If you like these books -- early classics of the genres -- it's going to be well worth your time to check out Fantasy Masterworks collection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_Masterworks). It's a set of reissued sci-fi and fantasy novels, chosen by the British publisher Millennium for their quality and influence on later writers.
3/5 of the books in the linked article are included.
It's not perfect-- it's missing War for the Oaks, for example, and doesn't have any Iain M Banks. But there's an awful lot of good material in there.
Both Gollancz (SF Masterworks) and Orbit (most Banks books) are ultimately owned by Lagardère/Hachette. Presumably they could wrangle the rights if they really wanted.
I suppose they just don't see any need to republish Banks books, most of which are quite recent, continue to be popular and are mostly still in print under Orbit as part of an already unified series.
Perhaps but if adding it to the list costs them little then to do a print run I don't get why they wouldn't and just have two printings concurrently, if they did say Consider Phlebas with the first edition cover I'd pick up a second copy just for that cover.
Though I'm carefully not going to look on AbeBooks to see what the first editions currently go for since I don't need to spend that kind of money (want to yes, need to no).
Harumi Marukami and Han Kang count as fantasy. (I’d argue so does Ian Banks.) Read Tolkien with a hard eye towards rules, meanwhile, and you find a universe that is largely consistent in the Unseen over the Seen, which pretty neatly maps to invisible physics guiding visible phenomena.
They really aren't all that different from each other. One is imaginary things that might one day be possible, and the other is imaginary things that won't ever be possible.
And even then, that can swap between the genres. Scifi often contains FTL tech, which from what we know is almost certainly impossible so it's actually more like fantastical magic. Meanwhile, fantasy can have hard rules for its magic, in which case it acts more like technology that we haven't discovered yet. I haven't read it yet myself, but I've heard of Wizard's Bane, where a programmer is transported to a magical land and becomes really powerful because he treats the magic system like a new programming language.
Other things I've noticed is that scifi tends to involve spaceships and is more mystery oriented, whereas fantasy tends to take place on the ground and is more hero's journey oriented. But even these aren't defining traits. Plenty of scifi books involve investigating alien planets and many contain the hero's journey (including the original Star Wars if you count that as scifi). Meanwhile plenty of fantasy books are on some sort of ship (Narnia - Voyage of the Dawn Treader) and many are more mystery oriented (Harry Potter for example).
Personally, I think a better line of division is hard vs soft. Was the world created first with actual rules and the characters molded to fit the world (Dune, Lord of the Rings)? Or were the characters created first and the rules are bent to create the story that is being desired to tell (Star Trek with its technobabble, Star Wars's prequels and sequels, the entire universe of Harry Potter)?
They are different if you like sci-fi and dislike fantasy which OP apparently does as do I, on the grand scheme of things not a big deal but it does get in the way when specifically looking for new sci-fi to read.
It's not on the quality level of these books, but the Off to Be the Wizard series of books are humorous programming-as-magic tales that skirt the sci-fi/fantasy line. [The fulcrum of the story is that there is a computer file "out there" that reflects reality; those who find it can edit it to do all kinds of "magic". Hilarity ensues.]
I never find it helpful when people say they aren't that different from each other.
Sure there may be some similarities if you want to take an analytical view of the genres, but there's an awful lot of people who like one but not the other.
That's inaccurate. SF/Fantasy contains elements which are not possible under the laws of physics, not anything imaginary. Literary fiction is also imaginary, but taking place in "our world".
(The lines get blurrier when talking about imagined historical fiction, or even things like alternative fiction.)
Strictly speaking you don't have to have elements not possible under the laws of physics. I would definitely call The Martian science fiction, but it doesn't really try to break any physical laws.
Even things like Tau Zero are using relativistic time dilation as the plot driver.
I agree, and sometimes the line is drawn between SF being "things that are theoretically possible" vs. Fantasy where things are impossible. But then you have things like Egan's Clockwork Trilogy, which is "what if the laws of physics actually worked a bit differently in this specific way" but which I assume anyone would consider SF. As opposed to Brandon Sanderson's books, which could be described in a similar way, but are usually categorized Fantasy.
At the end, it's mostly a marketing and feeling thing. As one of my favorite authors put it, the different between SF and Fantasy sometimes comes down to - are you putting a tree or a spaceship on the cover of your book?
Ursula Le Guin in her preface to The Left Hand of Darkness [1], describes Science Fiction as "descriptive." She invents "elaborately circumstantial lies" as a means of describing what she sees as some truth in our being. The full quote:
> I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.
This is how I think about both science fiction and fantasy. Elements of world building are different, even within each sub-genre, but this element of incorporating elements that are inconsistent with our world to tell stories is common to both. It's also why the term "speculative fiction" persists: a category that subsumes sci-fi and fantasy.
They're usually the same thing, differing only thematically. Some "hard" sci-fi may be completely grounded in reality, but for most the "sci" is just a background setting. Many space operas are even more fantastical than wizards throwing fireballs at each other. Some fantasy writers go far out of their way to build coherent worlds governed by physical laws just as strict as our own. Both/Either/The genre(s) use the flexibility of an imagined world, whether that's an imagined future or some land of myth, to contrast with the present, and as with the fantastical myths of old, to make moral or political points that couldn't be so easily expressed if weighed down by history and nuance.
Practically speaking, they're lumped together for a few reasons:
1. Many people who like one genre also like the other.
2. Many authors write in both genres.
3. There's a lot of similarity in the genres, and lots of things that are hard to categorize. More true lately btw.
Just as an aside though, I personally was an avid almost-only-SF reader for the first 30-ish years of my life, but lately have been reading a lot of fantasy as well. I highly recommend trying, especially more modern fantasy - I feel like the lines are even blurrier between them today, and a lot of the best work today has shifted from SF to fantasy. (I still love SF and there's a lot of great SF as well, to be clear.)
Bookstores like to make things easy for themselves by defining categories (a la Seeing Like A State), especially due to the perceived overlap between the readership of the two categories as the weird books the nerdy guys read.
While that may have been true historically, fantasy has a new, blossoming, largely female readership, although you could consider this to be overloading the term 'fantasy' as these new BookTok books seem to have little in common with the old school sword and sorcery.
How would you classify The Foundation? Classic sci-fi novel, right? But it has telepaths.. By modern standards, telepathy, empaths, telekinesis.. that's all magic. Fantasy. But in 20th century science fiction it was extremely common.
There's no clear cut line. Wizards in one, starships in the other, but there's lots of magic in sci fi and lots of space in fantasy. The two genres meld together into a continuum and so it's only fair when some people classify them together. Discrete classification of continuous phenomena will always be a bit subjective.
If it's called telepathy it's sci-fi, if it's called magic it's fantasy. Learn the rules!
On a more serious note, yeah scifi and fantasy can usually be distinguished, I get why it so often gets lumped in together as speculative fiction, even though it annoys me when I'm looking for one and have to sift through the other.
Only for the earlier parts of that century. By the late 70s to 80s the scientific consensus was coming down hard against parapsychology but it continued to be featured in science fiction for quite some time. It was still going reasonably strong well into the 90s with popular media like Star Trek, Babylon 5, etc. You can still see some traces of it today, to an extent it has become a part of the genre that persists for legacy reasons, respect for or reference to older media in the genre.
The distiction isn't clear anyway. Some "fantasy" book are more scientific than some "sci-fi" books - if they have a system of magic then is that any difference to FTL travel, or Vinge's Region's of Thought?
I know what you mean, but the boundary can get blurry in some cases.
A Canticle for Liebowitz for example mostly feels like some kind of fantasy but for the fact that the reader knows it's set in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland.
Big chunks of the Peter F. Hamilton Void series is basically more or less set in a slightly magical Early Modern Venice.
The Laundry Files is strongly and deliberately in the middle ground of technology and magic, despite being ostensibly set in the present-day.
Stone Spring is an alternate history set in the Stone Age, but is not substantially more ahistorical than a non-fantasy historical novel about a person who didn't exist in reality doing things that never actually happened. Perhaps there's more focus on the engineering rather than fighting, romance, politics, murder and whatever else historical novels often revolve around, but building is as valid a human thing to do as plotting a regicide, say.
Generally, the concepts in both are the same: construct an "unreal" world and set a story in there, often with a projection of real-world issues onto the hypothetical substrate. Often the only real difference is if the unreal element is driven by magic, technology or a small change in a historical event. Sometimes it's a mixture. Sometimes the technology is treated as magic because the users don't understand it. Sometimes the magic is treated as a technology. Sometimes the historical divergence was thousands of years ago, sometimes it has only just happened in the story.
It would probably be more accurate to lump the whole lot under something generic like "speculative fiction" but that's not really a well-known term and has a slightly different meaning that blends into things like historical settings which may not be generally considered fantasy.
> A Canticle for Liebowitz for example mostly feels like some kind of fantasy but for the fact that the reader knows it's set in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland.
You might compare The Sword of Shannara, which is a character-for-character, scene-for-scene copy of Lord of the Rings, but which is technically set in the postapocalyptic future (it's easy to read the book without noticing this) rather than the legendary past.
I do not understand the praise that PHM or Andy Weir get in general. I hate the way he writes.
Characters are all interchangeable and quirky because he says so. The science is tacked on like a chemistry teacher putting their kids to bed.
SciFi: Read Larry Niven and James Blish if you like feats of engineering, read Ann Leckie and Nancy Kress if you like characters defined by their actions.
Don’t tell me to be excited Andy just because you wrote “THAT’S SOO COOL!” after revealing some tidbit. I’m not a fucking child.
Weir gets a lot of praise because his writing is accessible. While I also demand a bit more from the sci-fi I enjoy in terms of their narratives providing thought-provoking moments and a certain depth of information that we tend to call "hard" sci-fi, I'm not about to take a dump on Weir's work. He knows what he can do and who his audience is, so he writes for them. That is, arguably, the smartest thing any author can do if they want to make a living at it.
I had the same vitriol you do for Weir toward Ernest Klein. Absolute shit author in my opinion...but my opinion doesn't matter. His first book was still a wild success with a movie adaptation despite having one of the weakest plots and and some of the flattest characters I have ever seen in print, dressed up in a patchwork coat of nostalgia, which is the only reason it had the mass appeal that it did. But the book was not written for me, was it?
I think we forget, sometimes, that authors don't really owe us anything, that they're trying to pay the bills doing what they do, so our approval means little and only makes us look like self-rightious jerks so I had to learn to let that go and just not read those books that weren't jiving with my tastes or demands. In the end, let people have their books they like because, well, at least they're still reading and not watching TikTok or whatever.
You would not believe how bad publisher data is. I run a book website, and Dune is often tagged nonfiction in the data we get from publishers. I don't think they know how to use the BISAC system the industry uses (https://bisg.org/page/BISACEdition). With Dune, they were marking it "AI," which is a nonfiction-only category.
I also love Solaris. I remember reading it the first time as a teenager. It is so matter-of-fact in its telling, but the facts are so bizarre, that I found it to really induce terror. It has always struck me as more of a horror novel than as a sci-fi novel although it is clearly the latter.
There are now multiple English translations of Solaris available. I know that there’s been a lot of praise for the newer translation, and I read it, but I do not like it. Something about the earlier translation feels more ominous.
On that note—I’ve always found it hard to believe that The Cyberiad was written by the same author! I love the Cyberiad as well but almost for the opposite reasons I love Solaris. The entire universe is charming and funny, whereas Solaris is engrossing but dreadful. I went through a phase in college, reading every Lem book I could find, and eventually discovering that my library’s stacks also included Lem in Polish. Sadly I know no Polish, and was not motivated enough to learn it, so those novels remained off-limits to me.
I grew up in Germany, and there are more German translations of Lem than there are English translations - some 'first' English translations are very recent (last 10 years? Like Summae Technologicae?). I've always had a hypothesis that German geeks are more constrained and worried about the impacts of tech because we grew up with Lem, while American geeks grew up with Heinlein. VERY different views of the world.
Solaris is such a unique concept.
From Polish authors I've really enjoyed Limes Inferior by J. Zajdel. The concept of means of payment spoke to me, when I had my own wondering about workless future and digital currencies.
Indian politics 100 years following independence, forbidden AIs that pass a predefined threshold and policemen that chase them, individuals who have all their gender indicators surgically removed ...
Had a look at my bookshelf to see what I could find that was obscure, maybe these would be interesting:
First Contract (Greg Costikyan) - a book about the economics of first contact
John Courtney Grimwood (author) - science fiction, generally cyberpunk, told from the point of view of characters who don't understand the tehcnology, which gives his work a kind of mystic vibe. (Eg, Nine-tail fox is about a detective trying to solve his own murder)
Footfall (Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle) - was a big release back in the day, but not so well known these days. Hard SF alien invasion novel (Independence Day might have ripped this off a bit)
The NASA trilogy (Stephen Baxter) - dark alternative future books, with bleak endings but great science. I think not so well known these days because of the bleakness, but that's also part of what made them memorable when I read them.
> And I am ashamed to admit I haven't read any Greg Egan yet, need to get on that :)
Permutation City is his best-known work, and while some people (including me) enjoy the density of ideas, others find the characterisation weak. I'd start with one of his short story collections, such as Luminous.
> Culture, gender identity, hive mind, all rolled up into one extremely dense universe with a rich history told through warfare and cutting remarks, humanising potentially inhuman central characters with a vague number of limbs.
> It takes ten pages to get used to the dense yet clipped writing style, but once it clicks, you cannot put the book(s) down: the plot moves forward at breakneck speed.
The City and the Stars by Arthur C Clarke is one of my favourites and have only ever met one other person who has read it. Just reread it recently and it's even better and more relevant than I remembered.
The 1950s was a particularly good time for sci fi I think.
Wouldn’t say best but he is certainly world class for his short stories. While the film “Arrival” was excellent, it was based on his short story “Story of your life” which was even better.
The Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein. It's become my go-to recommendation for anyone I know that likes to read. Most people I've recommended it to have ended up buying all four books.
What's aspects of sci-fi or fantasy draw you? I personally go for the weirder sci-fi that seemed to come out of the imaginative (and, well, drug-fueled, probably) 60's and 70's, so my recommendations tend to come from that.
Dune by Frank Herbert - I'll get the obvious one out of the way. Everyone needs to read at least the first book. The world-building is a commentary on our own and none of the movies, series or games will every really capture the books in their entirety. There is just so much more to Dune than the barely-below-the-surface treatments we get with film because they have to appeal to a mass audience that tends to have the relative intelligence of my left shoe.
Candy Man by Vincent King - take PKD's Electric Sheep question of what makes a human a human, then explore the answer in a far-flung future that ends up being a bit of a nightmare circus. Great world-building, here, but King reveals in slow morsels that leave us with questions and fuel turning the page. While his other works are not really that prolific, he hit the nail on the head with this one, bringing some dialect playfulness to the writing that just adds to the immersion. It's a haunting world, unsure of why it exists due to short memories and withholding of information, and unintentionally hints at the modern day disquiet of man as we race toward whatever Singularity we have accidentally or intentionally created.
Colossus by D. F. Jones - a bit like Wargames but more swanky, the US and Russia each create artificial super-intelligence then let them talk to each other, which goes about as well as you can imagine. The story hints at the notion that as soon as politics gets involved with science, things tend to get really cocked up, resulting in hostile takeovers, or worse, annihilation. It's a short read, and should be on the to-do list of anyone experiencing existential dread over the AI race today.
A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller - everyone needs a bit of post-apocalypsia now and then and I always recommend this one to get your fix. Here's an extreme treatment of what happens when anti-intellectualism becomes the modus operendi as we are thrust into a harsh and desolate world brought about by global nuclear war, roaming mobs blaming science (rather that politics, as Simpletons will do) for getting humanity into the mess it's in, going so far as to forbid pretty much any book-learning or education beyond the church. As artifacts from the past (our present, more or less) are uncovered, things get a bit hectic.
I'm also happy to take any recommendations, enjoying other authors like Stanislaw Lem, John Brunner, Robert Heinlein, Vonnegut, Jack Vance, etc. Reading books is probably one of the few things in my life that makes me feel a little less alone.
I'm into Neal Stephenson and PKD. Currently reading Nexus by Naam. Near-future post-cyberpunk tends to be a hit for me, but I'm hoping to find a good space opera. I thought the first Culture book was basically a Schwarzenegger space-adventurism movie in book form, which is nice but not what I wanted.
For cult sci fi classics you can't get much better than "Stars My Destination" by Alfred Bester. Other goodies include Dune (of course), Gateway, and The Forever War.
I also recently read Speaker For The Dead (sequel to Enders Game) and was pleasantly surprised. Possibly better than the original.
A sibling comment mentions Tchaikovsky which I strongly concur with.
IIRC this was the first book in the universe that the author wrote, but publishers insisted it was a bit heavy, so he wrote Ender's Game as an easier entry into the universe. On the topic of Ender's universe, the whole Ender's Shadow thread is also a great read. The first book is covering some of the same events but from the perspective of Bean.
In the side panels are users/readers who drew up their own maps on what they think the Nightscape is.
It has all the romantic mystery of a fantasy tale, whilst still being firmly grounded in reality.
I remember when London's Shard was going up, and I'd see it lit up slightly at night, glowing and ominous and thinking, "this is it: this is the last holdout of humanity."
Wright also has an extended paen to the mentioned Voyage to Arcturus: https://a.co/d/hubUM05 which neither I, nor the author, recommend unless you have read and deeply love Voyage to Arcturus, but I mention it because the overlap reading this list was quite uncanny. That is a very, very specific point of overlap.
Should the original author ever read this thread I highly recommend Wright to them because of the overlap.
I'd like to recommend one as well: The City & the City, by China Miéville. A delightful, unique experience! Fresh and original, “fantasy science fiction”. Not a big fan of detective stories and noir, but this is something else.
I found Railsea really fun. It's a bit silly and didn't take itself very seriously. Somehow it feels like it could have been a novelisation of a British 1960/70s stop motion TV show like the Clangers.
Of these I've only read The Worm Ouroboros, and I cannot recommend it enough. The structure is a bit weird at first—you gotta get past the first chapter—but after that it settles and is astounding. If you have any passing interest in Lord of the Rings, you'll likely love it.
I've read 3 out of those 5 books, and I see our preferences differ. For instance, I've a few books from Van Vogt, and I can't imagine I could like anything he wrote.
- "A voyage to Arcturus" tried hard at being strange and philosophical, but it seemed shallow and I did not feel interested.
- "The worm Ouroboros" was better, with a very unusual epic style, both in writing style and in the story. But some points made me cringe, e.g. the focus on nobles and the despise of common people, even heroic characters. Then it got repetitive, with a final trick that felt like a mockery of the whole story.
- "The dying Earth" was a good book, but it is far from my favorites. I prefer continuous novels to collections of short stories, even when they share a common setting. The book sometimes felt like a poetic tale, with nature and nostalgia as strong themes, though it was also quite brutal.
Since anonymous suggestions aren't very useful without any context, I'll match little-known books with famous books:
- If you thought that "1984" had good ideas, but also many stupid parts that spoiled the whole book, then try two older books. "We", by Zamiatin, is a bit old and naive but enjoyable. It was a source of inspiration for "Brave new world" and "1984". The Swede "Kollocain" (1940), by Karin Boye, is excellent, and much more subtle than the latter.
- If you like collections of related short stories, like "The dying Earth", then "The carpet makers" (1995) by Andreas Eschbach is a must. I remember the joy when I finally had a global understanding of the whole situation.
- If you wish for bizarre fantasy, not the epic Tolkien style, not even the dark saga of Ouroboros, but something more gothic and unsettling, then Mervyn Peake's "Titus groans" is perfect.
- I think "Brain twister" (1961) is the only funny book I've read in SF-Fantasy-supernatural.
"The Dying Earth" is an "important" book historically as it is the source inspiration for the early Dungeons and Dragons magic system (some of the spells are clearly copied from it).
As an aside, I've had the good fortune to play in a few "Dying Earth" roleplaying campaigns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dying_Earth_Roleplaying_Ga...) and it's one of the most fun RPGs as most of the gameplay revolves around one-upping everyone else and experience is awarded for using taglines appropriately rather than killing monsters etc.
As a more casual sci-fi reader I highly recommend Red Rising as a series. This first book is a very straightforward mashup of hunger games and Galica which is quite fun and enjoyable, but the series as a whole immediately creates it's own identify after that and I adore it deeply.
A E Van Vogt can hardly be called unheard of, the null A series is quite a cult classic. But yeah, the Space Beagle is not his most well-known work.
It always surprises me (although it shouldn't) how many underrated gems there are still in the world. And new ones are produced every day.
E.G: I still think QTMN will deserve a place as a classic sci-fi author among the great ones, for "there is no antimemetics division" alone. And yet despite a solid fan following, it has never exploded in popularity. It is 10 times better than the 3 body problems, which comparatively had stratospheric success.
In movies, "Amelie" has been a planetary success, but from the same author, the excellent "The city of the lost children" is practically unknown.
Even last month, a tv show named "Nero" came out on Netflix, and while not revolutionary, is clearly above most of the crap that regularly comes out. Yet, nobody talks about it.
If you like these books -- early classics of the genres -- it's going to be well worth your time to check out Fantasy Masterworks collection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_Masterworks). It's a set of reissued sci-fi and fantasy novels, chosen by the British publisher Millennium for their quality and influence on later writers.
3/5 of the books in the linked article are included.
It's not perfect-- it's missing War for the Oaks, for example, and doesn't have any Iain M Banks. But there's an awful lot of good material in there.
Missing Iain M Banks is a weird omission indeed - perhaps they couldn't get the reprint rights.
Both Gollancz (SF Masterworks) and Orbit (most Banks books) are ultimately owned by Lagardère/Hachette. Presumably they could wrangle the rights if they really wanted.
I suppose they just don't see any need to republish Banks books, most of which are quite recent, continue to be popular and are mostly still in print under Orbit as part of an already unified series.
Perhaps but if adding it to the list costs them little then to do a print run I don't get why they wouldn't and just have two printings concurrently, if they did say Consider Phlebas with the first edition cover I'd pick up a second copy just for that cover.
Though I'm carefully not going to look on AbeBooks to see what the first editions currently go for since I don't need to spend that kind of money (want to yes, need to no).
I read sci-fi but not fantasy, why do people insist on lumping these together?
> I read sci-fi but not fantasy
I used to be the same. Ask yourself why.
Harumi Marukami and Han Kang count as fantasy. (I’d argue so does Ian Banks.) Read Tolkien with a hard eye towards rules, meanwhile, and you find a universe that is largely consistent in the Unseen over the Seen, which pretty neatly maps to invisible physics guiding visible phenomena.
They really aren't all that different from each other. One is imaginary things that might one day be possible, and the other is imaginary things that won't ever be possible.
And even then, that can swap between the genres. Scifi often contains FTL tech, which from what we know is almost certainly impossible so it's actually more like fantastical magic. Meanwhile, fantasy can have hard rules for its magic, in which case it acts more like technology that we haven't discovered yet. I haven't read it yet myself, but I've heard of Wizard's Bane, where a programmer is transported to a magical land and becomes really powerful because he treats the magic system like a new programming language.
Other things I've noticed is that scifi tends to involve spaceships and is more mystery oriented, whereas fantasy tends to take place on the ground and is more hero's journey oriented. But even these aren't defining traits. Plenty of scifi books involve investigating alien planets and many contain the hero's journey (including the original Star Wars if you count that as scifi). Meanwhile plenty of fantasy books are on some sort of ship (Narnia - Voyage of the Dawn Treader) and many are more mystery oriented (Harry Potter for example).
Personally, I think a better line of division is hard vs soft. Was the world created first with actual rules and the characters molded to fit the world (Dune, Lord of the Rings)? Or were the characters created first and the rules are bent to create the story that is being desired to tell (Star Trek with its technobabble, Star Wars's prequels and sequels, the entire universe of Harry Potter)?
They are different if you like sci-fi and dislike fantasy which OP apparently does as do I, on the grand scheme of things not a big deal but it does get in the way when specifically looking for new sci-fi to read.
It's not on the quality level of these books, but the Off to Be the Wizard series of books are humorous programming-as-magic tales that skirt the sci-fi/fantasy line. [The fulcrum of the story is that there is a computer file "out there" that reflects reality; those who find it can edit it to do all kinds of "magic". Hilarity ensues.]
this sounds intriguing, thanks!
I never find it helpful when people say they aren't that different from each other.
Sure there may be some similarities if you want to take an analytical view of the genres, but there's an awful lot of people who like one but not the other.
If the criterion is that it's to some extent imaginary, we already have a word for that: Fiction.
That's inaccurate. SF/Fantasy contains elements which are not possible under the laws of physics, not anything imaginary. Literary fiction is also imaginary, but taking place in "our world".
(The lines get blurrier when talking about imagined historical fiction, or even things like alternative fiction.)
Strictly speaking you don't have to have elements not possible under the laws of physics. I would definitely call The Martian science fiction, but it doesn't really try to break any physical laws.
Even things like Tau Zero are using relativistic time dilation as the plot driver.
(Haven't read Tau Zero.)
I agree, and sometimes the line is drawn between SF being "things that are theoretically possible" vs. Fantasy where things are impossible. But then you have things like Egan's Clockwork Trilogy, which is "what if the laws of physics actually worked a bit differently in this specific way" but which I assume anyone would consider SF. As opposed to Brandon Sanderson's books, which could be described in a similar way, but are usually categorized Fantasy.
At the end, it's mostly a marketing and feeling thing. As one of my favorite authors put it, the different between SF and Fantasy sometimes comes down to - are you putting a tree or a spaceship on the cover of your book?
Ursula Le Guin in her preface to The Left Hand of Darkness [1], describes Science Fiction as "descriptive." She invents "elaborately circumstantial lies" as a means of describing what she sees as some truth in our being. The full quote:
> I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.
This is how I think about both science fiction and fantasy. Elements of world building are different, even within each sub-genre, but this element of incorporating elements that are inconsistent with our world to tell stories is common to both. It's also why the term "speculative fiction" persists: a category that subsumes sci-fi and fantasy.
[1] Read that full preface here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/342990/the-left-hand...
"A novelist's business is lying....
and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That’s the truth!"
The preface is as valuable as the book that follows.
They're usually the same thing, differing only thematically. Some "hard" sci-fi may be completely grounded in reality, but for most the "sci" is just a background setting. Many space operas are even more fantastical than wizards throwing fireballs at each other. Some fantasy writers go far out of their way to build coherent worlds governed by physical laws just as strict as our own. Both/Either/The genre(s) use the flexibility of an imagined world, whether that's an imagined future or some land of myth, to contrast with the present, and as with the fantastical myths of old, to make moral or political points that couldn't be so easily expressed if weighed down by history and nuance.
Practically speaking, they're lumped together for a few reasons:
1. Many people who like one genre also like the other.
2. Many authors write in both genres.
3. There's a lot of similarity in the genres, and lots of things that are hard to categorize. More true lately btw.
Just as an aside though, I personally was an avid almost-only-SF reader for the first 30-ish years of my life, but lately have been reading a lot of fantasy as well. I highly recommend trying, especially more modern fantasy - I feel like the lines are even blurrier between them today, and a lot of the best work today has shifted from SF to fantasy. (I still love SF and there's a lot of great SF as well, to be clear.)
Bookstores like to make things easy for themselves by defining categories (a la Seeing Like A State), especially due to the perceived overlap between the readership of the two categories as the weird books the nerdy guys read.
While that may have been true historically, fantasy has a new, blossoming, largely female readership, although you could consider this to be overloading the term 'fantasy' as these new BookTok books seem to have little in common with the old school sword and sorcery.
How would you classify The Foundation? Classic sci-fi novel, right? But it has telepaths.. By modern standards, telepathy, empaths, telekinesis.. that's all magic. Fantasy. But in 20th century science fiction it was extremely common.
Interestingly, that was due to the top editor at a major sci fi publisher being really into psychics.
I don't see the problem. You yourself seem to have no trouble at all identifying The Foundation as sci-fi.
There's no clear cut line. Wizards in one, starships in the other, but there's lots of magic in sci fi and lots of space in fantasy. The two genres meld together into a continuum and so it's only fair when some people classify them together. Discrete classification of continuous phenomena will always be a bit subjective.
If it's called telepathy it's sci-fi, if it's called magic it's fantasy. Learn the rules!
On a more serious note, yeah scifi and fantasy can usually be distinguished, I get why it so often gets lumped in together as speculative fiction, even though it annoys me when I'm looking for one and have to sift through the other.
Note that in the 20th century telepathy was believed to be real.
Only for the earlier parts of that century. By the late 70s to 80s the scientific consensus was coming down hard against parapsychology but it continued to be featured in science fiction for quite some time. It was still going reasonably strong well into the 90s with popular media like Star Trek, Babylon 5, etc. You can still see some traces of it today, to an extent it has become a part of the genre that persists for legacy reasons, respect for or reference to older media in the genre.
Because both deal with imaginary world building?
The distiction isn't clear anyway. Some "fantasy" book are more scientific than some "sci-fi" books - if they have a system of magic then is that any difference to FTL travel, or Vinge's Region's of Thought?
They typically have a lot of overlap. Vast majority of scifi is fantasy set in the future.
The genres weren't always as defined and distinct. The early authors and especially the editors who popularized the genre frequently worked in both.
I would be hard put to place The Night Land in one genre or the other. Hodgson would have had no idea what the difference was anyway.
That's a major gripe of mine. Nothing against fantasy, but for me these are two almost opposite genres.
I think it is mostly to differentiate it from other fiction genres. While there is some overlaps, there is much more common in those other genres.
I know what you mean, but the boundary can get blurry in some cases.
A Canticle for Liebowitz for example mostly feels like some kind of fantasy but for the fact that the reader knows it's set in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland.
Big chunks of the Peter F. Hamilton Void series is basically more or less set in a slightly magical Early Modern Venice.
The Laundry Files is strongly and deliberately in the middle ground of technology and magic, despite being ostensibly set in the present-day.
Stone Spring is an alternate history set in the Stone Age, but is not substantially more ahistorical than a non-fantasy historical novel about a person who didn't exist in reality doing things that never actually happened. Perhaps there's more focus on the engineering rather than fighting, romance, politics, murder and whatever else historical novels often revolve around, but building is as valid a human thing to do as plotting a regicide, say.
Generally, the concepts in both are the same: construct an "unreal" world and set a story in there, often with a projection of real-world issues onto the hypothetical substrate. Often the only real difference is if the unreal element is driven by magic, technology or a small change in a historical event. Sometimes it's a mixture. Sometimes the technology is treated as magic because the users don't understand it. Sometimes the magic is treated as a technology. Sometimes the historical divergence was thousands of years ago, sometimes it has only just happened in the story.
It would probably be more accurate to lump the whole lot under something generic like "speculative fiction" but that's not really a well-known term and has a slightly different meaning that blends into things like historical settings which may not be generally considered fantasy.
> A Canticle for Liebowitz for example mostly feels like some kind of fantasy but for the fact that the reader knows it's set in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland.
You might compare The Sword of Shannara, which is a character-for-character, scene-for-scene copy of Lord of the Rings, but which is technically set in the postapocalyptic future (it's easy to read the book without noticing this) rather than the legendary past.
I think because a lot of sci-fi dips it’s toes in fantasy. Once you invent FTL it’s not much further to a medieval era species of telepathic dogs.
I’m with you though.
I'm with you. My favorite sci-fi is something like Project Hail Mary, which is radically different from fantasy.
I do not understand the praise that PHM or Andy Weir get in general. I hate the way he writes.
Characters are all interchangeable and quirky because he says so. The science is tacked on like a chemistry teacher putting their kids to bed.
SciFi: Read Larry Niven and James Blish if you like feats of engineering, read Ann Leckie and Nancy Kress if you like characters defined by their actions.
Don’t tell me to be excited Andy just because you wrote “THAT’S SOO COOL!” after revealing some tidbit. I’m not a fucking child.
Andy Weir does a tight well placed adventure better than most.
I can see that you wouldn't like him if you're more into characters than plot, but that's not what everyone wants.
Weir gets a lot of praise because his writing is accessible. While I also demand a bit more from the sci-fi I enjoy in terms of their narratives providing thought-provoking moments and a certain depth of information that we tend to call "hard" sci-fi, I'm not about to take a dump on Weir's work. He knows what he can do and who his audience is, so he writes for them. That is, arguably, the smartest thing any author can do if they want to make a living at it.
I had the same vitriol you do for Weir toward Ernest Klein. Absolute shit author in my opinion...but my opinion doesn't matter. His first book was still a wild success with a movie adaptation despite having one of the weakest plots and and some of the flattest characters I have ever seen in print, dressed up in a patchwork coat of nostalgia, which is the only reason it had the mass appeal that it did. But the book was not written for me, was it?
I think we forget, sometimes, that authors don't really owe us anything, that they're trying to pay the bills doing what they do, so our approval means little and only makes us look like self-rightious jerks so I had to learn to let that go and just not read those books that weren't jiving with my tastes or demands. In the end, let people have their books they like because, well, at least they're still reading and not watching TikTok or whatever.
It’s not people, it’s publishers insist on it.
Because they need a place for Star Wars, best known fantasy in space
Because of Roger Zelazny
What's truly infuriating is how awful the tagging on Audible is. "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is tagged sci-fi.
You would not believe how bad publisher data is. I run a book website, and Dune is often tagged nonfiction in the data we get from publishers. I don't think they know how to use the BISAC system the industry uses (https://bisg.org/page/BISACEdition). With Dune, they were marking it "AI," which is a nonfiction-only category.
Just one small example...
Of course there is a significant overlap in readers of both genres. I am mostly the same as you though, I rarely read fantasy.
Always annoys me having to wade through fantasy to find the sci fi on bookshop shelves. At least you can filter to just sci fi for ebooks mostly.
How would you define the difference?
Both fit in the category of speculative fiction and as the many commenters have pointed out, speciation is difficult.
One definition I saw that sort of kind of worked is:
One puts an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances, the other puts an extraordinary person in ordinary circumstances.
Anyone got some favs to share?
I need to read the new Peter Hamilton book (book 2 due out soon). And I am ashamed to admit I haven't read any Greg Egan yet, need to get on that :)
For modern sci fi and fantasy, pretty much anything by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
I also just discovered the short story collections of Rich Larson (Changelog and Tomorrow Factory are both recommended)
Just published as well is There is No Antimimetics Division by qntm. You can read the original on SCP [1], but it's now out in book form.
[1] https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
There is No Antimimetics Division by qntm is a great read
I love Stanislaw Lem. Solaris is his most famous and it has many of his core themes; I'd also try Fiasco.
I'm also a huge fan of R.A. Lafferty, but his stuff his harder to find, mostly out of print.
Peter Watts' Blindsight is amazing recent-ish hard SF. (the follow-up, I did not like at all).
Anything from the Strugatsky brothers you can get your hands on!
I also love Solaris. I remember reading it the first time as a teenager. It is so matter-of-fact in its telling, but the facts are so bizarre, that I found it to really induce terror. It has always struck me as more of a horror novel than as a sci-fi novel although it is clearly the latter.
There are now multiple English translations of Solaris available. I know that there’s been a lot of praise for the newer translation, and I read it, but I do not like it. Something about the earlier translation feels more ominous.
On that note—I’ve always found it hard to believe that The Cyberiad was written by the same author! I love the Cyberiad as well but almost for the opposite reasons I love Solaris. The entire universe is charming and funny, whereas Solaris is engrossing but dreadful. I went through a phase in college, reading every Lem book I could find, and eventually discovering that my library’s stacks also included Lem in Polish. Sadly I know no Polish, and was not motivated enough to learn it, so those novels remained off-limits to me.
I grew up in Germany, and there are more German translations of Lem than there are English translations - some 'first' English translations are very recent (last 10 years? Like Summae Technologicae?). I've always had a hypothesis that German geeks are more constrained and worried about the impacts of tech because we grew up with Lem, while American geeks grew up with Heinlein. VERY different views of the world.
Solaris is such a unique concept. From Polish authors I've really enjoyed Limes Inferior by J. Zajdel. The concept of means of payment spoke to me, when I had my own wondering about workless future and digital currencies.
River of Gods by Ian McDonald
Indian politics 100 years following independence, forbidden AIs that pass a predefined threshold and policemen that chase them, individuals who have all their gender indicators surgically removed ...
An amazingly saturated piece of writing
Robert L. Forward's Dragon's Egg and Starquake:
https://mdpub.github.io/cheela/
In the spirit of brining down the level of intellectual sophistication here, I have a few recommendations I've enjoyed.
- All 18 Expeditionary Force books by Craig Alanson
- The first 5 Starship's Mage books by Glynn Stewart. UnArcana Stars (book 6) went in a direction that made the government look extremely incompetent.
- Jacques McKeown series by Yahtzee Croshaw
- Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells
- Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor
Had a look at my bookshelf to see what I could find that was obscure, maybe these would be interesting:
First Contract (Greg Costikyan) - a book about the economics of first contact
John Courtney Grimwood (author) - science fiction, generally cyberpunk, told from the point of view of characters who don't understand the tehcnology, which gives his work a kind of mystic vibe. (Eg, Nine-tail fox is about a detective trying to solve his own murder)
Footfall (Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle) - was a big release back in the day, but not so well known these days. Hard SF alien invasion novel (Independence Day might have ripped this off a bit)
The NASA trilogy (Stephen Baxter) - dark alternative future books, with bleak endings but great science. I think not so well known these days because of the bleakness, but that's also part of what made them memorable when I read them.
Little, Big by John Crowley. Also everything else he's written.
Seconded!
> And I am ashamed to admit I haven't read any Greg Egan yet, need to get on that :)
Permutation City is his best-known work, and while some people (including me) enjoy the density of ideas, others find the characterisation weak. I'd start with one of his short story collections, such as Luminous.
Second the short stories. Axiomatic has some great ones too with concepts that really stuck with me.
And if you like that, Phase Space by Stephen Baxter feels very similar.
To quote an earlier comment of mine
> Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice series.
> Culture, gender identity, hive mind, all rolled up into one extremely dense universe with a rich history told through warfare and cutting remarks, humanising potentially inhuman central characters with a vague number of limbs.
> It takes ten pages to get used to the dense yet clipped writing style, but once it clicks, you cannot put the book(s) down: the plot moves forward at breakneck speed.
The City and the Stars by Arthur C Clarke is one of my favourites and have only ever met one other person who has read it. Just reread it recently and it's even better and more relevant than I remembered.
The 1950s was a particularly good time for sci fi I think.
Ted Chiang is often regarded as the best sci-fi author of our times.
Wouldn’t say best but he is certainly world class for his short stories. While the film “Arrival” was excellent, it was based on his short story “Story of your life” which was even better.
The Ted Sturgeon of our era.
The Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein. It's become my go-to recommendation for anyone I know that likes to read. Most people I've recommended it to have ended up buying all four books.
Also: a little more widely known, but the Black Company series by Glen Cook.
Midworld Press have started putting out some really nice signed editions of these which has made me quite happy.
I've become a huge fan of A.E. van Vogt and have been slowly collecting all of his pulp books.
What's aspects of sci-fi or fantasy draw you? I personally go for the weirder sci-fi that seemed to come out of the imaginative (and, well, drug-fueled, probably) 60's and 70's, so my recommendations tend to come from that.
Dune by Frank Herbert - I'll get the obvious one out of the way. Everyone needs to read at least the first book. The world-building is a commentary on our own and none of the movies, series or games will every really capture the books in their entirety. There is just so much more to Dune than the barely-below-the-surface treatments we get with film because they have to appeal to a mass audience that tends to have the relative intelligence of my left shoe.
Candy Man by Vincent King - take PKD's Electric Sheep question of what makes a human a human, then explore the answer in a far-flung future that ends up being a bit of a nightmare circus. Great world-building, here, but King reveals in slow morsels that leave us with questions and fuel turning the page. While his other works are not really that prolific, he hit the nail on the head with this one, bringing some dialect playfulness to the writing that just adds to the immersion. It's a haunting world, unsure of why it exists due to short memories and withholding of information, and unintentionally hints at the modern day disquiet of man as we race toward whatever Singularity we have accidentally or intentionally created.
Colossus by D. F. Jones - a bit like Wargames but more swanky, the US and Russia each create artificial super-intelligence then let them talk to each other, which goes about as well as you can imagine. The story hints at the notion that as soon as politics gets involved with science, things tend to get really cocked up, resulting in hostile takeovers, or worse, annihilation. It's a short read, and should be on the to-do list of anyone experiencing existential dread over the AI race today.
A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller - everyone needs a bit of post-apocalypsia now and then and I always recommend this one to get your fix. Here's an extreme treatment of what happens when anti-intellectualism becomes the modus operendi as we are thrust into a harsh and desolate world brought about by global nuclear war, roaming mobs blaming science (rather that politics, as Simpletons will do) for getting humanity into the mess it's in, going so far as to forbid pretty much any book-learning or education beyond the church. As artifacts from the past (our present, more or less) are uncovered, things get a bit hectic.
I'm also happy to take any recommendations, enjoying other authors like Stanislaw Lem, John Brunner, Robert Heinlein, Vonnegut, Jack Vance, etc. Reading books is probably one of the few things in my life that makes me feel a little less alone.
I'm into Neal Stephenson and PKD. Currently reading Nexus by Naam. Near-future post-cyberpunk tends to be a hit for me, but I'm hoping to find a good space opera. I thought the first Culture book was basically a Schwarzenegger space-adventurism movie in book form, which is nice but not what I wanted.
I also didn't like Consider Phlebas.
Space Opera's not really my genre but I enjoyed Commonwealth Saga by Peter F. Hamilton some years ago.
Read by myself and the rest in audiobook read by boring John Lee walking the dog. But I finished it and several conceptes have stayed with me since.
For cult sci fi classics you can't get much better than "Stars My Destination" by Alfred Bester. Other goodies include Dune (of course), Gateway, and The Forever War.
I also recently read Speaker For The Dead (sequel to Enders Game) and was pleasantly surprised. Possibly better than the original.
A sibling comment mentions Tchaikovsky which I strongly concur with.
> Possibly better than the original.
IIRC this was the first book in the universe that the author wrote, but publishers insisted it was a bit heavy, so he wrote Ender's Game as an easier entry into the universe. On the topic of Ender's universe, the whole Ender's Shadow thread is also a great read. The first book is covering some of the same events but from the perspective of Bean.
John C Wright wrote a nice short story set in William Hope Hodgson's "The Night Land"
Awake in the Night
https://web.archive.org/web/20090524012412/http://www.thenig...
In the side panels are users/readers who drew up their own maps on what they think the Nightscape is.
It has all the romantic mystery of a fantasy tale, whilst still being firmly grounded in reality.
I remember when London's Shard was going up, and I'd see it lit up slightly at night, glowing and ominous and thinking, "this is it: this is the last holdout of humanity."
It's four stories in the complete set: https://a.co/d/gEdBkYR
Wright also has an extended paen to the mentioned Voyage to Arcturus: https://a.co/d/hubUM05 which neither I, nor the author, recommend unless you have read and deeply love Voyage to Arcturus, but I mention it because the overlap reading this list was quite uncanny. That is a very, very specific point of overlap.
Should the original author ever read this thread I highly recommend Wright to them because of the overlap.
> Voyage to Arcturus
The blurb reads like a Gene Wolf story, surreal in its landscapes and interactions.
I will give it a try, and follow up with Wright's book.
Thanks for the recommendation!
I'd like to recommend one as well: The City & the City, by China Miéville. A delightful, unique experience! Fresh and original, “fantasy science fiction”. Not a big fan of detective stories and noir, but this is something else.
I found Railsea really fun. It's a bit silly and didn't take itself very seriously. Somehow it feels like it could have been a novelisation of a British 1960/70s stop motion TV show like the Clangers.
I loved Perdido Street Station and The Scar. Haven't read this one but I'm adding it to my list now. Thanks!
Liked it though preferred Embassytown. Hated PSS.
Of these I've only read The Worm Ouroboros, and I cannot recommend it enough. The structure is a bit weird at first—you gotta get past the first chapter—but after that it settles and is astounding. If you have any passing interest in Lord of the Rings, you'll likely love it.
I've read 3 out of those 5 books, and I see our preferences differ. For instance, I've a few books from Van Vogt, and I can't imagine I could like anything he wrote.
- "A voyage to Arcturus" tried hard at being strange and philosophical, but it seemed shallow and I did not feel interested.
- "The worm Ouroboros" was better, with a very unusual epic style, both in writing style and in the story. But some points made me cringe, e.g. the focus on nobles and the despise of common people, even heroic characters. Then it got repetitive, with a final trick that felt like a mockery of the whole story.
- "The dying Earth" was a good book, but it is far from my favorites. I prefer continuous novels to collections of short stories, even when they share a common setting. The book sometimes felt like a poetic tale, with nature and nostalgia as strong themes, though it was also quite brutal.
Since anonymous suggestions aren't very useful without any context, I'll match little-known books with famous books:
- If you thought that "1984" had good ideas, but also many stupid parts that spoiled the whole book, then try two older books. "We", by Zamiatin, is a bit old and naive but enjoyable. It was a source of inspiration for "Brave new world" and "1984". The Swede "Kollocain" (1940), by Karin Boye, is excellent, and much more subtle than the latter.
- If you like collections of related short stories, like "The dying Earth", then "The carpet makers" (1995) by Andreas Eschbach is a must. I remember the joy when I finally had a global understanding of the whole situation.
- If you wish for bizarre fantasy, not the epic Tolkien style, not even the dark saga of Ouroboros, but something more gothic and unsettling, then Mervyn Peake's "Titus groans" is perfect.
- I think "Brain twister" (1961) is the only funny book I've read in SF-Fantasy-supernatural.
"The Dying Earth" is an "important" book historically as it is the source inspiration for the early Dungeons and Dragons magic system (some of the spells are clearly copied from it).
As an aside, I've had the good fortune to play in a few "Dying Earth" roleplaying campaigns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dying_Earth_Roleplaying_Ga...) and it's one of the most fun RPGs as most of the gameplay revolves around one-upping everyone else and experience is awarded for using taglines appropriately rather than killing monsters etc.
Am I missing something, or is “Love And Chocolate” a romance novel that was included as a joke? Seems pretty incongruous in this list.
You may have overlooked the small blue bar at the top labeling it an ad.
My version of the website doesn't mention "Love And Chocolate" anywhere?!
I would like to recommend The Wandering Inn by Pirateaba. You won't read anything else for years.
So many lesser known modern books to recommend.
Memoires of an imaginary friend
Dogs of war (Adrian Tchaikovsky one)
The devil's detective
Red rising
The painted man
As a more casual sci-fi reader I highly recommend Red Rising as a series. This first book is a very straightforward mashup of hunger games and Galica which is quite fun and enjoyable, but the series as a whole immediately creates it's own identify after that and I adore it deeply.
+1 The Dying Earth
Pretty much anything by Jack Vance is a win.
One of the effects of passing of time is that even some of the greats of yore are now obscure and cultish. Like the whole golden age
I have met very few people under 50 that have read the early Schekley short stories. That are probably one of the sci fi peaks.
But in cult and unknown works - Ticket to tranai. One of the best (anti) utopias written.
A E Van Vogt can hardly be called unheard of, the null A series is quite a cult classic. But yeah, the Space Beagle is not his most well-known work.
It always surprises me (although it shouldn't) how many underrated gems there are still in the world. And new ones are produced every day.
E.G: I still think QTMN will deserve a place as a classic sci-fi author among the great ones, for "there is no antimemetics division" alone. And yet despite a solid fan following, it has never exploded in popularity. It is 10 times better than the 3 body problems, which comparatively had stratospheric success.
In movies, "Amelie" has been a planetary success, but from the same author, the excellent "The city of the lost children" is practically unknown.
Even last month, a tv show named "Nero" came out on Netflix, and while not revolutionary, is clearly above most of the crap that regularly comes out. Yet, nobody talks about it.
Popularity is a cruel mistress.