[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by iansales

I wondered if anyone would bite :-)

Oh, now, surely you knew I would....

The term "science fantasy" has arisen (my personal theory here) due to readers, writers, commentators, etc. only using the term "science fiction" to refer to stories which embody clear scientific principles or technological extrapolation. So any fiction involving elements which couldn't be rigorously explained - like Star Wars, for example - must be "science fantasy".

Well, the examples I saw when younger came a long time before the sharp division, when the two were often interchangeable in the magazines, and science fiction was still referred to as a subset of fantasy (cf. Derleth, Moskowitz, etc.). Such never really went away, despite the attempts of some (such as Knight) to draw such a sharp distinction (but then, Damon could be just a tad dogmatic on such things at times....)

At any rate, more recent examples began to crop up in the mid- to late-1960s, again, long before Star Wars and its ilk. As for more recent usage... you may well be right.

I think this is wrong, because science fiction is modernist and fantasy is fantastic. Sf is modernist because it takes it as a given that the human condition and/or environment is capable of (human) control and/or explanation. This is true even of Star Wars.

In fantasy, nature and supernature can't be explained or controlled. They're givens of the setting, to use as presented, according to a set of rules that have been arrived at empirically or by fiat.

I think I may take issue with some of your terms here (and at least some of their implications): I'm not sure "modernist" is the best term to use, considering its connotations and usual associations. Perhaps "rationalist" or "positivist" is more appropriate, reflecting the continuing influence of nineteenth-century positivist thinking and its current descendants? In any event, given your definition, HPL (at least in hist later work) comes very close to it, as the most he would allow was the "supernormal" or "preternatural"... that which was based in natural, but as yet unknown or undiscovered, rules of entity. And, while he was indeed one of sf's progenitors (his guidelines for writing a story of science fiction fit very well with such as Stapledon, for instance), I don't know as many would consider him a science fiction writer per se.

I'm also not too sure your classification of fantasy is correct. After all, a great deal of fantasy from the early to late middle twentieth century certainly had that sort of rationalist approach... especially that as written by De Camp, Anderson, Carter, Pratt, etc. The handling they (and others) gave to magic was often near-indistinguishable from that of science fiction, setting down rules within which magic works, creating nearly a "physics" of magic... yet these are by no means science fiction in either feel nor intent.

Again, for a great deal of sf's history, the two have been very closely intertwined; which is why so many earlier writers could float so easily from one to the other and back again. Only in the post-Tolkien years did fantasy and sf become so rigidly divided... a division that is once again crumbling via the work of such as China Mieville, Thomas Ligotti, et al.