Fantasy vs Science Fiction: A Poll

[Ray McCarthy]

We don't even remember the great horse manure crisis of 1894.

We still remember the 5th Century, October 1171, 1690 and the 1840s potato famine.
I don't remember the manure crisis. Didn't they at about the same time invent cars, simultaneously at turn of century there was steam, electric, petrol and diesel models, with steam having the speed record for a while. Though the Germans still had horses in WWII. Presumably somewhat behind the panzers.

 

[Lew Rockwell Fan]

Fantasy is ice cream for the intellect.

SF is Salmon and broccoli.

I like a minority of both. The fraction of fantasy I find worthwhile (which isn't quite synonymous with "enjoyable") is far smaller. The very best of it (de Camp and Meyers), is pretty good though. But that isn't why I voted for SF.

Part of the problem is discussing this is that as SF came be perceived by the masses as cool, a market opened up for dumbed down SF, and the field is now diluted by it.

SF, done right, especially when read by bright youngsters, is of profound social importance. Better people than I have expanded on this topic. See some of Asimov's essays in Forty Years of F & SF. With all respect, although I like some of it, and respect some of it's creators, this isn't true of fantasy.

The typical spirit of fantasy is "wouldn't it be fun if" or, worse, "wishing will make it so". The typical spirit of SF is "Possibilities are constrained by reality. These are possible futures. Choose."

I find both the writers and the sf community in general to be tired and uninspired . . . terminally nostalgic, the unsexed, the lonely, and worst of all, the conservative.

I can't think of many adjectives I could apply to fantasy readers generally, probably because I'm one of those low vocabulary, intellectually challenged SF types who majored in mechanical engineering because I couldn't hack the tougher curricula, like drama, journalism, or English lit. But I have observed at least one fantasy fan to be incredibly stupid and rude. and worst of all, probably a fascist who imagines h'self a liberal. You know the type I mean, the kind that always want to ban speech they don't like in the name of "civility". Most of 'em are OK, though. Maybe just a little goofy.

conservative with a small c. If you're talking Conservative with a capital

I doubt he'll follow the distinction. Quite apart from not having parties with those names, in the U.S., outside of the community of libertarians and fellow travelers, most people think you're speaking Martian if you even distinguish between Republicans and republicans, Democrats and democrats, Libertarians and libertarians, or Greens and greens, and those are party labels we DO have.

i have not read any adult fantasy books)

You mean the kind that used to have titles like "The Traveling Salesman, The Housewife, The Babysitter, and Rover Explore Kink"?

We've travelled to the stars. Been there, done that.

Did I miss something?

So, does anyone get annoyed with the fact that SF and Fantasy are so very much tied together by people who don't appreciate either genre?

Well, morons will be morons. . . . Seriously though, yes. What disturbs me more is people who actually consider themselves fans who don't get the distinction.

We don't even remember the great horse manure crisis of 1894.

I have an excuse. I was offplanet.

 

[Hilarious Joke]

The typical spirit of fantasy is "wouldn't it be fun if" or, worse, "wishing will make it so".

I'm a fantasy lover and have read a lot of it, and I think I have to disagree with you there. I think that statement is only true of a small and non-representative subset of fantasy. If I had to summarise the typical spirit of fantasy, which is of course a futile endeavour given the huge variety of it, it would be "in world still full of mysteries and unknowns, how do people live and find meaning, and what are they capable of?"

 

[psikeyhackr]

Fantasy is ice cream for the intellect.

SF is Salmon and broccoli.

You mean somebody wired my taste buds incorrectly?

Part of the problem is discussing this is that as SF came be perceived by the masses as cool, a market opened up for dumbed down SF, and the field is now diluted by it.

SF, done right, especially when read by bright youngsters, is of profound social importance. Better people than I have expanded on this topic. See some of Asimov's essays in Forty Years of F & SF. With all respect, although I like some of it, and respect some of it's creators, this isn't true of fantasy.

Well, morons will be morons. . . . Seriously though, yes. What disturbs me more is people who actually consider themselves fans who don't get the distinction.

This is rather interesting: A Look at What the Public Knows and Does Not Know About Science

I got 12 out of 12 but though I am not sure that might have been true when I was 14. I definitely remember calculating the miles in a light year in grade school. That was because of SF. But I don't seeany practical science questions in that survey like,how cars work or what is electricity.

Actually I get the impression that some fantasy fans resent SF for having a practical side but then want to associate them to add status too fantasy. Maybe it's just me.

psik

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I like all kinds of Fiction. Fantasy and SF.
I mean doesn't EVERYTHING fit into either one of those?

 

[The Big Peat]

Actually I get the impression that some fantasy fans resent SF for having a practical side but then want to associate them to add status too fantasy. Maybe it's just me.

psik

I see so many fantasy fans very deeply concerned with the practicalities of what they read though; and a fair dollop of SF that has no practical side at all.

Once upon a time I deeply resented the association, mainly because I didn't want to browse through sci-fi at the bookshop. Now I increasingly see them as two heads on the same beast of "What If" and the amount of thought put into the "What Ifs" is part of what's led me here. Most people don't, or at least don't do enough.

Maybe I'm in a minority. But that's a view based in part on what I see as the views of those around me.

 

[Randy M.]

As Tom Purdom said, "Nobody ever became a wizard because they read fantasy. But plenty of people have become physicists and biologists because they read science fiction."

Okay, but how many people became more aware of the vastness of time and space because they read Lovecraft? I mention that because he mostly straddled whatever line is between sf and fantasy.

Another thought, how many readers came to think more deeply about the wellsprings of their culture from reading LOTR? Or to seriously consider issues of loyalty and honor after reading LOTR? Among the defenses posted by readers of the Harry Potter series was its concerns with learning (Hermione and the library), friendship, loyalty, trust, teamwork, etc, all of which it managed without preaching.

I wonder if it isn't a false dichotomy to maintain sf leads to physicists and then ask, what does fantasy lead to? Ask rather, what does fiction lead to, and do fantasy and sf differ in their influence from other forms? My guess is, yes, but I'm not sure the difference would be all that great.


Randy M.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Harry Potter series

Very strong anti-racist angle.

Mudbloods

 

[Randy M.]

Very strong anti-racist angle.

Mudbloods

Good call.

Randy

 

[althea]

Fantasy for me; it occupies the sweet spot between history and mythology, the two obsessions of my childhood.

You said it so much better than I ever did.That is exactly how I feel.
I do read a wide range of subjects beside SF, and SFan,but I keep returning to them.
Reading The Way of Kings,by Brandon Sanderson at the moment and loving it.
It's great sci/ fantasy.

 

[Lew Rockwell Fan]

This is rather interesting: A Look at What the Public Knows and Does Not Know About Science

Good link, Psikeyhackr. Those are shockingly easy questions. And only 6% got all of them. Did you inspect the graph and table of results? More than HALF of people missed more than a THIRD of them! 2 specific questions were missed by almost 2/3 of people. But the problem is NOT limited to science. 2 books that came out at about the same time are noteworthy:

Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter
by Rick Shenkman
Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter: Rick Shenkman: 9780465014934: Amazon.com: Books

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future
by Mark Bauerlein
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1585427128/?tag=brite-21

From an NPR interview, I had the impression Shenkman was a Harvard history prof at the time his book was published, but I can't find confirmation of that with a cursory search, so I may have misheard. Bauerlein is an English prof at Emory.

Shenkman's title is misleading - he hasn't made any effort to gather and tabulate the huge wealth of material that answers the question his title poses. And there really is no excuse, because there are a lot of things like your link out there. The book was extremely well promoted, and while I don't disagree with anything in it and concur with his thesis, in truth, this was a lazy book - it has about 2 op ed's worth of information padded to make a book. It IS worth reading, but not worth buying. He actually seems to be more focused on showing the bad effect of TV than determining the answer to the question in the misleading title. Which is ironic, since apparently he's become a TV personality.

Bauerlein's book is true to his title, so the focus is unfortunately narrow. But he does address that focus well. Worth buying.

Both writers are more focused on how the problem is changing over time than on the problem itself. A Martian reading them might get the idea that people weren't stupid in 1940. They aren't focused on science literacy, and in other intellectual areas, their thesis that things are getting worse, can be justified. But in truth, the problem has ALWAYS been pretty bad. And the net result has been that democracy has become a lot like putting a bunch of 12 year olds in charge of NORAD and the Fed. And to paraphrase the late, lamented George Carlin, "Nobody seems to care."

I got 12 out of 12 but though I am not sure that might have been true when I was 14.

I did too and I suspect most people here would. I also suspect you of excessive humility. 14 is typically 8th grade or first year of high school. Of course you would have gotten 12/12. The biggest part of the problem is simply that most people don't read at all, more so than that they choose less enlightening material. When the "Heather Has Two Mommies" debate was raging, I recall some calm voice looked at a lot of the material given children to read at this age, and came to the conclusion that the biggest problem wasn't content that offended, but that, because so many things were proscribed as no-nos, that what remained was boring as hell. Give 'em pirates, westerns, blood, gore and maybe even that greatest of horrors, sex, if that is what it takes to get them in the habit of reading.

I definitely remember calculating the miles in a light year in grade school. That was because of SF.

I'll see your geek anecdote and raise you one. In the 5th or 6th grade, a test question was the earth-moon distance. I hadn't read the book. I NEVER read the book. I was reading SF, and maybe more importantly the non-fiction penumbral lit of SF, meaning stuff like the Good Doctor's column in F & SF, and the non-fiction in Analog. I didn't have that number memorized. But I DID know the relative masses of the Earth and Moon, the diameter of the earth, and the location of the center of gravity of the earth-moon system relative to the surface of the earth (hint for Fantasy fans: it's a round number, near enough). To know those numbers with reasonable accuracy, I only had to remember 4 non-zero digits, and you could get by with 3. So I calculated it.

But I don't see any practical science questions in that survey like,how cars work or what is electricity.

That is a curious omission, though I doubt it would have changed the results much. And I'm not sure that "what is electricity" is a good example of "practical". A better example would be:
"What happens when switch A is closed and switch B is open in the following diagram?". After all, people were using electricity before Thompson.

Actually I get the impression that some fantasy fans resent SF for having a practical side but then want to associate them to add status too fantasy. Maybe it's just me.

I can't say I've noticed that, although maybe I just don't hang out with many fantasy fans. However I do believe many pretentious, high brow "literary" types that tend to sneer at both communities, resent SF because they don't understand it, don't understand either it's content, purpose, or standards, and don't want to make the effort. But it is superficially too much like their chosen field to ignore and they don't want to admit ignorance. That, also, is a specific example of a more general problem - the bad influence of glib posers on the naive, but that's another subject.

 

[galanx]

I like all kinds of Fiction. Fantasy and SF.
I mean doesn't EVERYTHING fit into either one of those?

Elwood:What kind of music do you usually have here?
Claire: Oh, we got both kinds. We got country *and* western.

 

[galanx]

.

SF, done right, especially when read by bright youngsters, is of profound social importance. Better people than I have expanded on this topic. See some of Asimov's essays in Forty Years of F & SF.

So we SF fans have told ourself for going on a century- no indication that it's true.

The typical spirit of fantasy is "wouldn't it be fun if" or, worse, "wishing will make it so". The typical spirit of SF is "Possibilities are constrained by reality. These are possible futures. Choose."

The possibilities of FTL, teleportation, psi, the Time Patrol and Galactic Empiresl are constrained by reality?

I can't think of many adjectives I could apply to fantasy readers generally, probably because I'm one of those low vocabulary, intellectually challenged SF types who majored in mechanical engineering because I couldn't hack the tougher curricula, like drama, journalism, or English lit. But I have observed at least one fantasy fan to be incredibly stupid and rude. and worst of all, probably a fascist who imagines h'self a liberal. .

So you were out sick the week they did stats?

 

[psikeyhackr]

.So we SF fans have told ourself for going on a century- no indication that it's true.

There is that "done right" business.

I suggested categories and gave public domain examples some time ago.

Science Fiction Categories: A Proposal

Plenty of stuff called science fiction does not have a "scientific attitude". Lots of exposure to that kind of SF would be absorbed into a lot of kids by osmosis. But I could not tell that when I was 9 years old.

psik

 

[Lew Rockwell Fan]

So we SF fans have told ourself for going on a century- no indication that it's true.

You are confusing the meaning of "indication" with that of "proof", perhaps?

Walk about in any physics department in any major university and chat with any faculty members you can. Then do the same in in the history department. There is plenty of indication. Proof isn't terribly practical. A purist may insist that 'e can't prove anything but his own existence. Speaking casually, I'd accept a double blind study giving one set of children SF and another fantasy and evaluating the results 20 years later, without allowing them to become aware of the hypothesis. I could even design a sound, though expensive, protocol. But it would not (and rightfully would not) make it past any ethics review board.

That the CORRELATION is real is something I don't think anyone who has had significant social interactions with a substantial number of hard scientists could possibly doubt. The only realistic doubt is whether the correlation exists because SF leads to science or because something else leads to both, and leads to SF sooner.

There are other types of social importance as well. If you doubt that 1984 has been a more important influence on society than LOTR, perhaps we have different ideas of what's important.

The possibilities of FTL, teleportation, psi, the Time Patrol and Galactic Empiresl are constrained by reality?

What I said was:
'The typical spirit of SF is "Possibilities are constrained by reality. These are possible futures. Choose."'
That is hardly the same as saying that no SF has ever contained anything impossible. I think, given the context, the meaning is pretty clear. Nor do I consider everything labeled "sci-fi" to BE SF, nor do I consider all SF to be "done right".

So you were out sick the week they did stats?

My sarcasm meter went off the scale, but frankly, I can't see any connection between that and the quotation you put it under. If you're trying to insult me, you'll have to make it comprehensible to one of my limited intellect.

 

[psikeyhackr]

.So we SF fans have told ourself for going on a century- no indication that it's true.

The limited evidence is good enough for China:

China is the world’s manufacturing powerhouse. But it doesn’t invent or design most of the things it manufactures. China wants to capture the creativity and imagination of the culture that has produced companies like Google and Apple. So Chinese researchers talked to people involved with those and other companies to see what factors they had in common. The answer?

They all read Science Fiction.

The Chinese acted upon this research and today, throughout China, Science Fiction is a thriving and respected genre, read widely; which is very different from the early eighties, when Science Fiction was declared to be “spiritual pollution” and banned by the government. Back then, Science Fiction in China all but disappeared. But it has come back stronger than ever, appealing to a new generation of Chinese who see themselves as part of a world-wide cultural phenomenon, which includes Hip Hop, Fashion, Movies and Science Fiction.

What We Can Learn From The Chinese

psik

 

[Hilarious Joke]

Thank you for sharing that Psik, that is really interesting!

 

[hopewrites]

*blink*


*blink*



well on that correlation note, I always figured it was a good way to see if one had a scientific mind, one liking SF (still want to call it Sci-Fi personally). If reading technobable (SF's term, not trying to be rude) gets one going, where it gets one going is usually back to the science workshop one had to begin with.

If reading alchemy texts gets one going, where it gets One going is usually the kitchen/lab.

If reading about dragons gets one going, ... where do I go again? Oh right, trans-dimensional journeys through inner realities.

 

[galanx]

Well, a lot of cops and lawyers say they got their interest from watching cops and lawyer shows. Doesn't mean without Law and Order we wouldn't have law and order.

 

[galanx]

My sarcasm meter went off the scale, but frankly, I can't see any connection between that and the quotation you put it under. If you're trying to insult me, you'll have to make it comprehensible to one of my limited intellect.

My apologies on that. I blitzed over your closing statement.

Most of 'em are OK, though. Maybe just a little goofy.

Confirmation bias on my part.