ABSTRACT
The idea for this chapter came from years of being frustrated with (mostly) younger writers who seemingly didn’t understand the difference between these two forms of genre fiction. I would work with, say, a freelancer, or I would be interviewing a potential employee, and we’d get talking about sci-fi and fantasy. In those situations, I was mostly working on science-fiction games, so the dissonance was coming from the direction of fantasy-to-science-fiction (as opposed to the other way around). I’d make a comment about the kind of story we were telling, or the kind of style I was looking for, and the applicant would make some sort of comment to the effect of, “That’s kind of like what Jordan did in The Wheel of Time,” or, “I’ve seen that done well in The Dragonriders of Pern,” and I’d think to myself, “Why is this person pulling examples from fantasy when we’re doing a sci-fi story?” I’d dig deeper and find out that, all too often, the applicant hadn’t read a great deal of what I would consider science fiction (Asimov, Heinlein, Niven, Card, Orwell). I remember vividly in 1997 when I was doing a fantasy N64 title (let me repeat that, a fantasy title), the author most often quoted to me as a “touchstone” was Jordan. Now, I don’t mean to take anything away from Robert Jordan, rest his soul, but the point here is that many younger fans of genre fiction aren’t very well read. I’m sure this would be different today since the Lord of the Rings (LotR) movies had yet to be released, but hardly anyone in that discussion had ever cracked open Tolkien. So I guess expecting younger readers to know the early greats in any of the genres might be too “oldfashioned” of me. But that didn’t explain the ignorance of the distinction between fantasy and science fiction.
