Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

[james_davis_nicoll]

SF or fantasy? Why?

Comments

[serene]

I don't have confidence in myself as an arbiter of this, but in my brain, fantasy. Because magic.

SF-Fantasy

[thejeopardymaze]

Because chocolate and hazelnuts go so great together.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Superhero fiction.

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

Right, which means it's squarely in fantasy. EXCITING fantasy, and well worth seeing, even.

--Dave, will recite mind-numbing statistics about pre-Crisis continuity for food

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

Fantasy. Because there are no spaceships.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Is Make Room! Make Room! SF? It also didn't have space ships.

[agoodwinsmith.livejournal.com]

Myth because myth. :)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

If I took the characters in CTHD, changed their names to Sam McScottish, Mary O'Irish and Little Sally Crimsonhair, moved them from China to the Central States Alliance, and did a S&R to replace chi with psionics, I could have sold it to John W. Campbell's Astounding/Analog.

(The problem with Jade Fox is picking which of JWC's various xenophobias to play to for the role of "ungrateful underling who should have been happy to be abused." Anti-feminist might work but then I keep thinking of that one particular H. Beam Piper story...)

[nelc.livejournal.com]

I thought psionics wasn't part of today's definition of SF? If you're going to change things around to hypothetically place the story in some other marketing category in some previous time, why not change everyboby's names to Aramaic, set it in the Holy Land, and sell it in 15th century England as a mystery play?

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

It's fantasy if it is anything, surely? It's got people capable of bizarre stunts just because. If it twisted itself into a knot trying to convince us that the bizarre stunts were possible due to some previously undiscovered (or perhaps in this case, forgotten) scientific law, then I'd call it sf, sure, but I can't remember anything like that.

I guess that's my definition of the difference. Science fiction pretends (with varying amounts of effort) to be plausible. Fantasy doesn't bother.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Qi is a didactic concept in many Chinese, Korean and Japanese martial arts. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi#Martial_arts)

[carbonel]

Edge case that could be spun either way.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Jedi are Taoists.

Therefore, the Force is isomorphic with Qi. (well, Qi and Shi, really, there's a life force and a motion force and poor ol' Qi Gon Jin gets some lines that try to reflect this.)

Star Wars is SF.

Therefor, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is also SF.

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

Star Wars is SF.

I think that Star Wars is both sf and fantasy.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Fantasy. The martial arts moves are not possible.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Neither is FTL, to pick one SF trope I see all the time.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Fantasy, because it markets itself as such.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

There are certainly positions from which one can argue that only art that is sold is art, and the value of art is what someone will pay for it. I'm not sure I buy it, myself. I don't really believe that in my gut, but I don't know enough about art or argumentation to really effectively counterargue. But it certainly seems to me that when you say "the marketing label is the truth of the contents" that's essentially the argument that you're using: whatever the market will bear.

So, I'm not saying your point is wrong. I'm just saying that more often than not I seem to be not choosing to take a position from this assumption.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

It's explicitly set in a past which doesn't exist with people doing things the audience wouldn't consider possible (do any modern Chinese take Qi seriously enough to think such stunts might actually be performed?)[1] Now, if it were presented as taking place in an alternate universe, that would be different...

[1] To refer to a previous point, I imagine a large proportion of SF film watchers are either unaware one cannot travel between solar systems in a reasonable length of time, or think that if they clap their hands and believe hard enough the technology fairy will find a way around mean ol' Mr. Einstein.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

this is relevant. (https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/rec.arts.sf.written/bSkrpEPfDuY[1-25-false])

[(Anonymous)]

Neither. Trying to fit wuxia (and other asian genres) into western genre boxes is rather like the romans deciding which roman god a local diety was…

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

One should point out that non-western cultures trying to fit western genres into their non-western genre boxes amounts to the same thing. Doesn't stop everyone from gleefully attempting to co-opt other cultures' modes of artistic expression, much, does it?

(And I've heard that Star Wars was heavily heavily influenced on Lucas' exposure to Kurosawa's films, not the least of which was Hidden Fortress, and of course Kurosawa's films were heavily heavily influenced by his exposure to western noir literature and movies, not the least of which was Seven Samurai, so....)

[sanskritabelt.livejournal.com]

Anyway I'm not going to be baited into any argument based on the premise that SF and fantasy are different genres. Nice try tho.

[wakboth.livejournal.com]

I'm left thinking that dividing stuff into SF or fantasy, apart from a few exceedingly obvious examples, is generally a waste of time (but possibly a source of vigorous discussion).

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

Wuxia. Which is a genre unto its own self, and need not be shoehorned into either the category "Fantasy" or "Science Fiction." In much the same way that James Bond books are thrillers, and the occasional mad scientist with a death ray does not make them anything other than thrillers.

(Actually I can't remember off the top of my head whether the books ever featured a mad scientist with a death ray. But I stand by my point.)

On the distinction between F and SF, I adopt the "what I point to when I say" definition, and what I point to is partially influenced by what the story asserts about its background, and by props, and by what kind of words appear in the handwavy bits, and otherwise by personal whim. I think Star Wars and Pern are SF, and the Dying Earth books are fantasy, and even though I'm clearly and obviously right, it does not trouble me that other people have different pointing behavior.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. There are a lot of gold thieves and missile thieves, but I don't think there are any leading-villain mad scientists. Not in the books, anyway. In the movies, Diamonds are Forever features a death ray and Die Another Die has Icarus, which is sort of like a hipster organic death ray.

[rosefox]

SF because wires are technology.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

And rosefox wins an Internet!

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Hm. Pretty stuff with nice people and a pointless ending means fantasy. An SF pointless ending needs at least some nasty people, and grit.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Plenty of nasty-people fantasy around. Thomas Covenant crawls rapidly to mind.

[seawasp]

Fantasy, unless you decide to stretch really, really far and assert that all the magical powers you see thrown around are just Sufficiently Advanced Technology and no one's talking about the Ancient Ones who left it.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

Threat.

[kla10.livejournal.com]

*mumbles something about "speculative fiction", puts the damn disc in whatever player they use for movies this week, and orders out for pizza*

(My local bookstore shelves Stephen King and Tom Clancy with the SF. I blame their cats.)

[seawasp]

I'd shelve both of those with SF, if SF includes fantasy. If they're trying to split SF and Fantasy, then Clancy's in SF and Stephen King USUALLY goes in Fantasy, but not always.