Carl is outside in his boxers trying to get his girlfriend’s cat out of a tree when everything with a roof on the planet is destroyed and the smaller number of survivors are made to compete in an intergalactic dungeon game similar to D&D. If this sounds kind of dumb, I described it correctly; it’s kind of dumb. It’s also fairly entertaining and has a good amount of heart. People who have played any sort of role playing game, like World Of Warcraft, will probably be extra amused.
The fact that you’re not hearing the condescension in your own comments is a real big red flag.
Just because you don’t like an answer or the informations someone is providing doesn’t mean that person is being condescending. I can’t defend my point? These are the takes by authors like Asimov and Pratchett, they’re the ones that created and defined these genres.
DCC and Star Trek are no less science fiction than a time travel story or one that relies on time travel, faster than light travel, races of aliens that can change their shape, or humans that can change their gender at will.
I’m story you think you have drawn the one true line, but it speaks to a flaw in your character not a flaw in others.
They’re writers not gods. Prachett was best friends with a rapist.
They’re fantasy with scifi aspects, I covered this already.
A scifi book about a detective is still a scifi before a detective novel, a detective novel with scifi aspects, is a detective novel first. These distinctions are important.
There’s a hierarchy, and a proper way books are presented( disagree if you want.
What relevance does someone friends have to the topic at hand?
This is a dumb take.
Star Trek is just a space fantasy. Klingons are orcs, Vulcans are elves, teleporters are magic, phasers are wands, and telekinesis is spells. It’s how the stories are told and material within that dictates its genre, not a few aspects like “technology”. Technology has never meant “scifi” technology exists in regular fiction and even non-fiction too. Space ships are part of our current history, a story with it doesn’t become “sci-fi” just for that reason.
It’s a fantasy in a space setting. Not a scifi in xxx setting.
For “true” scifi the science and technology are supposed to be a believable extension of our universe, not some magical hand waving away fantasy mumbojumbo. So most of your suggestions fall into the fantasy aspect, most of those can only be explained by hand waving, there’s no basis on reality.
For FTL, it can be wormholes, instead of magic engines.
By your description 99% of SciFi is fantasy. You’re just cherrypicking what you feel is “pure” sci-fi and what isn’t.
The Expanse, The Culture novels, Foundation, etc… is just fantasy by your description. I could use your rules to pick apart most sci-fi novels and explain how they are just fantasy.
A little piece of life advice, unless you’re in chemistry or metallurgy, purity tests always make you the bad guy.
The expanse is scifi, it uses believable extensions of our knowledge, they still have thrust mass, they still have deceleration. Thats probably one of the best examples to use as as scifi actually.
Haven’t consumed the culture.
And if you’ve read Foundations by Asimov and his other books, it’s all explained how the weirdness is an extension of current knowledge (60 years ago). Asimov created the genre, and he’s written nothing that’s fantasy.
None of those use handwaving to explain the “technology”.
Unlike DCC, unlike Star Wars, unlike Star Trek, unlike MCU, etc.
Read Asimovs definitions on what the difference between fantasy and scifi, he’s the one that pioneered the genre and was editor on countless magazines and other written media.
Magic alien space goo, psychics, etc…
Your distinctions are arbitrary and purely a function of how you feel about certain properties.
Enjoy your gatekeeping purity tests, I hope they bring you comfort.
They aren’t, they are the foundational and distinguishing differences between the scifi and fantasy genres.
Fantasy doesn’t explain the “magic” or the “tech” it’s all handwaved and is just there as part of the story.
Scifi on the other hand, the technology is the foundation of the story, and the rest is built off of that.
Both can use parts of each other, but how the story is built is which dictates which is the primary category it should be in.
If you can’t understand something, and someone is trying to explain it, does that make them gatekeeping?
So using those non arbitrary definitions, it’s pretty easy to see DCC is fantasy, along with Star Trek and wars
Foundation, expanse, Robots, they all fall into the other.
Using only excerpts from the books themselves. Explain to me how the proto molecule works without one iota of handwaiving.
As a writer of sci-fi/fantasy stories, this level of willful ignorance makes me laugh.