r/mildlyinfuriating • u/Alextral • 1d ago

I really hate this

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Fantasy and science fiction being cramped in the same section, which is already so small :(

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u/capricioustrilium 1d ago

Would it be better if it was Speculative Fiction?

10

u/PadishaEmperor 1d ago

That’s one of the genre descriptions that are especially useless in my opinion. Speculative Fiction encompasses way too much and even many books that generally aren’t considered Speculative Fiction could probably be considered.

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u/phunniemee 1d ago

In my dream classification the whole giant section is called Speculative Fiction and it's graded like the Mohs scale.

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u/Alextral 1d ago

Is fantasy speculative though? Sci-Fi is as I would define it always a „what if“ -situation based on actual science. Fantasy has magic.

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u/VelvetMafia 1d ago

Both scifi and fantasy involve things that do not exist in the real world and never have. The mechanistic density of the nonexistent tech/magic can be described on a scale of hard to soft, where hard tech/magic systems rely on quantitatively explained, consistent rules, and soft systems just kinda happen without a defined mechanism.

The genres are wildly different, but so are books within genres. Like Pushing Ice has fundamentally different scifi rules than Queen City Jazz, and Tolkien's Middle Earth is nothing like the world of Arcane Ascension.

Then there is mashup space fantasy with both magic and tech, like Path of Ascension and Defiance of the Fall. Or steampunk with magic, like the Golden Compass.

TLDR I think fantasy is speculative, and there's a good case for lumping the genres together

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u/explodingtuna 1d ago

I do most of my browsing in the Nonspeculative Fiction section.