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as an expression of the adolescent male love affair with machines.
    I have found these quarrels to be almost as sad as they are funny-like bitter arguments between small children in the same family. Don’t touch me. You hit me first. I hate you. You stink. The fact is that what crowds out good science fiction is bad science fiction; science fiction improves when it borrows the best techniques of fantasy, and fantasy improves when it borrows appropriate techniques from science fiction. I suppose all the arguing does no harm-but it doesn’t enlighten us much, either.
    Most of us who write speculative fiction turn with equal ease from fantasy to science fiction and back again. I’ve written both, and have found my fantasy stories to be no easier to write, no less rigorous than my science fiction; nor have I found my science fiction to need any less sense of mythic undertone or any less passionate action than my fantasy stories.
    Why, then, do you even need to think about the difference? First, because fantasy and science fiction are separate publishing categories. Most book publishers who offer both kinds of speculative fiction have separate imprints for fantasy and science fiction-or at least put one term or the other on the spine. Some even maintain a separate editorial staff for each genre. And the magazines are keenly aware of the difference between science fiction and fantasy, either because they don’t publish fantasy or because they have to maintain the proper balance between them in order to hold their audience.
    Yet in most bookstores, fantasy and science fiction are lumped together in the same group of shelves, alphabetized by author with no attempt to separate one from the other. And they’re right to do so. Those few misguided bookstores that try to have separate science fiction and fantasy sections find that most authors who have books in one section also have books in the other. This can be very confusing for would-be buyers.
    “Where’s the latest Xanth novel?” asks the fifteenth kid today. “I found
    Piers Anthony’s books in the sci-fi section, but you don’t have any Xanth books there.”
    “That’s because the Xanth books are fantasy,” says the patient bookstore clerk. “They’re in the fantasy section.”
    “Well that’s stupid,” says the kid. “Why don’t you have his books together?”
    And the kid is right. It is stupid. Science fiction and fantasy are one literary community; while there are many who read or write just one, there are many more who read and write both, and it’s foolish to divide them in the store. After all, sf and fantasy have a largely author-driven market. While there are certainly some readers who buy sf or fantasy like Harlequin romances, picking up anything with a spaceship or an elf on the cover, there are many others who search for favorite authors and buy only their works, only rarely branching out to sample books by writers unknown to them. These readers expect to find all of an author’s books together on the shelves. They don’t want “a science fiction novel” or “a fantasy”they want the latest Asimov or Edding, Benford or Donaldson, Niven-and-Pournelle or Hickman-and-Weis.
    But there is a time when the division between science fiction and fantasy really matters-and that’s when you’re writing the story.
    Here’s a good, simple, semi-accurate rule of thumb: If the story is set in a universe that follows the same rules as ours, it’s science fiction. If it’s set in a universe that doesn’t follow our rules, it’s fantasy.
    Or in other words, science fiction is about what could be but isn’t; fantasy is about what couldn’t be.
    In the main, this boundary works pretty well. As rational people, we know that magic doesn’t work and superstitions are meaningless. So if magic works in your story, if superstitions come true, if there are impossible beasts like fire-breathing dragons or winged horses, if djinns come out of bottles or mumbled