Science Fantasy Vs. Science Fiction
A definition offered by Rod Serling holds that "science fiction, the improbable made possible; fantasy, the impossible made probable". The meaning is that science fiction describes unlikely things that could possibly take place in the real world under certain conditions, while science fantasy gives a scientific veneer of realism to things that simply could not happen in the real world under any circumstances. Another interpretation is that science fiction does not permit the existence of fantasy or supernatural elements; science fantasy does.
For many users of the term, however, "science fantasy" is either a science fiction story that has drifted far enough from reality to "feel" like a fantasy, or a fantasy story that is attempting to be science fiction. While these are in theory classifiable as different approaches, and thus different genres (fantastic science fiction vs. scientific fantasy), the end products are sometimes indistinguishable.
Arthur C. Clarke's dictum that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" and Larry Niven's "any sufficiently rigorously defined magic is indistinguishable from technology" indicates why this is so: a rigorously defined version of magic would be indistinguishable from a form of technology based on certain properties of the fictional universe (the "magical" properties). A writer can describe a future world where technologies are so advanced to be invisible, and the effects produced would be classified as magical if they were only described as such. A world might include magic which only some people (or only the reader) know to be in fact technological effects.
There is therefore nothing intrinsic about the effects described in a given story that will tell the reader whether it is science fiction or fantasy. The classification of an effect as "fantastic" or "science fictional" is a matter of convention. Hyperspace, time machines and scientists are conventions of science fiction; flying carpets, magical amulets and wizards are tropes of fantasy. This is an accident of the historical development of the genre. In some cases they have overlapped: teleportation by matter-transmitter-beam is science fiction, teleportation by incantation is fantasy. A hand-held cloaking device that confers invisibility is science fiction; a hand-held Ring of Power that confers invisibility is fantasy. Mind-to-mind communication can be "psionics", or it can be an ancient elvish art. What matters is not the effect itself (generally improbable, though not always believed to be so by the authors) but the wider universe it is intended to evoke. If it is one of space travel and proton-pistols, it gets classified as "science fiction", and the appropriate terms (cloaking device, matter-transmitter) are used; if it is one of castles, sailing ships and swords, it gets classified as "fantasy", and we instead speak of magic rings and travel by enchantment. In short, science fiction uses technology to explain unfamiliar phenomena while fantasy employs magic. For the most part, science fiction will attempt to explain its effects using known physical laws or reasonable extensions of them. Science fantasy will generally ignore physical laws (i.e., magic) or invent its own structure of laws which have no necessary connection to known laws. Science fiction is also more likely to take the time to delineate the laws or extensions involved, while fantasy will provide a more meager structure of its invented rules.
Drawing the line between science fiction and fantasy is not made any clearer by the fact that both of them can use invented worlds, non-human intelligent creatures (sometimes, in science fiction as well as fantasy, based on myth: consider C. L. Moore's Shambleau and Yvala), and amazing monsters. It is, to a large extent, authorial fiat that tells us that C. S. Lewis' Narnia books are set in a fantasy world rather than on another planet. An example of this is Star Wars, a borderline case in which a mystical power known as the Force lends a strong fantasy element to the science fiction veneer. The main difference between the two is that science fiction is largely based on established scientific theories, while science fantasy is largely implausible.
Even archaism, one of the strongest conventional marks of fantasy, is not an infallible distinguishing characteristic: an archaic world of edged weapons and battlemented fortresses could simply be another planet that has entered a stage of barbarism, or has never emerged from it. Some of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover books represent just such a world, complete with technology-indistinguishable-from-magic. (It is this, as much as the "dragons", that leads some readers to perceive McCaffrey's Pern series as fantasy, in spite of the science-fictional setting established in the first paragraphs of the first book.)
Read more about this topic: Science Fantasy
Famous quotes containing the words science, fantasy and/or fiction:
“Thinking is seeing.... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)
“... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965)