Swords and Dragons and Space Ships.

Reading the comments today on this review of The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jeminin makes it apparent a lot of people are really concerned about the hard definitions of science fiction and fantasy.

When it comes to this terrible divide we fight our wars of words over, my reading interests are firmly on the science fiction side. I like stories of space exploration, development of new technology, and the interaction of cultures different, yet in many ways oddly similar, to our own.

Yet the hardest-core science fiction that people usually are enamored with in these comment battles is usually the most difficult for me to fathom.

I am a medium-to-large fan of Alistair Reynolds, so I will use him as a example of where things start to go rough in "totally hardcore" science fiction.

In the Revelation Space universe, you  have these folks called Conjoiners. They are essentially a hive mind of people who have "transcended" to a new level of consciousness that is difficult to explain to us the non-elevated reader.  They dress drably, don't have very nice facial expressions, and look with disdain on regular people.

Once you get hooked up to them, you start to see all the fancy colors and virtual computer representations that they are seeing beyond your senses. But most interactions involving the Conjoiners in Reynolds fiction are typically from the vantage points of outsiders. You can't really describe things from a Conjoiners point of view for very long, because you the writer aren't transcended and it takes a lot of brainpower and hand-waving to describe the experience.

So here is where the Dragons and Space Ships subset of science fiction starts to fit in.

Humans, once advanced to a certain degree, are difficult to describe and explain to both the reader as well as by the author. Their methods and motivations are either very Big Picture or entirely inscrutable.

So you do what Reynolds does and often describe the experiences from the perspective of an outsider.

The Ultras are a clear example in Reynolds fiction, as they are the ship crews who are naturally distanced from bizarre cultural evolution. Serveing on long sub-light space voyages all the time,  Ultras can balance old-school thought with the latest in body modification. There's no brain-internet to upload your individuality and sense-of-self up and into and away.

Some writers take this a step further and remove the entire story from the technology and describe barbarians who have limited access to this experience-altering technology. Knights, Dragons, Games involving Thrones, we all understand how these things work instinctively by the time we reaching full fiction-reading maturity.

Last year, I fell head-over-heels for the works of Ursala Le Guin and read probably 75% of her catalog before moving on. She is probably "soft" science fiction yet I would certainly say it is by no means fantasy. Space Ships are used to transport between planets. The "Ansible" is used for faster-than-light communication (which is against the laws of physics, gentle reader). There are revolutions in thought toward gender norms and cultural structures. The economic models of Capitalism, Socialism, Collective Anarchy, Neo-capitalism, Neo-socialism, Feudalism and neo-feudalism are bounced around as we visit different worlds and governments. No one plugs their brain into anything. These concepts once you plug your brain in are difficult to describe.

Gene Wolfe wrote this epic series called The Book of the New Sun which technically takes place on Earth in a very Warhammer 40k-ish archaic dystopia. Although I should note Gene Wolfe was writing about Severian the Torturer long before 40k was even a mote in Rick Priestley's eye.

But at the end of all that fantasy, there is a mind-blowing spaceship ride that lifts the reader out of all that fantasy and makes them see the world for how it really is. As seen from the vantage point of a medieval torturer/emperor of the world.

One thing I don't really like about Game of Thrones (aka the Song of Fire and Ice) is that there is no spaceship ride at the end. I know the books haven't been written (and probably never will be) but I am confident G.R.R. Martin has no spaceship planned. Make the Lord of Light into an ancient satellite beaming signals into people's brains by way of VALIS, and I would have gotten a lot more excited about the series as a whole.

You get too technical with your science fiction and you end up on the other end of the spectrum. A bunch of post-trans-humanism post-gender post-scarcity dudes enjoying utopia from the inside of a giant machine-consciousness or something. And they're probably simulating various fantasy scenarios from their little consciousness-boxes.

So that's why its okay to mix fantasy and science fiction. And why it makes a difference to have technology flying around instead of simple "magic." People get too hung up on definitions.