Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

[james_davis_nicoll]

SF or fantasy? Why?

Comments

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

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.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

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.

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

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.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

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.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

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

[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.