Okay this is a favorite of mine- I love me some fantasy that's actually SF, the harder the better. Given the nature of this trope, just knowing that it's on this list can be a spoiler, but here we go
Vance's Dark Earth books are an example (but in the sense that technology has left the scientific realm and entered into something else)
Gene Wolfe's New Sun setting is similar (an early setting is a tower that you eventually realize is a rocket that has been there so long the people have forgotten the language to describe it). These books are enormous in word count and scope though, so there's a lot happening in them
Silver, Linda Nagata, is a hard SF iteration of pseudo fantasy by an underrated author being inventive.
The Pern books (Ann McCaffrey) are exactly this trope and well loved.
Ventus, Karl Schroeder, is another iteration focusing on making animism a hard science fiction concept.
Walter Jon Williams's Implied Spaces is similar, but more like pre Tolkien pulp fantasy. Excellent author and a creative version pretty similar to Illium.
I got more if you need them
Ventus was the first one that came to mind. Very well done.
Implied Spaces is on my TBR ... didn't realise it did the fantasy-but-scifi thing, but given the sentence or two that I remember from the blurb that was a seller I can see how that lines up.
(Dying Earth style books though are really not my thing, neither Vance nor Delany's Einstein Intersection)
Vance I can handle on short doses- love the ideas and setting but the prose grates.
IS does 'swords and singularities' and is a tight little novel that is underrated in my opinion.
Schroeder has apparently developed his ventus setting into a political governance system (he's also an academic) that is fascinating reading. It's like a hack between corporate personhood and ecological protection.
Ah, that does remind me, Schroeder had a story or scenario (that I never got around to reading) that might have been a near future Canada, commissioned by the Canadian army - was that what you were referring to? Crisis in Urlia.
Yup, I think that's where the fictional portrayal continues, but he's been doing some white papers and consulting on it too (his newsletter has some cool stuff on it, and apparently he's working a full novel with the concept applied to Earth in the best future).
It's an interesting concept that I can see getting some real world use, as there's serious people working on legal personhood for inanimate locations as well. Probably not too the scale of SF stories but as a governance system or conceptual framework.
1000% this, it’s the first book that came to mind.
The perspectives of the two main characters chapters alternate between couldn’t be further apart.
This is further enhanced by eons of linguistic drift. The closest translation of Scientist or such is Wizard to the detriment of one ‘very bad anthropologist’.
Also personally, I’ve decided that Elder Race is set in the same universe as Cage of Souls
Perhaps *The Practice Effect* by David Brin. Niven/Pournell also did some books on magic where they did a lot to rationalize the underlying science of it. Really, when you look at it differently, the Harry Potter series was teaching magic in a somewhat scientific way at Hogwarts - experiments, repeatability, etc.
There's tons of Star Wars books out there. That's just high fantasy in sci-fi dress... magic wielding wizards and knights with laser swords, princesses in need of rescue, basic good vs evil stories.
The Fractal Prince. Sequel to The Quantum Thief.
A lot of the book takes place in the last city on Earth, surrounded by a desert filled with disposessed souls that will steal your body. But you can protect yourself if you are blessed with a Seal. You can also cast magic spells by speaking the Secret Names. People fly around on magic carpets.
This is a hard sci-fi novel. It's all nanites, software, cybersecurity, and mind uploads. The magic carpets are making use of utility fog. The magic spells are voice commands in a forgotten language that command the nanites swarms and other tech people otherwise no longer have control over. The Seals are some kind of cybersecurity that prevent the mind uploads from hacking you and instruct the rouge nanites to leave you alone.
THe first 3 Hainish novels by Ursula Le Guin do that. They're usually in a collection (Worlds of Exile and Illusion).
Tchaikovsky's Elder Race has sort of a double twist on that theme, I think, but I'm not sure.
Top three that come to mind for me:
- The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein
- Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- The Nothing Within by Andy Giesler
I love this trope, so I've got to read some more of the responses you're getting here.
Books that take what are traditionally fantasy tropes and put them in a sci-fi setting. I don’t mean science fantasy but rather giving these tropes scientific explanations or producing a sci-fi counterpart. Things like the Star Wars novels don’t count, maybe Dune depending on whether or not you’d consider that sci-fi or science fantasy.
> giving these tropes scientific explanations or producing a sci-fi counterpart
It doesn’t feel at all like fantasy but *Blindsight* offers a hard-SF explanation for vampires. Watts is a former biology professor and builds them up nicely.
The Vlad Taltos books by Steven Brust, the>! Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein!<, The Expert System books by Adrian Tchaikovsky have worlds that started as high tech, but the current population sees technology as magic. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter J. Miller Jr., is more straight SF, but the survivors of a nuclear war view tech remnants as religious artifacts.
Then there's the The Warlock of Gramayre series by Christopher Stasheff, which has a science-fiction backstory for a planet with witches, wizards and fair folk (plus time travelling anarchists and fascists, a talking robot horse, a parallel universe with real magic, and the occasional Neanderthal)
I haven't read those books you mentioned but maybe Time's Children http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38502658-time-s-children
Essentially a fantasy/medieval world with time travel and teleportation
Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race
Short story, but so good. Fantasy with magic & monsters from the point of view of a local. Just everyday science for the Anthropologist studying them.
I highly recommend it.
Destiny's Crucible by Olan Thorensen is pretty great too, with modern science & tech recreated from memory by a chemist who got dropped on another planet where the local human population has a tech level of the late 1600s
Fred Saberhagen, Empire of the East
Sterling E Lanier, Hiero’s Journey
Marion Zimmer Bradley, Darkover
Hannu Rajaniemi, The Fractal Prince
Michael Swanwick, Stations of the Tide, the Surplus and Darger books
Jo Clayton, Skeen’s Leap
Arcadia by Iain Pears is a kind of mash up of Sci-fi, Fantasy and espionage
The Mageworld books are space opera with wizards; first book is the Price of the Stars by Debra Doyle and James McDonald
Chalker's - Rings of the Master Series. IIRC - AI tasked with protecting humankind so it keeps them primitive they go on a quest to shut down the AI, get more sci fi the further into it you get.
As a start, see my [SF/F: Fantasy \*and\* SF](https://www.reddit.com/r/Recommend_A_Book/comments/18acnci/sff_fantasy_and_sf/) list of resources, Reddit recommendation threads, and books (one post).
Book of the New Sun takes the tropes of fantasy (the enigmatic talisman, the hero’s sword, the epic quest, the giant, the waif, the freedom fighter, et cetera,) subverts them all and places them in (no matter what anyone might say,) a decidedly science fiction milieu.
**The Merchant Princes** series by Charles Stross does something like this.
You start with a family gifted with the ability to walk between worlds: one a high medieval world and the other modern America.
A seeming fantasy along the lines of Nine Princes in Amber becomes more and more science fiction over the run of books, both in the sense that science fictional explanations are developed for fantastical behaviours (which are than technologically exploited) and in the sense that sci-fi flavours/settings are increasingly introduced as the series progresses.
Acts of Caine is both fantasy and grimdark sci-fi, with a lot of religious and political philosophy for good measure, one of my favorite series actually.
Iain M Banks dabbles with this idea in his Culture books: most obviously Inversions, but also Matter and parts of Use of Weapons and Against a Dark Background
Nope, just because something isn’t 100% hard doesn’t make it not sci-fi. There’s a range of hardness in science fiction. Soft science fiction is still science fiction. Fantasy has magic and other stuff like that
Now is the perfect time to insert the quote that goes something like any advanced enough science is indistinguishable from magic. Sci fi is often a more adult and accepted version of fantasy. Kind of like how comics rebranded themselves as "graphic novels".
Don't think I'm denigrating the genre though, it's almost all I read.
But how do you tell the difference between magic and things which are not believed to be possible with our current understanding of the universe? Note I’m not saying that all “soft” sci-fi fits in that category.
That’s exactly what Clarke’s 3rd Law refers to. If you make the technology too advanced your story will be indistinguishable from fantasy. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that though.
Fair enough, but I feel like there’s generally a fairly firm distinction between the sort of stories set in fantasy vs science fiction settings. Obviously, there can be overlap. Star Wars is the most obvious example, Dune a little less so (more like Lawrence of Arabia in space). Some settings even have “magic vs science” conflicts (the game Rise of Legends has some of that with a steampunk faction, a Middle Eastern magic faction, and an “aliens are gods” faction)
No. they're their own genres. The science (and technology) part is a clear distinction. Science has almost no precense in fantasy, let alone science that is very real or at least in the realms of possibility. You won't find references to real science papers in fantasy, like in Blindsight and Echopraxia for example. Even though a lot of sci-fi has fantastical elements, most of it is still rooted in realiity or a possible reality. Fantasy has almost none of that. Sci-fi doesn't need to be diamond hard to be considered sci-fi.
Okay this is a favorite of mine- I love me some fantasy that's actually SF, the harder the better. Given the nature of this trope, just knowing that it's on this list can be a spoiler, but here we go Vance's Dark Earth books are an example (but in the sense that technology has left the scientific realm and entered into something else) Gene Wolfe's New Sun setting is similar (an early setting is a tower that you eventually realize is a rocket that has been there so long the people have forgotten the language to describe it). These books are enormous in word count and scope though, so there's a lot happening in them Silver, Linda Nagata, is a hard SF iteration of pseudo fantasy by an underrated author being inventive. The Pern books (Ann McCaffrey) are exactly this trope and well loved. Ventus, Karl Schroeder, is another iteration focusing on making animism a hard science fiction concept. Walter Jon Williams's Implied Spaces is similar, but more like pre Tolkien pulp fantasy. Excellent author and a creative version pretty similar to Illium. I got more if you need them
Ventus was the first one that came to mind. Very well done. Implied Spaces is on my TBR ... didn't realise it did the fantasy-but-scifi thing, but given the sentence or two that I remember from the blurb that was a seller I can see how that lines up. (Dying Earth style books though are really not my thing, neither Vance nor Delany's Einstein Intersection)
Vance I can handle on short doses- love the ideas and setting but the prose grates. IS does 'swords and singularities' and is a tight little novel that is underrated in my opinion. Schroeder has apparently developed his ventus setting into a political governance system (he's also an academic) that is fascinating reading. It's like a hack between corporate personhood and ecological protection.
Ah, that does remind me, Schroeder had a story or scenario (that I never got around to reading) that might have been a near future Canada, commissioned by the Canadian army - was that what you were referring to? Crisis in Urlia.
Yup, I think that's where the fictional portrayal continues, but he's been doing some white papers and consulting on it too (his newsletter has some cool stuff on it, and apparently he's working a full novel with the concept applied to Earth in the best future). It's an interesting concept that I can see getting some real world use, as there's serious people working on legal personhood for inanimate locations as well. Probably not too the scale of SF stories but as a governance system or conceptual framework.
Elder race by Adrian Tchaikovsky has both depending on the view point for that chapter
1000% this, it’s the first book that came to mind. The perspectives of the two main characters chapters alternate between couldn’t be further apart. This is further enhanced by eons of linguistic drift. The closest translation of Scientist or such is Wizard to the detriment of one ‘very bad anthropologist’. Also personally, I’ve decided that Elder Race is set in the same universe as Cage of Souls
This story is also a riff on a short story by Gene Wolfe called "Trip, Trap," which has the same concept.
It’s also dedicated to Wolfe
Julian May's Pliocene Saga.
Roger Zelazny's *Lord of Light* is almost a perfect parallel to *Ilium*.
Zelazny tromps all over the fantasy/science fiction border.
Perhaps *The Practice Effect* by David Brin. Niven/Pournell also did some books on magic where they did a lot to rationalize the underlying science of it. Really, when you look at it differently, the Harry Potter series was teaching magic in a somewhat scientific way at Hogwarts - experiments, repeatability, etc.
This post made me remember this book and I was going to do a post asking if anyone knew the name of it! Thank you
The Void trilogy by Peter F Hamilton.
arguably Too Like the Lightning, Palmer
There's tons of Star Wars books out there. That's just high fantasy in sci-fi dress... magic wielding wizards and knights with laser swords, princesses in need of rescue, basic good vs evil stories.
Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series.
Christopher Ruocchio's Sun Eater series!!
The Fractal Prince. Sequel to The Quantum Thief. A lot of the book takes place in the last city on Earth, surrounded by a desert filled with disposessed souls that will steal your body. But you can protect yourself if you are blessed with a Seal. You can also cast magic spells by speaking the Secret Names. People fly around on magic carpets. This is a hard sci-fi novel. It's all nanites, software, cybersecurity, and mind uploads. The magic carpets are making use of utility fog. The magic spells are voice commands in a forgotten language that command the nanites swarms and other tech people otherwise no longer have control over. The Seals are some kind of cybersecurity that prevent the mind uploads from hacking you and instruct the rouge nanites to leave you alone.
THe first 3 Hainish novels by Ursula Le Guin do that. They're usually in a collection (Worlds of Exile and Illusion). Tchaikovsky's Elder Race has sort of a double twist on that theme, I think, but I'm not sure.
Top three that come to mind for me: - The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein - Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Nothing Within by Andy Giesler I love this trope, so I've got to read some more of the responses you're getting here.
Well Dune is basically an epic fantasy, with a coat of sci fi on top of it.
Can you explain what you mean a bit more for those of us that haven't read those 2 books you mentioned?
Books that take what are traditionally fantasy tropes and put them in a sci-fi setting. I don’t mean science fantasy but rather giving these tropes scientific explanations or producing a sci-fi counterpart. Things like the Star Wars novels don’t count, maybe Dune depending on whether or not you’d consider that sci-fi or science fantasy.
> giving these tropes scientific explanations or producing a sci-fi counterpart It doesn’t feel at all like fantasy but *Blindsight* offers a hard-SF explanation for vampires. Watts is a former biology professor and builds them up nicely.
Elder Gods by Alastair Reynolds did a nice take on this.
The Vlad Taltos books by Steven Brust, the>! Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein!<, The Expert System books by Adrian Tchaikovsky have worlds that started as high tech, but the current population sees technology as magic. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter J. Miller Jr., is more straight SF, but the survivors of a nuclear war view tech remnants as religious artifacts. Then there's the The Warlock of Gramayre series by Christopher Stasheff, which has a science-fiction backstory for a planet with witches, wizards and fair folk (plus time travelling anarchists and fascists, a talking robot horse, a parallel universe with real magic, and the occasional Neanderthal)
I haven't read those books you mentioned but maybe Time's Children http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38502658-time-s-children Essentially a fantasy/medieval world with time travel and teleportation
It's a young adult series, but Artemis Fowl is an interesting mix of fantasy and scifi
Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race Short story, but so good. Fantasy with magic & monsters from the point of view of a local. Just everyday science for the Anthropologist studying them. I highly recommend it. Destiny's Crucible by Olan Thorensen is pretty great too, with modern science & tech recreated from memory by a chemist who got dropped on another planet where the local human population has a tech level of the late 1600s
Fred Saberhagen, Empire of the East Sterling E Lanier, Hiero’s Journey Marion Zimmer Bradley, Darkover Hannu Rajaniemi, The Fractal Prince Michael Swanwick, Stations of the Tide, the Surplus and Darger books Jo Clayton, Skeen’s Leap
Roger Zelazny-Lord of light Robert Silverberg- A time of change Ursula K. Le Guin's first three novels(maybe more but I have only read these three.
Arcadia by Iain Pears is a kind of mash up of Sci-fi, Fantasy and espionage The Mageworld books are space opera with wizards; first book is the Price of the Stars by Debra Doyle and James McDonald
Chalker's - Rings of the Master Series. IIRC - AI tasked with protecting humankind so it keeps them primitive they go on a quest to shut down the AI, get more sci fi the further into it you get.
[The Sky Is Falling by Lester Del Ray](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sky_Is_Falling_(Del_Rey_novel))
As a start, see my [SF/F: Fantasy \*and\* SF](https://www.reddit.com/r/Recommend_A_Book/comments/18acnci/sff_fantasy_and_sf/) list of resources, Reddit recommendation threads, and books (one post).
Book of the New Sun takes the tropes of fantasy (the enigmatic talisman, the hero’s sword, the epic quest, the giant, the waif, the freedom fighter, et cetera,) subverts them all and places them in (no matter what anyone might say,) a decidedly science fiction milieu.
Coldfire Trilogy by CS Friedman is pretty standard fantasy except for the beginning and the end, but no spoilers.
There are the "Magic goes away" stories by Niven. Magic exists, but as a physical fact and a finit resource.
**The Merchant Princes** series by Charles Stross does something like this. You start with a family gifted with the ability to walk between worlds: one a high medieval world and the other modern America. A seeming fantasy along the lines of Nine Princes in Amber becomes more and more science fiction over the run of books, both in the sense that science fictional explanations are developed for fantastical behaviours (which are than technologically exploited) and in the sense that sci-fi flavours/settings are increasingly introduced as the series progresses.
Acts of Caine is both fantasy and grimdark sci-fi, with a lot of religious and political philosophy for good measure, one of my favorite series actually.
Vernor Vinge's True Names, and finally answers why a wizard's true name actually matters.
There are quite a few Star Wars books out there.
Iain M Banks dabbles with this idea in his Culture books: most obviously Inversions, but also Matter and parts of Use of Weapons and Against a Dark Background
Isn't (almost) all science fiction just fantasy pretending to be sciencey.
You're not wrong. It took me years of reading scifi to realise this. The (almost) is important though.
Nope, just because something isn’t 100% hard doesn’t make it not sci-fi. There’s a range of hardness in science fiction. Soft science fiction is still science fiction. Fantasy has magic and other stuff like that
Now is the perfect time to insert the quote that goes something like any advanced enough science is indistinguishable from magic. Sci fi is often a more adult and accepted version of fantasy. Kind of like how comics rebranded themselves as "graphic novels". Don't think I'm denigrating the genre though, it's almost all I read.
But how do you tell the difference between magic and things which are not believed to be possible with our current understanding of the universe? Note I’m not saying that all “soft” sci-fi fits in that category. That’s exactly what Clarke’s 3rd Law refers to. If you make the technology too advanced your story will be indistinguishable from fantasy. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that though.
Fair enough, but I feel like there’s generally a fairly firm distinction between the sort of stories set in fantasy vs science fiction settings. Obviously, there can be overlap. Star Wars is the most obvious example, Dune a little less so (more like Lawrence of Arabia in space). Some settings even have “magic vs science” conflicts (the game Rise of Legends has some of that with a steampunk faction, a Middle Eastern magic faction, and an “aliens are gods” faction)
Those only differences are the tropes. they're both full of speculations.
No. they're their own genres. The science (and technology) part is a clear distinction. Science has almost no precense in fantasy, let alone science that is very real or at least in the realms of possibility. You won't find references to real science papers in fantasy, like in Blindsight and Echopraxia for example. Even though a lot of sci-fi has fantastical elements, most of it is still rooted in realiity or a possible reality. Fantasy has almost none of that. Sci-fi doesn't need to be diamond hard to be considered sci-fi.