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4.3.12
2.3.12
What Separates Science Fiction From Fantasy?
I was recently told, by someone I like and respect and look to as a mentor, that science fiction is dying. I pay little attention to these kind of predictions; the death of sci-fi has been predicted repeatedly before, not unlike the death of science itself, and we have somehow found ways to save both of them from their predicted demise, to revitalize and breathe fresh life into them.
My friend's specific assertion, however, was that sci-fi, particularly of the 'posthuman/transhuman' variety that I work in, is becoming indistinguishable from fantasy as a genre. As he put it, 'if science fiction is about people who can fly and live forever and read minds, then how is it not fantasy?' This is a trick that's been tried before too, both by advocates of subsuming sci-fi and fantasy under the slippery label of 'speculative fiction' and by purists desperate to defend their beloved 'hard sci-fi which is composed of stories which conform strictly to the boundaries of science-as-it-is-understood' from the barbarian hordes of mere space opera. Now, I don't tend to concern myself with genre boundaries. As far as I have been concerned, if it feels like sci-fi that's what it is, and if it feels like fantasy that's what it is, and if it feels like sci-fantasy or slipstream or what-have-you, that's what it is too. Genres, after all, are artificial constructs which we impose on The Literature so as to carve it up into manageable chunks for our tiny minds to digest. But for a moment I felt at a loss as to why I feel like sci-fi as a label is still a useful distinction to draw. Why should I continue to insist that what I write is 'science fiction full stop'? So I've been considering it for the past few weeks, and come up with a few ideas on how it seems to me that sci-fi and fantasy are strongly distinct genres.
A few caveats before I begin: None of the following is to be taken as an 'attack' on the legitimacy or worth of fantasy fiction, which I consume just as hungrily as I do sci-fi; nor is it an attempted repudiation of genres which slip naturally and fluidly between them as, say, steampunk tends to. Such genres have their own qualities which make them more than merely a mishmash of fantasy and sci-fi, and deserve to be treated as entities on their own. Like all rules, there are doubtless exceptions to the following; please don't bother hunting up stories which don't follow them and shove them in my face, because it would be an immense waste of your precious, irreplaceable time. Finally, I have no idea whether these insights are in any way original or even particularly clever; but on my honour as a writer of fictions, I solemnly swear that I have not deliberately stolen anyone's ideas. If I have unknowingly duplicated someone else's work, I humbly apologize and would be interested to read it, as they have undoubtedly thought things through much more thoroughly than I have.
First: science fiction stories are intended to be taken as being set in what I think of as 'the real world that actually exists'. This does not mean that they are intended to be taken as 'predictions' or assertions about the nature of reality; simply that the universe in which a science fiction is set, given willing suspension of disbelief, is intended to be 'our universe'. Any departure from normality is taken as something to be explained -- scientifically, or at least pseudo-scientifically -- even if the explanation at some fundamental point requires a wave of the hand. I would also extend this to non-fantastic alternate history/parallel reality stories, which always have the many-worlds interpretation standing implicitly beneath them.
Fantasy, by contrast, exists explicitly in 'another world' which the reader is asked to accept as real purely on its own merits. Any departure from from normality, though it oftentimes must be explicated in order for what is happening to be comprehensible, is intended to be taken simply as 'the way things are'. Nobody needs to explain how magic is caused by 'thaumatron particles' or how humans evolved into orcs; though these can be fascinating digressions in and of themself, they are fundamentally beside the point. Even fantasies which are nominally set in 'our world', as we know it to be, are not about the reality we know. Harry Potter's story cannot be told in Little Whinging; it must be set in Hogwarts, in the Wizarding World, and the muggle world exists for it only as something to be escaped and avoided.
Second, and relatedly: fantasy is about things we know aren't true. We know that there are no dragons, that there are no vampires, that there are no wizards, that there are no prophecies. (To adherents of religions: you may cease protesting, because you know I'm right. Wiccans cannot toss fireballs from their hands, the prophecies of Nostradamus have never alerted anyone to a single event before the fact, and what are now considered miracles have an uncanny habit of having potentially mundane explanations. The very fact that you have had to resort to the numinous, blind faith, denialism, and the god of the gaps to sustain your beliefs is sufficient proof that those strong claims of religions which can be tested against reality have been weighed, measured, and found wanting. Get over it.)
Science fiction, on the other hand, is about things we don't know aren't true. (It's not, as hard-sci-fi advocates would have it, about only things we do know are true, because there's another word for that: fiction that is not science fiction. After all, Clarke and Asimov both wrote enormously successful works about people with psychic powers.) This is why it makes sense to protest when sci-fi doesn't get the science right, when it produces a howler that goes beyond the tolerance of even the most willing suspension of disbelief *coughcrackintheeventhorizoncough*. There could be aliens, there could be psi powers, there could be time travel; but there could not be anyone with the ability to change reality by chanting magic words. Not without a frantically waving hand and a vastly powerful thaumatron field.
Finally: sci-fi is essentially about change. This is why it did not exist until such time as humans began to use science, not only to develop disruptive technologies which accelerated the pace of social change, but to start to get a grip on why these changes happened and attempt to predict where they might go in the future. Thus, sci-fi is about how things are changed, not only by technology but by the inevitable process of social evolution. This makes it clearer in what way alternate history and parallel reality are fundamentally rooted in science fiction: because they are clearly attempts to explicate the nature of social change.
Fantasy, then, is about that which is unchanging in human life and human nature. That is why it is almost always set in the past, or an analogue of what we imagine the past to have been; in times when vast social changes either took place over generations or were generally accompanied by unthinkable death and destruction. For the most part, the only changes that occur in fantasy are of the apocalyptic variety, and are generally little more than a backdrop against which the fundamental, unchanging absolutes of human experience are to show themselves. Fantasy is also a creature of the age of reason. Before, there was no fantasy; there was simply fiction, much of which contained elements we now consider to be fantastic.
This is why I feel it is valuable for both fantasy and science fiction to have a vigorous, independant existence. Fantasy transports us to an unreal, impossible world specifically to tell us about the things which are unchanging in our lives and society. That is why I love fantasy and am an avid reader of it. Science fiction remains firmly in this world, and tells us stories about the ways it may be changing, the limits of that change and the immense possibilities still to be discovered. And that is why I write science fiction: because it's a process I want to be more than a spectator to.
My friend's specific assertion, however, was that sci-fi, particularly of the 'posthuman/transhuman' variety that I work in, is becoming indistinguishable from fantasy as a genre. As he put it, 'if science fiction is about people who can fly and live forever and read minds, then how is it not fantasy?' This is a trick that's been tried before too, both by advocates of subsuming sci-fi and fantasy under the slippery label of 'speculative fiction' and by purists desperate to defend their beloved 'hard sci-fi which is composed of stories which conform strictly to the boundaries of science-as-it-is-understood' from the barbarian hordes of mere space opera. Now, I don't tend to concern myself with genre boundaries. As far as I have been concerned, if it feels like sci-fi that's what it is, and if it feels like fantasy that's what it is, and if it feels like sci-fantasy or slipstream or what-have-you, that's what it is too. Genres, after all, are artificial constructs which we impose on The Literature so as to carve it up into manageable chunks for our tiny minds to digest. But for a moment I felt at a loss as to why I feel like sci-fi as a label is still a useful distinction to draw. Why should I continue to insist that what I write is 'science fiction full stop'? So I've been considering it for the past few weeks, and come up with a few ideas on how it seems to me that sci-fi and fantasy are strongly distinct genres.
A few caveats before I begin: None of the following is to be taken as an 'attack' on the legitimacy or worth of fantasy fiction, which I consume just as hungrily as I do sci-fi; nor is it an attempted repudiation of genres which slip naturally and fluidly between them as, say, steampunk tends to. Such genres have their own qualities which make them more than merely a mishmash of fantasy and sci-fi, and deserve to be treated as entities on their own. Like all rules, there are doubtless exceptions to the following; please don't bother hunting up stories which don't follow them and shove them in my face, because it would be an immense waste of your precious, irreplaceable time. Finally, I have no idea whether these insights are in any way original or even particularly clever; but on my honour as a writer of fictions, I solemnly swear that I have not deliberately stolen anyone's ideas. If I have unknowingly duplicated someone else's work, I humbly apologize and would be interested to read it, as they have undoubtedly thought things through much more thoroughly than I have.
First: science fiction stories are intended to be taken as being set in what I think of as 'the real world that actually exists'. This does not mean that they are intended to be taken as 'predictions' or assertions about the nature of reality; simply that the universe in which a science fiction is set, given willing suspension of disbelief, is intended to be 'our universe'. Any departure from normality is taken as something to be explained -- scientifically, or at least pseudo-scientifically -- even if the explanation at some fundamental point requires a wave of the hand. I would also extend this to non-fantastic alternate history/parallel reality stories, which always have the many-worlds interpretation standing implicitly beneath them.
Fantasy, by contrast, exists explicitly in 'another world' which the reader is asked to accept as real purely on its own merits. Any departure from from normality, though it oftentimes must be explicated in order for what is happening to be comprehensible, is intended to be taken simply as 'the way things are'. Nobody needs to explain how magic is caused by 'thaumatron particles' or how humans evolved into orcs; though these can be fascinating digressions in and of themself, they are fundamentally beside the point. Even fantasies which are nominally set in 'our world', as we know it to be, are not about the reality we know. Harry Potter's story cannot be told in Little Whinging; it must be set in Hogwarts, in the Wizarding World, and the muggle world exists for it only as something to be escaped and avoided.
Second, and relatedly: fantasy is about things we know aren't true. We know that there are no dragons, that there are no vampires, that there are no wizards, that there are no prophecies. (To adherents of religions: you may cease protesting, because you know I'm right. Wiccans cannot toss fireballs from their hands, the prophecies of Nostradamus have never alerted anyone to a single event before the fact, and what are now considered miracles have an uncanny habit of having potentially mundane explanations. The very fact that you have had to resort to the numinous, blind faith, denialism, and the god of the gaps to sustain your beliefs is sufficient proof that those strong claims of religions which can be tested against reality have been weighed, measured, and found wanting. Get over it.)
Science fiction, on the other hand, is about things we don't know aren't true. (It's not, as hard-sci-fi advocates would have it, about only things we do know are true, because there's another word for that: fiction that is not science fiction. After all, Clarke and Asimov both wrote enormously successful works about people with psychic powers.) This is why it makes sense to protest when sci-fi doesn't get the science right, when it produces a howler that goes beyond the tolerance of even the most willing suspension of disbelief *coughcrackintheeventhorizoncough*. There could be aliens, there could be psi powers, there could be time travel; but there could not be anyone with the ability to change reality by chanting magic words. Not without a frantically waving hand and a vastly powerful thaumatron field.
Finally: sci-fi is essentially about change. This is why it did not exist until such time as humans began to use science, not only to develop disruptive technologies which accelerated the pace of social change, but to start to get a grip on why these changes happened and attempt to predict where they might go in the future. Thus, sci-fi is about how things are changed, not only by technology but by the inevitable process of social evolution. This makes it clearer in what way alternate history and parallel reality are fundamentally rooted in science fiction: because they are clearly attempts to explicate the nature of social change.
Fantasy, then, is about that which is unchanging in human life and human nature. That is why it is almost always set in the past, or an analogue of what we imagine the past to have been; in times when vast social changes either took place over generations or were generally accompanied by unthinkable death and destruction. For the most part, the only changes that occur in fantasy are of the apocalyptic variety, and are generally little more than a backdrop against which the fundamental, unchanging absolutes of human experience are to show themselves. Fantasy is also a creature of the age of reason. Before, there was no fantasy; there was simply fiction, much of which contained elements we now consider to be fantastic.
This is why I feel it is valuable for both fantasy and science fiction to have a vigorous, independant existence. Fantasy transports us to an unreal, impossible world specifically to tell us about the things which are unchanging in our lives and society. That is why I love fantasy and am an avid reader of it. Science fiction remains firmly in this world, and tells us stories about the ways it may be changing, the limits of that change and the immense possibilities still to be discovered. And that is why I write science fiction: because it's a process I want to be more than a spectator to.
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