The Sword and Laser discussion

Great final 20 or so pages. The part leading up to it? I read kinda puzzled as it went on in a disjointed fashion. After a while I realized it didn't feel like SFF.

I have the same problem with the first part of Niven/Pournelle's Footfall and the entirety of Lucifer's Hammer. It's too close to the real world. I read SFF for that stepping off into a different world, and if it's too close to our reality then I don't engage. So for a similar style but different worldbuilding I enjoyed This Is How You Lose The Time War, much less so Empress of Salt and Fortune.

So, worldbuilding. How is this world different from our own history? Not so much really. It feels like ancient China with mages added. If we go by the extinction date of Mammoths it would be set about 12,000 years ago, even tho none of the civilizations would be close to what was in this book by that time. So either Mammoths survived or we postulate large governments much further back.

So maybe about the same era as Conan. That's clearly SFF. But unlike Empress, Conan gets into the weird pretty early on in each story.

I see a lot of people loved this book. For me it was too close to a historical story. I can read those but mostly as homework, not for fun. This was history with mages in a small supporting role. And a magical bird species. Not enough for me to make that leap.

Really enjoyed the ending, but it was a slog getting there.

It seemed to be mostly a character piece to me, so I wasn’t bothered by that issue.

In one of his short story/essay collections Isaac Asimov did once decry the fact that the dropping of the atomic bomb suddenly made sci-fi less interesting, because people were more interested in stories “ripped from tomorrow’s headlines” rather than the blue sky stuff he preferred.

I think there’s room for all kinds of SF and I don’t have a preference for any particular style of subgenre.

I don't think worldbuilding is unique to SciFi or Fantasy, or even a distinguishing tenant of those genres. Plenty of urban fantasy has barely any worldbuilding at all, and plenty of SciFi is built on the present brick-by-brick rather than with more creative expostulation (like Kim Stanley Robinson's "future histories"). Historical fiction is a world-building genre. The Earth any more than 200 years ago requires more world-building than Rivers of London or Red Mars. "History, but with mages added," feels to me like it describes about 99% of the fantasy genre, so that's just not a complaint that I'd level against a book like this.

I feel like I'm using similar arguments to you John, but coming to the opposite conclusion. This is How You Lose the Time War, in my eyes, had essentially no world-building at all, and was a reason that I didn't like that book. In Empress, I can take some snippets of historical knowledge, add mammoths, mages and magic birds and form a background and then I'm free to revel in the tiny touches of world-building, like the luminescent lake or the minutely described artifacts.

I know very little of ancient China. To me, it seemed very mythic - and I like mythic. The story telling style worked for me; it took a little time to get used to the idea that the pacing was going to be an interleaving of different threads, but once I got there I was fine with it.

Seth wrote: "The Earth any more than 200 years ago requires more world-building than Rivers of London or Red Mars."

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” - L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

I understand even if I don't feel the same way you do. As other mentioned, an urban fantasy is kinda the same thing - eg The Dresden Files is just normal Chicago, but wizards. Or, I guess, Harry Potter.

The funny thing is that I thought your topic was going to be about what *I* was thinking in the first couple chapters - how is this SFF? And then I had to remind myself that there aren't ghosts and birds don't talk. But, you know how there's hard SF and hand-wavy SF and all the way to space opera or Star Wars which straddles things (especially before midicholrians got involved)? I feel the same way with fantasy. Another, coincidentally also Asian-themed, story that had me feeling a lot like this was the first book in The Poppy Wars. Until somewhere between 50% and 75% through, it's just the story of a scrappy kid in a Confucian-style Not-China trying to make it through graduation to an important post. Eventually the fantasy elements come through, but kinda like Game of Thrones or EOSAF, they're kinda irrelevant. The only benefit of the talking bird is the one chapter where Rabbit talks to the bird instead of Chih.

I've been thinking about something similar, though in regards to a completely different book, and for the opposite reason. It's a book I often want to recommend to people looking for fantastical westerns, because I think the book is really good, but I also don't want to because I think they might end up disappointed when the fantastical elements are more subtle.

The book is Fool's Crow by James Welch and is normally classified in the historical fiction category. It's based on a real tribe, has a real world setting, and is for the most part, very grounded in the reality of a Blackfeet tribe in the 1870s. Except, and this becomes my sticking point, the visions and mythologies of the tribe are treated as real things. I currently have it classified with magical realism, as similarly to the Latin American novels that typify the genre it's the religious elements being real, as in have a measurable effect on the world in the form of miracles or visions, that give it the fantastical edge.

It's an interesting question, and one I struggle with on books that toe the line between reality and magic. Are they fantasy? Are they just fiction? And does it really matter if they're books you enjoy reading?