wake up at all?
I decided that every 100 years a different section of the ship has periodic "wakings" to injest/digest food, get some excersise etc. The ship is broken into sections...engineering, life sciences, construction, etc. In the fantasy simulation, each section represents a different race. Let's say, engineering/humans or life sciences/Elves and construction/Dwarves and so on.

The longer the colonists stay frozen th more REAL the fantasy world becomes to them. More real than the ship and their ultimate colonization mission. A war develops in the fantasy world and when they have periodic wakings, problems begin to occur on the ship.

Now, 10,000 years is a long time: In the fantasy world, the colonists "die" at the end of natural life spans and get "reborn." They are their own ancestors in the fantasy world. I'm toying with that idea or... time in the fantasy world is slower than on the ship. Lets say, 10 years in fantasy to every 1,000 on the ship. I haven't made up my mind on this issue. Remember, they're frozen and they are only aging for the few days they are awake every 100 years.

Also, the entire story is told in retrospect through ship's logs when a survey team with new propulsion technologies arrives at the world to see the progress they have made. Guess what, the world is empty, no colony. In the end, the colonists decided to just live in their fantasy world and to hell with colonization.

They're not building a colony in simulation. They're living alternative lives in a computer generated fantasy world.

What, exactly is that story in the ship's logs gonna be about? You got a great background idea, now all you need is a good story to go with it. Any Hints?

(Man are we off-topic! ;)

Story theme...
 

I want to use the story as a metaphore about racism. Elves live in harmony with nature, like native americans and Humans use and change nature to suit their needs, while dwarves (human allies) rape the land alongside humans mine metals and develop destructive technologies.

I may have some other races too, but haven't decided yet.

Piers Anthony's series was, again, a fantasy series. Much like his Xanth series, in which the magical world of Xanth was parallel to the regular world of Mundania, the Phaze books had a fantasy realm parallel to a high-tech realm with lots of sf elements. The use of unicorns and magic in the fantasy realm makes the series, like most of Anthony's work, fantasy. As for China Mieville, his work will be one of the other. I haven't been able to get any concrete plot information from anyone on his work, but I'm guessing off-hand that it's fantasy with sf elements. I certainly don't mind that he's trying to start some new sub-genre classification with a catchy name -- is it fusion fiction or something else now -- but it's window-dressing only.

It's not that I have some emotional investment in making the distinction. It's simply a matter of story construction. Because genre fantasy was developed from genre sf publishers and magazine publishers -- sort of hand in hand -- there seems to be this endless debate about what is fantasy and what is sf, a debate you don't really see in any other field of fiction. If you say a book is a murder mystery, for instance, you don't have someone shouting, no it's something else because there's a sheep in it! Science fiction stories are imaginings of science and fantasy stories are imaginings of the fantastical.

But whether you ascribe to that concept or not, you can rest assured the publishers will not freak out if you have fantasy and sf elements in the same tale.

Wouldn't argue with you for a minute about the Xanth novels. Please note that I was and am talking about the Apprentice Adept stories which had two societies living just out of Phaze with each other, one scifi and one fantasy. He wrote it specifically to prove that it could be done - or so he said in his afterwords.

As for Mieville, I think he defies such an easy categorization. In fact, had a quick discussion with Sammie way back when Perdido Street Station was a Book of the Month up in the Fantasy thread. Sammie swore the book was SciFi, an opinion I tend to agree with, but neither of us could explain the presence of demons in an obvious hell in a scifi novel. So much of The Scar can be explained in terms of scifi but then something will happen - the ability to travel unseen through the world due to a potion - that can't be explained in any terms but fantasy.

I do love rule breakers.

I know that you were talking about the Apprentice Adept series, HE, that's what I was talking about too. I was comparing the structure of the two realms in that series to Anthony's Xanth series. Anthony wasn't the first to parallel sf and fantasy worlds in a story. He was, however, very popular at the time and his version did very well. But the Adept series is still a fantasy series. The existence of the fantasy realm with its magic and magical creatures is not given scientific explanations for their presence, however minimal. Which means it's an imagining of the fantastic and thus, fantasy.

As for Mieville, if he has demons and magic potions and no scientific explanation for their existence, however speculative and lackidasical, then his works are fantasies, which is what I suspect. No one will tell me the plot of any of his works, so I won't know until I get to read them, I guess.

It's not a matter of there being rules which have to be adhered to, and then those rules being broken or not. It's the composition of the story -- what the author put in there, the rationale for its existence. If you put in fantastic elements with no science explanation, then you remove the science from the story composition. If you have fantastic elements for which you provide a scientific explanation, then you remove the fantasy aspect from it. It doesn't mean that it won't be a ripping good story either way.

We have two genres. They're related to one another. Writers can write stories for both genres, and many do. We can borrow aspects from one or the other, just as you can borrow a murder mystery plot for a sf novel or have a romance or horror in a fantasy story. But their composition is ultimately one or the other -- science or fantasy, Spiderman bitten by a radioactive spider (yes, you're groaning at the plausibility of it, but at least there is a science explanation for Spidey's powers, however hokey) or Hellboy being a demon raised from the ether -- fantasy.

KatG: At the risk of seeming obtuse, Anthony created two worlds, one fantasy and one scifi. As you accurately state, the fantasy portion of that work "with its magic and magical creatures is not given scientific explanations for their presence, however minimal. Which means it's an imagining of the fantastic and thus, fantasy." However, you also seem to be saying because that fantasy world exists co-equal with the scifi world, the entire work must be considered fantasy. Why would not the reverse of the argument be true: that because Anthony gives the scifi world a rational, plausible, soft-scientific explanation for its existence, the work should - despite its fantasy element - be considered scific? Because any fantasy content taints everything and makes it fantasy?
I suppose it is easier for publishers and book stores and libraries to have clearly defined genres under which to file things. However, clearly defined genres constitute a rule. Let me give you another example: is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales fantasy or fiction or great literature? Where do you spose you'll find it in the Library, Bookstore, or Publisher's Brochure? Keep in mind that Chanticleer's Tale "with its magic and magical creatures is not given scientific explanations for their presence, however minimal. Which means it's an imagining of the fantastic and thus, fantasy."

As a curiosity, have you read Johanna Sinislao's Troll, A Love Story? If so, can you define a genre? If not, treat yourself to a really good book and let me know later.

It's got nothing to do with contamination. It's not that if you put a fantasy element into a story, it instantly becomes fantasy. In fact, my point was the opposite. It's not the elves or the spaceships that determine one genre or another. It's the construction of the story -- the rationale for the existence of what things you have in the story, which in turn effect plot, set-up, and characters. Anthony has no scientific rationale for the fantasy realm. He has unicorns that turn into people, and magic spells with no scientific explanation for their existence. Therefore, even though he has people with talking computers in the other realm, it's a fantasy story that uses sf elements. Anne McCaffrey in her Pern books has dragons, fire lizards, and people communing telepathically with creatures. But all of these things exist because of the planet's native wildlife, the red star and genetic engineering by a bunch of colonists -- not from magic, supernatural forces or a mystical lack of explanation at all. So the Pern books are science fiction. Anthony's imagining is: what if next to a world of technology, there existed a world of magical fantasy. McCaffrey's imagining is, what if a group of planetary colonists faced dangerous environmental conditions and had to scientifically change their society to survive, an event that their descendents have all but forgotten. Do you see the differences in the premises? In Anthony's work, instead of having a person from the contemporary world cross over to a fantasy realm, he has a person from a "future" world cross over to a fantasy realm. In McCaffrey's work, it looks like fantasy -- and certainly can be enjoyed by fantasy fans -- but the premise is a sf one. It's not a rule, it's just what each story is made of -- science or fantasy.

The "genres" that we know of today are artificial classifications. Many sf stories and fantasy stories exist and have existed outside of the genres. Usually, only those books published by specific genre publishers get put in the sf/f section of stores. The non-genre sf and fantasy gets put in the fiction section. But that doesn't change what is actually in the stories, whether it's a sf premise with a science rationale or a fantastic premise with a fantasy rationale.

As for Chaucer, he's literature because he's old but still around. :) And brilliant. His "Canterbury Tales" are a collection of linked short stories. Some of the tales are fantasy tales with fantasy premises and elements. Some of the tales are just tales with no fantasy elements or premise. Because Chaucer was not published by genre publishers, there not being any back in the Middle Ages, he is put in the fiction section.

I have not read "Troll, A Love Story" though the title alone will probably put it on my reading list. I'm guessing that it's a non-genre publication. So my question would be, is the Troll a magical troll or is the Troll an alien life form or alternate species on Earth? Where does the Troll come from? Because that's what tells you what sort of story it is.

zombies raised through mystical spells -- fantasy
zombies created by bio-engineered weapon gone wrong -- sf
magical time traveling portal -- fantasy
scientifically invented time traveling device -- sf
golem created from clay and mystical spells -- fantasy
golem created from electricity and biological experiments -- sf

It's still a good story, whether it's an sf story or a fantasy story.