Pellinor fans!!! discussion

I was having a discussion with a friend about where Science Fiction ends and Fantasy begins and I thought it might be a good discussion!!

Personally as soon as technology gets involved or it's set in the future its Science Fiction and anything set in a world which resembles the Middle Ages and has magic of some sorts is Fantasy.

I'm reading a book now that is suppposed to be Historical fiction but it seems more like sci-fi 'cause they're cloning dead people and all sorts of weird stuff but it also reminds me of fantasy because there is all sorts of mythology and *possible* magic.

Excellent discussion topic! I've often thought the boundary between the two was increasingly fluid the more I read. Here's a couple of examples I've recently read: Dune Messiah, the sequel to Dune, is set in a future galaxy far, far away so it must be SF of course? But it features, among other wonders, shape-shifters, revenants and prophets, all of which to me are typical fantasy figures.

Another author usually seen as a 'hard' SF writer, Isaac Asimov, strays perilously close to fantasy in his Foundation series, especially the one he wrote just before his death, Forward the Foundation. This prequel pursues the concept of mind-readers, at one time (I understand) seriously investigated as an ESP trait by the US military but now usually a staple of fantasy.

In any case, I don't really regard stories set in the distant future as SF: they don't really extrapolate many current scientific concepts in any meaningful sense, and surely nobody really believes that Star Wars is anything but fantasy played out in space. (A space, by the way, where you can actually hear sounds... How fantastic is that?)

Linda, what's the historical fiction book you're reading? Sounds like another crossover genre title!

Going back to boolean algebra, I think that the Venn diagram now overlaps.

Dune is possibly a reasonable analogy, especially the prequels -beginnings of the Sisterhood (as we will again see in 2012). Barbara Hamley's Silicon Mage springs to mind, also Orson Scott Card's Earthfall series.

When's all said and done, Happy New Year to you all, in whichever zone you are in !

Ice wrote: "Going back to boolean algebra, I think that the Venn diagram now overlaps.

Dune is possibly a reasonable analogy, especially the prequels -beginnings of the Sisterhood (as we will again see in 20..."

Blwyddyn Newydd Dda i chi, as they say in my part of the world!

you're welsh? and i have to disagree with you Chris: Star Wars is at the heart of my view of SciFi.

Becky wrote: "you're welsh? and i have to disagree with you Chris: Star Wars is at the heart of my view of SciFi."

No, just lived here a few years.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree over Star Wars!

If you like, we can see it as part of SFF, a category devised, it seems to me, to cover those works that straddle the two genres.

In any case, there seems to be a move to promote the 'S' in SF as 'speculative' rather than science, especially as there is often little science involved in much that goes under the banner of SF.

Ice wrote: "Going back to boolean algebra, I think that the Venn diagram now overlaps..."

Having looked up 'Boolean algebra', I find I am none the wiser, either logically or structurally...

ok, that is a good compromise

i class post-apocalyptic worlds as the crossover point...when technology has destroyed everything and the only way to survive is to hack someone apart with a sword, essentially but not necessarily

I’ve found Wikipedia is a useful starting point for clarifying the difference between SF and Fantasy genres. In a nutshell, it suggests that SF is largely based on writing “rationally” about alternative possible worlds or futures, while “supernaturalism, usually absent in science fiction, is the distinctive characteristic of fantasy literature”.

It gives a list of typical SF elements, but, to be honest, I can’t see how fantasy doesn’t use some of these elements too.
1. “A time setting in the future, in alternative timelines, or in a historical past that contradicts known facts of history or the archaeological record.” I can think of some fantasy that uses this, for example (just to instance YA authors) Diana Wynne Jones has her Related Worlds, and Joan Aiken has her Dido Twite books, where an alternative 19th century history still felt more like fantasy to me.
2. “A spatial setting or scenes in outer space, on other worlds, or on subterranean earth.” Ditto.
3. “Characters that include aliens, mutants, androids, or humanoid robots.” What about Elves? Ents? Aren’t these alien?
4. “Technology that is futuristic.” I’m not sure there’s a lot of difference between Doctor Who’s sonic screwdriver and Harry Potter’s wand.
5. “Scientific principles that are new or that contradict known laws of nature, for example time travel, wormholes, or faster-than-light travel.” Again, so much fantasy uses time travel, for example, as a plot device.
6. “New and different political or social systems (e.g. dystopia, post-scarcity, or a post-apocalyptic situation where organized society has collapsed).” Again, I often think that fantasy deals with these, though not always in an explicitly Earth-centred way. (For Becky this is the 'crossover point', but is it crossing over to fantasy or back to SF?)
7. “Paranormal abilities such as mind control, telepathy, telekinesis, and teleportation.” This sounds like magic to me!

Wikipedia defines fantasy in terms of the supernatural, and gives as examples of fantasy supernaturalism “magic (spells, harm to opponents), magical places (Narnia, Oz, Middle Earth, Hogwarts), supernatural creatures (witches, vampires, orcs, trolls), supernatural transportation (flying broomsticks, ruby slippers, windows between worlds), and shapeshifting (beast into man, man into wolf or bear, lion into sheep).” SF seems to include many of these elements too, but pretends to give a “rational” explanation for each by using scientific or pseudo-scientific terms, what one commentator suggests is "a formal framework determined by concepts of the mode of production rather than those of religion".

As "science fantasy" is sometimes used to describe science fiction with fantasy elements, this seems the best term to use for this crossover genre. Now to think of examples...

Chris, I'm reading:

Mary Modern

There is also time travel in it but no magic so far :( Good book though!

Chris - Elves and Ents aren't aliens! in all the books I've read which include them they were on the earth first....humans were considered the aliens if we take that word at its most literal definition. the Wikipedia thing pretty much is my vision of Sci-Fi

Becky wrote: "Chris - Elves and Ents aren't aliens! in all the books I've read which include them they were on the earth first....humans were considered the aliens if we take that word at its most literal defini..."

I understand what you're saying, Becky, but 'alien' simply means 'other', or 'different', and doesn't necessarily imply precedence. If dinosaurs were here on Earth first, then by your definition we're the aliens! And the dinosaurs were aliens as far as trilobytes were concerned ... And so on, and so on.

I looked at the synopsis of Mary Modern, Linda, and agree that it sounds like fantasy but without any explicit magic. That she's a geneticist seems to imply science is in the mix, but time travel without obvious technology (however far-fetched or implausible) to achieve it doesn't really make it SF, to my mind.

In the same vein, Jill Rowan's The Legacy also uses time-travel in what is clearly otherwise a romance, and she 'explains' it by means of introducing alien (ie extra-terrestrial) technology, but I'm not convinced that this makes it SF. I think 'aliens' here are, in effect, the 'supernatural'.

touché Chris! however im guessing in the context of the wikipedia thing "alien" means "ET" etc

Becky wrote: "touché Chris! however im guessing in the context of the wikipedia thing "alien" means "ET" etc"

I agree, Becky! The Wikipedia list (“Characters that include aliens, mutants, androids, or humanoid robots”) certainly suggests we're expected to think of hardcore SF like Philip K Dick or Frank Herbert.

But in the same way that fairy abduction narratives in the European Middle Ages mutated to alien abduction stories in the US in the mid-20th century, I still think that much of the function of modern SF aliens resembles the function of all those medieval witches, fairies, bogeys, water horses, afancs, brownies, goblins and trolls.

In other words, weird 'other' (alien) beings whose ways of thinking and acting and looking are very definitely not human, and often superhuman and even sub-human on occasions.

Don't know why but I really hate Fairy and Alien (ET) stories. They bore me because they are all the same essentially. But I understand what you are saying, I think.

Becky wrote: "Don't know why but I really hate Fairy and Alien (ET) stories. They bore me because they are all the same essentially. But I understand what you are saying, I think."

The older I get, and the more I read (and re-read! I seem to be doing a lot of that recently!) the more I find I'm only really interested in stories that bring out bona fide human feelings, emotions and reactions.

My preferred SF stories are less about technology and alien beings than about the human personalities involved, the dilemmas they have to face and how they resolve them. Like you, I suspect, I don't really empathise with fairies and aliens unless there's a large dollop of humanity in them as they interact with humans. I appreciated Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, for example, because, even though there was doubt surrounding whether the protagonist was human or android, I felt sympathy for him and his doubts about what constituted 'life' and 'living'; I also liked the computer HAL in the film 2001: a Space Odyssey because alongside the impersonal human astronauts the death of his 'personality' seemed much more moving. But these are exceptions: a lot more SF leaves me cold when I don't give a damn about the individuals involved.

In a similar way I don't get excited about vampires and zombies, fashionable though they are in genre films and books. Both types seem to be prey to their need to prey on the living, and I'm not really interested in that, however thrilling it must be to many viewers and readers. Vampires and zombies seem to be one step away from generic faires, aliens and robots.

Yes! I totally agree! Especially about the Vampires and Zombies, I thought I was the only one that found them dull. I never noticed that the stories I truly love all have very human and moral dilemmas at the heart of them. Weird. I remember doing a powerpoint on a book using an issue raised in it to demonstrate certain ethical approaches to problems.....lets just say the class of teenagers didn't quite get what I was trying to say. :/

But any way, tangent.... I find that when reading I need a distinctly human protagonist so I can better connect with them. It doesn't bother me if they have special powers etc, but I still need that human moral code through which to view their actions.

I find that when reading I need a distinctly human protagonist so I can better connect with them. It doesn't bother me if they have special powers etc, but I still need that human moral code through which to view their actions.

That's true; think of all those superhuman heroes/heroines on celluloid/DVD, they may have superpowers but they have human emotions and failings so that we find we can connect with them.

Interestingly, I've been enjoying Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines series and prequels (the genre is steampunk, but it's really future SF with Victorian technology), and the connecting thread is a cyborg called Shrike. He's like a revenant/zombie-cum-robot, so theoretically anathema to me, but you end up feeling sorry for him, and the final pages of the last book are quite moving, in a Frankenstein's monster kind of way.

I tried reading Mortal Engines but gave up after the first chapter, something I rarely ever do, just didn't quite do it for me. But then I am notoriously picky! People gave up buying books for me which I hadn't explicitly asked for and instead just give me the money for them instead. :)

Becky wrote: "I tried reading Mortal Engines but gave up after the first chapter, something I rarely ever do, just didn't quite do it for me. But then I am notoriously picky! People gave up buying books for me w..."

Sorry you couldn't get on with Mortal Engines; I wasn't sure at first, but I was attracted by the cover, which had an old-fashioned children's comic feel to it (the designs have changed now, and are less appealing to old farts like me, and probably quite rightly so) and I'm glad I persevered.

You're right about books often being intensely personal: if people give me books now it's usually because I've dropped heavy hints rather than that they've accurately divined my reading tastes!

Haha, people have never been able to tell what I will like so I think my parents gave up years ago. Covers don't really have any bearing on me other than to bring me to it in the first place but then if the blurb doesn't cut it goes back on the shelf. Also I trawl though all the shelves in Waterstones looking at all the books from A to Z and look at the titles and if I can read them.

Elizabeth wrote: "Hmm, this is interesting and it's a topic that I could expound upon for a while. But I agree, Star Wars, Star Trek and the like are what I think of as Sci-fi.
... I honestly want to see more sci-fi/ fantasy cross overs, just to see how they would work. Maybe I should write one eventually."

I think you should, Elizabeth! I've been wracking my brains to think of a crossover, and can't remember coming across one. I'll have to do some research...

Covers: I do think covers have more of an effect on us than we realise, Becky, otherwise publishers wouldn't bother with them and we would mostly have those old-fashioned Penguin covers which were all the same except for the title and author. Both the Harry Potter books and the His Dark Materials came in two editions, YA and adult, with very different covers, and I know I prefer the adult covers. But then I'm an adult!

Hmm, just a brief search has come up with Brian Aldiss' Helliconia: Helliconia Spring Helliconia Summer Helliconia Winter: Hellonica Spring Helliconia Summer Hellicon Sf Masterworks trilogy (this is the one-volume edition, hence the unwieldy title) and Anne McCaffrey's Dragonrider books. Don't know about the latter, but I'm not totally convinced by the Helliconia example. Aldiss does flit from genre to genre (I particularly loved his fantasy The Malacia Tapestry) but despite the occasional fantasy feel of Helliconia I think the SF elements dominate overwhelmingly.

Now, as to the Books of Pellinor, I think we're largely agreed these are fantasy. But there is that strange conceit that these are "re-discovered" texts that survived from Atlantis and that date back, say, 10,000 years. Does that count as an SF element? It's certainly not the future, which much of SF presupposes. Does it cross over into historical fiction? No, it's not based on any accepted history or even prehistory. I'm sure I'm not the only reader who feels the introduction of this antipasto rather distracts the reader from enjoying the main course.

Pellinor is not Science Fiction, sorry, but in no way is it SF!

As for covers, I prefer the old fashioned Penguin covers with nothing on them. I don't think you can sum up a book in a cover. My favourite covers are the english cover of all the Pellinor books, simple block colour with a picture.


Also there is Green Rider

it's very simple in my opinion and i really liked the blurb which is why i picked it up.
and Sabriel:

again really simple.
but i really don;t like the cover of one of my favourite books The Fugitives of Chaos: ,
far too much going on! but to me the cover has no impact on the book, its all about the blurb and first chapter, always.

The visual aspect of any object is very personal, isn't it? Apart from my own interests, in my family my son has a Photography degree and works in film and TV, one of my daughters has qualifications in Design and currently specialises in creative sewing, and my wife is a spokesperson on appearance-related issues for the British Psychological Society; so you can see that for me Appearance Matters! But whether you like a pared-down, clean design look or a flamboyant loud appearance in your covers, both approaches will be factors (unconscious or not) in your acquiring one book or another, let alone choosing between one edition or another.

Becky wrote: "Pellinor is not Science Fiction, sorry, but in no way is it SF! ..."

To go back to your first comment, I came across a useful distinction in FutureWorld Science Museum, published by the Science Museum:
"Science fiction is realistic speculation about the future, based solidly on an understanding of nature and science."

The authors then go on to say, "And even though science fiction is a kind of fantasy, it's nevertheless different to the likes of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Those types of books are knowingly magical and fantastic. The difference with science fiction is this: it denies it's fantastic."

Now we're talking SF/Fantasy Crossovers, aren't we? If and how and when they overlap? I think Pellinor in some slight way is a sort of crossover:
1. The narrative is knowingly magical and fantastic (= Fantasy).
2. The narrative is not about the future but about the past (= Fantasy).
3. But the introductions claim to be based on real books discovered in the present day from a distant past, books which need the sciences of palaeography, linguistics and archaeology to help decipher and interpret them (= SF?).
4. And the scholarly introductions and references and appendices deny that the narrative is fantastic, which is one of the definitions of SF.

So, without the extras, Pellinor is definitely Fantasy. The extras are SF, because even though they are about past history they certainly involve sciences and they certainly pretend that it is all real, not fantastic. The total is an SF/Fantasy crossover (just!). But if you skip all the paraphernalia (and, let's be honest, most of us do) then Pellinor is without doubt pure Fantasy! Yay!

wow! actually never thought about it like that. And I suppose for some appearance is important, which is probably why some books have such intricate covers

Becky wrote: "wow! actually never thought about it like that. And I suppose for some appearance is important, which is probably why some books have such intricate covers"

For all people who are not visually-impaired in some way appearance is important, whatever they may say! We make value-judgements about what we see in front of our eyes, whether they're people or books!

well i wear glasses so do i count as visually impaired? :) and i don't know, i'm kind of distrustful of anything that looks too good because i'm always thinking 'what is it hiding?' but that's just me, i am slightly abnormal

Becky wrote: "well i wear glasses so do i count as visually impaired? :) and i don't know, i'm kind of distrustful of anything that looks too good because i'm always thinking 'what is it hiding?' but that's just..."

No, you're not abnormal, just naturally cautious ... and just a little bit suspicious! But that's good!

Incidentally, Elizabeth, if "Star Wars, Star Trek and the like are what I think of as Sci-fi", and if FutureWorld suggests that SF is "realistic speculation about the future", where does that leave Star Wars which famously begins A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...?

yeah but that opening refers to a long time ago in that galaxy, its in a completely different world to ours so therefore doesn't count

sorry i know it wasn't directed at me, and yeah, i'm a lot suspicious!!

sorry to burst your excited bubble, but i don't understand RP games. my frond has tried explaining them over and over again to me because she runs an RPG website but my mind always goes "wwhhhhaaaatttt??" every time :/

only if you can write on demand, which is something i can't do plus im almost constantly plagued by writers block! and i never know where things are going :/ basically im a bad writer, but an AMAZING reader! even if i do say so my self :P

i might have another look, but i just don't understand the actual mechanics of it

will do, but i've never heard of maze runner, im guessing its a book...any good?

wow, looks good, just ordered it off amazon.

What do you think would a sci-fi/fantasy world would be like?

I suppose a bit like Star Wars, Elizabeth! Yes, it's all space-y with robots and rockets etc, but really it's fantasy as far as I'm concerned, with a spot of technology thrown in:
Animals that talk? The stuff of fairytale and fantasy.
Something called 'the Force' that gifted individuals use to accomplish mind over matter? That's magic.
Light sabres and Jedi knights? Pure swords-and-sorcery.
A princess that needs rescuing? Puh-lease!
Chariot-races? Monsters? Death-star masquerading as the wizard's castle?

Star Wars science is laughable (noises in space? Hasn't anybody told them that "In space nobody can hear you scream"?) and unworkable. It's just fantasy in space! If anything is a crossover than this could be it (sorry, Becky!).

Seriously, though, I shall have to give some thoughts to it, to see if any genuinely conscious crossovers have been written; nothing springs to mind at the moment.

Interesting definition of science fantasy here: http://www.fantasybookreview.co.uk/fa...

Science fiction makes the implausible possible, while science fantasy makes the impossible plausible.

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 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 supernatural elements; science fantasy does. Even the usage of this definition is difficult, however, as some science fiction makes use of apparently supernatural elements such as telepathy.

This page also gives some examples of science fantasy, none of which (apart from Frankenstein) I have read. Perhaps you others have? (Green Angel wasn't mentioned, however...)

hmm, science fantasy, that makes sense, and i agree with the definitions....we may have found something to agree on Chris, haha

Becky wrote: "hmm, science fantasy, that makes sense, and i agree with the definitions....we may have found something to agree on Chris, haha"

Hooray!

Now for real crossover
Julian May and The Many-Coloured Land plus all its back & forth such as Intervention

Maeve wrote: "ikr!!"

Its finally arrived!! Gonna read Maze Runner now!!

The only obvious SF/fantasy crossover I can think of is Chariots of the Gods. There's myth, aliens, magic, science and make-believe all in there.

But, now I come to think of it, it's claimed to be fact. And yet so many other 'non-fiction' books these days read like very boring SF/fantasy crossovers. Look out for anything with Atlantis/the Grail/Excalibur and similar in the title. The best guides to this fictional 'non-fiction' genre, in fact, are the words 'true' or 'the truth' in the title: they usually signify anything but.

haha! i do have a book about Atlantis which I am reading, but it is so obviously fiction that it doesn't bother me. Its called Kingdom Beneath the Waves, and its set in what i think is another world, but i'm not 100% sure yet