What it is

Science fiction usually wants to explain how something works. Fantasy is often happy to let it remain mysterious and wondrous. Science-fantasy says yes, do both. It treats “magic” and “technology” as different lenses on the same impossible phenomenon.

Frank Herbert’s Dune gives you interstellar politics and hard logistics, but also prescient visions that can be read as genetics, prophecy, and religion at the same time. Anne McCaffrey’s Pern offers telepathic dragons, then quietly shifts the ground by revealing myth and engineering braided together. Star Wars is fantasy in a spacesuit, the Force is magic, lightsabers are swords, and the story runs on mythic bones.

Science-fantasy is what happens when the universe stays explainable, but it never stops being strange.

The best examples keep the scale and possibility of the cosmos, while protecting that numinous sense that something larger is present, watching, shaping, remembering. It is a genre that lets you feel awe without apologizing for the machinery behind it.