And are you seriously telling me that you gleaned this little gem of hilarity from what I wrote? Sure you weren't drunk-posting :p ? And anyway, what does plagiarism have to do with anything either I or GP was talking about o.O ?

[citation needed] and even if there was such a thing, it would be a ridiculously amusing category meant solely for housing the poor little works from either genre castoff by angry fanboys.

Well look, I'm not gonna be a fanboy defender of the thing :p but all I'm saying is that the rules (regardless of when they are made up) mostly hang together into a coherent whole (hence the claim of consistency). I can't think of a single book that lists all the rules of the universe at the beginning of the book - they all make things up as and when required. Some are simply more clever than others about disguising that fact. HP at least has a good cover story for slowly revealing things - there's a school and the kids are learning things as they go along - our POV as readers is that of a student at the school (so we get little to no access to the grown-up POVs for instance). As counterpoint, look at BSG - now there's a deus ex machina for you. Of course, saying that something is more consistent and fair than BSG doesn't mean much :p but it's the best I could come up with without putting way too much thought into it.

In other words, SF is simply the Fantasy story re-written from the point of view of a technologically savvy spectator. Fantasy is the same story written from the point of view of a medieval villager.

Fap fap fap ...

Excellent. Wish I hadn't spent all my mod points. I just wasted my entire evening explaining this at 6 different places on this page =)

I read somewhere that it's protected by a grandfather clause =) mostly because it would be a giant PITA to change genres every few years. Dunno if the person who wrote this was just being facetious to shut me up :p

As I explained in response to the same post, it is extremely easy to take SF (/fantasy) and write it as fantasy (/SF). That's all GP was going for - you took him too literally (unless I totally misinterpreted either of you :)).

Seems to me the major difference between the two points of view is the spectator's assumed level of knowledge. By spectator, I mean the imaginary person through whose eyes you're viewing the book's world. For instance, I would love to see LOTR re-written from the point of view of a savvy spectator who actually understood the details of the science behind all the magic :).

Again, a matter of opinion (so I actually agree with you in principle). Those who prefer more rigorous explanations go for SF, those who prefer less go for Fantasy. Here on /. you're bound to find more of the former (I for one don't assign any value judgments to this particular preference since we're talking about ENTERTAINMENT - where the whims of the ah... entertainee [sic] ought to be the only damn thing that matters). Of course, I would hope that this preference wouldn't carry over into the real world but as far as the type of fiction you read, it's a purely arbitrary preference.

I would have agreed with you two days ago, but then I stumbled across this piece of work by Orson Scott Card. Please check it out - you might think differently (just the "boundary 5" section from pages 20-25). Mind you, regardless of my change of heart over the principle, I fully agree with you about the practical matter of having to wade through the Fantasy stuff to get to my beloved SF ;-)

There was a sequel to Childhood's end???? o.O GIMME!!! Though I fully agree with the City and the Stars thing (or as I read it - "Against the fall of night"). Beautiful story, wistful flowing into freewheeling, enthusiastic. "Beyond the fall of night" was a farking joke (with its very own Ewok mascot :p). 2010 on the other hand, was more interesting for me than 2001 (and exactly the other way for the movies - the guy from Jaws is annoying).

Sounds like a synopsis of a particular book rather than a characterization of an entire genre :p.

Why not? Reversing your labels would imply that you're not comfortable with classifying Rambo as Fantasy, but there seems to be nothing wrong with that a priori.

I agree with your put-down of SyFy, but the above statement is baffling. Why the hell does it have to be one or the other? I want a good plot, several "wtf?" moments (a la Asimov, or even the Matrix to name a diverse few :p) AND (AND!AND!AND!) good special effects. The combination does exist and is less rare that people make it out to be. Also, as I progressed through more and more physics classes, I found greater numbers of "hard-SF" icons fall towards the "soft-SF" side, so the "bad science" criterion is really just a matter of relative knowledge levels. All I can reasonably ask for anymore is that the most obvious scientific principles not be violated and I can get on board with it.

Not true. I loathe most "serious" fantasy but the "anything goes" argument is absolutely fallacious. I would empathize with you about it being boring, but not this. I was once like you in holding to this sort of genre chauvinism, even the part about hard vs soft SF (I mean that kindly and I'm dead serious about that). Please (for the sake of your reading enjoyment), give this a read - just a few short pages (20-25) from "How to write science fiction & fantasy" By Orson Scott Card.

The following criticism is not so kindly. My apologies :)

"One and only one thing"? Are you just making this up as you go along? :p Sheesh ...

At the risk of sounding frivolous, Harry Potter is the closest I've seen anyone get to this particular ideal. Consistency is all I ask for from either SF or Fantasy. It's sadly rare in both genres.