Hard Sci-Fi vs Medieval Fantasy? - Magic vs Theoretical Science.

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Title.

  • Hard Science Fiction

    Votes: 41 53.9%

  • Medieval Fantasy

    Votes: 35 46.1%
  • Total voters
    76
The Shadow said:
Foundation is what, 200 or 300 pages long? It's not a long book, it's just not a very interesting one. Asimov did his best work in his short fiction IMO. I recognize some of its far reaching inspiration for other books, but it never grabbed my attention as much other early masterworks like The Martian Chronicles and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I feel like my problem with Foundation is that it covers too huge a stretch of time in a small amount of detail and without a clear focus. It's patched together from novellas and it shows.
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It’s a longer series. Especially for Asimov.
 
IAmNotAlpharius said:
The issue I have with hard sci-fi is that it loses its allure as we make scientific advancements. Imo sci-fi is at its best when it embrace characterization, the dark, and the ludicrous like 40k or Futurama.
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I always find it interesting to read old sci-fi just to see what they thought the future would be like and compare it to how it actually has advanced. It's not in a "Ha Ha, look how dumb they are for thinking we would have personal airplane suits in the year 2000", it just neat to see what people thought back then as an interesting what if. Personally I will always have a soft spot for sci-fi written about life on other planets like Mars or the Moon, (stuff that was written before we got to the moon.) I do love me some John Carter. Also 40k will always be fun.

When it comes to fantasy, you have high fantasy and low fantasy, and I have seen a lot of stupid slap fight over what is better. It's stupid just enjoy what you're reading.

Truthfully I can't pick a favorite of my Holy trinity of Sci-Fi, fantasy, and horror. They all have a lot of fun sub genres that I like and can blend well together.

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germany-in-the-year-2000-4.jpg
 
Nekromantik2 said:
I always find it interesting to read old sci-fi just to see what they thought the future would be like and compare it to how it actually has advanced. It's not in a "Ha Ha, look how dumb they are for thinking we would have personal airplane suits in the year 2000", it just neat to see what people thought back then as an interesting what if. Personally I will always have a soft spot for sci-fi written about life on other planets like Mars or the Moon, (stuff that was written before we got to the moon.) I do love me some John Carter. Also 40k will always be fun.

When it comes to fantasy, you have high fantasy and low fantasy, and I have seen a lot of stupid slap fight over what is better. It's stupid just enjoy what you're reading.

Truthfully I can't pick a favorite of my Holy trinity of Sci-Fi, fantasy, and horror. They all have a lot of fun sub genres that I like and can blend well together.

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It’s not just fiction either. I have Popular Science magazines from like, less than 10 years ago predicting flying cars in 2020. They also had an issue a while back about predictions they made that turned out to be wrong. Also mostly about flying cars.
But, that also didn’t predict some stuff we have now, because it’s so mundane. Like, I can’t think of anyone predicting a Nintendo Switch, a portable console that can plug in anywhere and you can pick up and continue to play. Like, that’s normal to us in 2019, but I guarantee that if you have a kid from in the 90s a Switch with Breath of the Wild, they would think it’s pretty damn cool.
Don’t believe me, look at what passed for 3d animation in the early 2000s, it hasn’t aged that well. But we thought it looked just fine.
 
CivilianOfTheFandomWars said:
It’s not just fiction either. I have Popular Science magazines from like, less than 10 years ago predicting flying cars in 2020. They also had an issue a while back about predictions they made that turned out to be wrong. Also mostly about flying cars.
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Never did get my hover board in 2015. :( I can still remember seeing Donkey Kong Country on the SNES and thinking, "This is it, it can't get any better." Back to the Future 2 is really interesting watching now.

It's also funny what things don't every catch on because something better gets made, but for a little while that thing is seen as the future, looking at you laser discs.
 
Nekromantik2 said:
Never did get my hover board in 2015. :( I can still remember seeing Donkey Kong Country on the SNES and thinking, "This is it, it can't get any better." Back to the Future 2 is really interesting watching now.

It's also funny what things don't every catch on because something better gets made, but for a little while that thing is seen as the future, looking at you laser discs.
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Dude, I remember renting Gamecube games from the dvd shop and thinking, “It’s beautiful. Rayman Arena is the cutting edge of gaming tech.” And now it’s just, “Ew, I can see the squares.”
I wonder when someone will look back at what we have now and wonder how we enjoyed it.
 
I prefer fantasy for the most part, and a lot of the sci-fi I enjoy usually ends up being fantasy set in space. That being said I find it harder and harder to get into new fantasy settings these days, as I really don't have the energy to have to learn a whole new set of words for elf, orc, magic, and whatever the super special totally-original MacGuffin for every novel I read. Then again, reading hard sci-fi sometimes feels like one of my old textbooks, so call it a draw there.

I think sci-fi's key advantage, as some have alluded to earlier, is the ability to weave horror into the mix. Very few fantasy books I can think of have really made the horror come alive for me, while sci-fi does so a lot more frequently.
 
Locomotive Derangement said:
There are a lot of classic SF stories people consider "Hard" that are complete fucking fantastic nonsense by today's standards even if they're still good stories by great authors.
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Name what you're talking about. The credibility of scientific fiction has obviously differed in its 60+ years of existence.
 
I'm a long-time fan of speculative fiction. Bujold's Vorkosigan saga has held my attention as well as Brust's Taltos saga has, or Ellis' Transmetropolitan series. As said by others, the grounding in science and myth allows for imagining "great things — terrible, yes, but great". Given some of the horror elements built in to the Shadowrun setting, it's Best Practice to save a bullet for yourself in the end.

Part of the problem with urban fantasy has been the dominance of the Young Adult market, much like the "juvenile" market of the 1950s and 1960s constrained science fiction as a genre to being largely schlock, simply because the bulk of the readership isn't interested beyond the story's "now", let alone the horror show that others in the Chosen One's world may be living.
 
Y2KKK Baby said:
Name what you're talking about. The credibility of scientific fiction has obviously differed in its 60+ years of existence.
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I kind of exemplified this already in something like Forbidden Planet, but I can also be a dickwad and just capsize this arguement by bringing up things like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or HG Wells The War of the Worlds, which were very well-thought out for their eras but are obviously shocking ridiculous to modern eyes. But I do love them greatly, they just aren't very "Hard" SF anymore.

CivilianOfTheFandomWars said:
Sanderson is known for being pretty good at that. He treats magic more like science, and some characters are basically magic scientists trying to do neat shit.
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I'll weigh on this arguement since I have my hands wrist-deep into it in my own work, but people used to be terrified of magic. Terrified. If you read up on mysticism, its clear that nobody knew how it worked, and as a horror fanatic I adore that point of view, that magic can accomplish great things but at the same time is this nightmarish force nobody particularly has control over. It really speaks to the human condition.
 
BoingoTango said:
I mean, what is considered Hard sci-fi? I haven't read a lot of Sci-Fi, but I like Neuromancer, which I'm currently almost done with. Is that considered Hard sci-fi?

But in general I really enjoy fantasy. I'm a big fan of Dragonlance. I mean it's not deepest thing ever, but it's generally just a lot of fun, also I like Dragonlance's magic system a lot.
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Hard sci fi is whatever sci fi makes you hard.
 
Locomotive Derangement said:
which were very well-thought out for their eras but are obviously shocking ridiculous to modern eyes.
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Well, there you go.

There's still science, it's just outdated, my dude. Much different from soft writing of today though.
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
What is that a reference to? Because that sounds awesome.
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I made the image as a joke to annoy someone who expressed dislike towards magic systems that operate like programming languages, mostly those in the occasional amateur world-building projects. The Chad magic system itself isn't a reference to anything in-particular, however individual Chad points are.
 
I voted for Medieval Fantasy, but to tell you the truth, I enjoy both genres near equally.
 
I think that sci fi lends itself to pulp more. And I love me some pulp. Say what you will about the author, “Battlefield Earth” is a fun read in the same way grindhouse movies are a fun watch.
I think this may be because in sci fi you can just have aliens and shit and no one will really question it. But in fantasy, some degree of world building is almost expected.
Take “Eragon”, the kid made a huge world full of all this minutia and cultures the like, but it’s still basically pulp to me. Contrast with “Battlefield Earth”, the only world building needed is that aliens are dicks, humans are cavemen, and we’re all set to go. This is avoided easier with ‘Urban Fantasy’, but it’s not really my cup of tea and it’s mostly the same YA story anyways.
It’s also why I think that sci fi lends itself to short stories a bit more than fantasy. You can just show off a neat idea about tech you had and that’s basically a sci fi short story. We understand technology, we know how screens and stuff work. Not so with fantasy. In fantasy, it’s either magic, monsters, medieval politics, stuff like that. And all those raise the questions of ‘how does that work? Why is that happening? Where the hell are we?’ That can bog down a short story if the author isn’t careful.
 
I love both, but TBH, hard sci-fi is such an underrated genre in the mainstream. I hate how the public at large mostly consumes unrealistic sci-fi like Star Trek: Discovery, or the other space fantasies that Hollywood has to offer.

From what I've read of hard sci-fi authors like Greg Egan and Stephen Baxter, they are relatively easy to understand, even if you don't know the exact principles of the math within them.

Also, I love that Japan has a hard sci-fi scene now, judging from the existence of this guy and his blogs. TBH, his video essays are some of the best on the web because they make no pretentions about what they are. It's just a guy talking about the science, theming, and lore of an author he loves.


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