this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2026
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Science Fiction
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Personally I think
And while the term speculative fiction is valid, it's an umbrella term, not an actual genre. Also I think most fiction is, at its heart, an answer to a "what if" question, so maybe the term is too broad.
Your example is tricky.
There's one novel of Iain M Banks' Culure series that is like that. Without context you'd think it's typical fantasy, all medieval-like, except for one or two scenes that are either weird magic or a knife missile/drone. Of course we know it's the latter.
So as long as it has even 1% of "scifi", even by association, I'd say it's OK.
All that said I much prefer to read good books, no matter the genre.
edit: !fantasy@lemmy.ml or make a new one, it's easy!
Yeah, I just replied to someone else about the spectrum between SF and fantasy. It's really hard to draw a hard line between them. I wouldn't go for "future fiction," because there's good SF (even hard SF) that occurs in present or the past.
Sci-fi is a big umbrella that includes 1984 and Star Wars. But what about the non-Jedi parts of Star Wars that do deal with technology, ethics, politics, religion, and the human condition? Banning "future fantasy" would mean getting rid of things like Andor, which does have a lot to say and is much closer to 1984 than A New Hope.
Anything relating to time is a bad term I think. Much of it's in an alternate universe with different timelines. For example, Star Wars is in the past, if you listen to them.
I think a better term might be "technology fantasy" and "magic fantasy," but they aren't mutually exclusive. To use Star Wars as an example again, it has magic and technology. There shouldn't be an attempt to separate them as exclusive to each other because they're essentially the same things just with different settings.
Not sure how you mean that, but in any case it requires humanity to become spacefaring beyond the solar system first, so in the future. And there's the "Sci" again. Or "Tech".
the first words on screen are "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away"
so it's definitely set in the distant past.
people in the Star Wars galaxy don't know which planet humans are native to, so while they may be native to that galaxy, there's equally little evidence against a time-travel event, and humans there are Earth humans from our future who went tens of thousands of years back in time as well as moving to a far away galaxy. This could also help explain why humans there use Latin and Greek letters so much.
Speculative fiction may be the term you're looking for