Smiley Face said:
What on earth..? How are so many people voting for science fiction?
I'm about to blow your mind, so hold onto your head for a second:
Science Fiction is more diverse because Fantasy has to be The Matrix.
"But SciMal," you're thinking, "The Matrix was a Sci-Fi action flick!" Yes, it is, but why? I'll give you a hint: Because it used technology-as-magic, but did it so well that all you saw was the technology. I'm not talking about the shitty Messiah trope crap in the 2nd and 3rd movies - this is explicitly about the first, although it's explained quite well by the Architect in the 2nd (amongst his ramblings).
See, Science Fiction is written to make people think. It's written to present perspectives on modern culture, morals, technology, and overall acts as a critique on the experience of being human as the writer has experienced it. Science Fiction is a sandbox that must flow directly from reality itself because a critique is invalid if the connection cannot be made between the critique itself and the material it's based on. Although SF doesn't necessarily have to follow all of the known laws of reality (FTL drives), the further it ignores the rules the closer it gets to Fantasy.
Fantasy authors make up their own rules. They have to in order to avoid logical conflict in their readers. "Solve it with magic" is an omnipresent option for the authors of fantasy works, and the readers know that. Fantasy readers don't read LotR or Harry Potter to understand how the world works or gain hope for the future; they read LotR and HP because it provides escapism. It offers a glimpse into a world where the everyday tediousness of being human is taken away, and that's what the readers desire.
Fantasy works are ways of living out dreams - quite literally stated by the name of the genre itself. But all WE know - everybody who exists and ever existed and ever will exist - knows, is reality. Mundane, banal, sometimes brutal reality. So, in order to facilitate the act of escapism, fantasy works are given doses of reality that often manifest in the form of rules to the extent of what's possible. As the Architect said - humans will simply reject a perfect world. So the rules must be made by the other, and unlike the omnipresent rules of physics, can end up not making logical sense - or are exceedingly transparent rules put in place to prevent the protagonists from seeming like giant douche-canoes. That's why magic in Harry Potter can't create food and solve world hunger; then the Wizards/Witches would be the most giant dicks in all of human history, and nobody will want to identify with them. The more rules an author makes up, the closer the illusion is to actual physics - although authors often risk contradicting themselves because the only litmus test for their rules interacting against each other is "Is there an excuse in my head that makes this reasonable?" So no matter what Fantasy is *capable* of, it will always have to restrain itself back to the point that it becomes relatable to its audience.
Then there's the often unnoticed issue: The dreams that fantasy stories live out are pretty fucking common from person to person because reality is a shared experience. Solving basic sustenance? Yup. Solving body-image issues? Yup again. Solving the problem of bad things happening to good people? Damn skippy. Heck, many even solve the problem of death. Never want to have your heart broken? Love potions! Tired of the same old house day-in, day-out? Say a few words, wave a wand, and the drapes are completely different.
Then you have Sci-Fi. I'm not going to pretend that Sci-Fi doesn't have its problems; about 5 minutes at a Barnes and Noble will show you that the subgenres in Sci-Fi are pretty slim. You have your Space Operas, you have your War Stories - IN SPACE!, and you have 'the rest.' It's in 'the rest' that you find a lot of the gems, because they're the ones that experiment with new ideas. The authors have often done the hard work of delineating how reality turned into the world they created - they *have* to do the work, because that's what Sci-Fi as a genre *is*. Connecting reality as-we-know-it to 'the Future' and making us swallow it. Sci-Fi authors know their audience has gotten progressively more aware of and savvy with technology, biology, physics, and basically the STEM subjects, so they're forced to get more creative.
More than that, though, Sci-Fi *encourages* exploration of unfamiliarity - unlike Fantasy, which must restrain itself with familiarity. As long as the author can adequately describe how the concept is plausible, or so completely implausible that it shouldn't exist, Sci-Fi readers are content. More than that, they get curious. Dyson Spheres? It would take a shitton of resources... but they're plausible. Suspension tubes that freeze aging in its footsteps so astronauts can visit far away systems? Hell, we can't do it now, but there are examples in nature... sure, plausible. A giant crystalline entity that travels faster than the speed of light and destroys entire civilizations indiscriminately for no apparent reason? WTF? I guess we just haven't discovered the rules of the Universe that allow us to understand it yet!
Those are more modern-day examples. If you go back to older Sci-Fi you'll see the same exploration not so much with technology and the ever-broadening horizon of human understanding, but more philosophical issues. "What would an alien who doesn't understand human morals act like?".... "What if THIS THING or EVERYTHING we know is completely wrong? How could that be, and how would humans react?".... "How insignificant, or significant, are we in the grand scheme of things?"
Finally, there's the problem of popularity. Things get made to make money. Fantasy has been absolutely DOMINATED by LotR for decades, and then you have thousands of years of fairy tales common to most people (of European/American descent) that are rearranged in different ways - like Harry Potter, which has elves, wands, legendary items, and bluntly connects itself to old fairy tales via Merlin and such. So between mash-ups of very familiar elements (sort of like Mexican cuisine) and LotR, you've got 90% of your Fantasy genre covered. That's what's popular. That's what people want. If you want to make money or have people read your work on a large scale, put some dragons in that shit and call it a day.
Science Fiction has never reached the same level of popularity because it's escapism that forces people to think, and thinking isn't what people want to do when they want to forget about the world. So Sci-Fi often degrades in quality as it becomes more popular, more escapist, and thus losing the ability to explore the limits of human conception.
That's why Sci-Fi is more diverse, IMHO. You can do more with it because you're showing people something new - introducing them to experiences and concepts they are expecting to be unfamiliar. With Fantasy you have to play it safe because going too far means losing an audience. You must constrain yourself to many of the expectations of your audience because your audience isn't looking for new and exciting (and possibly disconcerting), they're looking for comfort and brief moments throughout the day when they really do believe that the problems of being human and living in this reality can go away without impossible amounts of hard work.
It doesn't make one BETTER than the other, but it certainly allows Sci-Fi to explore stranger and more 'alien' ideas.
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Well played.
