Reply #18: I'm a fan of both

[hyphenate]

Truly intelligent readers can tell the difference in a heartbeat and I enjoy both for their respective philosophies and takes on storytelling.

I would participate in an SF oriented forum and would be glad to have it, but it would also be nice to have a separate one for fantasy as well.

There are actually far more connections with fantasy than with SF than most people are aware of, especially in television. For instance, contrary to popular belief, shows such as Stargate and Andromeda are more fantasy than SF. Even B5 had a delicate balancing act between fantasy and SF and I think it was more fantasy ultimately. And such movie fare based on almost any comic book (Spiderman, MIB and Superman, for example) are more fantasy than SF.

If people are talking about what openly admits to being fantasy, that's another topic altogether. However, there is an extremely fine line between the two genres than most people will care to admit.

True "SF" nowadays is often more in shows that you would not even consider as being SF--shows like the CSI and forensic series, for example, are notable for one thing. Of the genre fare on SciFi, Taken was likely the most "realistic" of the lot, but almost anything that involves a potential alien race nowadays is more fantasy than SF.

It's really a difficult choice to limit fantasy in discussions about SF precisely for this reason. Unless you are a hardliner, there is inevitably crossover, regardless of how ruthless you are to filter out the supposed fantasy.

Television and film notwithstanding, you have far more delineation in literature, though even here it's sometimes difficult to tell. For instance, you have the subject of time travel. In the "real world" time travel would be considered fantasy because there has been no way of actually formulating scenarios where such scientific evidence exists to make it possible. On the other hand, robots have generally been an accepted form of SF since the beginning, and journeys to realistically created planets have been able to be projected without too much problem (read Hal Clement novels, and you will know what I mean).

On the other hand, even in such respected writing as that of Poul Anderson, John Brunner, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick and such, there exist elements that have been disproven since the stories first made their appearance, rendering such noble "SF" to the realm of fantasy.

I find that trying to make distinctions between the two very closely related genre is useless, because once you decide to exclude one element, you end up making decisions based on truly arbitrary criteria--in one person's eyes, Enterprise would be considered SF, but in reality, it's fantasy. Matrix looks very SF, but it's only fantasy. X Files might be thought of as SF, but The Lone Gunmen should be classified as fantasy.

I know I'm nitpicking, but I do find it incredibly difficult to try to separate both genre, because by true definition, horror films are often more SF than fantasy, simply because the possibility of "ghosts" is more fundamentally accurate than the possibility of warp drive.

If, on the other hand, an SF group is formed, I would like to see a fantasy group as well. They both serve their purpose, and people are going to find pretty close to the same sort of material in both.