Based on this:

Quote from: Mr. AnalyticalI think it's because gamers are hooked on shit fantasy.

Fantasy is all about familiarity and escapism and not asking oneself too many difficult questions.  There's so little variation between fantasy settings and novels because fantasy fans get confused, angry and violent if they have to encounter any new settings.

But, without disturbing or sidelining that thread...

This seems to be a broad condemnation on all fantasy, on the face of it. Which, honestly, kind of irritates me because I tend to be a fantasy gamer (even though I play other games when possible). OTOH, since I'd long ago begun to assume that Fantasy doesn't have anything to do with swords + magic or what have you, but really a certain kind of setting convention, it made me wonder.

I don't know Mr. Analyticals opinion regarding fantasy being catagorically shit, or if he's just asserting that the popular fantasy is simply shitty. In the SciFi thread, the statement was thrown out there unchallanged, and I'm not particularly interested in doing so myself. What I've thought is, specifically, that Fantasy is not catagorically shit. (Shit being something, I assume, that does not ask any questions or provoke any thought in the reader. It's a charged word, but I didn't come up with it.)

I assert that fantasy can ask questions of readers. I don't know what hard scifi is asking of readers, in particular, but I feel that it can do the same thing. Fantasy can easily prod readers about social situations and can develop a sensical internal logic. I assume that the hard scifi crowd are composed of realists, and prefer something like that.

Disagree? (Agree?) How? Why?

Oh, as it stands...

QuoteThe problem is that these kinds of books only just stray over the line from SF to fantasy. They're arguably more Sf than fantasy anyway despite including magic. Mainstream fantasy is all about elves and prophecies and shit like that.

I'm interested. You seem to be finding examples of Fantasy and taking some 'smart' examples and claiming them for Sci-Fi. Maybe I just don't get it - in fact, I'm sure you've got a really good rational for it, but I'm curious to see it defended or reasoned out.

You could start with Ursula Le Guin:

QuoteThe fantasy writer must "believe in" the world she is creating, not in the sense of confusing it in any way with the actual bodily world, but in the sense of giving absolute credence to the work of the imagination — dwelling in it while writing, and trusting it to reveal itself.

I believe that as soon as wishful thinking or a conscious political or didactic purpose intrude on that credence, they deform it and the story loses plausibility. Wishful thinking gives us the feeble kind of fantasy where everything is easy, and you never have to feed or water or look after the horse you rode all day. An ideological purpose produces a sermon, or satire (which is not fantasy, and has very different standards of plausibility, since it is a mirror held up to actual life).

Plausibility in Fantasy

QuoteIt's often said that science fiction is the modern mythology. In the case of the rare science-fictional creation with archetypal power, such as Shelley's Frankenstein, this becomes an arguable statement, but in general I think it's meaningless. Myth, legend, and folktale are ancestral to, not forms of, modern fiction. Elements of myth and legend may be used consciously or unconsciously by fiction-writers, but we don't write myths. The nearest we come to it is fantasy.

Fantasy is far more direct in its fictionality than either realism or science fiction. Its contract with the reader is a different one. There is no agreement to pretend that its story happened, might have happened, or might ever happen. Its invention is radical. With the informed consent of the reader, fantasy deliberately violates plausibility in the sense of congruence with the world outside the story. Only in lesser matters is realistic detail used to ground the story, to prevent the reader from getting an overload of the improbable. Behavior of human characters in fantasy generally meets conventional expectation; but the characters in fantasy may not be human, or may relate to nonhuman beings in unexpected ways. What constitutes plausibility in fantasy is the coherence of the story, its consistent self-reference.

The invention must not contradict itself. The "secondary creation," as Tolkien called it, must be entire and self-consistent. Imaginative authority and inner coherence are fantasy's chief means of obtaining its end, which is the reader's willing participation in an undisguised invention.

Fantasy is shamelessly fictive. Some people feel it's wicked to invent something God didn't think of. Others see it as a waste of time. And to others, fantasy is an exercise of what may be our most divine and certainly is our most human capacity, the imagination.

Plausibility Revisited

QuoteMy fiction, especially for kids and young adults, is often reviewed as if it existed in order to deliver a useful little sermon ("Growing up is tough but you can make it," that sort of thing). Does it ever occur to such reviewers that the meaning of the story might lie in the language itself, in the movement of the story as read, in an inexpressible sense of discovery, rather than a tidy bit of advice?

Readers—kids and adults—ask me about the message of one story or another. I want to say to them, "Your question isn't in the right language."

As a fiction writer, I don't speak message. I speak story. Sure, my story means something, but if you want to know what it means, you have to ask the question in terms appropriate to storytelling. Terms such as message are appropriate to expository writing, didactic writing, and sermons—different languages from fiction.

The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review.

A Message About Messages

I like the quotes, but I think it can be stated a little easier (simple).

S.F. - Grounded in science and fact
Fantasy - A disconnect between reality and the story

You have varying degrees of each and if you look at it on a line, Hard S.F. is to the way right and ... er...maybe the Fantasy that would be to the way left hasn't been fantasized about yet.    Another thing about Fantasy, maybe it has no limits, where Hard S.F. does.  Hmmmm.

I agree with your opening ideas.  I like both S.F. and Fantasy and enjoy Hard S.F. as well.  Just finished Songs of Distant Earths by Clark...great book.

The issue I have with the other thread is that Hard S.F. leaves 1 thing out (not all the time) and that is excitement.  I can get excited about a fight, a chase and a lot of things in a RPG.  But it is hard to get excited about a new discovery (wow...do you mean the gravity of this world allows trees to grow that tall...wow).  I'm being extreme, but you get my drift.  Hard S.F. is great, but that same sense of discovery and wonder doesn't translate as well into RPGs.  

As to people not thinking, that isn't new.  Most people don't want to.  Many don't know how (not something schools train you to do).  RPGs or books are for relaxation and when you have to think, only a select few enjoy thinking/debate.  Passive vs. Active.  I can sit, not think about my day and watch the game.  I can sit, not think about my day and debate my neighbor about The Allegory of The Cave.  Again, I'm being extreme, but some don't have the will, don't have the capacity and some don't want it.

Quote from: Thanatos02I assume that the hard scifi crowd are composed of realists, and prefer something like that.

Disagree? (Agree?) How? Why?

That's funny, because in my experience hard scifi fandom is largely composed of science wankers or military buffs who masturbate copiously to mindblowingly boring technical minutia while utterly missing the point of the few relatively good hard scifi authors (the legions of grotesquely bad/stupid hard scifi authors are writing to the chorus of course, and filling their writing with mentally-retarded militarism and techno/scientific obsessiveness).

In other words, most hard scifi fandom is composed of people who couldn't comprehend literature if literature sent Kofi Annan to negotiate with them.

Not that Fantasy fans are any better, they're worse.

The problem is that Fantasy and Sci-fi as a whole are NOT quality literature. They have their occasional champions, people who write stuff that is truly defining. But on the whole, the vast bulk of mass-produced dreck that fantasy and sci-fi novels largely consist of are no more intellectual than the vast bulk of Zane Grey westerns or Harlequin romances.

Its just that geeks like to pretend that somehow they are. Because far too many geeks like to imagine that they're smarter than everyone else, and want to be able to claim that without having to do any real work.

RPGPundit

Like SF, Fantasy novels suffer from an image problem at the publisher level, "The fans will read anything with fantasy on the cover and like it" (this is not helped by the WOTC line of Fantasy novels either) . So while not all fantasy is shit about 90% of it is.

My List of Good/Smart Fantasy Novels (YMMV):

The Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion (SP)
The Harry Potter Series (Yes I know its for kids, but its  good)
A Song of Ice and Fire

Yeah its that fucking short.

Authors that almost make the cut, but dropped the ball.

The Wheel of Time. (An interesting concept, but Jordan got lost in his own  
                            head)
The Shannara Series. (The author seems to be able to write, but preferrs to
                              rip off Tolkien)

"Fantasy is all about familiarity".

Well here's the deal. Hard SF in the matter of being technically correct as per current scientific about the hard sciences is all about familiarity. In fact what gets a SF, all of it, so meticulously scrutinized in this way is the modern nature of its setting and the similarity to what the reader sees everyday. What is familiar to the reader.

I think it's interesting that Robert Jordan, who is now on his ninth book in the series, is seen as one of the bad guys spinning a weak idea out ad nauseum but George Martin (whose Song of Ice and Fire is currently LONGER than Wheel of Time if you count the prequel books) is one of the good guys.

I think that's received wisdom based entirely upon marketting spin and trendiness and without any real difference of quality between the two authors.

I also think that it's complete hogwash that Martin has "done epic fantasy right".  Okay, the guy inspired himself from history in a few places but for all the "moral ambiguity" of a couple of the characters most of the characters are clearly goodies and baddies, some absurdly so ("Let me take a rest from making evil plans and torturing puppies in order to shag my sister... ah ah ah... I am Soooooo evil!").

I actually have more respect for Salvatore as a writer than I do for Martin because at least Drizzt novels aren't a thousand pages long and don't go anywhere.


Fantasy is, as I said in my blog, chewing gum for the eyes.  Romance novels for geeks.  You pick up your 1000 tome and it's pretty similar to everything else on your bookshelf but you read it anyway because there are a few tiny teeny differences... like elves with guns! or no elves or dwarves at all... wooooo... am I freaking you out yet?

Fantasy is all about the familiar, the safe, the routine.  It's about stock characters and plots, cliches (sorry... archetypes) and nobody needing to think too much about what they're reading.

The only decent fantasy is the stuff that goes out of its way to try not to be fantasy or to write fantasy from an ostensibly SF perspective.

Pundit's just talking absolute twaddle as usual.  It's a vision of SF that, I would say, stopped being remotely realistic in the 1960's, so that either means that Pundit's in his 50's at least or he's just being a troll.

Well, the familiar is often comfortable and it's very easy to point to the legions of fantasy books at the book store that really are truely dreadful because they're doing little but ripping off other peoples good (or at least passible) ideas and pandering.

That's the state of media, though. Most media is pandering. And if you think published scifi and fantasy is bad, you should (or shouldn't, actually) read some of the really bad stuff that gets written in the creative writing classes I'm in. Bad scifi, bad fantasy, really bad 'literature'.

So, le Guin says that a message makes a work preachy and that wishful thinking makes a work toothless. I'm willing to agree, for the most part, though her langauge is pretty bad, in my opinion.

Lit that has a 'message' gets pretty preachy, and that's irritating. (Sword of Truth, for example. Also, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress got surprisingly irritating surprisingly fast for me.)
It's possible for writing to have a message, or something, and not get preachy. But that's more difficult. That's why it's pretty much, by default, better writing.

I honestly don't think there's anything about science fiction that's inherantly better then fantasy as a genre. I do think that fantasy is glutted with poor writers that read Lord of the Rings or something with dragons in it in their youth, and now just crap out really awful novels though.

Quote from: blakkieWell here's the deal. Hard SF in the matter of being technically correct as per current scientific about the hard sciences is all about familiarity. In fact what gets a SF, all of it, so meticulously scrutinized in this way is the modern nature of its setting and the similarity to what the reader sees everyday. What is familiar to the reader.

  Hard SF is a subgenre of SF.  It isn't about being scientifically correct at all, it's about engaging directly with current scientific ideas through the medium of fiction.  If it was all about being technically correct then you wouldn't have ANY FTL in Hard SF and, in fact, it's pretty much 50/50.  Besides which, the founders of hard SF include people like Arthur C. Clarke and I doubt that black monoliths feature in astrophysics 101.  No... there's really no basis in fact for this characterisation at all.

  Though it does continue to amaze me how widespread this "Hard SF" concept is amongst gamers.  I really have no idea where it comes from other than perhaps the idea that all SFF is basically fantasy and that any SF that goes out of its way not to have psychic powers and swordfights is immediately labelled as hardcore physics-wank.

Quote from: Mr. AnalyticalPundit's just talking absolute twaddle as usual.  It's a vision of SF that, I would say, stopped being remotely realistic in the 1960's, so that either means that Pundit's in his 50's at least or he's just being a troll.

Hard SF went nowhere but down since the 60s.  The Second Wave movement (people like Le Guin, Zelazny, Philip K. Dick.. you know, all the hippies that hard SFers despise) took the last intellectual wind out of hard sci-fi's sails and used SF to actually tell stories that had a point to them again.  

Unfortunately, those dudes are all dead now, and SF in general is a massive shitdump of banality and technical-obsession.  I can't think of anyone who's writing SF today, either hard or soft, who's of any real worth. Stephenson was, but as far as I've heard he's not really doing SF as such anymore. Gibson's gone insane, everyone else is dead or utter drivel.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Mr. AnalyticalFantasy is all about the familiar, the safe, the routine.  It's about stock characters and plots, cliches (sorry... archetypes) and nobody needing to think too much about what they're reading.

Well, if that's how you define fantasy, then you're right by default, arn't you. How easy!

Quote from: Mr. AnalyticalThe only decent fantasy is the stuff that goes out of its way to try not to be fantasy or to write fantasy from an ostensibly SF perspective.

Better go ahead and make a clause that, shit, if there's actual good fantasy out there, it must be scifi instead.

Quote from: Mr. AnalyticalThough it does continue to amaze me how widespread this "Hard SF" concept is amongst gamers.  I really have no idea where it comes from other than perhaps the idea that all SFF is basically fantasy and that any SF that goes out of its way not to have psychic powers and swordfights is immediately labelled as hardcore physics-wank.

The origins of that particular bias just might have something to do with the long lines of physics-wankers lining up to blow their wad over the novels that do exactly that, those novels who's only redeeming faculty is the claim "We have painstakingly gone to the trouble of making sure that we don't do anything the least bit speculative, or therefore creative, in this novel! In fact, we've gone to such trouble about that, that our plot is shit, our characters pointless, the setting is duller than drywall... but hey, you won't see any evil Artificial Gravity machines here, and that's what matters!".

Fucking idiots.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditHard SF went nowhere but down since the 60s.  The Second Wave movement (people like Le Guin, Zelazny, Philip K. Dick.. you know, all the hippies that hard SFers despise) took the last intellectual wind out of hard sci-fi's sails and used SF to actually tell stories that had a point to them again.  

New Wave isn't the offspring of hard SF.  What you're talking about is the move from kind of Asimovian 50's style SF to the more literary New Wave authors (who, by the way aren't all dead... JG Ballard's one of the founding father of New Wave and he had a book out in October and M. John Harrison has recently re-emerged and has been producing pretty good and interesting stuff like Light and Nova Swing).

Literary SF (the dominant idiom of SF at the moment) is the clear descendant of New Wave.  Modern SF is all about literary technique, characterisation and confronting the Other.

Hard SF is a subgenre that flourished in the 90's but is actually quite rare, at the moment you'd be hard pressed to find proper hard SF writers beyond Stephen Baxter.

Interestingly, Blindsight, arguably the most interesting and rigorous piece of hard SF to have appeared in the last few years takes Hard SF and imports all the stuff about style and technique and characterisation that gives Literary SF and New Wave before it its intellectual punch.

Seriously, the only person I know that writes mil SF is Scalzi and even he's more complex than Slammer's Hammers in space.

You get SF writers who just want to tell stories with cyborgs and space ships and killing (Neal Asher) but they're not the critical or the commercial mainstream.

Quote from: RPGPunditThe origins of that particular bias just might have something to do with the long lines of physics-wankers lining up to blow their wad over the novels that do exactly that, those novels who's only redeeming faculty is the claim "We have painstakingly gone to the trouble of making sure that we don't do anything the least bit speculative, or therefore creative, in this novel! In fact, we've gone to such trouble about that, that our plot is shit, our characters pointless, the setting is duller than drywall... but hey, you won't see any evil Artificial Gravity machines here, and that's what matters!".

Fucking idiots.

  Again, that doesn't sound like any Hard SF I have ever read.  Even the uber rigorous Mundane SF people are all about speculation.  The idea is not to tell stories that are scientifically correct but to look at science journals and pick out interesting ideas and then engage with them in a fictional setting... to speculate as to what the future might be like if those theories were true.

  This is why lots of SF refers to itself as "Speculative Fiction".

  You're simply not talking about any real phenomenon that exists in the world.  You're like a tabloid ranting about schools banning "baa baa blacksheep" on the grounds of racism.  It's all in your head, neither SF writers nor SF fans nor SF critics say or do any of those things.