Should Fantasy and Sci/Fi really intertwine?

[Parson]

Originally Posted by Cloud

as long as the ideas and presentation hold together.

Cloud, I think you've put your finger on the problem for me. I have a much harder time having the ideas hang together for me in Fantasy than I do in SF. Even the "Fantasy" SF seems to have more going for it for me than straight Fantasy. For example, I had a very hard time with the Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings because I just couldn't get over the setting "Middle Earth!" As if there were a possibility of a whole other word suspended between earth and the molten core!! It is much easier to suspend belief on "FTL" travel or esoteric Physics. We all know there are things we don't know there so belief becomes far less of a stretch.

[RyFrye]

Originally Posted by Parson

Cloud, I think you've put your finger on the problem for me. I have a much harder time having the ideas hang together for me in Fantasy than I do in SF. Even the "Fantasy" SF seems to have more going for it for me than straight Fantasy. For example, I had a very hard time with the Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings because I just couldn't get over the setting "Middle Earth!" As if there were a possibility of a whole other word suspended between earth and the molten core!! It is much easier to suspend belief on "FTL" travel or esoteric Physics. We all know there are things we don't know there so belief becomes far less of a stretch.

Correct me if I am wrong...but...I think "middle earth" isn't a physical locale, it's a time in history...even in LTR. Though LTR added an alternate history with mythical creatures.

[Parson]

I don't know if "Middle Earth" were a "historical epoc" or not. That would make more sense, but I never picked up on that if it were true. It would make more sense than a physical location.

[sci-fi girl]

Tolkien said that Middle Earth is our Earth but in a fictional period of the past. It was a wide continent at the east of the other continent Aman, also called the Immortal Lands, and both had been separated by Belegaer, the Great Sea. The Immortals Lands became inaccessible after Numenor's fall. Middle Earth was mortals' land and over the centuries, it became Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.

[j. d. worthington]

And the term itself comes from Middle English, which took it from Norse mythology's Midgard:

Midgard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And, yes, it was (like Howard's Hyborian Age) set in prehistory. "Middle-earth" also refers to it being the "mid-realm" between the unknown East and the "Undying Lands" of the Valar.

[Parson]

There sure are a lot of bright people here with phenomenal memory.