More Words, Deeper Hole

Superhero fiction.

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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

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Fantasy. Because there are no spaceships.

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

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Don't you oppress my arbitrary and inconsistent definitions, cat boy!

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Now we see the violence inherent in the system!

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doc-lemming.livejournal.com

They're implied, as in, "Golly, if this weren't a crapsack meathook future, we could have had space ships."

I can play the "implied" card on almost any movie I want to declare SF. Even James Bond: in Moonraker he actually rides in a space ship. Therefore, SF.

If there were a myth with a space ship in it, maybe I'd have problems, but I'm sure I can come up with some kind of counter argument.

For instance, The Starlost is clearly fantasy because they only think they're in a space ship. It is clearly a Settlers of Catan version of Dante's Inferno. ("I rolled a seven, so Virgil comes and take one of your sins to the plain of Virtuous Pagans.")

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kla10.livejournal.com

>If there were a myth with a space ship in it, maybe I'd have problems

The Spelljammer setting in D&D?

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sanskritabelt.livejournal.com

"If there were a myth with a space ship in it..."

Celestial Matters, by Richard Garfinkle?

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bruce munro (from livejournal.com)

Well, it's not _presented_ as myth. If alternate physics settings are fantasy, is Egan's "Clockwork Rocket" fantasy?

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> a Settlers of Catan version of Dante's Inferno.

waaaaant

--Dave, we'd need at least a couple angels' worth of support for a kickstarter though

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agoodwinsmith.livejournal.com

Myth because myth. :)

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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...)

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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?

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Star Wars is sold as SF and seems to do OK.

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ice-hesitant.livejournal.com

Shiny lights that travel in straight lines make for scifi.

Shiny lights that travel in fuzzy clouds make for fantasy.

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nelc.livejournal.com

Would Star Wars not do okay if it was marketed as Fantasy (may contain some spaceships)?

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Have you read Doyle & MacDonald's Mageworlds books?

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nelc.livejournal.com

No. Is that Fantasy (may contain spaceships) or SF (may contain magic)?

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It's Star Wars. (That's how it was described to me, when the proprietrix of Future Fantasy handed The Price of the Stars to me.)

Only the second and third book are better than first.

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nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)

The comparison is really perfected by the way the fourth book was a prequel and was terrible.

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Yes, you'll note I only recommended the first three :).

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tandw.livejournal.com

...that one particular H. Beam Piper story...

Which one?

I expect Kay Tarrant would have had something to say about the manner in which Susan Swarthy, Little Sally's maid, got her hands on the Sooper Seekrit textbook for learning Wodenite psionics, though.

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This one. (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20726)

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sanskritabelt.livejournal.com

Change martial arts powers to cybernetic implants, set it in a 2050 arcology and whoops-a-doodle theres your cyberpunk whose SF creds no-one dares question.

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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.

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

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Yes, but it doesn't let anyone do the kind of things people do in the movie, and the movie makes no effort to explain why it does there, or indeed shows any sign that it feels any need to explain it. Sure - you could turn the movie into sf, if you were so inclined. You'd have to make a semi-serious attempt to make it seem plausible that people used to be able to jump tall buildings in a single bound but then everyone forgot how to for some reason. I'm not sure why you'd want to bother, though, unless you were really allergic to fantasy. It's just so much simpler to tell the audience to just go along with it because it's cool.

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seawasp

Many of its adherents claim that it *DOES* allow those things, and a friend of a friend actually saw a Master do stuff Just Like that.

In other words, it is in fact as respectable as psionics, I'd say.

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rpresser.livejournal.com

Much as my martial arts nephew assured me that this evil smelling slime, specially prepared by Sifu, that he was spreading on my gouty toe was simply bursting with Qi and would stop my pain, permanently, and I should buy a bottle or four from Sifu, every month if possible.

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So... James Bond: fantasy or SF?

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jeriendhal.livejournal.com

Travelogue, with added explosions.

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Well, I was trying to point out that "tradecraft is a didactic concept in many western schools of espionage" and that James Bond is to tradecraft as Wu-Xia is to Qi... but I suppose I could have just said that without trying to be all coy.

Edited Date: 2013-08-30 06:59 pm (UTC)

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carbonel

Edge case that could be spun either way.

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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.

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Star Wars is SF.

I think that Star Wars is both sf and fantasy.

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Why is Star Wars Science Fiction? What does any of it have to do with science? (Apart from anything else, it explicitly does not posit a possible future for us based on scientific or socio-political development.)

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graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)

Three reasons.

It's marketed as Science Fiction.

It attempts to postulate a material explanation for the strange powers. (However horrible midichlorians are in so very many ways, they're canon.)

It has spaceships in it.

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(a) Fast food burger contents are marketed as beef. That doesn't make them actually beef. Marketing is not an accurate representation of the contents. "Sold as ..." argumentation doesn't particularly convince me.

(b) Fantasy also often attempts to postulate a material explanation for strange powers: mana, principles of sympathy, contagion, imitation and so on.

(c) So what do spaceships have to do with anything? Lord Of The Rings has boats. This makes it fantasy? (I realize that this is a disingenuous point in that the artefacts in SW are ostensibly technologically advanced past our current understanding. But then so are the Rings of Power. I would argue that the spaceships in SW are not in fact science-fictional artefacts, they are fantastic artefacts: there is no attempt to explain their functionality as a technological development over our current paradigm, or to carry through the consequences of that technical progress.)

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doc-lemming.livejournal.com

And that's the conceit of the fourth Avengers movie: Ultron has secreted an important part of his psyche in an arm bracelet, originally worn by Pepper and later given to Tony Stark, but it has to be destroyed in the ~~fires of Mount Doom~~ forges of Odin (which have no computers, unlike Tony's factories). Wackiness ensues, with Captain America, Hawkeye, and Black Widow standing in for the hobbits, the Sinister ~~Six~~Nine as the Nazgul, the Winter Soldier suborned again and playing the role of Wormtongue, and Ian McKellen as Magneto (by then they'll have the rights back from Fox).

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And note that at least twice we have importance attached to the boats _sailing off into the sky_, to reach another plane. (Elven boats seeing the edge of the world drop below them as they journey to otherwise-now-unreachable Valar lands; E\"arendil's boat with him and the Silmaril set as the morning star in the sky...) So yeah, primitive spaceships.

--Dave

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houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com

"It"?

Star Wars 1977 was fantasy with SF props. The prequels are SF -- bad SF.

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avram

Spaceships. Also robots and laser-guns.

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Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun has these. Science Fiction? Fantasy? Why?

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It's a science fiction story where most of the characters believe that they're in a fantasy story. Isn't that the whole point?

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Because most of the setting pretends to run on science. It's only the Force stuff that doesn't. (and in the prequels, that turns out to be science too)

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I don't see much evidence for this, actually. It is strongly implied that the technology employed and presented in the film is mechanical and can be used, repaired, and extended using mechanical principles, so yes, I'll bend on that point. But I don't think that makes it science fiction. Is steampunk science fiction? I don't think it is. Many people disagree on it.

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blpurdom.livejournal.com

Isn't faster-than-light travel and weapons that can destroy an entire planet in mere seconds inherently in the realm of science fiction? The mystical mumbo jumbo is fantasy, sure, but I think that's why the answer upthread was both science fiction and fantasy.

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Is steampunk science fiction?

A definite borderline case, that. Steampunk is meant to emulate science fiction written in earlier centuries, isn't it? Its conceit isn't that its stories could possibly happen in the future, it's that its stories could possibly have happened in the future as envisioned by people in the past. It's kind of retro-science fiction. Which makes it weird enough to be outside of easily defined categories.

Star Wars, on the other hand, implicitly says, "let's say, for the sake of the argument, that if our technology was sufficiently advanced we could build stuff like this." It's science fiction, at least by my definition of it.

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I see it as stories that we modern folk would like to think could have happened in the future of a past rosily envisioned by we modern folk. Therefore, it falls into the "if only" category of fantasy, and not the "what if" category of science-fiction. But then steampunk and I don't exactly see eye to eye, so I'm cognizant that others might have entirely different opinions about it.

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I see it as stories that we modern folk would like to think could have happened in the future of a past rosily envisioned by we modern folk.

Probably, though that just makes it even more... meta. "Let's pretend that there was a past in which people might have pretended that this was the future." It doesn't make it fantasy, though it does make it a weird sort of hybrid.

I think we differ less in our view on steampunk and more in our view on science fiction, to be honest. What you call science fiction, I think I'd call "hard" science fiction - thought experiments about what might plausibly happen. Most science fiction I see is less that and more stories that are about robots and space ships because robots and space ships are cool. If fantasy is everything that's "if only," then a whole lot of things are fantasy that we don't normally recognise as such. I see the difference more as what sort of thing you are required to pretend makes sense in order to enjoy the story.

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The couple of times I briefly committed steampunk, I was thinking of it as a pastiche of specific works of actual 19th-century science fiction. (But I suspect that by now steampunk has migrated far from that place.)

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...and the ur-steampunk novel, Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine, was definitely not that.

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ross-teneyck.livejournal.com

I always understood the genesis of "steampunk" to be basically "cyberpunk in the Victorian era." (Hence the "punk" part of the name.)

Now, of course, that was back in the day, and the concept has evolved and mutated and gone though reactions and irony and reversals and reimaginings, so that doesn't mean much anymore. Even if we knew what "cyberpunk" meant then, or means now, which is a whole 'nother argument.

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seawasp

Because that's the popular perception, and that trumps any grognard arguing for his purer definition. If you go to the average person and ask for three examples of popular science fiction, not fantasy, you'll get Star Wars as one of the three a large majority of the time.

If it involves spaceships that look techy, and zap guns instead of staffs, and super-tech laser-swords instead of Magic Swords, it's science fiction.

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My 7-year-old daughter recently saw the original movie (in unaltered 1977 form). I decided to ask her the demarcation question.

"Is Star Wars science fiction or fantasy?"

"It's science fiction."

"But The Force is basically magic, isn't it?"

"No it's not!"

OK then.

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...come to think of it, I didn't ask her whether The Avengers is fantasy or science fiction. (All the Asgardian god stuff there is generally portrayed as Sufficiently Advanced Technology and otherworldly science, Kirby-style. But it sounds like the Scarlet Witch is going to be in the sequel, which brings in the superhero version of magic and kind of throws a curveball if you're trying to draw the SF/fantasy distinction.)

Edited Date: 2013-09-01 11:29 am (UTC)

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seawasp

One of the reasons, I think, that psionics, and variants such as The Force, are often seen as more SF-y than Fantasy-y is that in general "magic" is often portrayed either as being able to do anything, or at least with no clear limits on what it could do. While comic books and some others have created "psionics" that were, basically, unlimited magic, a lot of such things, including the Force, are depicted as tools that have specific and limited uses and capabilities. No one's turning people to frogs using the Force, for instance.

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I can think of exceptions to that, though. Tolkien is an obvious one: magic in The Lord of the Rings is a lot like the Force (and this may well not be a coincidence). The foreground instances of it, especially as used by the good guys, are pretty limited, and it's implied that there's cosmic significance and immense potential power there but we're not shown all of it. The most powerful applications of it that we do see are evil, and associated with the temptation of power (much like Palpatine zapping Luke with Force lightning and telling him to give in to his anger; but in LOTR some of the most notable manifestations have to do with information, concealment and revelation, like the palantirs and what happens when you use the One Ring). But powerful good magic is more backgrounded.

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...and Peter Jackson's movie adaptations of LotR were definitely influenced by wuxia movies, but the book fans seem to take those touches as an abomination.

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seawasp

*some* book fans. Others, like me, love the movies too.

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seawasp

"Backgrounded" doesn't mean "limited". Gandalf's limits were pretty explicitly stated to be "you can't use your power unless you're facing someone on your level, so no spellslinging of note", not "Gandalf's only able to light pine cones on fire".

It's fairly clear that the good guys and bad guys can do the same things but DOING a lot of things with your powers tempts you to the Dark Side, so to speak.

In The Good Old Days, everyone wielded lots more power and those powers could do more things. LotR is sort of Niven's The Magic Goes Away in slow, epic decay form.

But there's nowhere in LotR that he codifies magic, or shows someone being trained to be a magician, and thus giving us, the audience, a clear feeling for the idea of magic being limited in application and capabilities.

Of course, the word "magic" is also used explicitly (along with its relatives sorcery and necromancy) in the LotR universe, which pretty much automatically puts it into Fantasy -- that plus Undead and Dragons -- while Star Wars and Babylon 5 and such space opera never use the word Magic, or they deprecate it and specifically say it's Sufficiently Advanced, or Psi powers that are misunderstood.

That's what puts such in the SF catagory and keeps LotR in the Fantasy category.

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ross-teneyck.livejournal.com

LOTR is tricky because what counts as "magic" there is not what most fantasy novels means by the word. Or not exactly, anyway.

So, for instance, Gandalf and Saruman and the other Istari are called "wizards." But in most fantasy, a "wizard" is an otherwise normal mortal being, possibly with a specific inborn gift, who has studied and trained to master magic. The Istari are basically angels who have accepted a voluntary limited mind-wipe and a number of other restrictions in order to act as agents in Middle-Earth. Their "magic" is the inherent power they have by being who and what they are.

A lot of the other "magic" in LOTR is manifested in crafting... e.g., the Elves who forged the various rings of power, using a mixture of their own techniques and those taught to them by Sauron. (And who were insufficiently skilled to spot the back door Sauron planted in the techniques he taught them.) Also the weapons forged in Gondolin, and items made by the Dwarves at the height of their skills, and so on.

There is very little in LOTR that looks like what we would normally think of as spell-casting. (There are a few things here and there, but not much... Gandalf talks about putting a locking-spell on a door, for instance, and he's seen setting things on fire now and again. That's mostly it.)

But on the larger point -- I don't think the difference between "magic" and "psionics" is that magic is unbounded. I can think of any number of fantasy novels with pretty clear limits on what magic can and cannot do. And some provide at least as much handwaving about how magic "works" as SF stories do about how psionics "works." I think most of the difference is that one is called "magic" and the other is called "psionics."

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Note also the raising of the river/horses to wash the Nazgul away, done by an Elf. (And Tom talking the hobbits out of Old Man Willow - an enchantment/charm spell, right?) But yes, lots of it tied up in crafting, including the ur-back-story of the Silmarils (which could Never Be Made Again because creator angst and missing components).

--Dave

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doc-lemming.livejournal.com

Who?

I hope that some day they make the other two trilogies that Lucas envisioned as part of the Star Wars line. Probably the third one, because the first would be a downer and it's hard to come up with new and cool stuff when you're deliberately going into the past of your fictional creation.[1]

1. Usual exceptions about stories set during a fall from a previous, glorious past.

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jhetley.livejournal.com

Fantasy. The martial arts moves are not possible.

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

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But that's not the distinction that's important. The martial arts moves are pretty firmly presented to the audience in a "ah! if only we lived in a magical world where this were possible, we wouldn't have the problems we have now!" way. The FTL stories, if they're science fiction stories, should be presented in a "ah! if we eventually come to develop FTL, then this would be the kind of world we could inhabit, and we wouldn't have the problems we have now!"

To me, these are subtly different thematic positions to take.

And for "we wouldn't have the problems we have now" you can probably substitute "we'd really be in the crapper so be happy you are where you are", because those kinds of juxtapositions seem to be exceedingly popular in both modes these days.

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graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)

The customary position about magic martial arts is that, sure, these are possible, here and now, if you study really, really hard.

That's only been really obviously nonsensical this last hundred years or so. The literary tradition doesn't see any reason to take the position of impossibility, just like so much SF -- when's the last time you read SF that even bothered trying with an explanation for the waste heat from the space ship's necessarily immensely mighty engines? -- doesn't see any reason to take the position of impossibility.

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I'm not sure I agree with you on the magical martial arts point, except if you're also going to say that super-james-bond spyness is possible if you study tradecraft really, really hard.

But it's not uber-competence really that's the signifier of the fantasy/SF divide, I think; I think it's the assumed position of the story-teller with respect to the current world and the imagined on. Fantasy worlds are de facto impossible, and this is part of the understood context for the fantasy story. Science Fiction worlds are de facto not impossible, and this is part of the understood context for the SF story.

The reason that FTL is still a part of SF is that in many people's minds, creator and listener/reader, they can still say the thing "FTL" and wholly engage in the narrative on the underlying assumption that it describes a world that is de facto possible, even though, really, it's not.

Edited Date: 2013-08-30 07:13 pm (UTC)

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graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)

I don't by that.

Very little about classic SF is possible at all. (Positronic brain? it works via antimatter electrons? what? The various atrocities against biology, it's not a long list of stuff that's even vaguely possible.)

The point isn't that it's possible; the point is that it feels a certain kind of plausible with respect to one's pre-existing biases.

You can maybe distinguish between SF and fantasy on the basis of which sheaf of biases this is supposed to work well with when considered as story-building instructions. Actual possibility is much, much tougher.

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Yes, I agree that it's not important if the future is actually possible; what's important is that the reader be able to approach the story with the understanding that it's a story about a possible future. It's a "what if" tale in the sense of "if we develop technology x or social conventions y, then look what a wonderful future it will be", instead of an "if only" tale in the sense of "if only we all lived in a magical land where brave young hobbits could defeat the avatar of evil by bravery and fortitude leading to the destruction of his locus of power: then all would be right with the world".

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londonkds.livejournal.com

The hobbits' bravery and fortitude does not defeat the avatar of evil, it fails at the last minute and is rescued by blind luck/divine grace.

Sorry to be pedantic, but this misconception about Lord of the Rings seems to have been directly responsible for a lot of the most dumbed-down school of pseudomedieval genre fantasy.

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That is a fair point. Mind you, divine grace is also something science fiction isn't all that keen on.

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seawasp

Super-James-Bond Spyness is often seen as BEING reality by those who don't think about it much, and certainly isn't understood as being as ludicrous as it really is, so yes, I'd say that in fictional context Super James Bond Spyness IS possible if you study spy-things very hard, just like being a Super-Scientist is possible if you're just amazingly smart.

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jhetley.livejournal.com

On which basis I say that much "science fiction" sails under false colors/colours.

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All fictions sail under false colours. Also true colours because all false colours are true. Or something. 8)

(There currently seems to be a debate going around about the "all storytellers are liars" thing and the worth of that meme. I think it's an interesting lens through which to examine story. Some folks are not so sanguine on it.)

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ritaxis.livejournal.com

Fantasy, because it markets itself as such.

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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.

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ritaxis.livejournal.com

I should maybe have used some word other than "market," because the thing I am talking about is not about selling at all.

I am talking about the way a story (a book or a movie) puts itself into an audience context. I actually think that's what James is asking, and so therefore I haven't really answered the question, but I can't remember enough details to say what I think it does to put itself into a fantasy audience's context.

Though the soundtrack is probably relevant.

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Ahhh! Yes, I see you. It's when a story starts with "Once upon a time..." it is advertising to the audience what kind of story it is. Of course, it may lie. (Arguably Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun does exactly this.) Or it may not know and be confused about itself, or just not smart enough to know. But yes, on the point of that rhetorical device, yes, I agree with you.

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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.

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

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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…

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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....)

From: (Anonymous)

Co-opting is fun. So is playing with tropes.

But trying to shoehorn the world's creative output into a small number of contemporary western genre boxes is silly. Look at the average record shop, that groups everything from traditional Celtic harp to Chinese hip-hop as "World", yet splits modern American music into fractally-divided sub genres.

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Sure. I agree.

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Is the DC or Marvel comics universe fantasy or science fiction? Both of them have sorcerers who do actual functional magic, and truckloads of SF paraphernalia with supposedly physical explanations.

The Fawcett/DC Captain Marvel started out as a knockoff of Superman, and now they're hanging out in the same universe, but the modern comics state that a major difference between the two is that Captain Marvel's powers come from magic, whereas Superman's very similar powers are somehow science-based (the science makes no sense, but in-world it's supposed to be science), and that makes him vulnerable to magic.

I think I hold with the identification of superheroes as really a third genre, with different basic assumptions. Wuxia is not quite the same, but it's more like superheroes than it is like fantasy or SF as we know them.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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lostwanderfound.livejournal.com

Dr No?

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pixel39.livejournal.com

Dr No is radio waves (in the movies) and missiles. No death ray. Most Bond villains are billionaire industrialists and mostly they're concerned with nuclear missiles.

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rosefox

SF because wires are technology.

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tandw.livejournal.com

And

rosefox wins an Internet!

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Made of wires. Therefore, qed.

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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.

Edited Date: 2013-08-30 09:40 pm (UTC)

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ethelmay.livejournal.com

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

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houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com

Sure. But where's any (strictly (pretty things nice people)) + pointless ending in SF, lately?

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