UPDATING OCCASIONALLY (FOR NOW)

3 thoughts on “543 – Cradles And Graves”

  1. Keith

    Oh lordy, they really are a great couple…though, I suggest adopting.

  2. Anonymous

    Consequences be damned, because doing nothing might be worse.

  3. Tommyguada

    hi

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543 – Cradles And Graves
Posted on April 23, 2025 by Dawn

Chuck sez: "Never let a covert operation get in the way of a bad pun."

Science Fiction vs. Fantasy

Posted on January 30, 2019 by Clint

This is the kind of topic that probably deserves more than a little discussion, but seeing as this week has us in some distractions I’ll just start off for now with the thesis statement, so to speak, and then maybe write some more next week.

The topic itself burbled up due to Dawn and I having a conversation after she was remembering how bookstores often lumped Science Fiction and Fantasy works into the same section. They might still do this, though there are fewer and fewer bookstores still around to check. Her declaration that such was fine because “they’re basically the same thing!” got yours truly in a huffy, refutative state. Not so! cries I, with all the weight of my absolutely no degrees in literature behind the argument.

But here’s my take: lumping SF and Fantasy together is lazy, but also is not simply a matter of sorting dragons and elves in one bin and spaceships and lasers in the other. Science Fiction versus Fantasy is not about the props and settings, but about how concerned a given author is about the technical details of their world and the impact any alterations (from what we in our world are used to) might have on how people live.

By this metric, I maintain Star Wars is pure fantasy despite its spaceships and lasers because it really has no time or interest in explaining how hyperdrives work; all you need to know is that the Millenium Falcon’s hyperdrive is not currently working. Oh, I know there are technical manuals out there that have been published in the 40+ years since the movie’s release, but I feel like they are willfully missing the point. Star Wars is, excuse the expression, light-years removed from something like the original novel of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, where for better or worse a great deal of time is spent detailing how a submarine might function and how its existence impacts society. Eventually there is a giant squid attack, but it’s hardly the central focus of the story.

Now there’s something to be said for tendencies. Stories with what we’d consider possible future technology tend to explain that tech more often, and on a deeper level, than stories with wizards and dragons, even if Clarke’s Third Law still has a ring of truth to it. ESP tends to get more time devoted to its workings than magic crystal scrying, even if they functionally do the same thing. Ask yourselves, though… what was the last setting you read that really tried to make a study of how magic being real might have impacted Earth’s history? I mean without some amount of handwaving I would find that a herculean task, likely beyond my scope of confidence and knowledge to tackle. Hell, I remember when I was going to try to write about a race of intelligent cephalopods that evolved underwater and got hung up pretty darn early on the tech tree due to the fact you can’t really have fire. Think about how much of human technology depends on being able to easily produce and harness fire. And sure, I could posit some phlebotinum substance like “phosphire” which is as easily observed, used, and reproduced by octopus-folk as fire was for us, but the more you’re trying to lean into Science Fiction the more that feels a bit like cheating.

Well, I didn’t say it was a very concise thesis, but there it is. Change my mind.