Mixing Sci-Fi with Fantasy, should it ever be done? can it be done right? know of any examples?

mixing Sci-Fi with Fantasy, should it ever be done? can it be done right? know of any examples?

Star Wars

Endless Legend

John Carter of Mars.

Actually for that matter most science fiction from the 1960s and before tends to have a fantasy veneer; and a lot of fantasy has a science fiction veneer. The two genres weren't fully distinct from one another until around the time of the Moon landings.

Bionicle

Yerp

No. It's far too much used as a "plot twist" that everyone sees coming. It robs sci-fi of its best qualities, and fantasy of its best qualities, and then mashes them together. What do you expect is going to happen?

Star Wars is Science Fiction, not Science Fantasy. The technology in Star Wars is not run on magic, and science fiction does not imply that it cannot have supernatural elements like The Force.

dude, you could at least try to educate yourself about science-fantasy before posting here? i mean, com'on, you can do better!

Star Wars is Science Fantasy because it's a fantasy story in space. It's about a young warrior being trained by wizards to defeat an evil empire, because it's his Destiny™. The spaceships and blasters are just set dressing. Science fiction is speculative fiction about what would happen if X technology was real.

if space wizards shooting fireballs from a flying saucer at powered armored sapce marines isnt "right" then i dont know what you want

By your logic, ASoIaF is an accurate portrayal of 12th century Europe.

/thread

Star Wars is literally about an evil space wizard and his dark knight controlling an evil empire that rules the universe, being taken down by a farm boy turned good wizard, his roguish friend with a non-human companion, and an orphaned princess.

It's fantasy as fuck.

>can it be done right? know of any examples?

OP said examples of it done right.

I don't subscribe to your autistic genre separation in the first place, but no. There are already clear cut science fantasy settings; Spelljammer, Endless Legend, and so on. Star Wars is not one of them.

>the story is like a traditional fantasy story! That means its fantasy!

No. That just means that's the story. I never said Star Wars was realistic or grounded or anything like that. It's an Opera. A Space Opera.

What does the science in Star Wars run on? Does it run on magic? No. It is not a Science Fantasy world. The Force may be a mystery and based on spirituality, but that doesn't make it fantasy. The primary story of the setting does not matter, that doesn't change how the settings actual mechanics work. It is not Science Fantasy.

I know all of you are very proud of how smart you think you are, how well you understand tropes and want to "subvert" them and show how Star Wars is ACKSHUALLY a fantasy story, but that garbage isn't going to fly around here. Everything thinks of Star Wars as Science Fiction. Everyone writes Star Wars as Science Fiction. It's not going to change, stop being autistic pendants. Even if you were right you'd still be annoying, but you aren't even right. You're flat out wrong on every account.

>SW
>40k
>Shadow Run
>countless anime/vidya
Yeah obviously they mix

Wildstar was good too.

>What does the science in Star Wars run on?
They never say in the movies because its not relevant to the story.

Are you saying its only fantasy if instead of rocket fuel space ships are powered by magic crystals? That's a super spergy hill to die on.

>The Force may be a mystery and based on spirituality, but that doesn't make it fantasy.
The Force actually isn't a mystery, we know exactly what it is, its the presence of life that binds and connects living things on a metaphysical level. We know what it can do to affect the physical universe, from boosting the physical abilities of its users, to literally, violently creating electricity to torture people, to the subtle quirk of misdirecting people's attention. It's a magic system like any other found in a fantasy work, and it underscores the entire universe and is a vital element of the story as a whole.

Star Wars is a fantasy, a fairy tale that spends more time discussing its make believe magic system and how that effects the plot than just about any other story element.

All of my fantasy settings exist within a larger, more sci-fi galaxy.

Sometimes
Rarely
Star Wars

Star Wars is actually Space Wuxia, if you don't know what that is then don't bother replying.

World of Darkness sometimes

Even then it was a gradual separation.

There was still a faiiirly regular mixing of them them even into the early 80s (late 70s for sure) in comics, rpgs and the like.

>He thinks SW is not science fantasy

nigga do you even read books?

star wars has next to no science....

Good fiction doesn't make a distinction between sci-fi, fantasy, and horror.

Lord of Light is a sci-fi novel that uses story elements from mythology.

Creatures of Light and Darkness is a mythological novel that uses story elements from sci-fi.

Bas-Lag is a fantasy trilogy where the existence of magic and weird creatures doesn't preclude scientific understanding or industrialization.

Book of the New Sun is a sci-fi novel where the protagonist is unable to understand advanced technology outside of religious allegory.

Even Lovecraft could be considered to be a mix of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror.

I'd also look into the stuff that came out of the "New Weird" boom in the 90s/early 200s.

Magic the Gathering is MagePunk.

Did "Science Fantasy" exist as a term before the solid Scifi/Fantasy split? Or was it a term that came into being to describe the older combined works and anything new that still followed that model?

Also an interesting thing, there is a fairly good case for Star Trek to be considered Science Fantasy with all the impossible and magical things that go on, both in regards to some of the technology and the powers of some of the entities encountered.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Do you like any final fantasy after the first?

It came well after,

Anime examples:

Outlaw Star
Escaflowne
Wolf's Rain

... pretty much anything Dragon Ball related.

Thought so but wasn't sure.

Makes it easier to find the stuff these days I guess, but does sort of hide the fact that Scifi and Fantasy are part of a sliding scale rather than separate things.

Most of the major comic book universes have both.

With super technology, aliens, gods, monsters and magicians all running around.

Star Wars is fantasy because it's a fantasy story.

>but that garbage isn't going to fly around here.

...where's "here"? Because it's certainly not Veeky Forums.

>Everyone writes Star Wars as Science Fiction

The last time I read any kind of science in Star Wars was in the novel "Vector Prime", where they technobabbled a way to make an ice planet explode. And even then the science involved in it seemed pretty dubious at best.

>What does the science in Star Wars run on? Does it run on magic? No.

It doesn't have to. The science involved in forging swords and plate armor in Middle-Earth doesn't run on magic, but I defy you to tell me that The Lord of the Rings isn't a fantasy because of this.

What do you think science fiction is? Because it's usually taken to mean speculative fiction that envisions what things would be like if certain technologies were real. Star Wars has none of that. The technology involved is basically irrelevant to the story.

I mean, for fuck sake, literally the first thing we see on the screen after the company logos are "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away", something which Lucas has TOLD US is meant to be analogous to "once upon a time in a far away land".

Judge Dredd is mostly apocalyptic scifi...but then there are the psychic powers, magic, demons, ghosts and all sorts of weird fantastical shit.

Sure. I want to run a campaign in this setting some day. It's got literally something for every one of my regular gaming group to enjoy.

Nice "source" retard

I love that you bring up all these excellent books, but I feel the need to point out part of the point of LORD OF LIGHT is that you're never entirely sure what the Buddha nature of Sam is, or whether that's even relevant at all.

I think science fantasy is a term that was invented pretty much to describe Star Wars. It comes well after the sci-fi/fantasy split, and mostly exists to reconcile the fact that Star Wars fits far more comfortably into fantasy than sci-fi, yet has lasers and spaceships and so "can't" be fantasy by the common mode of thinking (even though that's entirely irrelevant to fantasy...or sci-fi for that matter. There's no lasers or spaceships in I, Robot).

> there is a fairly good case for Star Trek to be considered Science Fantasy

On an individual episode basis, sure, but I think any Trek series as a whole fits fairly comfortably into science fiction, since a large portion of it is based around the idea of portraying what Humanity would be like with FTL travel, transporters, and attendant technologies.

This would be particularly true of the Original Series, actually, although TOS exists right at the edge of the firm split between sci-fi and fantasy and so was comfortable with including more fantastical elements (Apollo, Jack the Ripper) as long as they could be couched in pseudo-scientific terms (both, it turns out, were just aliens).

MECHADRAGONS!

I have never been able to get into Saga and still don't understand what it is people see in it.
To me, it seem like just a poor man's Incal.

Good game, shame its such a pain to emulate

>Good fiction doesn't make a distinction
No, that's Weird fiction.

I'd say a lot of the old-school Kirby stuff like the New Gods is a successful blend of sci-fi and fantasy.

On the other hand most of the mixing in contemporary comics comes more from layers of continuity and too-many-cooks than authorial intent.

Actually Star Trek as a whole shows the sliding scale that runs between Scifi and Fantasy.

As you say episode by episode there are a lot (even in the later shows) which have a pretty solid mix.

Taking Series as a whole TOS is reasonably mixed with the later ones being less so but still containing the occasional fantastical elements.

Oh then you have DS9 which most remember for the Dominion War, but also had that rather important side plot with the whole Prophet deal which was fantasy as fuck.

I guess at one end of the scale is super hard Scifi with all roots in theoretical science, while at the opposite you have "pure" Fantasy low technology (medieval or earlier) and high magic.

Very true, but it'll take a positive continuity mistake as a win even if the current creators almost never mix the elements in their stories.

Add UQ Holder/Nanoha/late Negima to those. And Witch Hunter Robin.

I wouldn't call it "done right" by any means but WoW has basically been sciencd fantasy for a while now. The latest patch involved using a space ship powered by holy energy to travel to another world to kill demons on it using holy mech suits and teleport beacons.

I think that was a Spelljammer module. Or it's what happens when someone at Blizzard realizes this Warhammer 40k thing is kinda popular.

Well, lets see...

Half of what's written by Zelazny, the Phaze/Proton of the Apprentice Adept series as well as the Tarot series by Piers Anthony, Pern series by McCaffery, Just about anything Burroughs wrote concerning John Carter, the Witch World series by Andre Norton, and on and on and on and on.....

The real question is can YOU do it well. And the only answer is the one you come up with.

In terms of the sliding scale, I think I'd actually put Enterprise as the "hardest" of the Star Trek series. It had the least number of truly weird, "magic" things happening. Organians did show up once, but almost entirely in an observer role, and amusingly the two Organians are specifically conducting a scientific experiment on the crew of the NX-01. Enterprise was, as well, more than any other series (excepting TOS, probably) supposed to be based on the idea of showing what OUR world would be like if such-and-such technologies existed.

At the other end, Deep Space 9 is probably the most fantastical, for the reasons you pointed out.

The other three lie somewhere in the middle. If I had to put down a scale, it'd be:

ENT TOS TNG VOY DS9

I'm actually not sure exactly where to put VOY compared to TNG, but then I remembered that VOY showed the Klingon Afterlife once and didn't really do too much to discourage our thinking that it was the literal afterlife. Then again there was another episode where Neelix died and DIDN'T go to any kind of afterlife, as a rather important plot point. But that might just be because no god wanted Neelix.

Eh, I'm not saying it's High Art, I just enjoy the colorful sexy characters and punchy pacing.

And I think it's a nice example of "epic space fantasy with elves, robots, etc." that doesn't feel like a forced mash-up of 2 genres.

Incal is great.

If anything, the Neelix situation is evidence that there is some judging being rather than an impartial situation.

>Hey, so your dishonor means you and your mother are going to Klingon hell.
>YOU Hedgehog? No, Eternal Torment would be too cruel on hell. You don't get anything.

The Temporal Cold war honestly puts ENT over TOS for me in softness. TOS had weird stuff but it didn't have an entire time travel metaplot running through the series.

It used to be called Weird Fiction

Artemis Fowl, for the first 5 books desu
still want to fuck Holly

Seconded.

>I don't subscribe to your autistic genre separation in the first place, but no. There are already clear cut science fantasy settings; Spelljammer, Endless Legend, and so on. Star Wars is not one of them.
damn, OP, you could have stopped there but you had to rant on. now all that's left to do in this thread is to mock and troll you. why did you had to go there? is it for the (you)s? it's for the (you)s, right? damn, son, i am disappoint.

Pern

I guess they all fall into Speculative Fiction at the end of the day.

Meh. The better question is why magical civilizations wouldn't reach with the stars with the rest of them. It's a vast universe out there.

too much to list user

old school Fantasy and Sci-Fi didn't care about mixing

like said

I dunno, the Temporal Cold War is if anything a fairly realistic look - for a certain degree of realism, of course - at what would happen with the proliferation of reliable time travel among competing factions that don't agree with each other as to the course that history should take.

I liked how Final Fantasy VII and VIII did it.

Yes, it can be done.
It was in fact what the primary method of fantasy and science fiction was back in the flash gordon days.

Sure, just don't do that cliche shit of "it was aliens all along!" Take a fantasy world, and move it into the future, after technology and magic have both advanced to sci-fi levels

Spelljammer is just straight up fantasy. It does not endeavor to simulate science fiction esthetics, which is what science fantasy like starwars does.

Consider novels in Jack Vance's Dying Earth setting. They established concepts that later on became staples in D&D fantasy, and don't hide that they're set in the far, far future Earth.

No. "Science fantasy" is just fantasy with chrome plating. You could replace Star Wars' blasters with magic missiles or crossbows and still end up with the same plot. Same goes with FTL and magical teleportation, or miniaturized reactors standing in for power crystals. The distinction between the "science fantasy" and fantasy is arbitrary, and based only on aesthetics. Real science fiction doesn't ignore the constraints of physics, but rather works within them. If anything, it requires more imagination than fantasy, since it requires problem-solving abilities rather than mere speculation.

For example, I've been working on an Earth vs. Mars setting for Ops and Tactics,
although it could work with other systems. Mars is difficult to colonize, no matter what Elon Musk says. There's travel/communication delays, an environment that is hostile to all life save the toughest extremophiles (and even that's a stretch), and an awkward legal status (space law is a bitch right now). Its inhabitants would have to be smart, tough, and independent just to survive. Imagine the sort of tension with the comparative paradise of Earth and its inhabitants that would cause. That's the seeds of a cold war plot right there, no "magic" required.

>Star Wars is Science Fantasy because it's a fantasy story in space
So the prequels are science fiction then?

Why do do many people here mistake science fiction for fantasy? You do know that the fiction part in scifi means fiction right? You're arguing about science faction.

>mixing Sci-Fi with Fantasy, should it ever be done? can it be done right? know of any examples?
Fading Suns

Nah. It should ALWAYS be done.

A man of wealth and taste

This.

Soft sci-fi? Sure.
Star Wars was pretty good.

>but that garbage isn't going to fly around here
It literally has space wizards.

Old school D&D

I find this to be one of the most interesting things about old school D&D, and it goes beyond token sci-fi elements.

D&D is treated as "generic fantasy" when it's fundamentally non-traditional. Fantasy is typically idealist, while D&D is as hardcore materialist as a narrative medium can be. Life and death are determined by hard numbers and arbitrary dice rolls with a total disregard for narrative convention.

What's most ironic is the trend of games claiming to move away from D&D's "generic" fantasy while adding elements like fate or narrative points, which change a story about outsiders risking their lives to do dirty work to knights riding on horseback slaying monsters.

>Does it run on magic?
Yes. The Force you dumb fuck.

Brandon Sanderson might write up some good stuff, based on the way he's going. It's already there with the short story Sixth of Dusk.

It's not like new school cares about it either. Most D&D settings have some sci-fi stuff, WoW has tons of it and I don't think I even need to mention Elder Scrolls.

In fact fantaay settings that don't have any sci-fi are the rare ones. Middle Earth is the only one that comes to mind. GoT might be another, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be sci-fi in the end as it has that "realistic" take on things which is typical for sci-fi that masquerades as fantasy.

That said there's a huge difference between mixing fantasy with sci-fi and science fantasy. WoW, Barrier Peaks, Elder Scrolls or Spelljammer are obviously still high fantasy despite having sci-fi elements. Star Wars and 40k on the otherhand are examples of science fantasy which is more close to sci-fi than fantasy.

No, it didn't exist. Back then these things we're just called pulp or weird fiction. There was no real distinction between sci-fi and fantasy at all. Also fantasy back then (like Conan) was quite different from modern fantasy that was derived from LoTR. Science fantasy as a term however is newer than the splitting which happened when pulp age ended. I'm not really sure who coined it and when, but it seems to have appeared in 80-90s and was originally used to solely describe Star Wars because of the force, blatant ignorance of physics and technology that makes no sense.

Problem with that term is that it was coined by pretentious elitists who thought that sci-fi was just pulp garbage and wanted new genre name for their sci-fi because they thought it was high literature.

Personally, I'd prefer if we'd just stick with hard sci-fi, soft sci-fi and fantasy. Things like science fantasy, urban fantasy, whateverpunk are really unnecessary and remind me of similarly retarded metal or electronic music genres.

New Sun is kind of weird that way. While Severian certainly doesn't understand much of the advanced technology around him there absolutely is supernatural forces at play behind the scenes.

Wolfe subverts the 'magic is just sufficiently advanced technology' convention by having the sufficiently advanced tech being simply a tool employed by entities such as the Outsider.

Can't go into too much more detail without spoiling the plot but it is well worth the read/reread/third time reading.

Get back to /sffg/ with that "you need to read Wolfe 5 times to really get it" shit. Most people don't have time for that. I had enough fun reading long sun once thank you very much.

I meant New Sun.
Long sun has some nice moments relevant to the thread, but I've only read the first part as of now.

The sci-fi element is a little bit of a spoiler, but the Second Apocalypse series is probably one of the best and most cerebral fantasy sagas out there and is definitely a successful implementation of the genre combo.

Ironically they're somewhat more sci-fi than originals, but just because they have themes of cloning and AI rebellion.

Holy shit, I got quads and I was one digit away from godhood, and from there 1 number away from becoming the devil himself...

Actually, in the old EU, there is a race of T. rex/Chinese Dragons that literally rip out your soul to power their tech.

Endless Legend, Star Wars, John Carter of Mars, Destiny.

Technology in Star Wars is like 90% fantasy bullshit that ignores laws of physics, so it could be magic as well. There is also the fact that the setting is completely fictional having no Earth nor Milky Way.

But Endless Legend is just plain sci-fi from the very start, that's how thin the veneer of "fantasy" is. If you play as any of the sci-fi factions, the fantasy part doesn't even exists in the first place.

How would mermaids move on land in a science fantasy setting? Assuming they can breathe water and air, what would the best way of making this sea based race venture out into the stars?

>and AI rebellion
That's a consequence of Lucas' shit writing. The Droid army serve biological masters from beginning to end, there was never an AI uprising, it was just poorly conveyed who exactly the separatists actually were.

Aurellian Rantet is truly a divine being