There's a lot of fantasy settings that are secretly a sci-fi setting...

>Is there a scifi setting where all the technology is just well disguised magic? Like in the discworld books where a modern looking camera just had a small little goblin in the inside who painted pictures.
I mean, following that idea, flintstones?

Actually yeah, really good example

Maybe? but one that definitely fits is the one about mad scientists.

You mean Genius: the Transgression?

You're asking the wrong question OP.

What separates a sci-fi setting from a fantasy setting?
Sci-fi has planets and fantasy has planes, sci-fi has spaceships and fantasy has airships, fantasy has magic and sci-fi has cosmic mumbo jumbo.

This is a serious question, what even sets the two apart?
Is it just the aesthetic?

Sci-fi pretends to be realistic, in some cases, it is.

All technology? That's pretty rare. There are several settings where it seems like things are driven by advanced scientific principles at first glance but it turns out there's a real supernatural force hidden somewhere influencing events, but the reveal usually applies to some specific things with the majority of science still being science. Having it apply to all the advanced tech in the setting would be quite a drastic effect, far moreso than the more common inverse. Most of the settings just have magi-technology that's obviously magical.

Off the top of my head, I can think of Mage: the Ascension, where reality itself is shaped by human belief, and all the technology of the modern age is effectively a form of magic, with a secret war between practicioners of other magical disciplines (who must operate in secret, because the world resists overt changes to the laws of physics) and a conspiracy that wants to keep science as an unopposed force (and use devices which they present as "enlightened science", but are actually just as supernatural as those of the mages).

Genius: the Transgression is a fan-made system that's basically oWoD mage for nWoD, because Mage: the Awakening dropped the part where the laws of physics are just magic that people subconsciously agree with and any magic system works if you believe in it, and had magic just be actual magic instead. In that system, "mad scientists" still do the magic-powers-shaped-by-your-own-belief thing, but "real" science still works normally, and their Mania-powered superscience devices break down if a normal scientist looks at them too closely.

Black mirror?
So what about science fiction that isn't realistic, like Dune? Or guardians of the galaxy. Or rick and morty?
Just to name a few distinct examples.

Soft sci-fi and fantasy are separated simply by aesthetic, but hard sci-fi is its own genre which tries to base itself off of real-world science. Most acclaimed hard scifi writers are at least knowledgeable about the science at hand for that reason

It still pretends to be realistic, even though even the author doesn't believe this premise. This is called soft sci-fi.

SLA Industries

Quite literally.

Doctor who.

Shadowrun

Nier: Automata, if you didn't play Nier.

If we're talking Luke's point of view, there was never any fi to his sci. It was just everyday life.

I think OP's talking about the observer's pov.

I'd classify GotG as fantasy based on the larger setting (comic book universe, heavily fantastical), as well as the magical mcguffin in the movie.

Really? As far as I know, Shadowrun is just cyberpunk fantasy. Tech is tech and magic is magic, and both are well understood.

"Fantasy is fiction that makes the impossible seem probable and science-fiction is fiction that makes the improbable seem possible."
You don't seem to have much of a grasp on either genre if you think including planets is automatic sci-fi.

>He thinks Guardians of the Galaxy is sci-fi
Why? Because it's in space? Do you think Star Wars is sci-fi too?

...

>You don't seem to have much of a grasp on either genre if you think including planets is automatic sci-fi.
>Do you think Star Wars is sci-fi too?

No I probably don't have a good grasp of the genre, but let's be honest, don't you think the majority thinks Star Wars is sci-fi because it has planets and spaceships?
Some inner-nerd-circles like Veeky Forums might have given it some more thought, but I think the broader consensus might be the simpler one: planets and spaceships= scifi.

Not to justify it being wrong, I just think it's not an uncommon mistake. I was asking the question to get more of a grasp on the matter.

Isn't super-hero a genre?

It's science fiction, yes. That something is fantasy in some ways doesn't prevent it from being sci-fi. You're just holding onto narrative themes and plot elements of fantasy stories and epics being in it and ignoring what's actually shown if you think otherwise.

Star Trek.

It is. The movie doesn't follow your typical superhero formula tho, and I'm basing it on that. It's closer to starwars than x-men for me.

It's not "secretly" fantasy by the time you encounter the Hive.

Lots of hp lovecraft stuff might fit. Its basically real world with some scifi human technology that isn't implausible just advanced air planes, big drills, stuff like that. Then space alien magic.

Xenogears had science that was actualy magic. The "magic" turned out to be incomprehensible super-science. That one had more TWEESTs than M. Night Shammalammadingdong braiding Twizzlers.

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Nier automata comes to mind if you haven't played the other games within its history.

Fallout. Especially fallout 4.

Fantasy tends to be romantic and nostalgic. Scifi tends to be pro-enlightment and for progress.

>Scifi tends to be pro-enlightment and for progress

You haven't read much science fiction, have you?

Star Wars is a Western/Samurai story, duh

I have done so. That's why I said it is the tendency. People get bored with old formulas and spice it up.

Anything with FTL is fantasy. FTL is indistinguishable from time travel.

I can't really think of any particularly "Pro-Enlightment" sci fi works which get a lot of acclaim except probably Star Trek. Most of them paint very grim, anti-humanist portraits of the future where things kind of suck. Not always on Neuromancer or 1984 levels but still not a lot of fun. Man in the High Castle, Forever War, Jurassic Park, even most Bradbury stories have a cynical or even outright sour take on what we would call progress.

Even more optimistic works like Starship Troopers are far from describing an Enlightment society.

>American scifi from the 30s to the 60s tends to be pro-enlightment and for progress

Pokemon

That's because most writers are romantics and hate maths.

Eh, quite a bit of prolific American writers at that time painted some pretty grim depictions of the future. Remember that's when Bradbury wrote most of his stuff.

Yeah, I thought better of it after I typed it. Lots of stuff wasn't super upbeat. Sturgeon was my immediate thought.

I find it funny how is much easier to get FTL (this things breaks science) than other more plausible things like robots, AI, nanobots, full automation, genetic enhancements, megastructures etc, etc.

That said, stories are difficult to make them interesting without conflict and struggle.

Well yeah, that's why I always disagreed with this notion there was ever a period where Science Fiction was the official Optimism Genre.

People have this weird believe pre-70s Sci Fi was some kind of Noblebright campfest. Even though by that point we had stuff like the Twilight Zone, grim apocalyptic films like Godzilla and Planet of the Apes, and of course countless novels where the future was anything but perfect.

Science and reason solves all problems vs love and divine provinence solves all problems.

Frankenstein wasn't exactly a hopeful start.

He was obviously a wizard creating an homunculus.

That's because elves have been replaced by anal probing aliens.

>Science and reason solves all problems

If that's the case how come so many Sci Fi stories are about science causing problems, then making those problems worse?

Checkmate atheists

Dead Space is about religion discovering science, then using science to make problems worse.

The videogame Endless Legend

no

It's funny how to contrast movies made in Japan like Godzilla vs Americans ones made at the time. Japan is like the "government is the problem, science is the answer". American films are often "science is the problem, the government is the answer".

It was less magic and more 'literal pseudo-divine interference from a higher plane of existence' but yeah christ Xenogears was a hell of a drug

Americans were dealing with the immediate consequences of rushing Atomic Bombs on their tech tree. With that genie out of the bottle, many saw responsible government as the only way to prevent annihilation. Starship Troopers was basically Heinlein drawing up his ideal political system for preventing nuclear war.

The Japanese had already born the brunt of that new technology. Things couldn't get much worse for them, so they looked to science as a way to pull themselves back up.

That's a scifi setting pretending to be fantasy. Wrong way round.

Um...Dancers at the End of Time/Second Ether trilogy i guess

>There's a lot of fantasy settings that are secretly a sci-fi setting, but is there a sci-fi setting that is secretly a fantasy setting?
I think that this sort of thing is rare because fantasy and sci-fi don't naturally go that way. Fantasy is generally about mythical and mystical things that aren't explained beyond "this is how magic works", while science fiction is generally about things that are based on principles that are either understood or at least understandable. I'm not denying the whole "magic can be studied scientifically" thing, but in general it just tends to be less explained than science.

It's easy for a hidden secret to turn fantasy into science fiction, by having something that people see as magical because they don't know about its underlying principles, but then have it turn out that the cause of its effects is actually based on scientific principles. It's not so easy to have devices which are developed and create based on what appear to be well-known scientific principles turn out to be based on something mystical that science hasn't recognized as such.

Actually yes. Because as it turns out all their advanced technology is actually magi tech, running on alchemy.

Its pretty much both at the same time. Or at least thats how my campaign in the setting feels.

Ooo.

this is the only right answer so far

I mean, yeah that's the idea of magi tech really. Merger of science and magic, eaches' philosophies applied to the other to further their union as a whole.

You mispelled viking

Basically, you are fucking stupid.

Science basically being magic - sci-fantasy - is 40k in a nutshell

user, we went over this. 40k is tongue-in-cheek blatant with it. It is hardly a secret.
OP wants a setting where its a sci fi setting thats secretly a fantasy world.like those settings in fantasy where the gods are SHOCKING THRUTH! aliens from another world or magic is really NANOMACHINES.

>like those settings in fantasy where the gods are SHOCKING THRUTH! aliens from another world

The inverse of this would be extremely weird. Like what would this setting's version of fedora lords be like? Low-information idiots who smugly reaffirm the existance of gods and magic while thumbing their noses at mongoloids who put their faith in superstitious nonsense like "science" and "logic"?

We already have those IRL, they're called bible-thumpers and baptists.

You need to go to pre-1950s sci-fi for most of the really utopian, technology-burning-a-way-for-civilisation-and-the-future. It's a product of peoples who were secure in their identity and the fate of their civilisation. Nowadays everything is crumbling, or at least appears to be. People used to trust governments and institutions, now people view them with suspicion, whether it be beliving they're trying to tear down and sell society to the highest bidder, or oppress and replace them, breaking down culture and identity.

>Pre-1950s sci fi is bright and utopian
>What is Metropolis
>What is 1984

Utopian writers, or at least those putting trust in institutions and technology outweigh those. You just couldn't get a Galactic Patrol written today or after the 1960s, at least not without being played tongue in cheek.

Nope, still science.

Secondary materials reveal that the god-monsters (and thus humanity) were created by a hyper-advanced progenitor race. The White and Black Moons were seed-ships, and the whole conflict is because only one ship is supposed to go to any given planet, and Earth got two by mistake.

user, stuff like Galaxy Patrol never went away. What do you think stuff like Star Wars or the MCU is?

There's never been a point where sci fi writers had to go "well better write a story where everything's bright and hunk-dory" to get published. Saying grim science fiction is the product of people losing trust in their governments is patently false. Mostly because there's /never/ been a time where everyone trusted their government.

Tenchi Muyo! comes to mind. At first it's all sci-fi with its backstory, involving an alien princess of a race with plant-based organic technology, a "demon" sealed in a cave who turns out to be a genetically engineered superpowered space pirate, a hyper-advanced genius scientist, space police, and other things like that. The technology is so advanced that a lot of it is visually indistinguishable from magic, but it's all presented as advanced alien science.

It turns out that a lot of this advanced technology is actually based on the divine power of various gods and goddesses. Jurai's trees are all descendants of a goddess who took the form of a tree, and their Light Hawk Wings (seemingly some sort of advanced force field) can withstand any force in the universe because they draw on the power of its creators. Several major characters turn out to (secretly or unwittingly) be gods in disguise, including the main character (which is why he can generate his own Light Hawk Wings without any apparent external power source) and Washu, the aforementioned super-scientist (which would mean that some of her miraculous inventions might have been literal miracles).

>What do you think stuff like Star Wars or the MCU is?
Both are reflections or adaptations of previous more optimistic material, and even they're mostly gone now. Modern day capeshit is fucking grimdark memery, [UNSOLICITED OPINIONS ON ISRAEL], or both; while even the earliest phases of the SW EU were starting to pick holes in the perfect, utopian New Republic.

I'd probably argue that the longest surviving optimistic utopian Sci-fi was probably Star Trek up until the end of TNG - after that, it split into cheap drivel (VOY) or the more fashionable cynical direction the genre had been going in for ages (DS9). Even that was because Roddenbery kept forcing his hippy views on the whole thing; the TNG films (apart from Generations) quickly went down the same route, too.

Voltron: Legendary Defender

Mass Effect.

Did Andromeda do even more stupid bullshit I'm unaware of or is this about Biotics?

That's because the actual science behind the speed of light is complicated and unintuitive, whereas the concept "this spaceship can go from Earth to Alpha Centauri in twenty minutes" is simple to grasp, even if it's not even remotely realistic.

>even if it's not even remotely realistic.

Well, it kind of is. If that ship could accelerate and stop fast enough it could potentially take it twenty minutes to reach Alpha Centauri.

It's just four years would pass back on Earth.

>It's just four years would pass back on Earth.

That's the unintuitive part. People hear "twenty minutes to Alpha Centauri" and expect to be able to say, "We're popping out to Alpha Centauri to get some burgers, we'll be back to pick you up when you've finished watching your movie."

Basically Elder Scrolls, no? Isn't that how everyone felt about the dwemer getting fucking vanished?

Fucking Jians

Biotics.

Is there a source on this?

It still does go in reverse in the case of WH40K Orks.

What about Neon Genesis Evangelion? At the start it just seems like they're giant mechs who are partly biological but it turns out they're products of all sorts of crazy magic hocus pocus, or at least I think they were it was a pretty confusing show, why did they all turn into soup?

Fantasy mostly rips off lord of the rings.

Sci-fi mostly rips off Star Wars.

>one of the classes is named warlock
It was never a secret.