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Powell’s Essential List: 25 Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books of the 21st Century (So Far)
(www.powells.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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I have no faith in anyone who lumps sci-fi and fantasy into the same genre.
I'm over 2000 books read (a mix of classics, literary and genre fiction) and the more I read the more fantasy and sci-fi feel similar. Despite one having a reputation for escapism and the other for (indirect) social commentary, in my experience any given book of either can fall anywhere between those two poles. Any sufficiently advanced technology, etc.
Someone once said that fantasy is a made up world where the author creates the constraints, and science fiction is a made up world where physics creates the constraints. I kind of like that definition.
For hard sci-fi I agree, but for soft one the difference becomes more and more tenuous.
Which is why I disagree with the people saying SF and fantasy don't belong together. Some soft SF is basically fantasy set in space, or whatever.
I hear what you're saying, but it's so widely done - even a lot of bookstores do it - I can see why the author would. Plus there really are some books that have elements of both. You could argue that Dune is one of those.
Absolutely!
A lot of what people call science fiction is not at all science based, and is completly fantasy. Dune as you said, and Star Wars are the most obvious examples. Even Star Trek really, is more fantasy than sci-fi. It's really only what people call "hard science fiction" that's purely not fantasy.
Idk, they start out with saying it’s all themed around escapism.
Trust that they have a TON of reading lists, if you want a different collection, powells probably has a list for you by the collective or by an individual employee. They have wonderful curation.
Same. I love sci-fi but really can’t get into fantasy. They aren’t the same and it bugs me that they’re always lumped together.
It really is hard to draw a crisp line between them though. Sure, there are hard SF books (Ringworld, Red Mars) that are clearly SF, and there are fantasy books (Hobbit, Narnia) that are firmly fantasy, but they're like ends of a spectrum. Where would you put Dune? How about Hyperion? There's just too much that's in the middle of the spectrum.
A new class, world building.
You're just adding a third axis on the scale though. Saying a book is world building doesn't mean that it's neither SF nor fantasy.
Yeah this list is wack. Not that these are bad choices per se but so many are just not sci fi.
It doesn't say it's all science fiction, it says science fiction and fantasy.