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Sci-fi vs Sci-Fantasy

The only horses I remember offhand in TOS are in "City on the Edge of Forever" and "Spectre of the Gun". In "Errand of Mercy" there are goats or something I think. The question I guess is are they actually Organians posing as goats?

DOH! I forgot about "The Cage" and "Shore Leave".
 
But two TOS movies had real live horses. One of those movies had an excess of dust.

hmm...

The horses in Generations were fake horses, too, all Nexus-y. Were the horses in STV Earth horses or alien horses?

The only horses I remember offhand in TOS are in "City on the Edge of Forever" and "Spectre of the Gun". In "Errand of Mercy" there are goats or something I think. The question I guess is are they actually Organians posing as goats?

DOH! I forgot about "The Cage" and "Shore Leave".

Yes! Here's a real horse.
 
The horse I was thinking of in "City" is pulling a milk wagon. The Rodent guy (John Harmon) steals that milk bottle.
 
They were special earth horses designated for the planet of Galactic Peace. They were real. And dusty. And Our Heroes road them in a here comes the calvary manner, really if it had just stopped there it WOULD be a space western.
 
There's only a few people I've ever come across who take it literally to the point of not being able to enjoy bad science in later series. Really they just don't like a particular series so get hung up on the science in that series while excusing it in the series they do like.

It's a good thing we only got horses in two of the movies otherwise it might get accused of being a space western. You really have to be careful how many horses and how much dust you put in a thing if you don't want to attract such slurs.

Horses are canon. TOS had horses* in at least three episodes ("The Menagerie" & "Shore Leave" & "Spectre of the Gun"). :shifty:

* - All fake horses, though, so TOS "dodged that bullet." ;)

ahh so its as I expected...youre really just here to goof off because you have to fill the hours somehow
 
I suspect "science fantasy" was a term invented by hard SF fanatics as a way of being dismissive toward anything that didn't fit their own narrow definition of science fiction.

If you exclude any work of fiction that breaks some known law of physics, or handwaves away some magical technology, then you've basically got an empty genre. Even so-called hard SF gets things wrong. The science isn't the point. The point is looking at the world from a different perspective from the one we're used to to highlight truths about ourselves and about the universe, and to tell an entertaining story while doing it. Having some pretense of the story happening in our own universe makes the message stronger, but if you have to suspend disbelief now and again, it's not the end of the world.
 
726 episodes in 6 tv shows (if you count TAS...and I do). Its pretty much impossible to maintain the sci-fi aspect of a sci-fi tv show over that many episodes without sacrificing the "science" of sci-fi to plot drama (fantasy). The teleporter, holodeck, and warp coil are just 3 aspects of the ST universe that blur the lines between magic and sci-fi whenever the plot needs them too. When is sci-fi really fantasy?

Star Trek is pure fantasy, dressed up in sci-fi colours. It's no more realistic than Marvel superhero movies, and that's been the case since day one. Nothing holds up under scrutiny - not the depictions of space (sound, seeing stars from brightly-lit rooms, soup-like nebulae, ultra-dense asteroid fields, brightly lit starship hulls in deep space, the movement of ships in zero-gee), alien biology (where humans and aliens of all kinds can interbreed without trouble, where a species' alien-ness is measured in the impracticality of it's forehead bumps), silly dramatic conventions (everyone speaks English with perfect lip synch, ships experience g-forces when moving at FTL speed, consoles explode on the bridge to indicate how damaged the ship is, everything's always fine by the next episode no matter how horrific the trauma endured), the way time is constant through the universe ignoring relativity (which would define real long-term space travel) and all that is before you even get to the regular fantastic technologies like the transporter and warp drive and then the really barmy one-off stuff like Genesis, Red Matter or the goofy diseases or anomalies which cause transformations (which are, of course, always reversible!)

None of this is meant to bash Trek - I love it! But I love it for what it really is - an awesome, rich comic book-style fantasy universe very loosely based on real life, and populated by awesome characters where amazing adventures take place. I don't ask more of it than that.:)
 
I don't understand, what is the difference between "sci-fi" and "sci-fantasy"? There is none, from where I'm sitting.

Now, sci-fi and fantasy are two different things, sci-fi is about aliens and robots and science stuff while fantasy is about wizards and demons, monsters and magic stuff.
 
I suspect "science fantasy" was a term invented by hard SF fanatics as a way of being dismissive toward anything that didn't fit their own narrow definition of science fiction.

If you exclude any work of fiction that breaks some known law of physics, or handwaves away some magical technology, then you've basically got an empty genre. Even so-called hard SF gets things wrong. The science isn't the point. The point is looking at the world from a different perspective from the one we're used to to highlight truths about ourselves and about the universe, and to tell an entertaining story while doing it. Having some pretense of the story happening in our own universe makes the message stronger, but if you have to suspend disbelief now and again, it's not the end of the world.

Very nicely put.

This is a debate that goes back to the very beginnings of the genre. Jules Verne complained that H.G. Wells played fast and loose with real science by employing plot devices like time travel, invisibility, and anti-gravity. But does anybody want to insist that H.G. Wells, of all people, wasn't writing "real" science fiction?

If your definition of SF is so narrow that it excludes H.G. Wells and Star Trek, then maybe you're not using the term the way the rest of the world does.
 
ENT had a western episode with horses, but my traumatic amnesia won't let me remember the details.

:)
 
The way I see it, "science-fantasy" and "hard SF" are both subcategories under the larger umbrella term, "science fiction," which encompasses everything from Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury to Heinlein and Asimov.

And horses are definitely canon, dating all the way back to "The Cage" and Tango. :)
 
Both and for trek I would say both.

I love science fantasy. a perfect example is harry potter and the prisoner of askiban, where they use science fantasy to go back to the past. the time travel theory was intact but it was not done with any calculation or future maths it was done with magic.

star trek is about space explosion so they will use more science fiction than magic to explain their plots.

i like both in reference to the genre of the series.
 
ENT had a western episode with horses, but my traumatic amnesia won't let me remember the details.

:)

The best visual moment was after the unsuccessful incognito stuff and Archer beaming out with an injured person, he decides to show the town who they really are. It's a great scene when the shuttle lands in the middle of town and Archer and crew step out in their uniforms, harkening back to all those "take me to your leader" moments in old movies.
 
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