Sci vs Fi

Dragonriders of Pern vs. Game of Thrones

Here's something that should settle a few arguments: Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern is not actually fantasy. The dragons of Pern were genetically engineered from native fire-lizards by a colony geneticist named Kitti Ping Yung. Their telepathy? Biological. Their teleportation? Explained. Pern is a lost human colony on a distant planet, and the medieval society its inhabitants live in is the result of forgetting their own technological origins, not magic. McCaffrey won the first-ever Hugo for Best Novella in 1968 specifically for the Pern stories, years before George R.R. Martin had published a word of Westeros.…