The page is more for lesser known authors, while the late Iain M Banks is certainly a master of science fiction, he is one of the best known authors.

The SF masterworks sister project has a Banks book, and the link in the wiki article to that list also has a quote from him praising their other choices as

> "amazing" and "genuinely the best novels from sixty years of SF".

Missing Iain M Banks is a weird omission indeed - perhaps they couldn't get the reprint rights.

They really aren't all that different from each other. One is imaginary things that might one day be possible, and the other is imaginary things that won't ever be possible.

And even then, that can swap between the genres. Scifi often contains FTL tech, which from what we know is almost certainly impossible so it's actually more like fantastical magic. Meanwhile, fantasy can have hard rules for its magic, in which case it acts more like technology that we haven't discovered yet. I haven't read it yet myself, but I've heard of Wizard's Bane, where a programmer is transported to a magical land and becomes really powerful because he treats the magic system like a new programming language.

Other things I've noticed is that scifi tends to involve spaceships and is more mystery oriented, whereas fantasy tends to take place on the ground and is more hero's journey oriented. But even these aren't defining traits. Plenty of scifi books involve investigating alien planets and many contain the hero's journey (including the original Star Wars if you count that as scifi). Meanwhile plenty of fantasy books are on some sort of ship (Narnia - Voyage of the Dawn Treader) and many are more mystery oriented (Harry Potter for example).

Personally, I think a better line of division is hard vs soft. Was the world created first with actual rules and the characters molded to fit the world (Dune, Lord of the Rings)? Or were the characters created first and the rules are bent to create the story that is being desired to tell (Star Trek with its technobabble, Star Wars's prequels and sequels, the entire universe of Harry Potter)?

Ursula Le Guin in her preface to The Left Hand of Darkness [1], describes Science Fiction as "descriptive." She invents "elaborately circumstantial lies" as a means of describing what she sees as some truth in our being. The full quote:

> I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.

This is how I think about both science fiction and fantasy. Elements of world building are different, even within each sub-genre, but this element of incorporating elements that are inconsistent with our world to tell stories is common to both. It's also why the term "speculative fiction" persists: a category that subsumes sci-fi and fantasy.

[1] Read that full preface here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/342990/the-left-hand...

They're usually the same thing, differing only thematically. Some "hard" sci-fi may be completely grounded in reality, but for most the "sci" is just a background setting. Many space operas are even more fantastical than wizards throwing fireballs at each other. Some fantasy writers go far out of their way to build coherent worlds governed by physical laws just as strict as our own. Both/Either/The genre(s) use the flexibility of an imagined world, whether that's an imagined future or some land of myth, to contrast with the present, and as with the fantastical myths of old, to make moral or political points that couldn't be so easily expressed if weighed down by history and nuance.

Practically speaking, they're lumped together for a few reasons:

1. Many people who like one genre also like the other.

2. Many authors write in both genres.

3. There's a lot of similarity in the genres, and lots of things that are hard to categorize. More true lately btw.

Just as an aside though, I personally was an avid almost-only-SF reader for the first 30-ish years of my life, but lately have been reading a lot of fantasy as well. I highly recommend trying, especially more modern fantasy - I feel like the lines are even blurrier between them today, and a lot of the best work today has shifted from SF to fantasy. (I still love SF and there's a lot of great SF as well, to be clear.)

What if I told that all fiction books were fantasy?

Bookstores like to make things easy for themselves by defining categories (a la Seeing Like A State), especially due to the perceived overlap between the readership of the two categories as the weird books the nerdy guys read.

While that may have been true historically, fantasy has a new, blossoming, largely female readership, although you could consider this to be overloading the term 'fantasy' as these new BookTok books seem to have little in common with the old school sword and sorcery.

How would you classify The Foundation? Classic sci-fi novel, right? But it has telepaths.. By modern standards, telepathy, empaths, telekinesis.. that's all magic. Fantasy. But in 20th century science fiction it was extremely common.

I imagine one of the reasons is that the master himself, Arthur C Clarke, said it himself with his 3 laws. The third of which is: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

There's a lot of overlap of varying degree of trickiness that makes it more of a spectrum than a clear binary, and so it often makes sense to treat them as a such.

In particular, SF plots often mix in significant fantasy themes to the point that they are sometimes a majority of the book.

Banks' Inversions is a Culture novel (SF) that intentionally reads as fantasy if you don't know the Culture setting, while leaving the reader to infer the SF setting if you do.

"Grass" by Sheri Tepper, or "Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula Le Guin are other examples. Both happen on other planets, but while both have SF settings, most of the stories fits better into fantasy tropes.

Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep is very explicit SF at "top level", but a significant part of the plot is closer to fantasy, happening on a planet in a pseudo-medieval setting.

Others like Stanisław Lem's The Cyberiad, while more explicit SF, also intentionally mix the two - being written as fantasy in a mock-medieval inspired proto-feudal society, where the characters engage in typical fantasy-inspired quests, with dragons, princes and princesses, with medieval weaponry, but with most characters being robots and with access to space travel...

There's a lot of overlap where authors toys with the distinctions, or outright mocks them.

Because both deal with imaginary world building?

The distiction isn't clear anyway. Some "fantasy" book are more scientific than some "sci-fi" books - if they have a system of magic then is that any difference to FTL travel, or Vinge's Region's of Thought?

They typically have a lot of overlap. Vast majority of scifi is fantasy set in the future.

Might be based on Arthur C. Clarke's aphorism, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Ray Kurzweil uses this as a major motif for "The Singularity is Near" about how Harry Potter can be rewritten with all magic replaced with "advanced" devices with handwaved theoretical feasibility explanations. A more specific issue than sci-fi vs. fantasy is the "hard/soft" sci-fi delineation.

Because they need a place for Star Wars, best known fantasy in space

> I read sci-fi but not fantasy

I used to be the same. Ask yourself why.

Harumi Marukami and Han Kang count as fantasy. (I’d argue so does Ian Banks.) Read Tolkien with a hard eye towards rules, meanwhile, and you find a universe that is largely consistent in the Unseen over the Seen, which pretty neatly maps to invisible physics guiding visible phenomena.

I know what you mean, but the boundary can get blurry in some cases.

A Canticle for Liebowitz for example mostly feels like some kind of fantasy but for the fact that the reader knows it's set in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland.

Big chunks of the Peter F. Hamilton Void series is basically more or less set in a slightly magical Early Modern Venice.

The Laundry Files is strongly and deliberately in the middle ground of technology and magic, despite being ostensibly set in the present-day.

Stone Spring is an alternate history set in the Stone Age, but is not substantially more ahistorical than a non-fantasy historical novel about a person who didn't exist in reality doing things that never actually happened. Perhaps there's more focus on the engineering rather than fighting, romance, politics, murder and whatever else historical novels often revolve around, but building is as valid a human thing to do as plotting a regicide, say.

Generally, the concepts in both are the same: construct an "unreal" world and set a story in there, often with a projection of real-world issues onto the hypothetical substrate. Often the only real difference is if the unreal element is driven by magic, technology or a small change in a historical event. Sometimes it's a mixture. Sometimes the technology is treated as magic because the users don't understand it. Sometimes the magic is treated as a technology. Sometimes the historical divergence was thousands of years ago, sometimes it has only just happened in the story.

It would probably be more accurate to lump the whole lot under something generic like "speculative fiction" but that's not really a well-known term and has a slightly different meaning that blends into things like historical settings which may not be generally considered fantasy.

The genres weren't always as defined and distinct. The early authors and especially the editors who popularized the genre frequently worked in both.

Same for movie/tv categories. Every service has “sci-fi/fantasy” lumped together. Annoying.

I would be hard put to place The Night Land in one genre or the other. Hodgson would have had no idea what the difference was anyway.

That's a major gripe of mine. Nothing against fantasy, but for me these are two almost opposite genres.

How would you define the difference?

Both fit in the category of speculative fiction and as the many commenters have pointed out, speciation is difficult.

One definition I saw that sort of kind of worked is:

One puts an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances, the other puts an extraordinary person in ordinary circumstances.

I think it is mostly to differentiate it from other fiction genres. While there is some overlaps, there is much more common in those other genres.

I think because a lot of sci-fi dips it’s toes in fantasy. Once you invent FTL it’s not much further to a medieval era species of telepathic dogs.

I’m with you though.

I'm with you. My favorite sci-fi is something like Project Hail Mary, which is radically different from fantasy.

Because of Roger Zelazny

It’s not people, it’s publishers insist on it.

We just need 3 categories:

* Sci-Fi

* Fantasy

* Sci-Fi & Fantasy

What's truly infuriating is how awful the tagging on Audible is. "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is tagged sci-fi.

Of course there is a significant overlap in readers of both genres. I am mostly the same as you though, I rarely read fantasy.

Always annoys me having to wade through fantasy to find the sci fi on bookshop shelves. At least you can filter to just sci fi for ebooks mostly.

Judging from your comment, you may find it intriguing to take a peek at the authors and books listed in Appendix N (Inspirational and Educational Reading[0]) from the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide (1979). If you have any interest in the fantasy roleplaying sphere, this list should be all the more interesting.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appendix_N

On your latter question, I don't see much discussion surrounding The Magus by John Fowles (1965), which is one of my favorite fiction novels of all time.

Agree. That is why when it comes to movies I still rent discs at a local video store. The owner, Colin, is the ultimate movie recommendation master. The algorithm just can’t compete. If you live in San Francisco, the store is called Video Wave.

I just read "THE MEMOIRS OF THE CONQUISTADOR BERNAL DIAZ DEL CASTILLO WRITTEN BY HIMSELF"

It's not fiction but it feels like a time warp into a world unimaginable.

I absolutely love Lem, and I just read Roadside Picnic this year.

I had not heard of XX before - will have to check it out, thanks.

I think of TC&TC as sociological science fiction.

I loved Perdido Street Station and The Scar. Haven't read this one but I'm adding it to my list now. Thanks!

I found Railsea really fun. It's a bit silly and didn't take itself very seriously. Somehow it feels like it could have been a novelisation of a British 1960/70s stop motion TV show like the Clangers.

Liked it though preferred Embassytown. Hated PSS.

For modern sci fi and fantasy, pretty much anything by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

I also just discovered the short story collections of Rich Larson (Changelog and Tomorrow Factory are both recommended)

Just published as well is There is No Antimimetics Division by qntm. You can read the original on SCP [1], but it's now out in book form.

[1] https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub

I love Stanislaw Lem. Solaris is his most famous and it has many of his core themes; I'd also try Fiasco.

I'm also a huge fan of R.A. Lafferty, but his stuff his harder to find, mostly out of print.

Peter Watts' Blindsight is amazing recent-ish hard SF. (the follow-up, I did not like at all).

Anything from the Strugatsky brothers you can get your hands on!

On A Red Station Drifting - Aliette de Bodard: a wild mixture of a station, run by a failing AI and strict Vietnamese behavioural rules.

Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel, plot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_Eleven

Nine Fox Gambit: Yoon Ha Lee: disgraced officer of space fleet must capture fortress protected by complex mathematics.

Theatre of the Gods and Hunters and Collectors by Matt Suddain. Both defy a one line plot description, look them up. Theatre was one of the best books I have ever read.

This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal el Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Two opposing generals mess with time to gain a personal meeting.

Sea of Rust - C. Robert Cargill: the story of a scavenger robot

Robert L. Forward's Dragon's Egg and Starquake:

https://mdpub.github.io/cheela/

For anyone (like me) who likes their sci-fi fun and a bit cheesy I have a few recs:

Dream Park - Larry Niven & Steven Barnes: A group of pretend adventurers suit up for a campaign called "The South Seas Treasure Game." As in the early Role Playing Games, there are Dungeon Masters, warriors, magicians, and thieves. The difference? At Dream Park, a futuristic fantasy theme park full of holographic attractions and the latest in VR technology, they play in an artificial enclosure that has been enhanced with special effects, holograms, actors, and a clever storyline. The players get as close as possible to truly living their adventure. All's fun and games until a Park security guard is murdered, a valuable research property is stolen, and all evidence points to someone inside the game. The park's head of security, Alex Griffin, joins the game to find the killer, but finds new meaning in the games he helps keep alive.

The Long Run - Daniel Keys Moran: Years after the massacre of the Castanaveras genies, Peaceforcer Elite Commander Mohammed Vance still searches for the survivors. Now the gene-altered children have come of age. Denice – the world’s most powerful telepath – and Trent the Uncatchable – hacker, thief, and revolutionary – are about to come out of hiding. The world will never be the same. (It's book 2 in the series, but I'd recommend this as a stand-alone, or starting here.)

In the spirit of brining down the level of intellectual sophistication here, I have a few recommendations I've enjoyed.

- All 18 Expeditionary Force books by Craig Alanson

- The first 5 Starship's Mage books by Glynn Stewart. UnArcana Stars (book 6) went in a direction that made the government look extremely incompetent.

- Jacques McKeown series by Yahtzee Croshaw

- Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

- Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor

River of Gods by Ian McDonald

Indian politics 100 years following independence, forbidden AIs that pass a predefined threshold and policemen that chase them, individuals who have all their gender indicators surgically removed ...

An amazingly saturated piece of writing

Bit of shameless self-promotion but I have just finished re-editing my 370,000 word sci-fi trilogy novel and have just released the eBook for free (https://rodyne.com/?p=1252) - the length shouldn't be a problem if you like Peter Hamilton :-)

Little, Big by John Crowley. Also everything else he's written.

I'm into Neal Stephenson and PKD. Currently reading Nexus by Naam. Near-future post-cyberpunk tends to be a hit for me, but I'm hoping to find a good space opera. I thought the first Culture book was basically a Schwarzenegger space-adventurism movie in book form, which is nice but not what I wanted.

Had a look at my bookshelf to see what I could find that was obscure, maybe these would be interesting:

First Contract (Greg Costikyan) - a book about the economics of first contact

John Courtney Grimwood (author) - science fiction, generally cyberpunk, told from the point of view of characters who don't understand the tehcnology, which gives his work a kind of mystic vibe. (Eg, Nine-tail fox is about a detective trying to solve his own murder)

Footfall (Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle) - was a big release back in the day, but not so well known these days. Hard SF alien invasion novel (Independence Day might have ripped this off a bit)

The NASA trilogy (Stephen Baxter) - dark alternative future books, with bleak endings but great science. I think not so well known these days because of the bleakness, but that's also part of what made them memorable when I read them.

> And I am ashamed to admit I haven't read any Greg Egan yet, need to get on that :)

Permutation City is his best-known work, and while some people (including me) enjoy the density of ideas, others find the characterisation weak. I'd start with one of his short story collections, such as Luminous.

"an alien light" (nancy kress) and "windhaven" (lisa tuttle and george martin) are two underrated gems. windhaven has long been my go-to recommendation for sf/f fans looking for good books they might not have encountered; the nancy kress is a more recent discovery, one of her early books that i feel has quite undeservedly not gotten as popular as some of her later stuff.

The Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein. It's become my go-to recommendation for anyone I know that likes to read. Most people I've recommended it to have ended up buying all four books.

To quote an earlier comment of mine

> Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice series.

> Culture, gender identity, hive mind, all rolled up into one extremely dense universe with a rich history told through warfare and cutting remarks, humanising potentially inhuman central characters with a vague number of limbs.

> It takes ten pages to get used to the dense yet clipped writing style, but once it clicks, you cannot put the book(s) down: the plot moves forward at breakneck speed.

The City and the Stars by Arthur C Clarke is one of my favourites and have only ever met one other person who has read it. Just reread it recently and it's even better and more relevant than I remembered.

The 1950s was a particularly good time for sci fi I think.

Ted Chiang is often regarded as the best sci-fi author of our times.

I usually care more about the ideas than characters / prose and the recs below kinda reflect that.

Anyways, in no particular order ...

  - Adiamante by Modesitt (1996), pacifist environmentalists vs cyberpunk warmongers. It's a lot of philosophy and a bit preachy at that but the world building was pretty thorough.
  - Last and First Idol by Gengen Kusano (2018). Similar to Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon, it parodies various aspects of Japanese culture over a period of eons. (It's a set of three ~70pg stories).
  - Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky (2010). Parody where the main character investigates how to exploit magic. Kind of like xkcd / what-if but in the Harry Potter universe. Author is controversial and the story's pompous /r/iamverysmart vibes can be offputting but I enjoyed it.

  - Greg Egan's stuff
  - There is No Antimimetics Division by qntm
  - Sequels to Enders Game and the Ender's Shadow spinoffs by Orson Scott Card.
  - Dragon's Egg and its sequel by Robert L. Forward.

I've become a huge fan of A.E. van Vogt and have been slowly collecting all of his pulp books.

What's aspects of sci-fi or fantasy draw you? I personally go for the weirder sci-fi that seemed to come out of the imaginative (and, well, drug-fueled, probably) 60's and 70's, so my recommendations tend to come from that.

Dune by Frank Herbert - I'll get the obvious one out of the way. Everyone needs to read at least the first book. The world-building is a commentary on our own and none of the movies, series or games will every really capture the books in their entirety. There is just so much more to Dune than the barely-below-the-surface treatments we get with film because they have to appeal to a mass audience that tends to have the relative intelligence of my left shoe.

Candy Man by Vincent King - take PKD's Electric Sheep question of what makes a human a human, then explore the answer in a far-flung future that ends up being a bit of a nightmare circus. Great world-building, here, but King reveals in slow morsels that leave us with questions and fuel turning the page. While his other works are not really that prolific, he hit the nail on the head with this one, bringing some dialect playfulness to the writing that just adds to the immersion. It's a haunting world, unsure of why it exists due to short memories and withholding of information, and unintentionally hints at the modern day disquiet of man as we race toward whatever Singularity we have accidentally or intentionally created.

Colossus by D. F. Jones - a bit like Wargames but more swanky, the US and Russia each create artificial super-intelligence then let them talk to each other, which goes about as well as you can imagine. The story hints at the notion that as soon as politics gets involved with science, things tend to get really cocked up, resulting in hostile takeovers, or worse, annihilation. It's a short read, and should be on the to-do list of anyone experiencing existential dread over the AI race today.

A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller - everyone needs a bit of post-apocalypsia now and then and I always recommend this one to get your fix. Here's an extreme treatment of what happens when anti-intellectualism becomes the modus operendi as we are thrust into a harsh and desolate world brought about by global nuclear war, roaming mobs blaming science (rather that politics, as Simpletons will do) for getting humanity into the mess it's in, going so far as to forbid pretty much any book-learning or education beyond the church. As artifacts from the past (our present, more or less) are uncovered, things get a bit hectic.

I'm also happy to take any recommendations, enjoying other authors like Stanislaw Lem, John Brunner, Robert Heinlein, Vonnegut, Jack Vance, etc. Reading books is probably one of the few things in my life that makes me feel a little less alone.

For cult sci fi classics you can't get much better than "Stars My Destination" by Alfred Bester. Other goodies include Dune (of course), Gateway, and The Forever War.

I also recently read Speaker For The Dead (sequel to Enders Game) and was pleasantly surprised. Possibly better than the original.

A sibling comment mentions Tchaikovsky which I strongly concur with.

It's four stories in the complete set: https://a.co/d/gEdBkYR

Wright also has an extended paen to the mentioned Voyage to Arcturus: https://a.co/d/hubUM05 which neither I, nor the author, recommend unless you have read and deeply love Voyage to Arcturus, but I mention it because the overlap reading this list was quite uncanny. That is a very, very specific point of overlap.

Should the original author ever read this thread I highly recommend Wright to them because of the overlap.

Norstrilia I absultely second. Actually, all of Cordwainer Smith is worth a read, but stories set in The Instrumentality of Mankind certainly are.

The culture novels by Iain M. Banks are also amazing, ship names in particular, but also themes.

And then there is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (or is this too recent) another fine example of exploring the absurdity of mankind.

I often find that older works deal more with ideas and philosophy than the modern works, which tend to be more formulaic with some notable exceptions, like K. J. Parker and Adrian Tchaikovsky - there are less niche works - or so I feel.

"The Dying Earth" is an "important" book historically as it is the source inspiration for the early Dungeons and Dragons magic system (some of the spells are clearly copied from it).

As an aside, I've had the good fortune to play in a few "Dying Earth" roleplaying campaigns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dying_Earth_Roleplaying_Ga...) and it's one of the most fun RPGs as most of the gameplay revolves around one-upping everyone else and experience is awarded for using taglines appropriately rather than killing monsters etc.

You may have overlooked the small blue bar at the top labeling it an ad.

My version of the website doesn't mention "Love And Chocolate" anywhere?!

As a more casual sci-fi reader I highly recommend Red Rising as a series. This first book is a very straightforward mashup of hunger games and Galica which is quite fun and enjoyable, but the series as a whole immediately creates it's own identify after that and I adore it deeply.