At what point does fantasy end and sci-fi begin?

I honestly think the distinction is silly & restrictive. There are many aspects of a work that we can point to as being indicative of its genre, but none of those are really exclusive to that genre. If an artist wants to include aliens and wizards, why is that wrong? Concepts such as tense genre lines and the possibility of transgressing the laws of sci fi & fantasy damages the creativity of artists as well as the receptivity of their audience.

Is it magic? Fantasy.
Is it technology? Sci-fi.

I agree with that, especialy since we've had that kinda stuff in the 70's or so. I don't remember the exact time frame, but having ufos in your fantasy setting was a thing.

>At what point does fantasy end and sci-fi begin?
Sufficient Advancement.

I mean expedition to barrier peaks was a thing. And honestly the distinction is fairly recent.
What about settings that have implausible technology? Settings with both?

I'd have said that they're fundamentally different.

The way I like to think of it Fantasy is about allowing the spiritual, or mental aspects of a character be physically represented in the world, thus allowing for a more direct connection between the internal and external conflicts of the story. For example, in Lord of the Rings, the external conflict (destroying the armies of Mordor) is directly tied to Frodo's internal conflict (his addiction to the One Ring) meaning that instead of the character arc and plot only being related they are directly causally linked to each other in a very literal way. The advantage of this kind of story is its ability to build an entire plot around a character's development, where all their mental blocks are made manifest as physical obstacles, and all their tools of coping take the form of more literal powers and weapons.

Sci-fi, in my opinion, is a form of speculative fiction revolving around the impact far-off or impossible advancements would have on society and the individuals in that society, usually to allow an existing issue to be explored in a less vague theoretical way. Essentially it's an avenue for asking 'what if' questions and using the characters to explore the consequences of the changes to the world.

I agree with you in general, but there's nothing stopping you from having your Fantasy example take place in the far off future or having speculative writings be about impossible things.

There's never been a clear divide. Even in gaming there's been a mixture of the two since Mystara was a thing.

True, which is why I don't like to classify stuff as one or the other based on tech level or realism.

I think it's more productive to classify genres based on their typical themes and methods of exploring those themes. Most other genres already do, romance, cosmic horror, decadent fiction, and stuff like that are all already based more on usual ideas explored and character arcs used than they are on superficial setting elements, so I find it strange that that's how we class sci-fi and fantasy.

>which is why I don't like to classify stuff as one or the other based on tech level or realism.
This
> so I find it strange that that's how we class sci-fi and fantasy.
I think this kind of has to do with the fact that by and large mos or at least a large chunk of Science Fiction and Fantasy works don't really have that much thematic depth.

No, but time travel, meeting gods, and literal magic does.

fantasy:
The powerful magical crystal filled the clay and stones and wood with life and the creature begane to move

scifi:
the powerful energy crystal sent energy coursing through the complex circuitry and the android began to move

also in sci-fi you need a echanical artefact for the awesome power of mysterious energy to work. In fantasy those can or must be channeled through a living creature. But there might be exceptions.

just because there is somethign that mixes the 2 doesn't mean that the 2 separate categories don't exist.
You can have a pure fantasy work, a pure sci-fi work and works that are various mixes of both, like star wars and star trek

Sci-fi involves science.
Fantasy involves intuition.

In a sci-fi setting, breakthroughs are achieved by methodical researchers who use the scientific method.
In a fantasy setting, breakthroughs are achieved by intuitive prodigies who stumble on something by accident.

If someone attempts to use the scientific method to overturn a fantasy setting, it turns out that magic is too inconsistent to be explained, and science is worthless.
If someone attempts to overturn a sci-fi setting by being an intuitive prodigy, he's ridiculed as a mad scientist or alchemist and gets nowhere with his uncontrolled experimentation.

t. Yudkowsky fan

>In a sci-fi setting, breakthroughs are achieved by intuitive researchers who invent the laws of motion after seeing an apple fall from a tree.
>In a fantasy setting, breakthroughs are achieved by laboriously grinding wizards who might develop a single spell after decades of methodical laboratory work.

Someone's never read Jack Vance.

I didn't say the categories didn't exist, I said I prefer to base those categories on themes and archetypes than setting elements.

What about stories that don't try to make a point about our present society or are purely for entertainment? And a lot of Heinlein's stuff like All You Zombies and By His Bootstraps didn't really have much to say about society. And the ray-gun sci-fi from the 50s was the equivalent of old penny dreadfuls, basically pure schlock.

Sci-Fi and fanstasy aren't genres in the sense that mysteries, horror, historical fiction, romance, and so on are. They're more of an aesthetic that can be applied to any other story archetype.

Heroic fantasy is closer to a genre since it actually encapsulates a story archetype and common themes.

fantasy stops when swords become irrelevant
sci-fi begins when cars become irrelevant

At least go with the speculative fiction bait.

I'd say those sorts of stories are pulp-action, that genre can occur in a futuristic or fantasy setting just as much as a romance or political drama can.

reminds me of Bakker's Prience of Nothing series. Space aliens trying to kill enough souls on a planet to sever the connection to the gods so they escape literal damnation. They use biological weapons and lasers and the humans can use literal magic.

If you can't, in real life, get it finished and to my desk by next year, it's fantasy. That knocks out pretty much every sci-fi cliche (FTL travel, handheld directed energy weapons, cold fusion power, any sort of space colonization beyond our solar system's asteroid belt), not to mention an average meal at Olive Garden or that novel you've been writing. Ever notice that those fancy gadgets are always 20 years away? It's because their developers know that they aren't happening anytime soon (maybe not even in their lifetimes) but need to keep the clients, investors, and grants coming.

Does it matter?

>breakthroughs are achieved by intuitive prodigies who stumble on something by accident.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_discoveries_influenced_by_chance_circumstances

Good to know real life is a fantasy setting.

>t. yud

mandatory.

They're not mutually exclusive.

>not keeping up with the latest posts

Do the laws of physics apply?
>yes
It's sci-fi
>no
It's fantasy

Garrosh please go.

What if both swords and cars are irrelevant.

You harness magic and mass produce things powered by it until it is boring.

Then you find out the repercussions of said process and the sci-fi story begins.

What about the laws of sacrophysics?

I have that in the homebrew.

still the best vilain the wow has ever seen

Eh, C'thun was better.

The way I see it, science fiction is fiction about science, as in whatever new technology they speculate about is central to the story and the story wouldn't be the same without it. This can either soft sci-fi, where technology creates a problem and the story focuses on how the people react to the technology, or hard sci-fi where the people have technology and encounter a problem, and use the technology to solve said problem.

Fantasy, on the other hand, is stories about characters going on adventures, and the specific details of the setting don't matter much to the core story, and exist only to provide additional flavor and excitement.

Take, for example, Star Wars. If you took out all the robots, the spaceships, the lasers and set the story entirely on a single fantasy planet you could still have the same basic story of "young guy learns magic and rescues princess and fights evil empire". Nothing at all changes for the story if you replace C3PO with an annoying butler and R2-D2 with a tiny magic elf. Blasters could just as well be guns and lightsabers could be katanas.

On the other hand, if you look at Asimov's robots, for example, you can't just take out the robots and keep the same story, since his stories revolve about the robots and their interactions with the three laws.

too bad that /thread-ing yourself is bad form, this quote deserves it.

Sci-fi is just fantasy that thinks it is somehow better than fantasy because it has all these rules it follows

Sargeras did nothing wrong.

imo, Science Fiction examines how advances in technology (whether plausible or completely fantastical) affect people and societies. This can be done with more or less focus on plot and storytelling, but it is always a major theme. Everything else is fantasy.

Gene Roddenberry called Star Trek science fantasy.

Fantasy starts when you can't imagine it really happening at all.
Science Fiction starts when you can't imagine it really happening -yet-.

>SCIENCE fiction
Meaning we start with a known concept and stretch it. There's how we get the concepts of "hard" and "soft" sci-fi. Hard sci-fi attempts to absolutely explain-out how everything makes sense, in theory. Soft sci-fi does maximum hand wave. But what it all comes down to is something in the real world acts as the anchor. In fantasy, nothing needs to have an explanation. Explanations in fantasy are purely for the reader's enjoyment, in sci-fi the explanation is part of an over-arching argument for why you should take this setting seriously.

>and we don't know why
>Comments mentioning diet and exercise will be deleted
lol

Is he arguing there are people whose bodies breakdown muscle tissue BEFORE fat?

>Nothing at all changes for the story if you replace C3PO with an annoying butler
He'd have to be a skeleton butler.

Not to mention it would make all the films a lot murkier, considering it would make the main characters a-okay with keeping living people as slaves. Having our first impression of Luke being him haggling with a slaver who kidnaps people in the desert is definitely putting a new spin on it.

You could easily remove those parts of the story without affecting the core idea. These parts are flavor, they're not key to the story.

What's Star Wars then? There are no cars, but there are swords. Is it fantasy? Is it scifi?

Science Fantasy is a genre too you know.

Star Wars is the epitome of it.

Well shucks, if you're gonna change it that much, what's left to make it Star Wars? Might as well make it about a young man who learns tax accounting from an old government official and uses it to take down a corrupt chain of supermarkets. See, it's still Star Wars because the key components are there.

It might be Star Wars because of the lightsabers and the Death Star, but the story is not about those things and it would work just the same in another environment, because the story is mostly character driven. These flavor components are not essential to the core story Star Wars is telling. In fact there are many other works that tell basically the same story as Star Wars in another component.

In sci-fi, the fictional stuff is core to the story, but in fantasy the fictional stuff is flavor to the story, and that's the main difference.

>another component
I mean another setting.

>a young man who learns tax accounting from an old government official and uses it to take down a corrupt chain of supermarkets
I like your idea better. Have you ever thought about going Hollywood?

>Have you ever thought about going Bollywood?
FTFY.

I don't know, the Death Star is pretty core to the story of the first film at least. Similiarly, even if you ditched the lightsabers, you couldn't do the final confrontation in VI without the Force. Luke going berserk, but then restraining himself and throwing aside his weapon would not have the same impact (or make any sense) in a different story.

People have an overly narrow definition of fantasy, just because a setting contains modern or futuristic technologies that does not mean it's scifi. Fantasy has reality bend in such a way that the story can mimic mythological epics and fairytales. Star wars and star trek are fantasy, so is doctor who.
Scifi uses future projections. You can have a scifi throwback by using ideas that are actually outdated and debunked, but the core of "what if" stays.

>Star Trek and Star Wars

Personally I'd say it's a matter of tone.

Star Wars is fanasty while Star Trek is sci-fi.

It's nothing to do with more scientifically accurate, simply that one is focused on themes associated with fantasy like the heroes journey, while the others is focused things like social metaphors and other things associated with science fiction.

If you've got spaceships and you're dealing with aliens and computers, its sci-fi. If you're stabbing shit and tossing magic around, it's fantasy.

>sci-fi
Lasers, basically. Magic doesn't have lasers, it has beams.

When you get hard.

And what if you got both? Star Wars, Starcraft, W40k, comics, hell, even Star Trek, Q is a thing, sufficiently advanced alien my ass.

If magic has rules that can be explored in scientific ways, can there be sci-fi settings based on fantasy setting?

I'd say there's some sort of a bell curve where "how fantastical something is" is dependent on "what science/technology as it appears to be advancing could be believed to some day be capable of discovering/doing". The god and partner creator of about five worlds Tezcatlipoca slicing off his foot to distract Cipactli, a monster who had a mouth at every joint and whose dead body made the land, was science fact for a culture at a time, not even just fiction, and has since then become more a fantastical idea to the world at large. Some time in the future, were technologies to develop such that planets could be assembled within an individual's lifetime at the hands of one or a few individuals, and were space-faring animals of incredible sizes discovered, or ecosystem-sized colonial creatures found on worlds with mostly water on them, it might become more believable that the events which those currently fantastical myths explore might have actually happened.

Here's one for you guys: What does Lovecraft's work count as by today's idea of sci-fi and fantasy?

Magic with hard rules is usually done by writers used to scifi that take the same approach they usually do when tipping their toes in fantasy, when the reverse happens and the romanticist fantasy people try their hand at scifi it's not Black Mirror or the Foundation series that inspires them, they'll just go for a space opera or weird science.
What I'm trying to say is that they aren't autistic enough to actually make it scifi when they're interested in writing fantastical stories, they'll just use some technobabble an stock tropes to dress it up with a future-y coat of paint but it'll be a magical story.
I mean that's what Star Wars and the entire genre of science fantasy is. Worldbuilders that like the esthetic usually associated with scifi but would still prefer to write a fantasy story.

What does this even mean? The fact you have people who can use magic would mean it's being exploited in some way that is learnable and repeatable unless you're going to go with some bullshit about bloodlines and only a few people actually having the power (i.e. god beings or what not)

At the "science" part.

It's true that the farther back you go the less defined the future and the nature of the universe is but I think science is something different from just accepted reality.
Scifi is written by first establishing the rules and then extrapolating from that, fantasy is written by establishing a story and then building the rules to fit that. Since there exists fantasy written like scifi, just with made-up rules, user wants to know if we could write scifi like fantasy.

>If magic has rules that can be explored in scientific ways, can there be sci-fi settings based on fantasy setting?
Actually yes.
As several user have tried to allude to, the basis of "Science" Fiction is exploring how a hypothetical innovation or change with affect society.
Since this innovation or change is hypothetical to begin with, it could very easily be "Magic," whether it's just mystifyingly advanced Science or a truly arcane force tapped into via creative application of Heisenberg Compensators.

When shit can be explained by Science and shit

Not so sure theres a line there. For sure an inbetween where a setting could be considered both. Pokemon is a pretty good example of this. They have matter to energy transfer down to the point where it works fine even on living creatures repeatedly, but each of said creatures are super natural to say the least.

I consider the new Stephenson's book "The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O." to be this. Magic existed, witches (bloodline-based) can be taught to use it. Rise of technology stopped magic, but it can still be used inside a special device, through careful application of quantum physics. This device and an immortal witch is then used to travel back in time. Then a lot of plotting, bureaucracy and witchery happens.

When the ratio between swordfighting/shooting tips from 50/50 to 49/51 or higher for shooting

Underrated post

Fantasy = no technobabble
Sci-fi = technobabble
Science-Fantasy = no technobabble, but set in space

>glad you could make it, Aman'thul

>Star Wars isn't sci-fi

Star Wars is firmly science-fantasy.

one of my favorite sci fi books starts with a chapter on how humans just got teleportation powers in the 24th millennium, and goes from there