Fantasy versus Science Fiction

Cover art featuring spacescapes and hardware? Science fiction. Landscape with castle? Fantasy.

Orson Scott Card has said, if it has rivets, it's science fiction.

Sometimes It's Not

Typically, if the story features space travel, you're reading sci-fi. But what if the Ship of the Aether is operated by scholar-priests via incantation and appropriate religious observances? Then it's not quite so obvious.

Sci Fi That Reads Like Fantasy

Gene Wolfe's amazing four-book series, Book of the Long Sun, is set on an enormous cylindrical vehicle. The inhabitants have been there for generations and no longer realize they are in a vehicle; to them, it is 'the whorl', their term for the world.

Patera (Father) Silk, the protagonist, is a priest and auger; he divines the intention of the gods through the reading of animal entrails. The gods are a pantheon of avatars for various characteristics, with complex interrelationships evocative of the love-lives of the Olympians. The reader soon begins to suspect that the gods aren't quite as remote as those living in the Whorl would believe.

The setting - a multi-generational starship - is pure science fiction. The tone and style, pure epic fantasy. A genre-bender at its best.

Another example of science fiction blended with fantasy is Jeffrey A. Carver's two-volume story, Dragons in the Stars and Dragon Rigger. The dragons of this story exist in a hyperdimensional layer of interstellar space known as the Flux. They are real, living beings, and yet the form in which they are revealed to human pilots (or star riggers) is drawn from imagery of the human subconscious. Here too the setting is star-faring science fiction, but with a look and feel of fantasy.

Fantasy That Morphs Into Sci-Fi

Kenneth C. Eng's Dragons: Lexicon Triumvirate is clearly a blend of science fiction and fantasy. It begins as a story about dragons in the middle ages, but it soon turns into a battle between magical dragons and cyborg dragons known as Technodragons. All this is done over a Lexicon, which is both magical and technological at the same time.

Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series begins as pure fantasy. A feudal world organized in Holds (Keeps or Castles) and Weyrs (Fortresses), Pern is a world beset by an otherworldy foe - mindless, burning bits of 'thread' that fall from the sky when the Red Star passes too closely, killing everything in its path.

To defend themselves, the inhabitants have the Dragonriders, stalwart warriors of both genders who ride the fabulous firebreathing dragons. The dragonriders are selected by their dragons at hatching, and bond to them mentally for life.

Tone, style and setting all declare the Dragonriders saga to be fantasy. Yet early on in the series, it is clear that Pern is a lost Earth colony, and the gigantic dragons were bred for their task from the tiny firebreathing fire lizards. As the dragonriders discover more about their forgotten past, the series veers closer to true science fiction. Yet readers slot it mentally in the fantasy cabinet, because that's where it seems to fit best.

Even The Authors Don't Help

Even authors have to pit fantasy versus science fiction. It might help if the authors would stick to a single genre, and many do. But plenty of authors write in both the fantasy and science fiction genres.

Less-than-helpful advice: if it feels like fantasy, it's fantasy. If it feels like sci-fi, it's sci-fi.