ESA and NASA Consider Joint Mission To Europa

ewg writes "In defiance of the monolith, the European Space Agency and NASA are in the early planning stages of an automated joint mission to Europa, Jupiter's watery moon. This follows the triumphant Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn's moon Titan. "All these worlds are yours, except Europa...""

Comments

Fantasy, not SCIENCE fiction

[FreeUser]

Depending upon your point of view, all of the above could be construed as Science Fiction, too.

I appreciate and agree with the point you're trying to make, but I disagree with your choice of labels. The Bible et. al. might be construed as "Soft-Sci Fi" maybe, but I'd consider including the Bible, the Koran, and the Maya Codex under the heading of "Science Fiction" (of any kind, soft or not) to be a fundamental misuse of the term. Science Fiction is supposed to be fiction based on science, however loosely.

"Fantasy" would be a more accurate heading for those works, as in "Fantastic Fiction." After all, they include such notions as "magic," "god(s)" etc. that really have no foundation whatsoever in science.

I've always found it unfortunate that fantasy ("Lord of the Rings" etc.) is grouped with science fiction, as I consider the two genres to be no more alike than Murder Mysteries and Romance (which enjoy their own, seperate sections in the bookstore). This doesn't mean that science fiction and fantasy can't sometimes be combined, just as one can have a romance/mystery novel, but that doesn't change the fact that science fiction and fantasy are fundamentally different, just as mysteries and romance novels are.

I disagree with your definition & your conclus

[FreeUser]

Fantasy is a sub-genre of Science Fiction. It contains fictional science. That is the definition of Science Fiction. Magic and trolls and what not do not exist in real life therefore a fictional science needs to be created in order to explain it.

That is really stretching the definitions of both magic and science beyond the breaking point. By that definition religion creates fictional science to explain things, which is nonsense. Whether they are truthful or not, religions are not science. Whether magical worlds can be articulated that are perfectly self-consistent (they can, at least to the "dust-mote" level) or not, magic is not science...though as Arthur C. Clark did point out, a sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from science. But that refers to our inability to comprehend, not a fundamental legitimacy of magic as science.

In any event, most fantasy never tries to explain why magic works, and that that does, generally doesn't do so with any semblance of science, Robert Shea's adventures being a notable exception. Which doesn't disprove my point: a few science fiction/fantasy crossover novels that blend the two does not two disparate genres unify, any more than romance and horror are one and the same simply because a few novels have been written that incorporate elements of both.