When is sci-fi actually fantasy?
Far too often!
The Star Wars series turned me off with its very first film (whatever number that was in their all-too-cute numbering scheme). I knew immediately that it was basically a fantasy filled with references to Japanese ninjas, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s characters (even the names!), and Isaac Asimov’s plot devices (the Foundation). Where were the lawyers at that time who went after plagiarists? (Or the ones even now?) Jedi warriors and fairy-tale princesses with light sabers? C’mon! (Okay, I’ll admit the music was interesting, but I liked that composer a lot more when he was leading the Boston Pops.)
Frank Herbert’s Dune series is even worse as sci-fi but at least it was in book form long before Hollywood screenwriters took a break from writing terrible scripts (e.g. Star Wars!) and tried to adapt those novels to the silver screen (a new Marvel Comics-like version is about to come out). Herbert’s books were already pure fantasy (forget that damn Hugo because it’s also given for fantasy!) filled with magic, mysticism, sandworms, and that miraculous spice existing only on one arid world, a coveted and moneymaking substance that Ponce de Leon might have searched for in Florida if he could get past DeSantis’s anti-immigrant Gestapo. (I’m sure Ron would have arrested him and sent him to New York if that fascist Florida governor and huge presidential primary loser had been around back then.) The Dune series is just more fantasy, whether in book or movie format. (The movies have been worse than the books, but that’s almost always the case!)
Too many people (a majority who have never read a book, by the way…if they can read—Trump can’t) conflate fantasy with sci-fi, and authors and screenwriters exploit them by adding a few starships and blasters to Harry Potter and call it sci-fi. (A silly author like Margaret Atwood might pardon their sins by calling it all “speculative fiction,” of course; she’s become rich peddling her fantasies.) That’s the formula for creating a sci-fi classic, right? Wrong!
Science fiction, sci-fi for short, even if you accept A. C. Clarke’s claim that any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic (consider Ugh the Caveman finding some time-traveler’s smart phone, basically a little computer!), must be some sort of reasonable extrapolation of current science. Comsats were created by Clarke in his fiction long before Elon Musk littered near-earth orbits with his space junk! Sure, the farther into the future an author goes with his story, the more bold the extrapolation has to be, and it all often approaches Clarke’s limit. But science fiction stories nowadays have generally ceased to be a logical extensions of current science, stories that often contain clear violations of known physical laws, which is what fantasy does (and all the examples above, I might add).
I read very little fantasy now—I graduated from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter on Mars stories with their Jedi warriors and beautiful egg-laying princesses decades ago. (For all their sophistication, I guess those Martians didn’t have IVF; and John Carter probably never realized an egg back on Earth was already a chicken, so he couldn’t apply that lesson learned to Martian females’ eggs!) I especially avoid fantasy stories if their authors claim they’re sci-fi. (You can comment on this post and tell me if you agree or disagree.)
Or, you might want to read some sci-fi classics written by Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and others (even some of mine?) to see how good sci-fi can be when it’s not conflated with fantasy! (By the way, the best sci-fi authors, like me, are ex-scientists. When they’re not, they can easily confuse fantasy with sci-fi!)
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Comments are always welcome. (Just follow the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page. If you don’t, I might send you an ESP-transmitted whack with my light saber!)
“Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection.” There are three complete sci-fi novels in this one inexpensive bundle. The first, Survivors of the Chaos, will seem a bit too close for comfort to what’s going on in the US and the world today. The last leads into the novel Rogue Planet and the Dr, Carlos short stories. (The first book represents well deserved mockery of the current Iranian regime; for the second collection, see the list of free downloadable PDFs on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page.) These are “evergreen books” (as entertaining, fresh, and hopefully still profound now as on the day I finished their manuscripts), but sci-fi in general can never get old, can it?
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
