![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The problem with fantasy and science fiction, as the comments to my previous post demonstrate, is that, like Walt Whitman, they contain multitudes. There is no definition you can put forward that someone can't find 1,654,420,749 counter examples for, especially if you're trying to talk about the difference between the two.
If there's any difference at all.
For me, there is. For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala, there isn't. And that doesn't mean I'm right and she's wrong, or that I'm wrong and she's right.1 It means that it depends what angle you look at the question from, and in what light, and what lens or lenses you're looking through. For genre writers, one of those lenses is always going to be your own creative process, and what does and does not work to get the stories out of your brain and onto the page where they can start to live.
I'm not making any value judgments about that lens; I'm just saying it's there. I can write pure litcrit about sf, but that's not what these posts have been. These are posts about theory, and my theor(y/ies) of sf is/are deeply informed and inflected2 by my own experience as a writer thereof.
But I've got another lens; insofar as I acknowledge allegiance to any critical school (which isn't terribly far, and genuine theoryheads would fall about laughing at the idea), I'm a genre theorist. And so when I think about science fiction and fantasy and the difference between them, or lack thereof, I think about them partly as a writer, partly as a reader, and partly as a genre theorist. And the interaction between those three things can get very interesting, in the Sparrovian3 sense.
As a reader, I agree that science fiction and fantasy are only dubiously distinguishable beasts. As a writer, I find them quite different, because they feel different in my head. As a genre theorist, I start making lists of conventions and tropes and attitudes, and say that, although there is no stable boundary between the two, and although they are very easily hybridized (a thing that has been happening to genres for hundreds of years), that does not mean that we should collapse them together.
The problem with genres is that they are Ouroboran. They eat their own tales.4 A genre is defined by the works in it, and a work's genre is defined by ... yeah. You see the problem. And yet, you can come to a workable consensus of what a genre is, even though no single work will have all the characteristics defined as typical of the genre, and most works in a genre will have characteristics that don't fit. It's that kind of discipline, genre theory, and I like it because what it's interested in are the places where the definitions don't hold and the boundaries become infinitely permeable.
So, actually, in my world-view, 'science fiction' and 'fantasy' are categories to define texts against, not to define texts as. The interesting question isn't whether a particular text is one or the other; it's what a particular text does, with one, the other, or both.
---
1Hey, look! Chiasmus!
2And you can tell we've woken the litcrit demon because all the rhetorical tricks have put on their party hats and are looking for the limbo stick.
3Because, dammit, Captain Jack Sparrow needs an adjectival form.
4I am so leaving that typo exactly the way it is.
If there's any difference at all.
For me, there is. For
matociquala, there isn't. And that doesn't mean I'm right and she's wrong, or that I'm wrong and she's right.1 It means that it depends what angle you look at the question from, and in what light, and what lens or lenses you're looking through. For genre writers, one of those lenses is always going to be your own creative process, and what does and does not work to get the stories out of your brain and onto the page where they can start to live.I'm not making any value judgments about that lens; I'm just saying it's there. I can write pure litcrit about sf, but that's not what these posts have been. These are posts about theory, and my theor(y/ies) of sf is/are deeply informed and inflected2 by my own experience as a writer thereof.
But I've got another lens; insofar as I acknowledge allegiance to any critical school (which isn't terribly far, and genuine theoryheads would fall about laughing at the idea), I'm a genre theorist. And so when I think about science fiction and fantasy and the difference between them, or lack thereof, I think about them partly as a writer, partly as a reader, and partly as a genre theorist. And the interaction between those three things can get very interesting, in the Sparrovian3 sense.
As a reader, I agree that science fiction and fantasy are only dubiously distinguishable beasts. As a writer, I find them quite different, because they feel different in my head. As a genre theorist, I start making lists of conventions and tropes and attitudes, and say that, although there is no stable boundary between the two, and although they are very easily hybridized (a thing that has been happening to genres for hundreds of years), that does not mean that we should collapse them together.
The problem with genres is that they are Ouroboran. They eat their own tales.4 A genre is defined by the works in it, and a work's genre is defined by ... yeah. You see the problem. And yet, you can come to a workable consensus of what a genre is, even though no single work will have all the characteristics defined as typical of the genre, and most works in a genre will have characteristics that don't fit. It's that kind of discipline, genre theory, and I like it because what it's interested in are the places where the definitions don't hold and the boundaries become infinitely permeable.
So, actually, in my world-view, 'science fiction' and 'fantasy' are categories to define texts against, not to define texts as. The interesting question isn't whether a particular text is one or the other; it's what a particular text does, with one, the other, or both.
---
1Hey, look! Chiasmus!
2And you can tell we've woken the litcrit demon because all the rhetorical tricks have put on their party hats and are looking for the limbo stick.
3Because, dammit, Captain Jack Sparrow needs an adjectival form.
4I am so leaving that typo exactly the way it is.
