Is time travel science fiction or fantasy?
The line between science fiction and fantasy is often blurred. And that's okay. Genre is often more about marketing than anything else. As a general rule though: SciFi has science and technology and fantasy has magic.
This excellent question explores the distinction: How to distinguish if a novel is science fiction or fantasy?
Time travel is usually considered SciFi, but can also be part of fantasy if the traveling is via magic and/or the rest of the story doesn't fit into SciFi. Many other sites focused on worldbuilding and literature and readers discuss this at length, but not from the point of view of writing.
Within the Writing.SE world, where (or why) would we draw the line in deciding the genre of time travel? What are the implications for authors and publishers?
2 answers
Time travel can enable the plot - appear as a plot device once at the start, and never show up again. Time travel is part of the setup, not part of the story, as it where. This is the case of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man. Those stories, I'm not sure either the "fantasy" or the "science fiction" label particularly benefits them. They are specifically time-travel stories, as they have no other "unreal" element in them. Their focus is the contrast between the modern character and the time they find themselves in.
In other stories, time travel plays a key role in the events throughout the story. It not only enables the story, but is explored within the story in some way. The problems created and solved within the story are connected to the time-travel element. (Time travel might not be the main element explored, though.) Such stories include Back to the Future and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. In such stories, I would look at the other trappings to decide whether a story is fantasy or science fiction, as per the question you link to.
Either way, I'm not sure there are implications for authors, maybe not even for publishers. Fantasy and sci-fi are sold together, in the "fantasy and science fiction" section. Alternate history is also usually found on those same shelves. I find "speculative fiction" is a good umbrella term for all the above. But you might want to take a look at (my) question What is genre, and why should we care? for some further discussion of genre distinction implications.
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I agree with Galastel. Time Travel is usually classified as "science fiction" because, unlike fantasy, science fiction doesn't introduce magical powers or beings, everything is supposed to be within some laws of physics. Science Fiction usually does include things that are probably impossible; like FTL drives, or time travel, or teleportation, but there is nothing in scifi that is explicitly unexplainable, like there is with magic. The characters in SciFi always refer to some fictional fundamental physics, biology or other science-type explanation. It is always "technology", not magic, even if the tech is basically doing magic things.
Fantasy, on the other hand, allows unexplainable or impossible creatures, introduces new magical forces, spirit worlds, and all kinds of mysticism. In a time-travel story, we would not expect any of that, we expect the world to still be the world and obeying the laws of physics, and evolving according to the laws of physics.
This makes "science fiction" a much closer fit to the time-travel story than to the "fantasy" genre, readers of SciFi expect what happens in time-travel, they will not be disappointed if time-travel is the one and only new thing in the story, and the rest of the story is actually a mystery, or a puzzle about how to change the future to avert some disaster.
Readers of Fantasy would be very disappointed if the only Fantasy element is time travel itself, that is NOT what they paid for!
Since there is no genre of "time-travel stories", I'd call it Science Fiction.
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