Defining SF & Fantasy

[Montero]

And a slight divergence - amuses me how all these near future disaster movies, whether global warming flood, global warming triggered ice age or asteroids arriving - seem to be regarded as not science fiction.

Seems to be a very firm image in some people's head that science fiction = Star Trek. (No funny costumes, prosthetics or invented languages means it can't be science fiction.)

 

[Gabe.]

I think you might be too set on using extrapolating technology. There's a novel by Nicholas Monsarrat, The Time Before This, in which the narrator hears a story about a man who found a repository in the far north of Canada containing devices stored by a race who had populated the Earth long before humanity. The book was published as mainstream, but sf readers would almost certainly consider it sf.

I think I might just be failing to express exactly what I mean. In my mind, the novel that you have described does fit my definition of SF, because although it does not extrapolate the future, it does extrapolate the limits of science. The devices left by the aliens, I presume, are not actual devices that we have today, but rather extrapolations or estimations on what technology could be like.

So to be clear, SF need to actually predict the future.

 

[steve12553]

Descarte said, "I think, therefore I am."
You have to start somewhere. We know what the word Science means and we know what fiction is. Pushing Science into something fictional. Example: we are pretty sure we can detect planets in other solar systems so someone travels to one of those planets. Science Fiction. Extrapolation of the science available to the author. In twenty years we may find that the Science we were building on was wrong but we don't know that today.
Fantasy also has a meaning we can start with. Dealing with imaginative or Supernatural events. In other words, we've allowed our minds to go to a place that we know cannot and will never exist. Example the young elf has to overcome wizards and get past a dragon. Or anything else that you'll never expect to see walking down the street of Cleveland, Ohio on a Wednesday afternoon. Time travel could be either one depending on how you get there a magic amulet or a time machine.
From here you can find all the branches of the trees that run in these forum. Horror can be either one or neither depending on whether the horror is generated by the supernatural, science gone wrong or human made wrong. There are many other branches or subsets but they all boil down to how much suspension of disbelief we can muster.