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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37870
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The answer is its all made up. So write what you want, and let other people worry about what genre it falls into.

For me exhibit A of this is Anne McCaffrey's [Pern series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonriders_of_Pern). The first book started out with people bonding with, and riding, fire-breathing dragons in a medieval setting. They periodically needed to do this to combat occasional death rain, falling from the sky.

100% Fantasy, right?

Later books in the series explained the dragons as a small native species with a really useful behavior (neutralizing the death rain), genetically engineered and bred over centuries, as the original colonists slowly lost their tech. The death rain ended up explained in detail as coming from a comet.

Now its Science Fiction.

Think about this; later books **retroactively** made the earlier books SF instead of Fantasy.<sup>*</sup>

If I can change the genre of a book simply by writing another book in the same series, _without altering a letter_ of the original work, the genre distinction is not really self-contained. It basically doesn't really exist, except in some marketer's head.

More to the point, even if there is a line between the two, modern authors are tromping all over it with big muddy boots. Take the [Monster Hunter International](https://www.goodreads.com/series/45313-monster-hunter-international) series. It pretty clearly comes straight out of the tradition of Military SF. To the point where I'd not recommend it to any reader who claims to like "Fantasy" but not Military SF. But all the antagonists, and some of the protagonists, are supernatural creatures. So which genre is it? The proper answer is, "Who cares?"

Another pretty enjoyable Military SF book I read a few years back (David Weber's [Out of the Dark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_the_Dark_(Weber_novel))) was about Earth being invaded by aliens, from the POV of some of the bands of survivors fighting guerilla warfare against the invaders. Hard SF all the way.

Right up until the end that is, when the vampires decided enough was enough and took over the invaders' ships (a bit of a Deus, but I still enjoyed it).

Seriously, these days just write a good story. Let the 3-drink minimum crowd over in marketing figure out what it is.

<sup>* - David Freer's <a href="https://www.baen.com/the-forlorn.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">The Forlorn</a> managed to pull off what I'm calling <em>The Pern Trick</em> within a single novel. It started Fantasy and ended up SF.</sup>

Original score: 4