Fantasy with Friends: Sci-Fi and Fantasy

Monday means Fantasy with Friends time! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about sci-fi’s relationship with fantasy: Science fiction and fantasy are often bundled together. Why do you think this is? How do you see the two genres as related or distinct? Do you enjoy both? I think the two get bundled together because they’re fundamentally about imagining something that doesn’t exist (yet). There’s that saying about how any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic: if you watch something like Star Trek, a lot of the tech doesn’t exist and we can’t even extrapolate that it could exist. It’s fantasy in space, and the rules bend to whatever’s convenient for telling a good story. So I think both genres rely on imagining the world to be different than it is, and they’re closer than you’d think. There are some amazing series that blend the two, like Rosemary Kirstein’s The Steerswoman, which looks like one thing…