Life & Wisdom Quote by Piers Anthony

Piers Anthony draws a clean, almost engineering-style border between science fiction and fantasy, but the real move is rhetorical: he’s staking a claim for SF as the genre that wants to be taken seriously without surrendering its sense of wonder. “Theoretically possible” is a clever loophole. It doesn’t mean likely, or even plausible by today’s standards; it means you can gesture at physics, extrapolation, or a yet-undiscovered rule and keep a straight face. That tiny phrase protects SF’s most productive trick: giving the reader permission to imagine radical change while still feeling intellectually responsible.

By contrast, labeling fantasy as “the impossible” is less an insult than a compact description of its contract with the audience. Fantasy doesn’t have to argue its case in the courtroom of science. It can be symbolic, mythic, moral, dreamlike. The point isn’t how the magic works; it’s what the magic is for.

The subtext is a cultural debate that has followed genre fiction for decades: which stories count as “real” speculation and which are “just” escapism. Anthony, a popular writer who moved easily between modes, is also smoothing the turf wars. He’s saying: different toolkits, different pleasures.

The irony is that the boundary is porous and everyone knows it. SF routinely smuggles in impossibilities (FTL travel, time paradoxes) dressed in lab coats, and fantasy often builds internally rigorous systems that feel more “theoretical” than some SF. The line isn’t physics; it’s posture.