Sub-genres -- which has more of them, SF or Fantasy?

[AE35Unit]

Generally, I'm not a fan of science fiction, I lean far more to fantasy.

Ha Soulsinging, I feel about fantasy as you do about SF.
But I feel that SF has more variety,more sub genres,than does fantasy.

 

[Fried Egg]

Re: June's here! What are you reading?

Ha Soulsinging, I feel about fantasy as you do about SF.
But I feel that SF has more variety,more sub genres,than does fantasy.

Just for balance, I will say that I love both SF and fantasy and find them equally as rich and varied as each other. Sure, there are plenty of duds on both sides but they both have their fair share of gems too!

 

[Connavar]

Re: June's here! What are you reading?

Ha Soulsinging, I feel about fantasy as you do about SF.
But I feel that SF has more variety,more sub genres,than does fantasy.

You might like SF more but there is no way SF has more subgenres that has been active with books,stories through the years. Famous subgenres like Cyberpunk in sf has practicly not many rated books,stories compared to fantasy subgenres like S&S/Heroic,urban fantasy,historical fantasy etc

I like SF in general more cause of my favorite authors but fantasy has subgenres that are active over many years,many authors thats why my reading is like 60% fantasy and 40% SF.

SF might have more vareity in stories but not more subgenres.

 

[AE35Unit]

Re: June's here! What are you reading?

Well on a very simplistic level in it SF you have space opera,cyberpunk,steampunk,time travel,parasitic vampirism, to name a few. In fantasy you have•••fantasy!

 

[Nikitta]

Re: June's here! What are you reading?

Just for balance, I will say that I love both SF and fantasy and find them equally as rich and varied as each other. Sure, there are plenty of duds on both sides but they both have their fair share of gems too!

I like both equally, too, and I like to alternate between them: after a few books of one genre, I'm craving for the other.

 

[Connavar]

Re: June's here! What are you reading?

Well on a very simplistic level in it SF you have space opera,cyberpunk,steampunk,time travel,parasitic vampirism, to name a few. In fantasy you have•••fantasy!

Of course there are those but i meant in the number of books being written. Cyberpunk for example died off years ago in terms of books. Now the best you get is elements of it in books that are not about it.

parasitic vampirism ? Vampire has their own subgenre in fantasy these days not in urban fantasy but in "Paranormal Romance" which is 90% about sexy vampires.

As reader of both you can the difference in the subgenres when you read SFF.
Also go to any of the bookstores in town you see Hard SF,Space Opera,military SF. While High Fantasy,Heroic Fantasy,Urban Fantasy has their own shelfs. Im not talking about chainstores that but specialist genre bookstores like the one i go too.

 

[AE35Unit]

Re: June's here! What are you reading?

Ah now Conn,parasitic vampirism doesn't refer to the traditional vampire stories that we think of but is a sub genre of SF,or maybe its more of an idea used in SF.

 

[j d worthington]

Re: June's here! What are you reading?

Well on a very simplistic level in it SF you have space opera,cyberpunk,steampunk,time travel,parasitic vampirism, to name a few. In fantasy you have•••fantasy!

Ummm... that's one of my big complaints about the way fantasy is viewed these days; and you couldn't be more wrong. Fantasy has a very wide range of subgenres, including urban fantasy, the philosophical fantasy novel, comic fantasy, heroic fantasy, the epic fantasy, openly allegorical fantasies, that odd blend known as science fantasy, contemporary fantasy, "mediaeval" fantasy, fantasy set in classical worlds, "enlightenment" fantasy (and fantasies set in these different milieus have a completely different feel and dynamic from each other), dark fantasy... the list goes on and on. Not to mention, as has been noted elsewhere, that sf itself is (originally, at least) a subgenre or product of the fantasy field....

And back on topic: I'll probably be finishing off The Winds of Limbo on my afternoon break... then it's a decision between a non-fiction piece, Moorcock's The Shores of Death, or Gustave Flaubert's The Temptation of Saint Anthony.....

 

[AE35Unit]

Re: June's here! What are you reading?

Yea I know JD i was being very tongue in cheek there. But basically altho I could split fantasy into its various groups I could split SF a lot further. Now where would The Forever War,that I just started reading,fit? Military SF perhaps?

 

[soulsinging]

Re: June's here! What are you reading?

Ha Soulsinging, I feel about fantasy as you do about SF.
But I feel that SF has more variety,more sub genres,than does fantasy.

Perhaps. Personally, I don't much care about subgenres, no more than I do with respect to music... as far as I'm concerned all that matters to me is enjoyment. Variety and originality are overrated imho and pigeonholing things into subgenres seems an irrelevant exercise to me.

I think generally that I find fantasy to be a bit more personal and character driven. Characters finding their potential or place within a difficult, adversarial world. I find science fiction to be more about politics and concepts of society... xenophobia and whatnot. Thus why I liked Ender's Game, but didn't care for Dune. Ender struggled to be the best and battle aliens and authority. He grew as a person slowly and with problems. In Dune, Paul just becomes a grown up super computer on one random page and spends the rest of the book meditating on theories of time, space, and politics. Not as engaging to me. Granted, both genres have crossover (Martin goes into politics extensively), but I just find the problems of fantasy to be more personal/human than the more social/political problems of sci-fi. Conflicts of people as opposed to conflicts of ideology, I guess.

 

[j d worthington]

Re: June's here! What are you reading?

Yea I know JD i was being very tongue in cheek there. But basically altho I could split fantasy into its various groups I could split SF a lot further. Now where would The Forever War,that I just started reading,fit? Military SF perhaps?

To some degree; but I think it fits more into other categories better. And I doubt you could divide either into many more than the other, as there is a great deal of variety in types (or modes) of tale within each... many more than can be easily classified.

Perhaps. Personally, I don't much care about subgenres, no more than I do with respect to music... as far as I'm concerned all that matters to me is enjoyment. Variety and originality are overrated imho and pigeonholing things into subgenres seems an irrelevant exercise to me.

I wouldn't say it's irrelevant, necessarily, as it can be very helpful in certain ways; but that too much stress is placed on it, I would agree. This tends toward an ever-more-narrowing view of what each branch of literature has to offer and, eventually, ghettoization and creative stultification (such as we have seen with fantasy over the past few decades... something which seems to be breaking up once again, thank goodness....)

I think generally that I find fantasy to be a bit more personal and character driven. Characters finding their potential or place within a difficult, adversarial world. I find science fiction to be more about politics and concepts of society... xenophobia and whatnot. Thus why I liked Ender's Game, but didn't care for Dune. Ender struggled to be the best and battle aliens and authority. He grew as a person slowly and with problems. In Dune, Paul just becomes a grown up super computer on one random page and spends the rest of the book meditating on theories of time, space, and politics. Not as engaging to me. Granted, both genres have crossover (Martin goes into politics extensively), but I just find the problems of fantasy to be more personal/human than the more social/political problems of sci-fi. Conflicts of people as opposed to conflicts of ideology, I guess.

Avoiding the Ender/Dune points (which I could argue), there's plenty of what you're talking about in sf... it just doesn't tend to be what is "hot" in sf these days. You have such wonderful things as Flowers for Algernon (Keyes); The Word for World is Forest (and, in fact, most of Le Guin's earlier work); much of Moorcock's work, nearly everything written by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner; a fair chunk of C. M. Kornbluth; Stanley G. Weinbaum; a large selection of Brian Aldiss; A Case of Conscience (Blish); nearly anything by Pangborn -- especially such things as "Angel's Egg" and A Mirror for Observers; Stewart's Earth Abides; various pieces by Asimov ("The Ugly Little Boy" and "The Bicentennial Man" come to mind); Simak's City, Way Station, and many others; a fair amount of Phil Farmer; James Tiptree, Jr.; Andre Norton; etc., etc., etc.

 

[AE35Unit]

Re: June's here! What are you reading?

But having sub genres is a handy tool if you prefer a certain type of SF(space opera) or dislike another(cyberpunk). When there such labels it makes it easier to find more of what you like. Just look at the recommendations threads on here. I could start a Space Opera Recommendations thread and get lots of suggestions. But if those sub genres just all melded into one it would be harder to find new stuff to read.

 

[soulsinging]

Re: June's here! What are you reading?

Avoiding the Ender/Dune points (which I could argue), there's plenty of what you're talking about in sf... it just doesn't tend to be what is "hot" in sf these days. You have such wonderful things as Flowers for Algernon (Keyes); The Word for World is Forest (and, in fact, most of Le Guin's earlier work); much of Moorcock's work, nearly everything written by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner; a fair chunk of C. M. Kornbluth; Stanley G. Weinbaum; a large selection of Brian Aldiss; A Case of Conscience (Blish); nearly anything by Pangborn -- especially such things as "Angel's Egg" and A Mirror for Observers; Stewart's Earth Abides; various pieces by Asimov ("The Ugly Little Boy" and "The Bicentennial Man" come to mind); Simak's City, Way Station, and many others; a fair amount of Phil Farmer; James Tiptree, Jr.; Andre Norton; etc., etc., etc.

I was disappointed with Flowers for Algernon, and didn't even like Le Guin's fantasy stuff (Earthsea). I've always felt a little underwhelmed with Vonnegut as well, and even the classics (1984, Fahrenheit 451) never really blew me away. For some reason, the genre just doesn't do it for me I guess.

As to the rest of those authors... I've never heard of a single one of them! In any event, I don't doubt there is plenty of character-driven sci-fi, I just feel like on the whole, I don't relate to the genre as easily to fantasy.

 

[j d worthington]

Re: June's here! What are you reading?

But having sub genres is a handy tool if you prefer a certain type of SF(space opera) or dislike another(cyberpunk). When there such labels it makes it easier to find more of what you like. Just look at the recommendations threads on here. I could start a Space Opera Recommendations thread and get lots of suggestions. But if those sub genres just all melded into one it would be harder to find new stuff to read.

Speaking for myself, that's why I noted that it can be useful in some ways -- both as a reader and in applying critical thought, as different modes may be suited to different types of story. My complaint about it is that all too often the most popular type comes to be seen as the whole -- as we saw with fantasy once LotR garnered such an audience -- and the immense variety within the field is overlooked, ignored, or simply not known; and then you have readers demanding more and more of the same thing, to the detriment of the field, as this causes said variety to be continually pruned down to "what sells" (for the moment). As I've noted before, we saw what happened with the Gothic novel and the ghost story (not to mention the Western) with this trend, and the same thing is still a good possibility with either sf or f (or both). Variety -- and cross-fertilization -- keeps each fresh and healthy....

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Since this discussion has strayed far off topic from the monthly reading thread, I've split it off into a thread of it's own.

And since it's an interesting discussion, and worthy of its own thread, pray continue ...

 

[GOLLUM]

We shall....

I would have thought off the top of my head that Fantasy actually has more Sub Genres than SF, at least from the exposure I've had to those respective fields and of course as J.D. points out that SF was orginally a subgenre of Fantasy or at least viewed that way.

Anyway I'm more of a Fantasy than SF fan, somehow it's always grabbed me in a way SF hasn't.

For the record I'm usually chasing the more let us say boutique or obscure subgenres of Fantasy that sometimes then make their way more into the general mainstream. I like to read something that at least seems fresh or cutting edge rather than the tried and true formula of mainstream fiction.

Cheers....

 

[bloggeratf]

Fairly confused here. Is it more published books in subgenres or just more subgenres?

If its published, fantasy wins as it is much more popular that SF. That said, SF has by far more subgenres. I mean, when Powered Armor can be considered a subgenre, it is hard for fantasy to keep up.

 

[Connavar]

Fairly confused here. Is it more published books in subgenres or just more subgenres?

If its published, fantasy wins as it is much more popular that SF. That said, SF has by far more subgenres. I mean, when Powered Armor can be considered a subgenre, it is hard for fantasy to keep up.

Thats what im saying Fantasy has more subgenres that is active with books still being published alot every year than SF.

We are talking about the known,accepted subgenres not every type of story in field. Hard SF,Space Opera,Cyberpunk etc

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

That said, SF has by far more subgenres. I mean, when Powered Armor can be considered a subgenre, it is hard for fantasy to keep up.

Sub-genres are defined by rather more than a single widget in one or more books.

 

[AE35Unit]

Well look at that. A thread started by me and I never knew! Aint that a doozie