”If you have to ask what science fiction is, you’ll never know.”

This is a quote from Arthur C. Clarke in his foreword to Science Fiction Quotes From The Inner Mind To The Outer Limits.

These days I think terms are better to describe than to categorize, eg. it starts out a little cyberpunk, goes into a space opera, then ends in a sort of fantastical Jack Vance Dying World cosy catastrophe.

There are some favorite books of mine that the line between fantasy and science fiction are so blurred that it becomes something else completely. Specifically C.S. Friedman’s “Black Sun Rising” comes to mind. The whole story starts out with a spaceship crash landing on a planet and then they discover that machinery fails on this planet so they are stuck and a whole “low tech” fantasy world arises from the ashes of the spaceship wreck. (I have severely bastardized the story line here, sorry!) What comes of this is a great story that mixes sci-fi with fantasy, a little horror thrown in and even a Casanova-esque character that has vampire like qualities!

This book is so “all over the map” that it turns out to be a great ride. The follow up books “When True Night Falls” and “Crown of Shadows” both start off slow but come to a good head at the end but never seem to deliver as much as “Black Sun Rising” did but all three are still a worthy read.

Originality good! Same old sci-fi bad!

SF should be based in known technology, right? Star Wars has always been science fantasy, but does The Terminator get relegated to action fantasy until we actually discover time travel?

Perhaps it comes down to weighing the relative amounts of technology & logic vs. magic & spirituality of a work.

As for Crichton, he’s better known recently for his fictional science.