Musings on the borderland

What is Fantasy?

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation ran an episode called "A Space Oddity" that involved a fictitious TV show titled Astro Quest.  In the course of investigating a murder at Whatificon, a bit of byplay ensues between David Hodges, the Trace tech, and Mandy Webster, the Fingerprint tech at around the 1:00 mark on this video


So is Mr. Ed hard SF but Star Trek is fantasy?  Maybe we can call it "hard fantasy"?

What tropes of hard SF really qualify as fantasy?  Earlier in the game we identified strong AI and downloading human minds into computers as being philosophically impossible, although True Believers in the parousia of the download, when they throw off this corruptible body and put on a new and incorruptible body -- gee, that sounds familiar -- and achieve the Singularity, the Rapture of the Nerds, will never believe the Chinese Room, let alone the Gödelian proof.  In our next installment, we will ask:

Is Genetic Engineering a Real Possibility?

By a real possibility, we mean a possibility in the Real World™, not in the Platonic world of ideal abstractions, where one may merely wave a hand, o'erleap the Singularity, and cry "Make it so."