The reason by the way that scifi and fantasy get put together is that people seem to struggle to tell them apart. People call Star Wars scifi, for goodness sake.
Can I just say that if newrobdob stands for President, PM, leader of the literary world or anything I'll vote for him. Well said - you can take your wizards, dragons, runes, magic, spells and shove it up your Fantasy aisle. Keep it away from SF.
And what happens when customers start complaining that you've got the dystopian future SF mixed in with space opera or alternative realities. SF often has blurred boundaries, often overlapping with fantasy.
Would you allow Vance's Dying Earth series on the shelves? (You wouldn't have my custom if not! 🙂 ) What about Gene Wolfe? Ursula LeGuin?
There is some decent fantasy. There is some decent SF. Unfortunately, most of the good stuff was written over thirty years ago. And fortunately wasn't six inches thick.
Edit: molgrips started the complaining before I got there! 😆
Well said - you can take your wizards, dragons, runes, magic, spells and shove it up your Fantasy aisle. Keep it away from SF.
Banks's Culture books (among others) are full of wizards, magic and spells, in a Clarke's 3rd law sort of way.
Banks's Culture books (among others) are full of wizards, magic and spells, in a Clarke's 3rd law sort of way.
Technically but don't be misleading. It's hard scifi in my opinion. Well.. quite firm, at any rate.
Tolkein basically invented the genre. It seems derivative now, but that's because much of the genre is derived from it, not the other way round. Tolkein is guilty of a lot of things but lack of creativity is not one of them.
I am not sure Tolkein invented gobbledegook, but he certainly popularised it.
You need an ample tome to swat away the school bull/sports captain.
Yeah there's some big fantasy books & collections, there's also plenty of big sci-fi series, a quick scan of my bookshelf and the culture novels, revelation space, Foundation, Hyperion- Endymion, Peter Hamilton as well as the wheel of time, got, first law, riftwar, tolkein . Mieville, still room for brilliant short stories eg phillip k dick, Heinlein, etc
I think I just like big immersive worlds
Same with TV series overtaking movies as the best form of film
I always assumed that because these stories invariably involve at least one character reading some massive old book at some point they made the real world books to suit.
