No. Well, actually, yes: I'm claiming exactly that, that both are vacations, two particular examples of a larger category. To build on Deckerd's words, "science fantasy" and "magic fantasy" are both part of "fantasy".
As for the rest of your posts, you seem to enjoy talking to yourself more than talking with people, so I'll leave you to your favourite past-time.
Your use of the word "fantasy" above is as phony as your indignation. The way you've misused/obfuscated "plausibility" and "realism,"
all literature is a branch of fantasy! The vast majority of adventure stories, the vast majority of mysteries, all operas and musicals
are just as implausible in the same way as you claim SF is.
By your moronic standard, there's not just science fantasy and magic fantasy, there are also kid finds pirate map fantasy; there's murder in a locked room fantasy; there's people burst into impromptu song with an invisible orchestra fantasy. Enough already!
The implausibilities of an Alcubierre drive simply are not the same kind as orcs who are supposed to live by the horde where there's no food! Have you honestly confused implausibility with outright impossibility?
On a personal note, don't you know that petty spite is as good a sign of surrender as a white flag?
I'm definitely on the SF and fantasy are basically the same thing side of this. Both are a method for the author to create fictional worlds in order to tell stories that could never be told in the real world. Sure one is based on magic, and one "science", but really they serve the same purpose either way, to separate the fictional world from the real one.
The literary geniuses have ignored the mention of this before, but no, as a matter of fact, they don't serve the same purposes at all. In fantasy, the deliberate invocation of impossibility is there precisely as a rejection of the real. And in SF, the invocation of possiblity is there to invite us to think that this is a real possibility. Where you are just flat out wrong is the assertion that the invitation is merely another trick to help willing suspension of disbelief. Sometimes it is, but it frequently is not. H.G. Wells did not slay his Martians with a microbe because he thought it was easier for the readers to accept their defeat! If your notion SF=fantasy steers you so badly wrong about such a classic SF novel, then you should abandon a bad idea.
STJ, it's not so much a "rejection" of Enlightenment, as a recognition of it's limitations and failures. Sometimes the only thing that makes sense out of the world is to realize that it in fact does not make sense, at least within the materialistic, secularized frame of reference the Enlightenment proposes.....For all the technical advancement the Enlightenment has given us, it has in powerful ways taken as much or more from our spirits, reducing us to mere cogs in a vast universal machine. A love of Fantasy is a rejection of that diminishment.
I've hesitated to comment because it has to start with contradicting you: You can't be partly rational and partly irrational, therefore you
are rejecting the Enlightenment. Nor are you really standing for our spirits or whatever. The world has wonders and horrors enough for any spirit. The light in the Enlightenment comes from its awe at the sublime, a fire in the mind that comes from understanding. This is the primary motive in the end for science (and an esthetic in SF that is not the same order or kind as that in fantasy, for that matter.)
On a purely practical level, I don't really think you can make a case that people have been cursed by an excess of reason. They love their technological toys but science, science the ignorantia curse as "technobabble." The Enlightenment above all is about people, not machinery, not even the body as machine or the universe as machine. The Enlightenment is about human equality. The Enlightenment is about sexual freedom. The Enlightenment is about social justice. The Enlightenment is the hope and belief that we can be better. The notion that we are diminished by these things seems to me to be utter nonsense.
I hope maybe you have been taken in by those who claim that science has conveniently proven true every old idea exploded by the Enlightenment. Free market economists and evolutionary psychologists are infamous for this. Though not infamous enough. If you are really interested in the Enlightenment, I strongly recommend the trilogy by Jonathan Israel. They are long, but his Revolution in the Mind might serve as a sampler.
