Poll: Which is more diverse: Fantasy or Science Fiction?

[Envy Omicron]

I want to make it clear right now that this is not about which of the two is better, but rather which of the two has more variety in terms of tools, creatures, themes, settings, etc. I would also like to apologize in advance if this has already been done before.

Right now I'm still not sure which one is more diverse. On the Fantasy front we have stuff like Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Dungeons & Dragons, and Legend of Zelda. Meanwhile with Science Fiction we have Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Mass Effect, The Twilight Zone, Blade Runner, 1984, and Alien. Sure, all of these have plenty of similarities (some more so than others), but all of them, as well as many others that I haven't named, still maintain a certain degree of uniqueness that make them almost instantly recognizable. I'm also aware that both genres have lots and lots of copycats, but I'm hoping that we'll only be focusing on the most popular IPs.

 

[Orange12345]

Well personally I'd have to go with Fantasy as my preference, I find that scifi can sometimes get lost up it's own ass trying to explain how things work instead of focusing on the characters, which fantasy does well because you can usually just say "MAGIC" and explain away things. But I do think that Scifi has a lot more potential for diversity since the universe is vast and all that

 

[TheBlueShotgun0]

I voted Sci-fi. Although both genres have a set of common tropes, science fiction seems to have a greater variety of them. Everyone can tell Terminator and Star Wars apart, but most fantasy just looks like a reboot of Lord of the Rings.

 

[Eddie the head]

Well you could call science fiction as sub-genre fantasy. But I am assuming we are not going by that logic. Anyway Sci-fi if you ask me.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Impossible to answer. Either could be as diverse as you wanted it to be.

Having said that, there is a really embarrassing trend in fantasy for people either to try to be Tolkien, or to try to be the "anti-Tolkien" in the same way as all the other anti-Tolkiens. Either it's what people think England was and full of boring blather about elves and dwarfs doing boring elf and dwarf stuff (not based on what Tolkien based his stuff on, just ripping him off), or it's "dark" and "edgy", lots of rape and bigotry for its own sake.

Now, not to say that fantasy authors have to do that, or that a lot of sci-fi isn't much the same, but the formula seems more set in stone for the people writing the same fantasy over and over.

 

[Heronblade]

Fantasy has a much wider range of possibilities, but very few authors use that greater range, instead defaulting to a number of preset concepts that people are familiar with. This does not necessarily detract from the quality of the work, but it is somewhat disappointing.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

I suppose if you look at it in the way that Sci fi generally has to be seen to conform to the laws of science, whereas fantasy can have literally anything without having to justify it's existence by science, Fantasy is technically the more diverse since it can just add anything without proper explanation.

But sci fi and fantasy are incredibly broad and overlap quite a bit, so it's not set in stone.

 

[DoPo]

The poll has two wrong answers in it. Can't pick any. The correct one is "both".

 

[Queen Michael]

As far as I can tell with my limited experience of both genres, fantasy seems to be reusing old tropes more than sf, so I'll say that in practice, sf is more diverse.

 

[Da Orky Man]

Put it this way: Can you think of a standard sci-fi universe? Many people jump straight to Star Trek, but that kind of universe is rare outside of TV. Hell, even in TV its hard to make valid comparisons. Star Wars could be considered somewhat similar, but only superficially. The closest thing to a 'standard' sci-f setting I can think of would be the near-future rocketpunk stories of the 40s and 50s, where handsome American crewmembers bravely pilot atomic spaceships through the voids of our solar system, sometimes exploring the misty jungles of Venus and at others meeting and occasionally fighting Martians, on their land or ours. And even this is a setting that hasn't really been used for decades.

On the other hand, standard fantasy setting? Easy. YOu have humans, elves and dwarf/ves. The elves live in the forests and the dwarfs live underground. The humans are the most widespread, but tend to be more the default setting. The elves are into mysticism, while dwarfs are more technological. There will usually be an evil race of some kind, along the path of orcs or goblins. This setting works or roughly describes a worryingly high percentage of fantasy universes.

 

[Tyelcapilu]

Sci-fi tends to lead to much more diversity, with things varying from The Fly to Ringworld, while fantasy has an odd tendency to 70% of the time be KNIGHTS AND DRAGONS.
But then it stands on where you want to stick science-fantasy movies/novels, like Star Wars.

 

[Atmos Duality]

In theory: Fantasy
Reason: There are infinitely more irrational concepts (fantasy, magic) than rational concepts (science).

In practice: Tough to say. I rather like both, and the breadth of concepts from both.

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

Well. There's the theory and the practice.

Fantasy has almost no boundaries to what goes and what doesn't; sci-fi is (mostly) grounded in some logic or with some sort of boundaries (such as, people can fly because the gravity is lower, they can shoot lasers because nanoquantumradiationfluxparticles and not because MAGIC BITCHES). In that way, you would think that fantasy has more diversity.

However, they fall in tropes. Authors of both genres don't want to travel too far out of what the readers want or, more importantly, what they are comfortable writing. Thinking of entirely new races, technology, cultures, and settings can lead to two different outcomes. Correctly paced by a good author, it can be a huge success; incorrectly implemented by the daunted or unprepared author, it can be a jumbled mess that isn't fun to read.

Rehashing a commonplace trope like dragons or space pirates doesn't dimish too much on the story, because it is always established that both the author and the reader - well - they know what that is. If I say dragons, you immediately think of flying, huge, reptilian, ornate, fire-breathing lizards with a treasure hoarding instinct, while space pirates brings forth, you know, the junker ships and the diverse crew of laser-toting anti-heroes. You know that, the author knows that, and both of you are comfortable with it. However, throw in something new: say, a giant bluish ball race. You aren't used to seeing that, and you start to question why the author would put that in, and the author can't quite pull a good reason why he did that.

In a way, each movement toward originality can be replaced by tropes. Well, yes, you could have a race of rock-like people, or you could just call them dwarves and better give the reader (and yourself) a better mental image that doesn't need explaining because everyone knows what a dwarf looks like.

It's really interesting how that works, too. You get two divisions of each genre. Fantasy has the Tolkien knockoff and the Tolkien defector; Sci-fi has the same imitator-defector thing but maybe with Star Trek. The real reason is, the author didn't want to be too fresh, because the author (like you) grew up liking Tolkien-Star Trek, and only knows the great success that they had. Dwarves and elves or spacesuits and hoverbikes are common because the author doesn't know (or want) to write anything more complex, because that can confuse the reader, or the author just doesn't think it necessary for their book to be that different than the status quo.

So. All that long stuff means: They have potential, but there's a pretty obvious reason why they never go much further than the basis of Tolkien or Star Trek. It's not a judgement on the genre, it's a judgement on the writing ability of the author.

Which boils down to, it depends.

TL;DR: Both are pretty unimaginative. But, personally, I think sci-fi has more diversity.

 

[MysticSlayer]

I really can't say. Even after only a little exposure I'm sure most people can constantly see connections among stories in both the sci-fi and fantasy genres. However, both are also good at taking old ideas and giving us new concepts with them. For instance, you can complain all you want about the proliferation of elves in fantasy stories like The Elder Scrolls and Dragon Age, but they're hardly presented in the exact same way in those stories as they are in Lord of the Rings. Some ideas, by necessity, are just going to be standard--we always think of trolls and orcs as evil and we always expect some incredibly powerful AI to go rogue. However, I find both to work within those standards and their similar ideas very well and they give quite a bit of diversity even among similar lore.

If I had to choose, though, I'd probably go with sci-fi, but that's more due to the fact that sci-fi/fantasy crossovers tend to fall more on the sci-fi side of things.

 

[VoidWanderer]

What weighs more a ton of feathers or a ton of bricks?

 

[FalloutJack]

In theory: Fantasy
Reason: There are infinitely more irrational concepts (fantasy, magic) than rational concepts (science).

In practice: Tough to say. I rather like both, and the breadth of concepts from both.

I'll do you one better. Science fiction, taken from scientific romance, is already a KIND of fantasy.

 

[IGetNoSlack]

In theory, fantasy. Because magic is a be-all, end-all cure for plot holes.

In practice, neither.

 

[miroac]

I think this question is kind of irrelevant unless you were to compare a particular scifi series versus a fantasy one.

The level of diversity is really based on the 'universe' in which the writter has set himself in.

Look at for fantasy a comparison between Game of Thrones and say, Raymond E Fiest's Magician series. GoT is set in a single world with it's interworkings of magic and fantasy, REF's works consists of a Universe with thousands of worlds and several dimensions.

The comparison can be given for scifi as well with the Starcraft Universe vs the Starwars. SC has 3 primary races, SW has thousands, tech is different for each universe and both have their own form of "magic". For SC it is 'scionic powers' or how ever you spell it, while is SW it is 'the force'.

In short I think it is really just limited to the writters setting. Neither are limited when it comes to diversity, because while fantasy has 'magic' as others have said, there are various scifi series that use technology to create 'magic' abilities in people.

It just comes down to how diverse the writter wants his universe to be.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

SciFi has more potential I would say... But a good fantasy writer could come up with as endless an array of subject matter as SciFi, but most seem to want to conform to the Tolkein model which leads to the D&D model...
But then I see SciFi as a form of fantasy in certain lights because of the fantastic nature of some scifi stories. Some are just beyond the realm of possible which is fantasy to me.
But I get the idea that Fantasy stories are usually based in magic, and scifi is more scientific.

 

[knight steel]

The poll has two wrong answers in it. Can't pick any. The correct one is "both".

Spoiler

Op:It depends entirely on the skill of the creator-both can be just as diverse as the other.
However the best result is when you combine to two to create ROBOT DRAGONS

Spoiler