Maybe the problem is that not all fantastic events in literature end up in the fantasy section in the first place… Maybe it is more like a web of connecting elements that make them end up together, enough of those things and you have a recognisable fantasy/sci fi book not enough and it is just weird fiction. That way even two fantasy books can be very different parts of the web but still be part of the imagined whole.

I feel like I may have just posted lots of gibberish… Friday afternoon is not the time to try thinking so hard.

There are times when this isn’t the case; say where the story expresses something observed or a revelation of the author’s through fictional characters and places for example but if we were dividing fiction using the ‘What if’ principle centrally it would lump together many works that don’t traditionally come under the heading Sci fi or Fantasy.

I would say that not all of those two genres (I’ve always distinguished them but my local bookstores did too) rest on the ‘What if’ approach. I’m sure there are examples of expression rather than exploration. Maybe Sheri S. Tepper’s Beauty is one of them? Although I’m sure there are a few what ifs in there too (it being a fairly regular use of the imagination) it seemed to me that there was no central ‘what if’ as such. But then the use of fairy tales grounded it in the known reality… My own argument leaves me feeling pretty unsure so I’m certain I’ve got a lot of things wrong in there.

Each poses a “what if” and uses that as a central element of the story — sometimes the “what if” is the tale itself and sometimes it’s merely the backdrop.

The beauty of the genre(s) is that by inducing an imaginary “what if” we can explore things differently than we could if we were dealing with so-called reality. For example, we can change one element of our reality and postulate what might happen. What if you fell unconscious and thought you were dreaming — would you behave with the same moral strictures as you would if you thought the world you dreamt were real (Chronicles of Thomas Covenant)? What if you were imbued with telekinetic powers and faced a technologically advanced enemy in a quintessential struggle of good and evil (Star Wars)? And so on.

I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that.

I have, and probably will continue to be, taken to task for both definitions.

Well, as long as it’s a professional debate and not a personal one, you’re welcome to continue stubbornly putting forward your opinions here.

Constance says:

Um, guys, Gabriel Garcia Lorce didn’t make up those things. Every detail was something he encountered in life.

Well, that was kind of my point. To Marquez (and to his readers), this stuff was real, not fanciful. I’m kind of wondering if that’s why nobody thinks to call it “fantasy.”

Gary says:

You are really stretching to include fantasy in this.

Yeah, so everybody tells me in the comments above. I’ve since backed down from including fantasy in point #2.

How do you deal with the science fiction and fantasy genre still further breaking apart – alternate history is now a separate category and I think the last Stross I read while labeled fantasy was a Slider novel – no fantastic or science elements but parallel worlds.

Is there a common characteristic of slipstream?

This elementary wonder, however, is not a mere fancy derived from the fairy
tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy tales is derived from this. Just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough.

and:

Thus ends, in unavoidable inadequacy, the attempt to utter the unutterable
things. These are my ultimate attitudes towards life; the soils for the seeds of
doctrine. These in some dark way I thought before I could write, and felt before
I could think: that we may proceed more easily afterwards, I will roughly
recapitulate them now. I felt in my bones; first, that world does not explain
itself. It may be miracle with a supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation. But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural explanations I have heard. The thing is magic, true or false. Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it.

These are from “The Ethics of Elfland” by G.K. Chesterton. (It’s a thought provoking essay, even if you don’t always agree with him.)

Additionally, ‘magical realism’ is a term borrowed from a Cuban writer, who meant something quite different than what the U.S. publishing industry means by it. It isn’t a term that Latin America uses.

Love, C.

As a suggestion, look at the history of 20th Century science and philosophy. Up till Einstein (roughly) philosophy’s “job” was to explain the world to people. Modern physics took that away. Philosophy has floundered since in linguistics and social ethics and somewhat in aesthetics and the history of language and culture, while science has chugged along “explaining” everything.

People turned to religion by the 70s in a big way. Oddly, just about the time physics and neurobiology handed a job back to philosophy.

I in no way intend a “demotion” of fantasy. Rather, I think fantasy–a lot of it–misses its own point– just as a lot of SF does– by playing games with nontechnological culture as substitute for the quest for meaning and self worth. SF gets excessively caught up in the cool of the tech while forgetting to deal with the real effects of a changing paradigm on people.

Subsequently, I tend to think of fantasy in general as–broadly speaking–religious fiction, while I consider SF process fiction.

I have, and probably will continue to be, taken to task for both definitions.

Jellyn sez:

With your first point, does whether it’s sf or not depend entirely upon the reader?

That’s a good point, especially when you start thinking about Latin American magical realism. To some of these people, the magic, ghosts, curses, etc. in, say, One Hundred Years of Solitude doesn’t seem outlandish to some of its audience. So is that why we typically don’t call Marquez a fantasy writer? Or is it all a cynical ploy to get a better class of readers, as Lois might say?

Mark: Very, very interesting stuff. I think you’re right, fantasy and SF in general have different views towards the idea of Process. You say that “fantasy doesn’t care” about this idea of process… but I’m still stubbornly clinging to the notion that fantasy does care somehow. I respect fantasy literature far too much to jump in with the crowd that calls fantasy just an escape or a regression back to a simpler time — but at the same time, why did we get an explosion of the fantastic in the twentieth century, and why have most readers taken it for granted that this literature should be shelved in with the science fiction?

This has occasionally led to some really bombastic depictions of human interaction which are patently absurd–people ultimately aren’t that definable–and to a hubristic element most clearly evident in a lot of early space opera (no matter what, we can fix that!).

To my mind, this is the thing that actually separates science fiction from fantasy, because fantasy–not that it couldn’t do that so much as it doesn’t care. Fantasy is not concerned with process as a description of the workings of the universe, but with revelation as to the nature of the universe. A fine line, true, but I think vital. It’s the line that separated alchemy from modern science.