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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3977 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 21, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Yeah that's probably a huge part of it. I'm trying to experience it as though I'm someone encountering all these tropes for the first time but I'm probably so used to them that I can't experience the same novelty and wonder as a first timer.

It’s ironic that I’d been a lifelong lover of science fiction and didn’t read fantasy (other than Piers Anthony’s Apprentice Adept, which barely counts). LOTR was the first fantasy book series I read, and so I got it all firsthand.

I feel like the two genres get bundled together but for some people scratch different itches. I’ve never been a major scifi guy but always took to it more easily than fantasy, and I absolutely love the cyberpunk subgenre

My Triessentialist view is that SF/F as a mega-genre addresses three itches which realistic fiction has to try harder to scratch:

  • The What - The desire to see or imagine amazing and impossible things, and see other species or peoples in fascinating and unique garb - Science Fiction or Fantasy

  • The How - The desire to understand a world or a society which functions in fascinating yet logical ways - Science Fiction or Fantasy

  • The Why - The desire to have unique or intoxicatingly different feelings as members of or visitors to fantastic societies and their rituals, goals, and folkways - Science Fiction or Fantasy

Or, in familiar words, "to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

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