I love that The Road is first. That book is good but BLEAK.

I love that The Road is first. That book is good but BLEAK.

I loved it but am wondering if I want to read it again. Oh! Maybe I'll just watch the movie. I never did get around to seeing it.

I'm glad we are reading the Stand. I never have and have been wanting to. It's like 1400 pages long, though, so I should probably start it soon!

Or could it be both simultaneously?

Yes, I think so.

I tend to think that fantasy is set in a world that never has been like our own, while science fiction springs (or sprang, sometime in the past) from our own human society, but even that's not true. I've read books I'd consider science fiction that don't have a single human character and do have things we'd consider to be magic, but the characters in the book don't see them as magical and approach them as if they are normal aspects of their existence and/or technology. I think it's all about style.

Hard science fiction explains. The Archangel trilogy by Sharon Shinn is an interesting series to try to explain what I mean. The first book is a work of fantasy - there is a land with human (or human-like creatures) as well as angels, essentially super-strong humans with wings, who can fly in to the air and sing beautiful songs to make things happen - they can change the weather, or bring down food, or even summon lighting. The entire thing is treated mystically - there's no explanation beyond saying it's all God's (the call him Jovah) divine will that the angels have this power. The angels don't understand it, the humans don't understand it, it just is.

The second book crosses over into science fiction near the end, when a character begins to work on the reasons behind it - give explanation for the powers. The explanation given is not scientific or believable according to modern science, but since it is an explanation it, in my opinion, becomes SF. There happens to be space travel involved, which is a trope that certainly puts things squarely in the science fiction camp, but I don't think the space travel would be necessary. I think the explanation is enough. Maybe we would call it "hard fantasy," but I really don't think that exists - you might have a hard SF tale with fantasy tropes, but it's still hard SF. The more detailed and consistent the explanation, the harder it is.

A lot of "urban fantasy" is, in my opinion, really sci-fi. Feed is an excellent example: sure, zombies, but they're explained. Any vampire book that explains vampirism as a weird virus or parasite is hard sci-fi. The more it sticks to its explanation and uses that explanation to drive the story, the harder it is. If the evil vampires are defeated by exploiting some aspect of their virus explanation, then the story is harder than if the explanation is just thrown in on the third page and then ignored, but if the explanation exists at all I think it becomes SF.

If Lord of the Rings opened with "A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far away..." then explained Gandalf's magic as a normal trait of the Wizard species, then it would be sci-fi, and no less believable than Star Wars.

Hmm, does that fact that Tolkien does explain Gandalf's magic as a normal trait of the Wizard species in the backpages mean that LotR is really science fiction?

I was going to say, sumi. Gandalf's a Maia. It's totally a normal trait of his species. What were you thinking of it as? Just like elfy things are normal traits of them being elves, etc. I never got the impression they didn't understand it, just that we don't.

What would Harry Potter have to do in order to be hard sci fi (in my head, that's totally impossible, but I'm curious about your filing system)? It's clearly a studiable discipline where you can create new magic results based on established and tested principles. There are rules, and classes, and labwork.

I seem to be seeing a lot of overlap in these sorts of discussion between what we don't understand (a whole lot) and what the characters understand.

I understand that I have a device that can conjure up my sister's face if I follow the right incantation. It's just it's Skype, not a Tarantir. And I don't know that much about the specifics of how Skype works, although I assume it's a combination of functionality I kinda understand. Then again, my scientist PhD mother just went "If you say so" when I tried to explain you can't translate the information contained in a spherical representation of earth into a 2D one, so map projections are as magic to her, despite almost an hour of heated demonstrations and analogies from me.

She does magic, though. She splices genes. I ain't never going to understand that shit. Although double helices are darned pretty.

I misread and thought you said Gandalf was mafia. I knew "I am Gandalf the White!" was kickass, but I didn't think it was gangsta!

Again I think precise definitions based on content don't work for this. Hard science fiction is a style. If not why is time travel usually hard sf but ghost normally fantasy horror? Style. (And before jumping in with counterexamples, please note the use of the word "usually".) Same thing about my earlier example of inherent abilities vs. learned. Plenty of counterexamples, but former is more common in fantasy, the latter in hard SciFi.

Unrelated: The westeros.org founders discuss the Winds of Winter chapter that GRRM released.

This is why there used to be a category called "Science Fantasy" which was all about the trappings of Science Fiction with non-scientific elements galore. So Star Wars would've landed in that category.

Also, there used to be a big strain of Fantasy written as sort of Alternative Science of which the Sprague De Camp/Fletcher Pratt Harold Shea stories were most famous. In these stories they use "symbolic logic" to enter mythic realms and have to figure out the rules of magic there which usually conform to some variation of Frazer's Sympathetic Magic.

This kind of sums it up:

Much of the series' attraction stems from the interaction of the psychologists' logical, rationalistic viewpoints with the wildly counterintuitive physics of the worlds they visit. Their attitudes provide something of a decontructionist look at the basic rationales of these worlds, hitherto unexamined either by their inhabitants or even their original creators. Essentially, they allow the reader to view these worlds from a fresh viewpoint.

"Reviewing the 1950 edition of The Castle of Iron, Boucher and McComas described the series as "a high point in the application of sternest intellectual logic to screwball fantasy."

Maybe the difference is exactly what you point out - the gap between what we understand and what the characters understand. To be "hard" anything, I think at least some understanding needs to be imparted to the reader.

The difference between science fiction and fantasy without the "hard' part is a more difficult question, honestly, which is why I actually prefer SF as in "speculative fiction" to stand for both. Obviously there are particular sub-genres that we put in one category or another; high fantasy, space opera, etc. I don't think those two are so different, stylistically - they're usually adventure stories, with different settings. But the settings mean we categorize them as fantasy and sci-fi respectively, which, fine. But Star Wars, for example, isn't hard anything, because it explains nothing and doesn't care. It became a bit harder with the midichlorians, but still left plenty of non-hardness to spare. But if you have magic or dragons or sword-and-sorcery, you have to be harder in order to qualify as sci-fi, in my mind.

For Harry Potter to be harder, and therefore more science-fiction-like, it would have to explain, to the reader, how magic works. Not what words you say to make kill somebody, but what happens in the brain of the wizard, the wand, the air between them. The explanation could be pretty half-assed (an organ near the liver serves to absorb energy from the warm air and focuses those energies toward the subject by way of electromagnetic waves, causing changes in their molecular structure) - I'd still probably call that fantasy, but it's a start.

To make it really cross over into science fiction, the explanation would have to be plausible and obey the fundamental laws of physics - conservation of energy and matter, etc, or at least offer a halfway believable attempt to explain why those laws are broken. If no such plausible explanation exists in modern science, a little hand-waving (positronic brains!) is absolutely allowed, and most science fiction includes some. The less handwavium, and the more the book cares that the reader believe the explanation, the harder it is. It would be tough to get HP to this point, since so much of the magic clearly break the laws of conservation of energy, momentum, and matter, not to mention thermodynamics.

To be really hard science fiction, the explanations need to be clearly based in scientific theory at the time of writing, and needs to be well-researched as well (quantum physics gives hard science fiction writers leeway to do lots of seemingly impossible things like communication that breaks the speed of light, but if that ever gets proven impossible they'll have to stop using it). Some theoretical extrapolation is allowed, but nothing that contradicts the world as science knows it.

But honestly, if you change Harry Potter to care about explaining how the magic works, you have a different book. You've changed the style. And that style is the key thing. I'd be willing to bet there are fanfics out there, probably starring Hermione or Snape (who is essentially a chemist, after all), that absolutely cross that line, and turn the HP universe into one closer to a SF universe.

But it's not enough that the universe is explained somewhere - if Tolkien wrote a treatise on magic and all of it's scientific backing, that doesn't make LOTR science fiction, because that explanation is not included in LOTR or used as part of the story. It's not even alluded to.