headspace-hotel:

I’ve been trying to work out a new system for speculative fiction genres because the sci-fi/fantasy binary we have is so incredibly uninformative and I’m concluding that there IS no good way to categorize books without the system becoming so overly complex that you’ll end up shorthanding it in unhelpful ways anyway. 

My dislike of the sci-fi/fantasy binary, on a practical/functional level, stems from several things.  

•   the binary seemingly excludes the VERY large category of stories that have a clear deviation from our reality but it’s something that can’t easily be shunted to sci-fi or fantasy. For example: stories that deal with life after death. Stories that focus around a fairly localized “unrealistic” thing happening e.g. a character is born with the memories of a dead pop star or something, or twin sisters share a telepathic connection. Any story where it’s kept ambiguous to what extent the “fantastical” thing is “real” or in the narrator’s mind, such as A Monster Calls or We are the Ants. Really any story that deals with something “unproven” but that doesn’t really “alter” our reality: e.g. if a character meets Bigfoot but everything else in the world is the same. Shit like the movie Groundhog Day. 
•   the fact that many technologies in sci-fi are no more plausible than the things magic can do, and very little of what’s considered “sci-fi” actually is informed heavily by science. teleportation, FTL travel, time travel, etc. are usually supported by absolute bullshit technobabble. In practice there is no difference from fantasy except the commonly associated tropes. They are very rarely fundamentally different.  Not that this is a problem with sci-fi, not all sci-fi has to be hard sci-fi. But it’s a serious problem when you try to separate sci-fi from fantasy in an honest way.
•    the fact that any degree of honesty about the above two things makes the “fantasy” category so vast that it’s basically useless because easily 80% of all stories that are popular, especially in the area of movies are fantasy. 
•    Alt-history being such a glorious hot mess of a category with stuff ranging from standard “alternate timeline where x happened instead of y” to “wwI but there are genetically engineered flying whales and star-wars-esque steampunk walkers” and dinosaurs and dragons and shit. (This is not a complaint. Alt-history writers need to proceed just as they have been doing.) 
•   the absurd fact that dystopia is lumped under sci-fi when dystopia does not, by definition, have to be sci-fi at all, and other weird bullshit in the categorization system 

But actually coming up with an alternative is incredibly difficult because there are simply so many possible variations on what speculative fiction can be that getting anywhere close to accuracy involves getting so complex your system isn’t functional.

I do really strongly feel that these genres need to be done away with though, because

1)      they actually say almost nothing about a story by definition

2)      the only reason why knowing a story is “fantasy” tells you anything about it is that our perception of “fantasy” is super limited for no good reason.

There isn’t anything literally, actually, functionally different between fantasy in general and sci-fi in general outside of a pile of tropes that are tied to the genres for no good reason and that have become identifying marks of the genres for no good reason. The actual dividing line is 99% just what we’ve become conditioned to accept in terms of tropes.

There’s an absurd amount of tropes and world-building concepts that have absolutely no practical reason why they couldn’t work together, but are just not ever combined in stories because they’re associated with different genres or subgenres within sci-fi and fantasy.

I’m going to make a list of what I feel are glaring examples of this:

•  the fact that monarchies are incredibly rare in dystopian novels, and democracies, pseudo-democracies, or even elections are incredibly rare in fantasy
•   the fact that no book I can think of has the concept of FTL travel via magic, and time travel via magic is basically just something writers throw in to keep a tv show going in the 4^th or 5^th season instead of having been a thoughtfully done piece of worldbuilding. Very little fantasy bothers messing with interplanetary travel. Which is sad.
• similarly magic systems are rarely designed with more modern scientific knowledge e.g. DNA in mind. plenty of magic systems that are based on “four elements” or “alchemy” but relatively few that borrow from ideas, disproved or not, about the way the world works that are more recent than like aristotle 
•   no elves, dwarves, orcs, werewolves, vampires, or any “mythological” creature in sci-fi or space operas ever, when there is no better reason for them to be in a world with no contact with or relation to Earth than on another planet. There are incredibly legitimate reasons vampires or dwarves might be found on an alien planet. Please 
• no gods in sci-fi like there are in many, many fantasy novels because I guess high tech and gods are mutually exclusive somehow. 
• Sci-fi putting actual effort into speculative biology and cool alien designs while fantasy just rips shamelessly off decontextualized mythology and medieval bestiaries 
•  Dragons and zombies have bucked this to a limited degree and I have no idea why. I think with dragons it might be because of Dragonriders of Pern
•  The fact that dystopias HAVE to be a future Earth and can’t be in an alternate world like in fantasy  
•  This is getting much better, but up until recently: fantasy is almost always pre-industrial revolution and most of the time pre-gunpowder weapons  
•   “Paranormal” stories where the “fantastical” is focused around ghosts, witchcraft and stuff are basically always based on Earth
•   There are basically no non-earth literary worlds (that are unconnected to earth by space travel) that I can think of with “future” or speculative technology and magic and/or common fantasy tropes. I can’t think of one atomic age fantasy world
•  Post-apocalyptic fairy tale retellings do not exist as far as I know and I want them to.
•  Also, just the expectations of level of “seriousness”/darkness for each genre are sometimes annoyingly prohibitive. e.g. post-apocalyptic stories are virtually always incredibly dark and gritty and the reasons are understandable but also it would be nice to see a lighthearted, adventurous romp through the irradiated wasteland, killing mutated monsters and stuff
•   Corollary to the above: the commonality of “epic” scale fantasy relative to smaller scale, more “slice-of-life” stuff. There’s literally no reason why you can’t write a cute series about a halfling  running a magical bake shop
• Corollary to the corollary: steampunk and urban fantasy skewing “less serious” for some reason 
• if there is any good reason for gigantic ensemble casts in fantasy, which I don’t know if there is, but if there is one you could have them in any speculative genre right 
• shapeshifters being largely a fantasy-romance trope when they’re really cool and should be used in all types of fantasy  
• Cryptids, vampires and werewolves, and elves, dwarves, orcs, etc. occupying totally different niches within fantasy for no reason. Bigfoot is a fantasy race now. You’re welcome. There’s also no reason why you can’t have vampires instead of elves. 
• look, fantasy races are often a devastating kitchen sink of different cultures anyway so you might as WELL have elves AND bigfoot