Q: Do you read more fantasy or SF (hard or soft)?
A: My favorite stories are often those that blend genres. For example, the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemison starts out reading like pure fantasy, but the more you learn about the setting, the more it seems like science fiction. Or, how would you classify Jo Walton’s Thessaly series? It has gods and magic (fantasy), robots and time-travel (SF), and is set in our past with real people like Socrates (historical fiction).
I love it when fantasy works explore how magic changes society in the same way that SF can explore how technology changes society. Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Sharing Knife and Chalion books are great for this. Conversely, it blows my mind when SF works have a bit of magic in them, like whatever is going on in the Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer.
Andrew M LeBlanc’s story “Reproduction in a Closed Loop” was
published on Friday, 5 October 2018.
Subscribe to our e-mail updates so you’ll know when new stories go live.
