Question: should this be a fantasy-free zone?

That's how I personally feel about it as well, but on one of my DCC reviews there was a small argument about whether it's SF or not, and it made me wonder what people generally felt.

Thank you, I'm with you.

I tend to agree - anytime you draw a crisp line, there's going to be an example just on one side or the other that prime will argue about. On the other hand, there are things that no one will disagree about. No one of going to because whether The Lord of the Rings is SF or fantasy. The book I was considering posting a review of has magic and gods in it, though there's a major faction in the series that's trying to end all that and replace it with technology.

Exactly. This is not a problem worth solving.

Yeah this here. Obviously pure fantasy should be taken elsewhere.

(Even though I love some of it, and otoh some SciFi isn't worth the electricity it took to put on your screen)

Okay thank you. You're one of the only ones so far who would prefer we really do keep it to SF, but I totally understand that position.

Right, there are lots of examples that have the trappings of one genre but are the other at heart. I feel that way about the Shadow of the Leviathan series. It seems like people are taking magic potions to make genetic changes, but they've found these sea creatures that have properties that can be distilled to make genetic changes, and it's handled in a way that feels more like chemistry than magic.

Man Book of the New Sun was one of the best reads ever. That shit was like borderline a different language at some points. I've never had to reread a book in the same way to understand what was being said sometimes. Absolute masterpiece.

It's like a fantasy with a sci-fi backdrop it's crazy.

Yeah, I just replied to someone else about the spectrum between SF and fantasy. It's really hard to draw a hard line between them. I wouldn't go for "future fiction," because there's good SF (even hard SF) that occurs in present or the past.

Sci-fi is a big umbrella that includes 1984 and Star Wars. But what about the non-Jedi parts of Star Wars that do deal with technology, ethics, politics, religion, and the human condition? Banning "future fantasy" would mean getting rid of things like Andor, which does have a lot to say and is much closer to 1984 than A New Hope.

Speculative fiction may be the term you're looking for

Anything relating to time is a bad term I think. Much of it's in an alternate universe with different timelines. For example, Star Wars is in the past, if you listen to them.

I think a better term might be "technology fantasy" and "magic fantasy," but they aren't mutually exclusive. To use Star Wars as an example again, it has magic and technology. There shouldn't be an attempt to separate them as exclusive to each other because they're essentially the same things just with different settings.

Agreed

That describes me as well.

I'm really enjoying it. Tchaikovsky has become my favorite living/writing author.

I still maintain that it's a spectrum, with some things certainly belonging at one end or the other, but with many things in between.

I will say, though, when I'm reading something categorized as SF, but I find some element of outright magic, it bugs me. As soon as there's magic, or an element that doesn't seem to have any sort of scientific basis at all, it moves out of SF into that middle ground for me. And it might be just personal preference, but the reverse isn't the same for me. I feel like a story can be fantasy and still have elements with a scientific basis. Again, I'm very willing to admit that that's a personal bias.

Probably intended to be funny, but in my usual style I'll answer seriously. If you were to write a story about, say, an herb that's found that cures cancer, that would be legitimate SF to me. It might not be hard SF if there's no explanation of how it cures cancer, but it's enough to say there's a compound in the plant that does it, because that's how medicine works.

The thing about homeopathic medicine that makes it non-science is that, for much of it, there's zero scientific evidence that it works. But in the confines of a story, if the author says it works, them it works.

It's always an interesting discussion. With "hard SF," so the science is grounded in our best current understanding of things. That's sort of one end of the spectrum. At the other is pure fantasy, with overt magic and stuff. But if I took a fantasy story and tweaked it to say that it wasn't magic/wizards, it was aliens using advanced technology, does it become SF? Some people will say yes, because there's a scientific explanation, others will say no, it's still fantasy because it's still being treated as magic that is impossible with what we know today, even if there's lip service being paid to the being an explanation.

That's the heart of the debate about DCC: it's full of magic, but Dinniman says the magic is created by advanced tech that defies all of the things we understand about the laws of physics.