The pain of being a science fantasy author

Clo

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When I have to pick one or the other (which isn't the case on ScribbleHub -- you can have both on here), I ask myself "Of the two community of readers, which ones will enjoy my work more, the Sci-Fi fans, or Fantasy fans?"

And in my case, it's clearly the Fantasy ones, so I'd pick that option.
 

aToTeT

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Oh yeah sorry about that. When I was making this I meant that on most webnovel sites you can only choose Sci fi or fantasy as a main genre and there is often no science fantasy option so you have to decide on which one to pick as a main genre.

Oh boy. Everybody misunderstood the post.I was referring to how most webnovel sites only let you choose Sci fi or fantasy as s main genre and often don't have a hybrid and then you are made to choose either another genre or either Sci fi fantasy. I probably should have made it more clear.
Ahh, it is a good thing to get your work out there.

What I will say to that, is that new eyes will be falling upon it either way.

Go with your gut: you can do no wrong here.
 

CharlesEBrown

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Oh yeah sorry about that. When I was making this I meant that on most webnovel sites you can only choose Sci fi or fantasy as a main genre and there is often no science fantasy option so you have to decide on which one to pick as a main genre.

Oh boy. Everybody misunderstood the post.I was referring to how most webnovel sites only let you choose Sci fi or fantasy as s main genre and often don't have a hybrid and then you are made to choose either another genre or either Sci fi fantasy. I probably should have made it more clear.

Huh. Only noticed that on one of the sites I considered posting to - don't even remember which one now; did not post there for other reasons (I tend to skirt with adult themes, and that was a big no-no there unless you had a paid, age-restricted account IIRC).
 
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Those are Orks... :D

I tend to blur the lines between them (then again, my main inspiration tends to be either horror via H. P. Lovecraft and his "disciples" or super-heroes, which already both blur the lines).
Even when I ran AD&D/D&D games, I blurred the lines (had a time travel adventure where the PCs discovered, essentially, Dinobots in the past, and discovered a future that had less magic AND lower tech than they were used to, for example), and I spent several years doing stuff for the Star Wars universe, which is a blending of Eastern Mysticism and the "we don't need to explain it, it just IS!" 'science' of the classic serials like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon.

A comment above said "Think Star Trek" - but Star Trek is almost straight hard sci fi, at least with the scientific theories of the 60s at the core (many of which, like the Organians, the Q-Continuum and a some other nigh-omnipotent beings are now thought to be more fantasy than "likely evolution"); a more blurred example of the lines would be Doctor Who - the series was MEANT to be pure science fiction, and kind of stayed that way throughout most of the First Doctor's run (the "Celestial Toymaker" kind of blurred things a bit), and through much of the second Doctor's era (one of his best, "The Mind Robbers" intentionally and even, at a few points, self-awarely blurred the lines between myth, fiction and science fiction, taking it much closer to fantasy than before; it wouldn't be until some of the weirder Third Doctor stories that it moved closer to Science Fantasy, and it still managed to stay "closer" to Science Fiction until The Fourth Doctor's "Key to Time" saga; by the end of the series with the Seventh Doctor's "Survival" it was more Science Fantasy than Science Fiction; the TV movie/debut of the 8th Doctor put it back a little closer to Science Fiction, but then it lay fallow for over a decade, and has pretty much NEVER been Science Fiction, just pure Science Fantasy every since the reboot with the Ninth Doctor).
Yes I agree.

I would consider Dr Who to be Soft Sci-Fi more than anything else. Kind of like the Twilight Zone...

Although with the multiverse hypotheses and 12 to 28+ dimensional string theory being what they are these days, maybe sci-fi and fantasy are really just genres. I.e, there are infinite universes and any possible universe that could exist probably does exist. So universes where the laws are different being what they are, magic could conceivably exist in some form in one of them.
 
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velw

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I share this dilemma. When things can't be sufficiently explained by science, readers would assume it's magic. But then, the series could be set in the near or far future when science is more present, while magic is few and far between.

Thus I started to use the word: psionic.
 

John_Owl

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The best way for Sci fi and Fantasy to co-exist is making Magic or Magecraft a branch of science.
Alchemy is usually presented as a scientific branch of magic. Wouldn't be hard to expand that out. How do fireballs work? Catalyzing the air to increase heat until the point of ignition, then controlling the various elements in the air to expand, condense, and control direction. How does ice magic work? Slowing the movement of atoms in the air until the existing water vapor reaches the point of instant freeze. Telekinesis, wind, earth, air, healing magic, gravity, spacial magic, etc etc. They can all be explained using scientific terminology.

How do you do all this with your mind? Humans reached a point to find a new pseudo-element called 'mana' that exists in everything everywhere. Or maybe they have implants that allow them to harness energy fields. Or maybe humans evolved to the next step in their evolution - Homo Novus, rather than Homo Sapien.

As I said in my above comment, Magic and Science aren't inherently opposed. They only SEEM to be because that's the old-fashioned way of viewing it. Star Wars is a space-punk fantasy (The Force could be classified as scientific magic). Honestly, I've stopped considering Sci-Fi an independent genre altogether and just view it was a sub-subgenre of fantasy. Fantasy -> Space-punk -> Sci-fi (sci-fi being spacepunk fantasy without ANY form of magic. normal humans with hyper-advanced tech). And that's only because hyper-advanced tech is usually explained in the same way as magic in fantasy novels.
 
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