Science Fantasy

Arthur C. Clarke's third law, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, is often quoted as its motto. Jack Vance's The Dying Earth (1950), set under a fading sun so far in the future that science has become sorcery, is an early classic of the blend. A British magazine called Science Fantasy ran from 1950 to 1966 and gave the blend a home.

The 1960s were rich ground. Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time (1962) mixed tesseracts with witches, Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light (1967) imagined colonists using technology to rule as Hindu gods, and Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight (1968) gave a lost colony telepathic dragons. Frank Herbert's Dune (1965), with its prescience and mystic orders, is often counted too.

Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer (1980) built a far-future world in which ancient technology appears as relics and wonders. More recently, N. K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season (2015) and Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth (2019), with its necromancers in space, show how far the blend can go. Star Wars is its most famous example on screen.

Expect worlds where ancient machines are treated as holy relics, psychic powers sit alongside laser weapons, or a fantasy world turns out to be built on lost technology. Tone ranges from gothic to swashbuckling, and the strangeness is part of the pleasure.

Many science fantasies are far-future stories, set so long after our time that the line between science and magic has worn away. Others are space adventures with an openly mystical streak.