| ▲ | bbor 3 days ago |
| Sinners was a scifi movie...? About vampires in the past...?! Wild. Ditto for Claire Oscura: Expedition 33, which I thought was high fantasy / steampunk at most. *EDIT:* It appears I'm just being silly, and the Hugos include fantasy. Ironically, the biggest fantasy series of our time by far has won 3 times in Novella form and once in TV form, but never the novels! |
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| ▲ | mapontosevenths 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| The difference between science fiction and fantasy was always only a tenuous distinction imposed by the few nerds who cared a little too much. As we age out of being culturally relevant, and newer (likely less literate) generations take over the definitions will change, and perhaps should. To me only hard science fiction will ever count, but I recognize that I'm in the minority there and also don't want to scare away the three remaining readers through gatekeeping. |
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| ▲ | srean 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Fantasys felt so lazy to me. Although sometimes I do enjoy the descriptions. But there is always an escape hatch out of a trouble and one that was not foreshadowed. It is constraints that makes things interesting and especially the higher order consequences of constraints and new tech. | | |
| ▲ | mapontosevenths 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Agreed. Fiction where the solution was "and then he found out he was the chosen one so magic happened" are unsatisfying. | | |
| ▲ | smgpie 3 days ago | parent [-] | | What you described does not qualify as a good fantasy either. There needs to be rules even in the world of magic, and eventually so called hard fiction and fantasy only really differ in the way how they present the fantasies. There is a book I love: Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, in which he first wrote about fantasy figures with magic powers in Buddhism tales, and then revealed that they were just humans with high tech and play gods to those who don't. | | |
| ▲ | srean 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Thanks for the recommendation
. Sounds like a good read. |
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| ▲ | ycombinete 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What is the biggest fantasy series of our time? |
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| ▲ | stevenwoo 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | A Song of Ice and Fire (contemporary writing I assume), it lost to Harry Potter book against one of GRRM’s best books/chance for win in novel category one year and Spin in another year(Accelerando was another nominee that year) | | |
| ▲ | 3eb7988a1663 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Surely on cultural impact Harry Potter has to win. While GoT had a decade flash in the pan, Harry Potter is still deeply in the cultural zeitgeist. "Muggles", "You're a Hufflepuff", etc have become cemented into our vocabulary. GoT is undoubtedly more complex, interesting world, but it never had a generation of children reading the midnight book release. That the author actually penned the series finale is also worth something. | | |
| ▲ | ycombinete 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That's what I was thinking! I was sure my parent meant GoT. But there can't be many metrics at all where GoT beats out HP for the title of "biggest fantasy series of our time". | |
| ▲ | stevenwoo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | The Hugo voting is kind of skewed since it’s a membership thing where anyone can join but one has to be aware of it and care enough to join. |
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| ▲ | GlobalChubby 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin | | |
| ▲ | agos 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I wanted to like it so much, and the first book was so promising... but couldn't really enjoy the other two books. I understand why it's loved, but also can't see it being the greatest of our time, by a mile | |
| ▲ | watwut 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | That one is great. |
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| ▲ | SamBam 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| You're not the only one to be taken aback by that. Yes, the Hugos do fantasy, but I'm not sure I would have even thought to categorize Sinners as fantasy. I mean, yes, it has vampires. Was From Dusk till Dawn fantasy? But as a sister comment suggests, categorization is never easy, and probably just reinforced personal biases. (See Old Town Road being reminded from Billboard's country music list.) |
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| ▲ | neaden 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I think by definition any vampire story is a fantasy story yes. Since vampires are not real and thus a fantasy creature. | | |
| ▲ | SamBam 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | There's more to Fantasy than a single boolean "does it contain something that is not real?" Fantasy gets applied to the work as a whole, to its dominant tone and structure, not to one element. A work of fantasy usually has other elements that show it to be such. Is there world-building? Is it a quest or a hero story? Is there some kind of lore that grounds the whole universe? Not all of those are necessary, but usually you can clearly define the whole work holistically as Fantasy. From Dusk till Dawn in particular is a straight crime thriller that turns into a horror movie. Ok, I got nerd-sniped into trying to define Fantasy after saying I wouldn't. | | |
| ▲ | neaden 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I don't think crime thriller or horror have anything to do with if a story is fantasy. Alien is a sci fi movie and a horror movie. Psycho is a horror movie with no fantasy elements. Sinners is a fantasy horror movie. It sounds like you are talking about epic or high fantasy, but there is fantasy romance, fantasy detective, fantasy crime thriller etc. You can even have a fantasy sci fi movie like Star Wars. | | |
| ▲ | krapp 3 days ago | parent [-] | | >You can even have a fantasy sci fi movie like Star Wars. And Star Trek. I will die on the hill that Star Trek is just as much space fantasy as Star Wars. | | |
| ▲ | 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | bigstrat2003 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I can envision a reasonable case that Star Trek is space fantasy, sure. But I think it's significantly overstating things to say that Trek is just as much space fantasy as Star Wars. There's nothing in Star Trek remotely as fantastical as the Force and the users thereof. | | |
| ▲ | krapp 2 days ago | parent [-] | | >There's nothing in Star Trek remotely as fantastical as the Force and the users thereof. A lot of things in Trek are a lot more fantastic than the Force. The second episode of the original series has someone whose powers far exceed any Jedi not named Skywalker or Palpatine. Plenty of aliens are telepaths. And then the Q came along. The Douwd are apparently an alien race made of eldritch music that can erase entire species with their mind. Honestly the Force is far more grounded in comparison. At least it has a structure and some rules. In Star Trek you could find an alien species that literally plays billiards with planets and it's never explained or referenced again. That just a thing that sometimes happens. Oh yeah and Wesley Crusher ascended to a higher plane of existence. But let's move on to cosmology. A weird barrier at the center of the galaxy where a space god is imprisoned like some JRPG final boss. Anomalies in space that create time loops or fulfill your deepest desires. Whatever subspace is supposed to be - both a "layer under normal space" that's used for communication and also arbitrarily fixes the plot and also sometimes monsters come out of it that steal your organs. Or technology. Set "Threshold" aside. The transporter can create evil clones of you or turn you into a child. The holodeck can create sentient life on command. The Enterprise got knocked up and had a baby one time. How does the universal translator work? Look up the only canonical explanation in TOS, it's basically magic. |
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| ▲ | BigTTYGothGF 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Vampires aren't any more fantastical than FTL travel, and yet we're perfectly happy to have that in SF. | | |
| ▲ | neaden 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I agree the line between fantasy and sci Fi is very thin. In general I would say if the author intends for it to be a natural explanation like wormholes or something it's sci fi, if it's a magic teleportation spell it is fantasy. There is a series I read once Starships Mage which plays with this, it's hard sci fi for most things but magic exists and FTL is solved through teleportation. Everything non magic has to obey relativity and such. |
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| ▲ | welferkj 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'd say that line can be blurred somewhat by "Blindsight". "Not real" isn't where I'd put the line, it's "not plausibly and consistently explained (or at least explained away) within the laws of nature. |
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| ▲ | krapp 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm comfortable considering horror as a subgenre of fantasy. Vampires and folklore and magic are staples of fantasy after all. | | |
| ▲ | plisken 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Snakes on a plane fantasy? | | |
| ▲ | krapp 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I'm comfortable considering horror a subgenre of fantasy when it incorporates explicitly supernatural elements. |
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| ▲ | lokar 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Culture is fluid, it must be to continue. Categories like this will evolve, expand, and shrink over time. |
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