What's so great about reading realistic stories anyway? So-called "science fiction" is coming to pass in this world, so if you want spaceships and star flights all you have to do is wait. Why read something when it will one day become possible to live it?
I originally had the same thought but, I think that there might be more to it. SF has 3 main problems for me: 1. A lot of it explores a very defined issue way to explicitly, 2. It is more likely to become dated, 3. Bad SF dwells way too much on the technology.
Basically, 90% chance of liking the fantasy (all good, mediocre, and even some poor) and maybe 40% of SF (good and a portion of the mediocre). In short, I picked fantasy because bad fantasy is better, in my opinion, than bad SF.
SF is actually NOT as fantastical as fantasy, unless it is badly written imo. Some careless authors throw in things that could never ever happen which is where fantasy and scifi connect, but realistic scifi is quite believable and usually explains some of what is going on. Star Trek and Star Wars and other such things are a bit far fetched, but most of the plots DO have basis in hard science... obviously Star Wars is fantasy/scifi since it has elements of both, but fantasy is basically anything that could never happen based on our understanding today, whereas scifi is less or not at all far fetched, and being a hardcore science nerd, I like that.
I see a lot of misconceptions about both sub-genres here, mostly (it seems to me) based on familiarity only with the more modern (post-1980s or at earliest 1970s) examples of whichever field is on the receiving end.
Manarion, as for your comment above... try, for instance, Kuttner and Moore, especially such things as "The Children's Hour", "Mimsy Were the Borogoves", or "Vintage Season" -- you'll be hard-pressed to find stories less likely to happen, yet which are very much in the realm of possibility if such a thing as time-travel is ever made practicable... or any tales more heartbreakingly poignant and beautifully written. Or try C. M. Kornbluth's work -- one of the most bitter and cynical writers of the "Golden Age" (see, e.g., "The Little Black Bag" or "The Marching Morons"), but also one of the most dynamic... and who can occasionally throw you for a loop by having an absolutely charming and lovely little oddity such as "Gomez". Or Cordwainer Smith, with his tales of the Instrumentality of Mankind. Or Zenna Henderson, with her stories of The People. Or the mind-bending sf of Michael Moorcock (a few of his books
do actually fit into the genuine sf category) such as
The Blood Red Game, or
The Rituals of Infinity, or
Behold the Man (that's not even mentioning the various Cornelius books). Or J. G. Ballard's work, such as
The Drowned World,
The Drought,
The Crystal World,
The Atrocity Exhibition,
Vermilion Sands, etc., etc.; very haunting, surrealistic tales which are nonetheless classics of the genre. Or, for that matter, that staunch old standby, Isaac Asimov, with such pieces as "Eyes Do More Than See", "Dreaming is a Private Thing", "The Ugly Little Boy"... or even "Lenny", one of his stories of robots and Susan Calvin. Or even Robert A. Heinlein with "Waldo", among others ("-- All You Zombies", "And He Built A Crooked House", "By His Bootstraps", etc.), or several of his juvenile novels, such as
Citizen of the Galaxy,
Red Planet, or
Have Space Suit, Will Travel, not to mention that very odd little book,
Beyond This Horizon.... And this is only a few right off the top of my head. There are literally thousands of others.
And, even if it is
possible, the stories themselves are often very powerful, as with Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations" or Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon"....
And Fireyfly: The Time Machine? The End of Eternity? Nightwings? The Mind Parasites? The Demolished Man? The Stars My Destination? More Than Human? "The Game of Rat and Dragon"? (The list goes on, and on, and on.....) Not to mention the work of people like Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Rod Serling, Charles Beaumont....
The same can be said for fantasy -- it, too, is an enormously broad field, encompassing the Tolkienian "quest" fantasy; urban fantasy; dark fantasy (of various stripes); alternate-world fantasies (both serious and humorous); and dozens of other types of tales, some of which are darned near unclassifiable, such as Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan books, David Lindsay's
A Voyage to Arcturus, Hope Mirrlees'
Lud-in-the-Mist, Algernon Blackwood's
Jimbo and
The Centaur, James Branch Cabell's ironic comedies such as his massive 25-volume
Biography of the Life of Manuel (a long read, but one of the most unique experiences in all literature, Balzac and Maupassant notwithstanding, and a rich treat going from very thoughtful, pensive and poignant thought to outright belly laughs, in some of the most exquisite prose ever put on paper)... and so on, and so forth.
It has always puzzled me how someone who likes fantasy can't stand sf, and vice versa, as they really are, despite their differences, quite closely related. They are both modern forms of mythmaking, of realizing what has always been "impossible" dreams that most of humanity shares in one form or another; and, when well done, both are very warm and human experiences which are often deeply moving -- and good examples of either aren't really that hard to find. So this entire "either/or" thing simply baffles me, as it seems very much a case of not seeing the forest for the toothpicks, let alone the trees.....
