My Toys Are Cooler Than Your Toys, Redux
Kate Elliott February 2nd, 2007
I think we can accept as a given that there are poorly thought through and poorly written science fiction and fantasy novels out there, even published ones. We might not entirely agree on which are which, but that’s a different question.
Invariably, married as I am to an anthropologist, I find comments like this (by Rob Sawyer) amusing for the way in which they ignore (and might well suggest ignorance of) not just the deep structures embedded in (thoughtful) fantasy but also the ways in which fantasy can examine history, historical structures, sociology, and anthropology, as well as the shifts in technology seen as cultures change.
And, really, SF has always had a lot more in common with mystery than with fantasy. Both SF and mystery prize rational thinking and deduction, and require the reader to pick up clues about what’s really going on as they read the story. Fantasy and SF, on the other hand, are diametrically opposed: one is reasoned, careful extrapolation of things that really could happen; the other, by definition, deals with things that never could happen.
If you found Mr. Sawyer’s comment amusing, this commentary on his comment will probably amuse you even more.
Which is, of course, why I read your novels in the first place.
I remember being at a SFWA party years ago where a number of hard SF authors had gotten drunk and were waxing profound about how, if one of the moons of Jupiter were made of solid copper (which they’re not, but assuming they were) you could beat it out into a long ribbon yea wide and yea thick and use it for a radio telescope to see across the universe yea distance. And if you beat it twice as wide and twice as long, you could see twice as far and…
At this point Paul Edwin Zimmer, standing next to me on the other side of the room as we observed this discussion, turned to me and said, “And they say we fantasy writers are unrealistic.”
To paraphrase Mr Palmer: “I did not know I contradicted any body when I called Star Trek a fantasy.”
Not only are my toys cooler than yours, but I am, therefore, cooler than you. Neener neener neener.
Sigh. So boring.
I was despairing the other day over how, to become the fantasy writer I want to be, I need to understand geology, climatology, history, politics, economics, religion, psychology, fashion design, pathology, linguistics, hunting, non-industrialized farming, medicine, sailing, blacksmithing (and other kinds of smithing), weaving, pottery, horse care and riding, architecture, melee combat with various weapons, archery, unarmed combat, tactics and strategy, folklore, gender ideology, music theory, genetics, cooking . . . I could keep going, but I’m about to despair again.
I hate the “fantasy’s easy; you just make shit up” attitude and all of its despicable cousins. And while I’m told Rob Sawyer is a nice guy who writes good stories, I’m getting sick of hearing him diss fantasy. I want to sit him down in a good anthropology course that will teach him to view the world from different perspectives even if they aren’t the perspectives he holds himself; that might change his mind on the nature and value of “things that could never happen.”
If you look at the end of Sawyer’s page, he’s just recanted, to the extent that he’s said it was just meant as a quick flippant soundbyte for a journalist, not an exhaustive treatise.
Honestly, if you’re going to give the press soundbytes, wouldn’t it be better to give them some nugget or thesis statement you could actually defend in a full essay or full book treatment?
If we’re going to talk about shelving, rather than put Mystery with Science Fiction, I think it would make more sense to shelve it with Horror, because you could categorize those as “Books with dead bodies in them.”
I continue to be astounded that there’s such an intense rivalry/enmity/suspicion between fantasy and science fiction. A year and a half ago, before I was a published author and before I was involved in the SF/F community, I had no idea such a divide existed.
It reminds me of one of my favorite cartoons of all time, which appeared in Joe Martin’s “Mr. Boffo” strip sometime in the ’80s. All of the passengers in an airplane are staring out the window at the left wing, which is completely engulfed in flames. A guy stands up from the right side of the plane, turns to the people seated on the opposite side, and proudly shouts, “Ha! We’ve still got our wing!”
Paul - hah! That’s good.
Kevin - great story.
Diana - thanks.
Marie - I despair with you. Every time i pick up another book, I realize that i don’t know enough to write fantasy properly.
I don’t know as much as I should about the Golden Age of spec fic, but I wonder if the split isn’t a product of the rise of category fantasy, post Sword of Shannara, and its slow but steady devouring of a sizeable chunk of the purchasing dollar.
The classic Greg Benford essay dissing fantasy and its market share was written - what? - about 15 years ago?
It’s a puzzle to me because most writers in the field I know love (and respect) spec fic, both fantasy and sf, although they may disagree about the worth of specific titles.
I admit, like Marie, I get real tired of hearing that ‘fantasy is easy, you just make shit up.’ I’ll just get back to Science and Civilization in China, Vol. 6 Biology and Biological Technology, Part II Agriculture now.
Amazing that this debate is still going on … why can’t we all just live happily together
… I guess that’s just an impossible fantasy…
Actually, here is something more useful I can say: it always struck me as significant that time travel, which is likely impossible, is a science fiction stalwart. That suggests that the difference between science fiction and fantasy is in the attitude, not the content.
As for time travel, see (listen to) my Time Travel in Fiction and Fact for more.
I think that there is a difference between fantasy and science fiction, but it’s not that. There’s tons of books that mix and match the two genres or have elements from both. I don’t think that they’re separated by a line so much as they’re… two parts of a Venn diagram?
Gyp - I call science fiction a subset of fantasy, with just the tiniest bit sticking out of the circle that’s non-fantastic. Trek, as I said above, is totally fantasy.
Trek, as I said above, is totally fantasy.
Is Star Trek totally fantasy though? I admit that most of the so-called “science” on the shows is hogwash. But seems to me the basic premise — that a society based on scientific knowledge, humanist principles, and the rational application of law can be a force for good in the universe — definitely belongs in the province of science fiction.
But David, I consider [almost] all science fiction to be fantasy: that is, containing some element of the fantastic. It is still no less science fiction.
Perhaps I ought not to have said “totally fantasy” as I do not mean that every element is fantastic, but that all episodes of Trek involve the fantastic.
I’ll bite. Is there a different attitude between science fiction and fantasy?
Dave, yes, the premise you state is what I consider the speculative element behind Star Trek.
Hi all, I’m a long time lurker and first time poster.
On one level, I agree with Lois that science fiction is a subset of fantasy. But on another, I see a huge philosophical difference between the two.
I’m currently reading George R. R. Martin’s Dreamsongs, and in one of his section intros he defines science fiction thus: “SF assumes that the universe, however mysterious or frightening it may seem to us, is ultimately knowable.” I’d go a step further and say that science fiction assumes that the material universe is the sum total of reality. Gods, unknowable mystery and the genuine supernatural are out (though alien races that appear to be gods a la B5’s Vorlons or DS9’s wormhole aliens are still in).
Fantasy, however, assumes that the material universe is not all that exists, that a deeper and more meaningful reality exists beyond the stuff we see and touch. The best presentation of this argument that I’ve come across is this article by R. Scott Bakker. (I don’t agree with his definition of faith, but I do agree that it’s a natural corollary to the worldview he depicts.) Fantasy is not necessarily anti-scientific, but it does reject science’s claims to be the sole arbiter of truth.
This division makes sense to me in the light of my own reading preferences. I can read (and watch) and enjoy science fiction, but in the end there are some places it just can’t reach. To me it’s hamstrung by its inability to depict reality as inherently meaningful. But fantasy allows for the possibility of meaning and transcendence in a way that science fiction just can’t, and so I find that only fantasy can provide stories that truly satisfy me.
“I call science fiction a subset of fantasy, with just the tiniest bit sticking out of the circle that’s non-fantastic. Trek, as I said above, is totally fantasy.”
Hmm. I agree with you that Trek has tons of fantastical elements, but I do think that its premise is fully science fiction. I always thought that what made sci fi sci fi was that it appealed to science fact to suspend disbelief, whereas fantasy appealed to the spiritual, the mysterious, magic, etc. (And the science fact that Star Trek appeals to is actually fantasy, for the most part…) Thinking of my own science fiction, I can see where fantasy plays a role here or there, but for the most part I try to involve as much science/astronomy as I possibly can.
Except, [replying to Gyp] that the very need to suspend disbelief is a sign of fantasy. Whereas science tends to compel belief.
Science fiction, then, would be that subset of fantasy in which the pretense of scientific plausibility is used by the author to compel a suspension of the disbelief that the fantastic elements engender.
…Yes, that makes perfect sense. I never really thought about it that way before.
Playing the Devil’s advocate again, Lois… isn’t the need to suspend disbelief a trait of fiction in general?
And you speak of the “pretense of scientific plausibility”… what of the science fiction where the science is completely plausible and demonstrable? Say, some of William Gibson’s books, where the only thing separating us from them is another 10 years of computer processing advancement?
Well, Gibson’s books are not the example I would choose. Gibson himself has admitted he knows very little about computers, and his future is pretty much a fantasy.
But a work like Landis’s “A Walk in the Sun” about explorers in our own solar system is an example of what I like to call “pure” science fiction, entirely without elements of the fantastic. And I think it does indeed compel belief - in large part because Landis writes with great authority on such subjects, being, after all, a Real Live Rocket Scientist.
As for the issue of fiction in general, I think this is probably true. There are those who claim that all fiction is really fantasy, with which I take issue, but I do think that fantasy could perhaps be described as a kind of super-fiction, as opposed to realistic or mimetic fiction. The one seeks to widen the gap of disbelief, only to call on the reader to suspend it; the other seeks to narrow the gap as far as possible.
Going with Matt’s point, by that definition, books like Lyndon Hardy’s Master of the Five Magics are science fiction, because everything, even the highly frightening world of the djinn and demons, is knowable and understandable, and moreover, there isn’t any obvious religion anywhere in the trilogy. All there are are a bunch of secular magical societies.
Personally I view the lack of faith in Star Trek (at least until we meet the Bajorans) as more akin to the universal translator than anything that would really happen. “To boldly seek out new life and new civilizations” who strangely enough all speak perfect English and don’t have any particular faith that would get the viewers back home in a tizzy.
Honestly, if you went around exploring other planets, even if you go with a star-seeding idea so you actually get humanoids on multiple worlds, communication would be on the order of travelling through the backwaters of Europe, and faith? Faith would be cropping up with great regularity, especially on earth, since humans do that crap.
A great deal of it is also set dressing and costuming. Are the mind-reading women in the white robes witches or jedi acolytes? Is there a difference? And if someone in your science fiction universe suddenly invents or reinvents faith, is it no longer science fiction?
The way I view it, there are always going to be rational people, faithful people, as well as practical people. You get three telepaths in a room: the first thinks his telepathy is a product of a spontaneous mutation via evolution; the second thinks his telepathy is a gift from an unknowable ineffable divinity; the third doesn’t even bother her head with such things except insofar as it makes her a better telepath.
I think Matt’s approach is a fairly practical one, and it relates to one that I’ve been chewing on lately: fantasy assumes a universe which is benevolently inclined, horror assumes a universe which is malevolently inclined, and science fiction assumes a neutral universe with no inclination one way or another. That last view tends to go hand-in-hand with a materialist and atheist setup, given how we think of gods.
What about dark fantasy?
What surprises me about the whole sf/f debate is the ego invested in identity one way or the other. Something that by necessity is totally subjective with constant evolution is never going to be cut and dry. Is the problem that commercial labelling determines more than the writer’s labelling? It’s science fiction if the semi-nude on the cover is wearing metal bits and wires on the funny helmet, and it’s fantasy if the semi-nude on the cover is wearing leather bits and horns on the funny helmet. Is it moot to debate if Bradbury is dark fantasy or science fiction if he’s always shelved in the science fiction section?
Lois — it depends on what you’re pointing at when you say “dark fantasy,” but let me put it this way: when I ran this structure past a number of my friends, they all said, “I can think of fantasy novels where the universe isn’t nice . . . but come to think of it, they blend over into horror, don’t they?”
Why do we call it dark fantasy? In a lot of cases, I think it’s because the surface trappings look like fantasy. But if you’re using this as your framework for thinking about stories, those surface trappings are no longer a deciding factor. Therefore, at least some of that “dark fantasy” stuff would end up as horror instead. I’m not going to say that’s right or wrong — as Stacy reminds us, what exactly do we get out of debating this? — but it might highlight certain similarities and differences that are obscured when we try to read those works as fantasy. That’s the only legitimate use of genre definitions, imho. I have no patience with definitions whose purpose is to get rid of all that stuff the definer sees as embarrassing or illegitimate.
I’m not sure that objecting to a generalized statement meant to define a category in a negative fashion that thereby promotes the definer’s prejudices as superior, is a debate. If that sentence made sense, which I’m not sure it did.
That we’re now discussing what if any is the difference between sf and f, and horror for that matter, is kind of a tangent.
But I guess if Sawyer has since said that he really wasn’t trying to say that fantasy is by definition careless and lacks reasoned thought, then we can move on to other subjects.
Lois writes:
Science fiction, then, would be that subset of fantasy in which the pretense of scientific plausibility is used by the author to compel a suspension of the disbelief that the fantastic elements engender.
Lois, I quite like this defintion.
Matt - I’ve heard variations of this, the philosophical (or cosmological if you will) division between sf/f, and I find it an appealing argument. Although, as Kevin says, that being so a certain number of sf-trapping novels would turn out to be fantasy and vice versa. Which I don’t necessarily see as a problem.
Marie, what about Steven Erikson’s Malazan fantasies, then? would they therefore qualify as science fiction? I’m always reminded of that bit I read years and years and years ago in the first volume of Will & Ariel Durant’s history of the world, in a general discussion (although who knows how anthropologically accurate it is!) about the relationship between different peoples and their view of the cosmos:
The dwarfs of the Cameroon recognized only malevolent dieties, and did nothing to placate them, on the ground that it was useless to try.
I haven’t read Erikson’s work, so I couldn’t say. My general response would be, I don’t particularly care if there are individual works that don’t fit whatever model I’m floating at the moment, so long as it proves a useful descriptor for most works out there. No system is going to be perfect, and I don’t feel the need to try to come up with one that is. I care about utility, and whether it doesn’t run too counter to popularly accepted groupings. (Putting dark fantasy with horror doesn’t bother me, since most people’s definition of it seems to be “where fantasy meets horror” anyway.)
Anthropology is a whole separate can of worms I’m not sure I want to open up just now, especially when we’re talking about older research.
BTW, for those who care, I floated a more in-depth version of my thoughts on Sawyer’s comment and similar approaches on my own journal, bringing in Delany and suchlike.
Marie, you’re quite right that it isn’t useful to name exceptions, and I even thought of that when I mentioned Malazan.
I guess I am not convinced that fantasy in the general sense supposes a universe that is benevolently inclined. Purposefully inclined, perhaps? Or - meaningful? Or? Hmm, I don’t know. I keep coming back to Matt’s comment about a “deeper reality” beyond what we can know. Knowability v unknowability.
As for the Durant quote, I just find it amusing.
Oh, and good stuff in the lj post.
There are also the various science fantasy novel series, notably McCaffery’s Pern and Sherri Tepper’s True Game, where we have a medievalesque world which is discovered, some books later, to have been an earth colony which of course could not maintain the shiny chrome-edged trappings for very long and so decended into a different cultural and technological pattern.
Personally, I rather like Lois’s definition. It explains things in a nice neat way.
The flipside of dark fantasy is light horror, which is what happens when you have fantasy characters dealing with a horror universe. Buffy is of course the most easy example to point to, but I and others have been writing it for years. By “fantasy characters,” I mean reasonably competent heroes and heroinnes who, rather than gibbering at the walls in Lovecraftian madness, simply deal with the fact that “vampires exist” or “Bob’s a werewolf” and go from there.
Then there comes the stories where the categories simply don’t matter. Is Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” fantasy? Science fiction? Horror? Magical realism? We’re given no explanation as to why Gregor Samza woke up one morning as a giant cockroach–it simply happens and the story proceeds logically from there, because whether or not there is a logical explanation to this fantastical occurence, that isn’t the point of the story.
Marie’s comment on benevolent vs malevolent universes got me thinking about the creation/origin accounts of various settings. I don’t read much horror, so I might be way off base here, but my impression is that the horror mythos is usually: in the beginning, evil ruled. Certainly that’s true of Buffy. The earliest history we’re given is that the earth belonged to demons (though I suppose it’s still left open how the demons and the earth came into being). Evil, though, is presented as the underlying or original reality; good is something of an intruder, and can never fully or finally vanquish evil.
OTOH, fantasy usually seems to present creation as intrinsically good and evil as corruption. Tolkien is the obvious example; the setting of the Wars of Light and Shadow series by Janny Wurts also comes to mind as one with an explicit (good) creator. Other settings may not have an account of creation but still tend to proceed on the assumption that the universe in its natural, unspoiled state is good.
Science fiction, of course, generally assumes a Big Bang origin or some other scientific or pseudo-scientific explanation with no value of good or evil attached to it. The universe just is.
If you begin with the proposition that the superset is fantasy, and that some of this is light and some of it is dark, then horror is not at all something other than fantasy but merely one of several types.
Further, while the definition of fantasy certainly allows the existence of supernatural beings such as gods and demons, it by no means requires them. The Star Trek universe, which is quite fantastic, is quite complete without positing any dieties in charge of the place.
One of the problems with these various definition schemes, I have found, is taking a much too narrow view of “fantasy” instead of regarding it as the all-inclusive category.
Lois: If fantasy is really the supergenre, what would you call the subgenre that I’ve been calling “fantasy” (in opposition to science fiction and horror)? I agree that definitions are key. I’d be tempted to call the supergenre “speculative fiction” and leave the subgenre as “fantasy”, but that’s mainly because I can’t think of a good alternative name for the subgenre.
On another angle… I wonder if this philosophical difference is why debates about the relative merits of science fiction vs fantasy sometimes get overheated — or, indeed, fantasy vs mainstream fiction. Maybe sometimes people are really arguing worldviews instead of literary genres? (Almost like a religious debate!)
There are already plenty of subgenre labels: Epic, heroic, “high”, urban, historical, ad inf. In fact, I suspect there are already more than are needed, and that these are not well-defined.
I do think that when exceptions keep popping up, as we have seen here, what it suggests is that the initial terms have not been well-defined, that people are taking a part for the whole, or a common feature for a defining one.
Lois — if you haven’t read it already, check out Brian Attebery’s critical work. He explicitly distinguishes between fantasy as mode, genre, and formula, and what you’re talking about is the mode aspect. That is, on the one hand we have mimetic writing, which at its most extreme end is reporting, not fiction. All fiction is at least a teensy bit non-mimetic, since it describes events that never happened, but what we call speculative fiction lies much closer to the fantastic end of that spectrum. I like Attebery’s work because I think it’s useful to recognize “the fantastic” as a mode of writing, but he also allows for the finer-grained levels where we see the genre and formula aspects of fantasy, as distinct from other fantastic types of fiction.
Lois, as in, arguing past each other? But yeah, one of the problems with these discussions is the lack of an initial definitional phase. I know full well that I’m pointing at what I think of as, say, fantasy, but no one else can see exactly what I’m pointing at, and meanwhile they’re pointing at something I can’t see.
Matt, I think that - at the risk of generalizing - much of English-language genre fantasy posits or assumes some variety of what I would call Manichaeism (no, I can’t spell - why do you ask?). When one wanders into other cosmologies, that dualistic or corruptive element may not exist in the same way.
So, accorcing to you guys, if I was going to shelve this stuff I would do it something like this, with no clear borders between each different kind. Am I right? Didn’t this whole discussion start by talking about whether fantasy and sci-fi should be shelved separately or not?
[reply to Gyp and noting that w/o threads this discussion is getting rather diffuse:]
Definitely the borders are not clear.
Forex, while your shelving schema would work pretty well, there is always the case of, say, science-fiction horror.
I think the key is to realize that genre descriptions aren’t exclusive. To say that a work is one thing doesn’t mean it can’t also be another. This is one reason I like to think of the question in circular terms - Venn diagrams - not linear. But of course shelves have to be linear, so you then have to decide which is the predominant aspect of any given work - is it more SF, or more horror?
Personally, I had no idea there was any hostility between fantasy and SF writers. I’ve written both and don’t really care about exact definitions. However, I got curious and looked the words up in the dictionary. I found these definitions (and please remember that I didn’t make these definitions nor do I necessarily support them):
American Heritage Dictionary
science fiction - A literary or cinematic genre in which fantasy, typically based on speculative scientific discoveries or developments, environmental changes, space travel, or life on other planets, forms part of the plot or background.
modified from dictionary.com
horror - a story that is frightfully shocking, terrifying, or revolting
dictionary.com
fantasy - an imaginative or fanciful work, esp. one dealing with supernatural or unnatural events or characters
Just a small point to sidestep the question of genre altogether - or maybe to make it wider… the phrase “the willing suspension of disbelief”, which a few people have referred to here, was originally written about poetry (by ST Coleridge, in a famous passage of Biographia Literaria). Of more interest might be the associated bit where he talks about the difference between “fancy” and “imagination”, the second thought of as a profound, organic response to reality. In both fantasy and SF, the concentration on technological or magical knick knacks and other superficialities at the expense of profounder metaphorical truths might be thought of as fancy triumphing over imagination…
Re Bill Gibson — Back in the day when his genre bust-expansion first three novels were published, and his actually remarkable list of short fiction was published, nope, he didn’t know anything more about computers than most of us. But Bruce did … and so did others with whom he hung out.
Since then, we have all learned a whole lot more about the digital world and computer tech than we knew when Neuromancer was published. And — by golly! so has Bill!
However, he’s always had an instinct, the instinct of a certain kind of artist — like Patti Smith, for an example — of what is really going on, whether with clothes or whatever, and what that means where that intersects with economics and the antiquing of capital corporatism. He continues to understand to that better than ever, since he is invited to spend so much time in the belly of the beast he documents in terms of fiction.
Love, C.
Lois, interestingly, I don’t like threaded conversations because I don’t like how threads separate out diverse responses rather than letting them overlap all over each other to create, perhaps, lots of interesting cross references and reminders.
Alison - have we seen you here before? If not, welcome!
I like fancy v imagination, as per Coleridge.
Back in the dark ages, on GEnie, when people would rag on about science fiction as a literature of ideas, we came up with a division between “nifty concepts” and “ideas.” I think this has something of the same difference.
Neurobiology has moved on past Gibson and the entire cyberpunkers. The nifty thing about Real Science, as opposed to SF, is that it keeps learning more about the world. I’ve had a few conversations with various “hard” SF people who still insist that the brain is digital and can be wired etc in all those 80s ways despite all the new evidence to the contrary.
Cyberpunk is a good example of what Kate calls “hifty concenpts”, and as Constance remarks, Gibson tuned right in to what people thought was happening and cools and all the rest of it. It’s crummy science though.
Technological change has been a part of human history forever. Or do SF people think that farming and living in settled communities are part of our genes?
The bitterness in these squabbles really boils down to shelf space and sales and envy, is my theory.
Kit