by Dee Holder

Created on: February 18, 2010

The main difference between science fiction and fantasy is that science fiction, no matter how fantastic the story, is on some level remotely possible, while fantasy as the name suggests involves beings, creatures and worlds that can never and will probably never exist.   Science fiction as a genre is all about what if?  What if we could travel in time?  What if aliens came to earth?  What if inter dimensional travel was possible?   How will humans behave 1000 years from now?   One million years from now?  All these things, while highly unlikely, are remotely possible.   Many modern scientific advances were once the topics of science fiction, for this reason I often think of science fiction as science waiting to happen. 

Science fiction gives us a way to look at our society through the eyes of fiction, rather than dealing with the ugliness of racism head on, you can discuss it honestly by simply changing the color of the participants from white and brown to orange and blue.  You can discuss sexism by writing a story about a world where men are treated the way women are treated in our society.  You can analyze war, religion and many other 'taboo' subjects by simply making the subject a robot, moving the conflict 1000 years in the future or into another dimension.  But the main impetus behind the generation of science fiction stories is the question "What if?"

Fantasy fiction is more personal that science fiction, similar questions can be asked in fantasy stories, and similar issues addressed, but they tend not to be on a global scale.  Where science fiction is an analysis of societies, fantasy is often an analysis of the self.  If you are a fan of Carl Jung, and his Jungian archetypes,  you will find they are often richly represented in fantasy more blatantly in fantasy stories than in any other genre that I can think of.  I tend to think of Fantasy stories as fairy tales for adults, often serving the same purpose as it does for kids, by giving us psychological tools to slay or tame our internal Ogre.  While Science fiction allows us to slay society's dragons in a non threatning manner, Fantasy does the same thing for our own personal dragons.

It is rare for the world of dragons and fairies to mix with that of robots and time travel.   It does happen, and these days I find it happening more and more but the mix is never really as satisfying as the

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