Sci Fantasy or do you want Sci Fi?
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In that case Bewitched is sort of sci. fi. too.
Exactly...doesn't I dream of genie co star an astronaut? So a space man, alternative highly evolved life form in revealing outfit....and dimensionally transcendental living spaces. It's definitely sci fi.
In that case Bewitched is sort of sci. fi. too.
Eh… no. I get that you're joking, but both are fantasy sitcoms.
And the difference is what? Technobabble?
Science fiction deals with scenarios and technology that are possible or may be possible based on science. Some science fiction such as far-future space opera or time travel stories may seem implausible, but they are still not beyond the realm of scientific theory. On the other hand, fantasy general deals with supernatural and magical occurrences that have no basis in science.
Fantasy is an older genre of literature than science fiction; in fact, fantasy is arguably the oldest genre. If we look back at the earliest surviving stories from human civilisation such as the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh or the ancient Greek myths, we find stories of gods, monsters and magic. Science fiction is a relatively recent genre of the last century or so with origins going back only a few hundred years before that.
Asimov would have disagreed with you. In one of his books he speaks about Hephaistos, the greek god of the forge and about his two helpers, two metallic women that Asimov thought of as the first Robots in History. There's also the mechanical Owl that athena sent to bellerophon and that he alone was able to understand the language of. The Greek already knew about mechanical devices, in fact they had already made some pretty nifty automatons, that seem elaborate even by today's standards.
Not necessarily. Science fiction and fantasy cannot always be distinguished clearly and the lines sometimes blur. For instance Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern is a science fiction series despite the existence of dragons while the Star Wars films are considered fantasy despite the sci-fi setting.
Yes, it's not as simple an issue as one might think.
How would that work, exactly?
The game of thrones thing? Well, I once saw someone working out the orbit westeros from the idea of their Winter being a literal season. That probably had something to do with it...beyond that, I have no idea.
It's not fantasy if it backs up a then current belief system, even if that belief system then falls away. Though that does lead to amusing thought of Newtons Principia being a fantasy world building exercise, and even more fun at the idea that something by Dawkins becoming the same a few centuries down the line.
Though I get your point, and it probably applies to things like Homer, and certainly to a fair chunk of Arthurian stuff...once again with the caveat that if it is believed, rightly or wrongly, at the time of its writing to be either historical fact or observation of nature, it cannot reasonably be called Fantasy.
In fact, these things would indeed be more like a precursor to science fiction, as they present an extrapolation from then current scientific belief.
Seems to be a bit of stretch. Though I did once joke that GOT takes place on Pern.
I have barely read the peen books, two decades of trying to start....I have read all the GoT books, largely to accompany my significant other. I find GoT to be loathsome. Pern...seems largely to not be.
I put off Pern for years, because I'm not much of a fantasy fan. Then a girlfriend informed me they were SF books. I also read them in in-universe chronological order, so the SF aspects were front and center.
One thing that I would greatly appreciate is a sense that the writers have a basic sense of the scientific concepts they're using. They don't need to be experts and I don't mind if they stretch the possibilities a little bit in order to create a good story but often times in Trek I got the feeling that the writers had no idea what they were talking about. Especially when it came to evolution where I didn't get the sense that the writers knew anything about evolution other than that it involved some things becoming other things.
I am afraid that it wasn't just something you sensed, it was the stark reality. These people didn't know shit about evolution or science in general. One would think that with Stephen Hawking in person visiting the sets they would have taken advantage of it to pick his brain on a few things but no way in hell that they would do that. It would have impeded their ability to make up crap.
I have been starting the first one since some time in the early nineties. I don't know I ever made it to Pern lol. Recently tried jumping in part way through after a kindle sale.
That's a bit harsh...most of the science was pretty good, especially in context of the day...the evolution thing is more of a semantics thing, they often used it as a synonym for mutation, and then folded the whole thing into exaggerated terms (much as Trek did from the sixties through) for the sake of the story...and as a way of explaining the god things and glowey life forms that Trek had picked up as part of its genesis in the sixties. Q is a God thing, like Trelane, like the Organians, like VGer....but then he drops lots of hints about evolution and humanity in particular, and suddenly there's an explanation for all the God things. But then sometimes the science Trek is about is the soft sciences, Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology...and when you compress those down for television, before you even get to the argument of whether or not you can call them actual sciences, you get the inconsistency.
Personally I have no problem with accepting that what the federation characters call evolution isn't quite the same thing we do...that's another soft science. Etymology. To them, in a universe where planet a can reproduce with planet b, millions of light years apart, things like Darwin are no longer the frame of reference. When exotic energy can mutate one being radically, instantly, into almost a different life form entirely, without outright killing them...then the frames of reference change again.
Is it unrealistic from a certain point of view? Yeah. Totally. But then so was flight, so were antibiotics, mind controlled tech etc etc. Is it totally unfeasible? Not in the frames of reference, not with the steps the story more often than not actually shows us have taken place from whichever now the story was made in and the then that Trek made off the back of it.
It comes down to consistency and continuity again I guess.
When an ancient race seeded life through the galaxy, when the afore mentioned exotic particles are there.....the frame of reference changes. And science changes fast. Dinosaurs have feathers and Pluto isn't a planet. Light is a wave, light is particle...when our paradigms shift so does our science fiction, but it doesn't invalidate it totally, it has to be taken as part of the whole. If Star Trek had started in 1866 , it would be totally acceptable for them to travel on steamships powered by aether stores, even if that series had just announced a new series for its centenary.
I think Star Trek has dual themes: character based space opera and action-driven sci-fi. TNG had a pretty good mix. DS9 leaned more space opera (which is why it's the best Trek) and Voyager was more action sci-fi (which is why it was the worst Trek).
Nah. It's a mix of character based sci-fi and action driven space opera.
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