Science Fiction vs Fantasy? by Anna Tambour

Science Fiction vs Fantasy?

by Anna Tambour

As periodically as menses, great battles erupt over science fiction and fantasy. What are the battles over? What are battles usually over?

Like menses, these fights are drawn-out and bloody. And like menses, they either fascinate or repel.

One of these battles is being waged now. And such is the regularity of these, that I can say with certainty that no matter when you read this, blood is being spilt now, or is building up for another flow.

I think that menses is fascinating. It also serves a most important need.

"No animal, obviously, can go without food indefinitely,

and toads are not able to eat while underground.

So, like the ghost of Hamlet's father,

the spadefoots are 'doomed for a certain term to walk the night.' "

- Robert M. DeGraaff,

The Book of the Toad: A Natural and Magical History of Toad-Human Relations

first published in 1991

Fasting fakir flummoxes physicians

"Doctors and experts are baffled by an Indian hermit who claims

not to have eaten or drunk anything for several decades - but is still in perfect health."

- BBC, 25 November 2005

"We then watched the video Dinosaur Mystery Solved. Dr. John Morris spoke of dinosaur discoveries and development of specimens: the assumptions and the mistakes that are made. He repeatedly asked, "How do you know?" The issue is interpretation. Your own foundation of belief determines the outcome. The Bible is factual and stands before the evidence of the fossils that won't go away, either. Scripture doesn't cave in before the artifacts, but a lot of people do. We have got to make them aware of the truth, of their need."

- Creationist Fellowship

"We know more about Mars than we do about the ocean."

- Sylvia Earle, marine biologist

Zoonoses

Not fantasy, nor science fiction.

"There are for each of us, according to his turn of mind, certain books that open up horizons hitherto undreamed of and mark an epoch in our mental life. They fling wide the gates of a new world wherein our intellectual powers are henceforth to be employed; they are the spark which lights the fuel on a hearth doomed, without its air, to remain indefinitely bleak and cold. And it is often chance that places in our hands those books which mark the beginning of a new era in the evolution of ideas."

- J.Henri Fabre, The Hunting Wasps

"Science Fiction vs Fantasy?"

is a part of

Bowl of Critters

an occasional snack

a part of
Anna Tambour and Others