Monday means Fantasy with Friends time! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about sci-fi’s relationship with fantasy:

Science fiction and fantasy are often bundled together. Why do you think this is? How do you see the two genres as related or distinct? Do you enjoy both?

I think the two get bundled together because they’re fundamentally about imagining something that doesn’t exist (yet). There’s that saying about how any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic: if you watch something like Star Trek, a lot of the tech doesn’t exist and we can’t even extrapolate that it could exist. It’s fantasy in space, and the rules bend to whatever’s convenient for telling a good story.

So I think both genres rely on imagining the world to be different than it is, and they’re closer than you’d think. There are some amazing series that blend the two, like Rosemary Kirstein’s The Steerswoman, which looks like one thing and develops into another as you understand the world more. (Though really this is a bit spoilery about The Steerswoman; forget about it if you’re going to read the series!)

Sometimes when there’s something speculative going on, it’s hard to say whether it should be characterised as sci-fi or fantasy — I recently felt that There Is No Antimimetics Division straddled a few genres, for instance. (My review of that will actually go up later today, which is probably why it just popped into my head.)

I do enjoy both genres, both separately and in the cases where they seem to blend. I’d say I lean more toward fantasy than sci-fi, because I’m not a huge fan of the sci-fi that focuses on big ideas over plot and character — I’m definitely a character kind of reader, and my investment often (though not always) stands and falls by the characters, in any genre. But there are some amazing sci-fi works that have it all.