And yet I've seen them.

RPGPundit

So what do you guys think of Asimov? Where do you put him? Hard, soft?

Ballard's still writing? That's sweet! The man who predicted Reagan's presidency in the sixties...

Pundit just overreacts to idiots. Once he gets over that he'll be OK.

Egh. I'm starting to suspect that this thread's gonna end up talking about a lot of science fiction writing, when what I'm interested in is talking about well-done fantasy, and that in game settings. Because, while I'm sympathetic to the lack of popular, well-done hard scifi game settings with systems to match, that's not where I was goin'.

Guess I oughta try harder.

All genres have their pitfalls. Fantasy gets the wishful thinking, and it's fantasy when it's swords and magic or spaceships and lightsabers. When you can say either, "A wizard did it." or, "It's Science!", then the point's moot, because neither of those answers are engaging the setting while they are handwaving the trappings in order to get at a different matter.

In the Fantasy genre, it's just that, a fantasy. But that's not to say that there isn't something there, it just means that the setting accepts some truths that arn't accessible from our standpoint. It sets up a "What if..." scenerio, where the ability to say that you don't understand why the world's physics work. (How does hyperspeed work? Automagically.)

Fantasy done right means that one can say, "Given the setting, then X." or, that as long as you can accept a different reality, then we can use those differences to play distance between ourselves and the world and can ask ourselve difficult questions there that we have a difficult time managing here. Goodkind tried to do this, but failed because he didn't stop with questions, but went onto the answers in a really heavy handed way.

In a different way, Pundit's critisism of Blue Rose is kind of how I'm thinking about Fantasy gaming settings. Blue Rose's setting doesn't kill me in the same way that it raises Pundit's ire, but it does go about its setting with a heavy hand. As a game world, if the player is only interested in their wishful thinking, then it's ok. But, when it tries to raise societal issues that the players aim to engage, it rapidly falls apart. I think in one way, that actually makes it kind of a good game (even if the setting is weak), though you will have to play at it cross-ways to get at the good part.

Does that make sense to anyone? I really wanna know.

Thanatos,

I think that looking for what's good in fantasy in 'what if' questions is a mistake. Not that you don't find them there in general, or that they're never interesting, but by and large science fiction is the better 'what would it be like if...' genre.

Here's a brief summary of my take - this is a value judgment which doesn't exhaust the genre, but it's what I look for and it's part of the genre. Good fantasy qua fantasy, whether it's Tolkien, Dunsany, Smith, Lee, Vance, Howard, Leiber, Wagner, LeGuin, Harrison, Shea, McNaughton, or a few others, evokes. A lot of LeGuin's fantasy stuff actually doesn't work (e.g. the last two crappy Earthsea novels) because she's too cerebral and starts asking those kind of smart sci-fi 'what if' questions in the middle of her books instead of remembering that THERE ARE DRAGONS. What's important about Conan is that he is a MAN. The only thing that Tolkien is really good at as a writer (as a writer - he's a great worldbuilder and mythologist) is evoking a sense of longing and loss and wonder, deep forests and misty mountains: that's enough and more than enough, he's taken half the world to Middle Earth and back through this power alone. A lot of Clark Ashton Smith's output isn't even really stories by any ordinary standard, more like prose poems or fables, but like Tolkien he gets you where you're going.

Fantasy, fantasizing, swaying rapture, transporting images, fire in the blood, radical hope. For my two cents worth anyway.

Asimov should be the standard to measure SF writers by, even his softest SF stories are plausible. In high school I read a lot of Asimov (my favorite SF author by far), Clark, and Bova.

Do we need a separate SF thread?

Quote from: JongWKSo what do you guys think of Asimov? Where do you put him? Hard, soft?

The reason for all this shit genre writing is because--as with film, television, radio, etc.--the common man doesn't give a shit about what the folks writing proper literature want; they want to sit back, relax, and be entertained- not be challenged, not engage the story, not at all actively participate in anything.  It's not only okay, but damn near demanded that the old, familiar pattern be reused with different trappings.  It's fucking comfort food for the brain.

Quote from: Mr. AnalyticalHard SF is a subgenre of SF.  It isn't about being scientifically correct at all, it's about engaging directly with current scientific ideas through the medium of fiction.

But why is it important to be 'currently scientific'?

EDIT: And maybe I've just been very disproportionately exposed to those wound up idiots about this not "realistic" and that "isn't possible" when the book clearly isn't about those things at all. *shrug* A number of the claims of "not possible" I even find a bit dubious and on the whole they don't seem particularly smart about it all. It comes off more like this neighbour kid I knew grewing up. Watching a illusionist on TV with her was painful because she kept saying "that's just trick photography". Yes, that is an exact quote. :jaw-dropping:   I bet I just need to look harder for SF folks instead of having them pop out at me. Oh, and thanks for the sprinkling tips on where to be looking in books.

P.S. I know 'Hard' is a sub-genre. I'm still curious about this 'Hard' bar, from an insider POV? I've heard mostly 1 rules breaker/book. And where is the 'fantasy' line, what are the signposts for SFF?

...in this thread seems to be narrowly focused on Tolkien-style epic fantasy and maybe Howardian sword and sorcery.  The really interesting writing in the fantastic genre has gone to other streams: de Lint's Celtic magic realism, China Melville's bizarre imagined worlds, Tim Powers' mash-ups of historical figures and magic subcultures, Gaiman's modern American mythology series.  A lot more "Sandman" than "Silmarillon".

   The best epic fantasy out there, for my tastes, is Terry Pratchett's Discworld saga.  It started out as a parody and satire of the genre.  But I defy anyone to say that characters like Samuel Vimes, Granny Weatherwax, and Tiffany Aching have less resonance and depth of character than figures like Gandalf or Aragorn.  I admit to being a shameless Pratchett fanboy on this issue. Yet Pterry really has done something extraordinary.

Samarkand

Quote from: JongWKSo what do you guys think of Asimov? Where do you put him? Hard, soft?

Two years ago, I'd have put him in the good hard SF category. Unfortunately, since that time, I've reread his magnum opus, the Foundation trilogy. People, it's not good. The writing is as exciting as soaked cardboard, the characterisation is uniformly poor (I suspect Isaac just didn't get people - what makes them go - at all), the "science", even at contemporary levels, is laughable. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells are dated, and Stanisław Lem is getting there slowly, but they at least took teir ideas and thought them through. Others had an interesting message, a clever metaphor, or whatever. Asimov is just a hack, sadly - although I must say I liked him when I was twelve. The thing is, I also liked Lem, and I like his stories still (although my favourite then was Invincible, while now it is probably Summa Technologiae or The Cyberiad).

As for hard SF in general, it is dead, and has been mostly dead since the 1970s. The genre is still there, but that's like saying Goodkind, Brooks and their cohorts are like Tolkien because they have elves and dwarves and heroic quests by farmer boys to topple a sinister dark lord and shit. Yug.

Unsurprisingly, I agree with Calithena on fantasy. Curiously, it is not just mired in genreification, but unfortunately "worldbuilding" as well. Not that worldbuilding is bad. It is that just that doesn't make fantasy good. Being evocative and otherworldly does. There is more fantasy in the first page of Dream-Quest for Ancient Kadath than three shelves of the elfie-welfie at your local book store. And maybe more than that.

I read some of them thar no fantasy and Sci Fi books.


But I didn't read that thar thread, no sir.

Samarakand - those authors aren't really interesting to me, though I'm glad you get something out of them, and I think they're either within (Pratchett) or on the border of (Mieville, Gaiman) 'fantasy' as a genre broadly construed. Mieville and Gaiman kind of sit on a border between fantasy and magic realism. But whatever, I don't care, I just don't think any of that stuff is very interesting. A certain kind of humor, poised quality, winking cleverness, mannered prose, situated social awareness kills fantasy for me. Bring on the butchering and fucking and voluptuous sorceresses and hideous monsters; bring on the misty forests and the lost echo of ancient wonders; I prefer academic writing or science fiction for the reflective stuff.

Quote from: CalithenaA certain kind of humor, poised quality, winking cleverness, mannered prose, situated social awareness kills fantasy for me.

Eh, wouldn't that description fit the writings of Dunsany, who is after all one of the fathers of modern fantasy literature? (James Branch Cabell, too, come to think of it...)

Quote from: Mr. Analytical...  Fantasy is all about the familiar, the safe, the routine.  It's about stock characters and plots, cliches (sorry... archetypes) and nobody needing to think too much about what they're reading.
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I have to agree that this is an accurate portrayal of 99 percent of contemporary fantasy.

But every so often a novel comes along that is 'fantasy' but really blows me away.  For example, I'm currently reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke.  It's a great novel.

However, such exceptions aside, I don't mind the fact that a lot of fantasy is 'familiar' and filled with 'cliches'.  As long as it is well executed, I like the familiarity of fantasy novels.  I read them in bed before going to sleep for escape -- I don't want to be 'challenged' by them!

Quote from: Mr. Analytical... Literary SF (the dominant idiom of SF at the moment) is the clear descendant of New Wave.  Modern SF is all about literary technique, characterisation and confronting the Other.

Hard SF is a subgenre that flourished in the 90's but is actually quite rare, at the moment you'd be hard pressed to find proper hard SF writers beyond Stephen Baxter.
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Out of curiousity, how would Ian M. Banks, Richard Morgan, Alastair Reynolds, Neal Stephenson, and Charles Stross be classified?

Those guys strike me as the best SF writers today.  (Strangely, aside from Stephenson, all are British.)