When it comes to fantasy and science fiction?

I love the possibilities of the impossible happening (especially with fantasy).

Also, the general aesthetics and awe and wonder of SFF in general.

I love how there is wiggle room to make anything a possibility, where dreams can become new worlds and stories can span the lives of so many fantastical characters.

That they are such broad genres to allow millions of stories and all of them can be different and amazing still. A challenge to the imagination to make a world of your own!

I find it fascinating how even both genres, fantasy and scifi, can be mixed. The vastness is what I love about it all, it truly is unending!

As has been said already, SFF is really about that ineffable sense of wonder and exploration/discovery that come with delving into the imagination of a place that is other than our own.

Moreover, I think that the draw of SFF is, at its core, more fundamental and primal than that. It's an ancient kind of storytelling that resonates deeply with us. Most of the "great" stories, the "great" works of fiction (all the way back to the days of oral storytelling) were in this vein. They weren't "realistic," per se. Really, I think, if you analyze it, literary/realistic fiction are more modern innovations in storytelling. SFF is more fundamental and lasting, as the classics show us.

Me, personally? I love being taken on a ride through a strange, new world. I tend to like the long, slow rides that give you a chance to really look at all the amazing things that exist there.

That's just me ;-)

The vastness, possibilities, room for endless experimentation, freedom and flexibility unlike that of any other genre. That's what draws me back. Sometimes I think we are untangling the rules of our world in order to make sense of it... if that makes sense...

I read sci fi for the bigness of the mental imagery it can conjure, and I write it for much the same reason. Solving the mysteries of the universe and kicking up some intriguing possibilities.

And the things you can do with characters when their back story can be anything. I can have telepaths and vampires and a girl from a parallel future with unique motivation, because there is nothing in the narrative to exclude them.

What's not to like.

I'm very drawn to the way SF and F allow writers (and readers) to explore what it is to be human without being constrained by what has actually happened in history or by what the world is like/how the world works at this moment in time. It's fun to tweak things and speculate how those tweaks might create ripples that affect people's experiences and world views and so on. I'll also admit to a particular aesthetic sense that draws me to these genres. I love certain kinds of worlds and world building, because I find them fun or cool and enjoy immersing myself in those settings.

I like spaceships. (I'd like to pretend I had some higher justification for liking spaceships and magic and aliens and dinosaurs and explosions, but do I really need one? I like genre literature. My taste in art, cuisine, and fashion is already impossibly highbrow. I need to have some pulp in my diet.)

Albedo said:

I like spaceships. (I'd like to pretend I had some higher justification for liking spaceships and magic and aliens and dinosaurs and explosions, but do I really need one? I like genre literature. My taste in art, cuisine, and fashion is already impossibly highbrow. I need to have some pulp in my diet.)

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There's nowt lowbrow about spaceships.

WriterDude said:

There's nowt lowbrow about spaceships.

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Maybe your fancy shmancy spaceships. Mine are Toyota Corollas in space.

I accept your point, though. In fact, why can't we have highbrow magic, aliens, dinosaurs and explosions as well?

Albedo said:

Maybe your fancy shmancy spaceships. Mine are Toyota Corollas in space.

I accept your point, though. In fact, why can't we have highbrow magic, aliens, dinosaurs and explosions as well?

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Ford Galaxy Class

I like a bit of the mundane in the fantastical. Space travel being the realm of Tie Rack and MacDonald's, or even checking the oil and water levels before an interstellar trip.

SFF is infinite. I read once that Q made himself so small that he could invert a quark-gluon, but while doing so his parent stopped him, since that would have created a gap in the space-time continuum that would have sucked the rest of the universe into it. I also read about a boy who had gotten a microscope for Christmas and was looking through it when he glimpsed a faint flash, just as he was called to dinner. What the boy didn't know was that he had just witnessed the destruction of an entire sub-atomic universe by an evil empire. And what about the wormhole in the core of our sun? Doesn't anyone care?

I don't think there's one reason, but here are a couple:

1. Creating a philosophical/political thought experiment that isn't possible or likely in the real world. That's part of the appeal of Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Black Mirror, etc.

2. "Tourism," essentially, getting a tour of a setting that is magical and we would never get to experience in the real world otherwise. More about wonder/spectacle than politics or philosophy, which I don't mean in a derogatory in any way. Star Wars and Lord of the Rings have more of this kind of appeal I think.

3. All the stuff that people like about any old story, regardless of genre.

Science fiction, as I see it, usually falls into two categories:
1. The future is awesome.
2. The future is scary.
Most science fiction dealing with the future falls into one of these two categories, like awesome being something like Meet the Robinsons,Elite: Dangerous, or almost anything out of Star Wars, and scary being Alien, 1984, and Black Mirror. However, there's still a good majority of science fiction that mixes these two, such as anything out of Warhammer 40k or The Horus Heresy series or I, Robot. Personally, I prefer a mix, but that's what's so great about science fiction and fantasy, you can do almost anything. Fantasy transports us into an unreal world while science fiction ask, "What if...?"

I read Science Fiction and Fantasy for the sense of bigness and wonder. I love an adventure, and the further away from my own mundane world, the better.

As a writer, I try to figure ways (to differing degrees of success) of making the world/universe as compelling as the story and the characters. Of course I am still learning, but that will come with time and experience.


Michael

For me, SF falls into the "neat idea" category. I don't read exclusively SF (although pretty darn close)--but the stuff I read and enjoy always has a neat idea or a twist, or something intellectually engaging. By that same token, there's a lot of SF that I don't enjoy--stuff that isn't internally consistent, stuff that's just a retread of a tired idea, stuff where the SF is only there to provide the excuse for the main conflict.

Books like Preston & Child's earlier novels (the non-Pendergast items), or just about anything by Tess Gerritsen, aren't strictly SF. But they do have that "neat idea" at the center of them, and the stories are well told.

Science Fiction and Fantasy allows a writer to get philosophical in a way that is a lot harder in other genres. Atlas Shrugged and Star ship Troopers are very much platforms for the authors' ideas about politics and philosophy. In college I wrote a term paper for World Literature about how The Tempest was Shakespeare's answer to Star Trek. Roddenberry used these 'strange new worlds' to explore our world, a lot of the planets they visit, in the original and newer series, are meant to show certain aspects of our lives. Prospero's island is very much the same idea, Shakespeare uses it to examine how England was changed after the reformation and the wars of the roses.

I like to be challenged, in whatever genre I choose to read. A few years ago I read Beowulf, the Seamus Heaney verse translation, and I thought it was really good. It was fascinating to go back in time and take in the fantastic ideas of ancient peoples. A few months ago I read Inferno, by Dante Alighieri. The version I read was in terza rima, Dant's original rhyme scheme. A tough read, but interesting. Like a snapshot of Christian ideology at a certain place and time. Harsh sense of justice, and very unforgiving. I also read The Iliad and The Odyssey, in the Fagles translation, and those were fun. These days I'm not very interested in most fantasy works. They are derivative and unoriginal, mostly exploring the same old faux-European fantasy settings and the same stock characters.

So I am amusing myself by reading the classics, especially epic poems with fantasy themes. There is a profound value in Epic of Gilgamesh that modern works of fantasy cannot match. Classics have proven themselves over time; the best that most modern works can claim is that they are "popular."

I hope this post is sufficiently bland as to avoid being censored.

neodoering said:

I like to be challenged, in whatever genre I choose to read. A few years ago I read Beowulf, the Seamus Heaney verse translation, and I thought it was really good. It was fascinating to go back in time and take in the fantastic ideas of ancient peoples. A few months ago I read Inferno, by Dante Alighieri. The version I read was in terza rima, Dant's original rhyme scheme. A tough read, but interesting. Like a snapshot of Christian ideology at a certain place and time. Harsh sense of justice, and very unforgiving. I also read The Iliad and The Odyssey, in the Fagles translation, and those were fun. These days I'm not very interested in most fantasy works. They are derivative and unoriginal, mostly exploring the same old faux-European fantasy settings and the same stock characters.

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When a mod asks you to follow our core guiding principle, and you respond by, again, insulting a large group of readers and writers, which is exactly what you were told not to do, it's not going to end well.

neodoering said:

So I am amusing myself by reading the classics, especially epic poems with fantasy themes. There is a profound value in Epic of Gilgamesh that modern works of fantasy cannot match. Classics have proven themselves over time; the best that most modern works can claim is that they are "popular."

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Now, see here? This is pretentious, arrogant, and ignorant all at once. First, it's ignorant in that these were works written for the popular audience. They weren't high-falutin' works. The high falutin' works were largely written as sycophantic praise poems, for patronage. They're kinda boring, even by the standards of their era.

Secondly, it's arrogant in that you're praising some of the finest poets the West has known (and yes, I'm cheating by lumping Gilgamesh in with the West, but there's some legitimate reasons for doing that) as if your blessing is a seal of quality.

Thirdly, it's pretentious. Oh my, neodoering reads the Classics!

Dude, I don't care what you read. Freshman read all of these texts in their first year, frequently. Many undergraduates read them in high school.

But you will respect your fellow writers, and you will absolutely respect mods. They volunteer, and don't really need you being snotty in posts or PMs.

neodoering said:

I hope this post is sufficiently bland as to avoid being censored.

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Yeah, it's more than enough. You'll never have to worry about being censored.

Roxxsmom said:

I'm very drawn to the way SF and F allow writers (and readers) to explore what it is to be human without being constrained by what has actually happened in history or by what the world is like/how the world works at this moment in time. It's fun to tweak things and speculate how those tweaks might create ripples that affect people's experiences and world views and so on. I'll also admit to a particular aesthetic sense that draws me to these genres. I love certain kinds of worlds and world building, because I find them fun or cool and enjoy immersing myself in those settings.

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^^^This. SF/F is a great place to work with social-political metaphor. You can explore how people are "othered" according to gender, race, etc.; witness "Star Trek" or other Gene Roddenberry projects.

Another cheerleader for examining political and social philosophies through the lens of sci-fi and fantasy.

Not that I don't like spaceships and 'splosions too, you understand

I love spaceships and explosions. "Giant shootey space scenes" as I call them. Like the Battle of Cardassia, in ST: DS9.

Other than that, what I love most about sci-fi is that it allows us to explore what we imagine humans might become (for better or worse). Novelists like Jules Verne and Philip K. Dick (amongst many others, of course) pushed boundaries and forced us to examine humanity's present through its potential future.

I like fantasy for its openness; anything goes. If you can imagine it, it can be real. Not just dragons and elves and whatnot, but anything. Fantasy lets us explore different worlds without needing to figure out how humanity made it into space.

I read a great article somewhere (wish I could remember where) about the differences between science-fiction, fantasy, and the blending of the two; science-fantasy.

Reading V Roth's Carve the Mark which is more Sci Fi / Star Wars than her other series. Normally I prefer more fantasy, but since I recently got into a 'science/space facts gathering kick' with my little brother, I really appreciate the vastness of her world. My mind feels tickled in the same way by her imaginative scope of other planets as it does by the vastness of "facts" that science can more accurately back.

I like fiction that reflects how reality is often stranger than realistic fiction can convey.

I like it when metaphors can play a direct role in the plot and story.