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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/42564
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/42564
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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.

Original score: 2