Thinking out loud (2): fantasy and science fiction

[truepenny]

But first, a clarification, since I managed a really concise explanation in a reply to someone's comment:

There's a difference, for me, between world-building and the simple necessity of good grounding. The way I use the words (and I freely admit I'm highly Humpty-Dumptyish in picking my definitions), 'world-building' applies specifically to stories set in worlds which are meant to be alien to the reader.

Grounding, and the use of telling detail (which matociquala explains far better than I ever could), is just good craft--part of telling a story well. World-building is part of telling a particular KIND of story well.

Evoking the world your characters live in is not world-building; it's grounding. World-building comes in if the world you're evoking is one you believe to be alien to your intended audience.

This is really easy to figure out in sf/f, because we're writing in worlds that don't exist outside our own fevered imaginations; it's easy in historical fiction taking place more than, oh, fifty years ago. It's tricky in fiction set in a time contemporaneous with the author, or in the recent past, and depends entirely on how the author approaches the temporal/cultural setting she has chosen.

But since I'm a specfic writer, we can leave that Gordian knot the hell alone. (Though if anyone wants to carry it off like a bone and worry at it, please feel free--it's just not an aspect of the question I find particularly compelling my own self.)

I said, in my previous post: "I'm cavalierly lumping science fiction and fantasy together for the moment, although there are ways in which the world-building each genre requires is quite different." And aireon quite promptly and properly called me on it, wanting to know what those differences are.

Again, ObDisclaimer, this is all my opinion. I'm not saying this is How Things Are, or How Things Should Be; I'm just saying this is How Things Look To Me. And I should probably talk about my own subject-position here, which is that of someone who happily reads both science fiction and fantasy, but who falls very much under the purview of Clarke's Law: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic as far as my gullibility is concerned. It takes really screamingly bad science to get my attention; mostly I'm absolutely happy to take it on faith that the science works the way the author tells me it does. (It will not surprise you to learn that hard sf is not so much my cup of tea; even if I were more scientifically minded, that would be true, because I'm always more interested in the characters and the societies than I am in the tech.) When I write science fiction myself, which I do very rarely, my stance is much like that of Ray Bradbury, who said of The Martian Chronicles: "There are rocket ships. That's all you need to know." (And I'm sure I'm paraphrasing atrociously, but that's the gist of it.)

But. There is a difference between the world-building in fantasy and the world-building in science fiction (although, like every other genre distinction in the world, it can be collapsed if you want to, and there are some stories I'm working on that are trying to do just that), and that difference is actually the refutation of Clarke's Law. Technology and magic are distinguishable, because the world-building they engender supports different kinds of stories. Characters and cultures (and authors) interact differently with a world that is predicated on technology from a world which is predicated on magic. I don't know if I'm going to be able to articulate the difference, but it's there. And I'd argue it's there because science fiction, by definition, is the fiction of machines.

It's an oversimplification to say that sf deals with the consequences of the Industrial Revolution while fantasy denies the Industrial Revolution ever took place. But it's an oversimplification with a grain of truth at its heart, like a pearl. Science fiction is about human beings' relationship with technology, with the machines we build. In this sense, Frankenstein is very much a science fiction story; the monster is a machine made of flesh and blood, but he is a machine, created by a man.

Fantasy, on the other hand, tries to imagine worlds in which the machine never came to power--sometimes simply by creating a society that hasn't gotten there yet, sometimes by offering an alternative to the machine. Magic may be very mechanical in its operations (depending, she says cattily, on how heavily influenced the author was by AD&D), but it is always based in the flesh and blood of the wizard. There's a terribly weird way (and yes, I am making my own brain hurt) in which fantasy is always Marxist, because it refuses the alienation between the worker and his work caused by the advent of machines. Wizards' power is not displaced into technology; it remains in their bodies, in their minds. "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" in Fantasia, like Frankenstein, is science fiction by this highly idiosyncratic definition, because the apprentice is very definitely alienated from his work--but, like Tolkien, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" rejects industrialization in the end, as the sorcerer regains control, reasserts the identity between power and practitioner.

Science fiction, if it is the fiction of machines, is also the fiction of alienation. I don't think it's any accident that dystopias are also generally science fiction; the two go together. Fantasy is the dream of the alienated, the attempt to re-imagine a world that does not cause the alienation of the self. This would be why fantasy, in the aggregate, tends to retreat towards the more solipsistic world-view of cod-medieval feudalism: socially, cosmologically, epistemologically, everyone has a place, and that place isn't defined (as it was in real history) by ideology and economics and the machinations of those in power, but by the inherent nature of the world.

Now, obviously, not all fantasy does this, just as not all science fiction is about alienation. But, very broadly, those are the directions the two genres pull in. And thus, the worlds those genres create are different; although the prose techniques of world-building remain the same, the worlds they build feel different. Science fiction, to me, always smells very faintly of engine oil and isopropyl alcohol. Fantasy smells of stone and cold water. And thus the world-building diverges before I even begin.

Comments

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

This, and your last post, have been absolutely terrific.

I think fantasy is fundamentally nostalgic...generally it's about place and past and longing, and a desire for contrast between good and evil, the world simple and clear as it was in the good old days/Golden Years/times before/happy mists of childhood. This is most obvious in high fantasy, but runs true for much of contemporary fantasy and other species as well.

Science fiction, on the other hand, is fundamentally forward-leaning...it's about process, the next thing, a desire for contrast between now and then, the world revealed and unfolded and made into something greater than it is today -- even if that greatness is a great flaw.

As you said, there are exceptions galore. George R.R. Martin may be in the process of turning fantasy's requirement for a core moral axis on its ear.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

All my fantasy characters are about progress and the future and flawed future greatness and making things better than they used to be in the nasty (recent war) years.

Yep. Definitely still a science fiction writer.

[rosefox]

That is the thing I most admire and enjoy about Martin's recent books: there are no Good Guys or Bad Guys. There are just flawed people, trying to do the best they can with what they have.

I'm currently up to my neck in nonconsensual worldbuilding for the novel, or series of novels, that I may someday write if I ever get to the point where I feel I know enough about the setting and can start to think about plot. Everything and anything starts me thinking about the places and people, the culture and technology, the language and history. I find that the more I know about it, the less I'm able to say definitively "This is fantasy" or "This is science fiction". It's not a familiar world, the characters aren't human, and there's interesting technology that's quite different from what exists or has existed on Earth; but much of the technological development is mystical rather than mechanical, and technology is entirely incidental to the story. A goodwill spell woven into an entryway ladder is about as remarkable as someone in here-now having a "God Bless This Home" placard on the door (and probably about as useful). Weather forecasts are done with reasonably accurate divinatory tools that just happen to be dice in the hands of weather-sensitive fortunetellers rather than computers in the hands of well-educated operators. The world is mostly water and my current theory is that the intelligent beings central to the story are descended from amphibians, but it really isn't about their alien-ness, because they aren't alien to themselves and I have no plans for them to encounter mammalian intelligent beings. (Of course, the story may surprise me. I have no idea at this point.) There's a lot of nostalgia and a lot of urge towards technological development. There are people who live close to the land and people who cling to societal distinctions and people who work through tools and intermediaries and people who ignore cultural expectations if they get in the way of their ambitions and desires. It's a whole world, and it's complex.

So it could be spun either way, marketed either way; and that leaves me thinking that the F/SF distinction really ends up being a "Which demographic will this appeal to?" distinction, and not much more.

[(Anonymous)]

Fantasy is nostalgic? Maybe, if you're looking only at books such as Eragon by Paolini, in which it's always the old fashioned show down, when the bad guy is taken out by the good guy with swords or magic and everyone's happy. But there are acutually quite a few fantasy novels where the world is striving to move forward in the best way it knows how. It's not just sci-fi that does that. --Matt Boren "thegrandmattster"

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

HAH! I told people I was still a science fiction writer! Because all the magic users in Thermionic Night and Sampo insist very firmly on displacing their power into objects, machines, and it smells of, oh, of ozone and copper wire, and also wet wool dried in too-warm rooms, but never mind that.

Still a science fiction writer! Wheeee!

[redbird]

I think I need to chew on the interaction of "fantasy is always Marxist" and the cod-feudalism.

If it's Marxist, it's a very defeatist Marxism: rather than seeing a way forward to communism, it gives up and settles in an also-oppressive and alienating time and place. The medieval serf did not control her or her labor, or the results thereof.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

It's a very blinkered kind of Marxism. Because the rejection of alienation between the worker and her labor are all focused on the magic-users. The rest of it isn't even remotely Marxist at all.

Or, rather, there's this particular thing about fantasy that is best explained--for me--by the application of Marxist theory. And this particular thing about fantasy is a thing that rejects the practice (alienation of labor) that Marx was objecting to.

If that makes any sense at all, and I'm not sure it does.

[cleverthylacine]

Ah--but does feudalism *have* to be oppressive?

Feudalism is predicated upon the notion of an exchange of obligations. What if the obligations that vassals and serfs have upon their lords are just as binding as the other way round, what if the lord really can be called upon to die for his/her land? What if that alienation doesn't exist? Fantasy feudalism doesn't have to be the same as real-world feudalism, especially when hedge-witches and midwives and wizards and lords who are bound to the land are all beings with intersecting powers.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

What if the obligations that vassals and serfs have upon their lords are just as binding as the other way round, what if the lord really can be called upon to die for his/her land?

This has actually been true for non-trivial parts of real-world feudal history. A point which much quasi-feudal fantasy seems to overlook. [ Or deny outright, which is one of the things that makes Ash so hateful. ]

[fitzcamel.livejournal.com]

Could you expand a bit on that point about Ash?

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Well, trying to do this without over much fuming and swearing, Ash felt to me like it was coming from a set of axioms about how feudalism was always horrible and oppressive to the extreme, with no checks and balances in for redress of abuses, and with nobody anywhere in the system caring at all about the virtues it supposedly is built on; a straw man to the extreme.

Mind you, I also hated Ash because it took the idea content of a moderately good Greg Egan story and diluted it with ninety-nine parts further verbiage, because it used modern language in an obnoxious way without any real feel for the attitudes implicit in that, and because it has a stupid ending. So I may just be a little bit biased here. Nor do I think I could bear to read the damned thing again in search of a second opinion.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

Hmmm!

[(Anonymous)]

It's an oversimplification to say that sf deals with the consequences of the Industrial Revolution while fantasy denies the Industrial Revolution ever took place.

This is the one point you make that I agree with. You are oversimplifying to leave out all those fantasy stories that take place outside the cliched medieval setting you describe. Modern fantasy. Fantasy set in Regency England. Fantasy set in Vienna, in the 1870s. Fantasy without magic. And yes, they are all clearly fantasy.

There's some nice writing here, but the central conceit didn't work for me.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

You are welcome to disagree with me. However, I do expect people who want to join any conversation in my blog to have the common courtesy to identify themselves.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Fantasy, on the other hand, tries to imagine worlds in which the machine never came to power--sometimes simply by creating a society that hasn't gotten there yet, sometimes by offering an alternative to the machine. Magic may be very mechanical in its operations (depending, she says cattily, on how heavily influenced the author was by AD&D), but it is always based in the flesh and blood of the wizard.

Which works fine for being non-scientific right up until the cultural context of the reader starts to include genetics. [ I've been turning over for a while the idea that when you make a contract with the Prince of Darkness and sign it in blood, it gets whisked off to a high-throughput sequencing facility, to extract a True Name that is three million letters long, though all of them ar A, C, G, or T... ]

There's a terribly weird way (and yes, I am making my own brain hurt) in which fantasy is always Marxist, because it refuses the alienation between the worker and his work caused by the advent of machines.

I disagree. The opposition between workers controlling the means of production and bosses controlling the means of production works as a description of an industrial society but I think it becomes increasingly strained the more your society is composed of people who are the means of production. I've always felt this strongly about my own experience as a programmer and database designer, and, absent situations of slavery or Draka-esque slavery-equivalents, the same paradigm seems to be inherent in any form of magic that is innate to the practitioner.

"The Sorcerer's Apprentice" in Fantasia, like Frankenstein, is science fiction by this highly idiosyncratic definition, because the apprentice is very definitely alienated from his work--but, like Tolkien, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" rejects industrialization in the end, as the sorcerer regains control, reasserts the identity between power and practitioner.

I should think about this some, because I'm not entirely happy with that as a dividing line between fantasy and SF - have you read Walter Jon Williams ' Metropolitan and City on Fire ?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I should add, probably, that my Marxism is very very bad Marxism, and based mostly on Marx as filtered through literary theory.

[renakuzar.livejournal.com]

I've always found it fascinating how willingly ignorant of the roll of the machine in medieval and ancient societies some fantasy authors are. The mid 13 century had wide spread use of the power loom and the spinning wheel was spreading from india to europe, as an example.

They've not only idealized a time and a place, but they've daydreamed out the reality of that time and place, castrating it of so many of the factors that made up its reality, such as the importance of faith.

To me science fiction deals with the unintended consequences of technology, and is (to misqoute e-bear) mostly setting.

Walt

Power loom?

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

If you're referring to the four to eight harness looms, okay. I don't think the fly shuttle loom was invented until a bit later (Google says 1740). I've always found it fascinating that people don't know a damn thing about cloth production. The thrown shuttle harness looms were faster than something like a backstrap loom, but were more expensive (most prehistoric looms are quite cheap to set up).

The four harness loom increased cloth production but allowed for less thread manipulation (see Mexican and Central American backstap enlayed weft work). More cloth could be produced, but the work may have been less interesting for the weavers (women in non-mechanized weaving cultures tend to be fairly involved in the artistry of it, not just producing textiles). Weaving production on a thrown shuttle loom or on a faster fly-shuttle loom is just production weaving, using humans for repetitive motions, not for making design decisions after the loom was set up.

Most of the transition from home to centralized factory production of cloth happened in the 17th and 18th Centuries.

And the Central American folks who set up the whispering tunnels and special effects temples knew what they were doing. At least one Renaissance pope was an unbeliever. (My favorite bit from 1491 were the mummified Inca kings who had women speaking for them -- what a wonderful racket).

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Technology is more like a Brand Name variety of magic, in a shared-world collaboration. SF writers adopt it as a starting place for their world building, Fantasy writers start closer to working from scratch.

Even present-day technology is hardly distinguishable from magic as far as I (and innumerable others) are concerned. I understand that it operates by certain rules, but I'm not an expert in those rules, and I observe such results as seeing and speaking over great distances, people crossing oceans and traveling around the world by air, light and heat at the touch of a finger, etc.

It's a variety of magic that is available to be learned by those with the interest and proclivity, it's shared by a great many people, it's integral to our society, and it works. This makes it a great starting point for fantasy, and it's no surprise that a lot of writers choose to work from such a well-built premise.

[fitzcamel.livejournal.com]

I realize that focusing on edge cases isn't always productive, but: where would you locate _The Iron Dragon's Daughter_?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Not having read it yet--although it is on my shelves--I can't.

[fitzcamel.livejournal.com]

Ah. Shucks. :)

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Does that imply that the class of stories in which a perfectly normal person picks up a magical object and is then able to do magic with it (but not without it) is really more science fiction than fantasy in terms of the world-building needed? I'm thinking of the sort of thing E. Nesbit and Edward Eager wrote.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Sorry, terrible choice of words there. By "perfectly normal", I mane to say "nonmagical".

[razorsmile.livejournal.com]

Science fiction, to me, always smells very faintly of engine oil and isopropyl alcohol. Fantasy smells of stone and cold water. And thus the world-building diverges before I even begin.

ok, are you synaesthetic or just really really clever?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I'm not synaesthetic, but I'm well trained to think in metaphors.

[razorsmile.livejournal.com]

That's good too :D